Behold the mosquito. Actually about a dozen of them. Or was it fifty or a hundred swarming me one evening this week? It’s hard to tell with these pests. Part of their power is that it takes just a single determined individual to ruin your lunch or nap or hike in the woods; it’s not only their bite, it’s the fear they instill even before they land a punch. So it’s difficult to determine how many opponents you’re facing, your mind magnifying the threat, probably giving them more credit than they deserve.But not completely. There’s not a one of us who can’t remember some time when we suffered a contagion of bites at a single meal – the bug’s not yours – and the agonized scratching the followed. The occasion when my worst assault occurred also turned out to be life altering, triggering a developmental leap.
Allow me to explain, perhaps while you swat away. I was sent to camp in the Adirondacks in the summer of 1966, my homesickness compounded by the plethora of mosquito bites I suffered on my first day away from my family. The camp director’s wife, taking pity on me, soothed my wounds with witch hazel, I believe it was, and a relationship was born.
At the advanced age of twelve I discovered I possessed a serviceable sense of humor; I was trying to keep her amused while she dabbed me with soothing cotton swabs. I was previously unaware that I had anything to offer the world let alone my closest companions. Unlike today’s parents who hang on their children’s every word, convinced of their genius, my mother thought nothing of interrupting me to point out a dog stain on the carpet as I described the drama of my day. And since none of her Boston Terriers were housebroken she had ample opportunity to interrupt my train of thought.
A sense of humor is a powerful thing. The camp director’s wife’s response to my wisecracks became Pavlovian. It didn’t take long before I was taking hot baths in her cabin while my fellow campers were suffering cold showers back in Hacker’s Haven, our bunk, and undergoing that gruesome hazing ritual known as the pink belly. That’s where you’re held down while your bunkmates apply stinging toothpaste to your stomach and then take turns slapping it into your skin.
The worst mosquito infestation I ever experienced came in the summer of 1971 when I was hitchhiking across Scandinavia. Returning from Norway’s North Cape, the northernmost point in Europe, five hundred miles above the Arctic Circle, we crossed briefly into Finland, sometimes described as the world’s happiest country. That’s impossible, certainly based on that nation’s ratio of mosquitos to people. Pulling off to the side of the road to scope out a place to camp for the night, the insects were so thick that we were driven back, along with a few of the bugs, into the VW minivan that served as our mode of transportation.
Given the horror movie dimensions of the mosquito problem we faced I seem to recall that my cousin and I, my travelling companion, spent the night in the bus alongside our hosts. They’d foolishly given us a ride two weeks earlier and couldn’t get rid of us. Also, our location was sufficiently remote and the hour late enough that it was unlikely we were going to find a lovely roadside, or better yet fjord side, B&B. My hunch is that the area was largely uninhabitable and there was nowhere to room within a hundred miles.
But my intention isn’t to burden you with my own losing encounters with these long-legged biting flies or to trigger traumatic memories of your own. As I stood in our driveway fighting them off at dusk this week – it must be all the rain we’ve been having lately; but they seem more plentiful and ravenous than ever – I felt something akin to affection for them. Perhaps it’s my advanced age but I realized they’re the authors of a recurring motif in my life. They help form the connective tissue, that coincidentally provides an inviting target to plunge their proboscises into and start sucking blood, that stretches from distant childhood to the stinging present.
In the same way people couple crickets with summer, so mosquitos also have recreational associations, if not entirely pleasant ones. They’re also part of the dome of summer, the decor of the outdoors. I still haven’t come across an adequate defense for, though not against, their existence. Spiritually as well as biologically. The Deep Woods Off I slather on seems to work even if it provides nowhere near the promised eight hours of protection.
But I do draw a certain amount of solace from the knowledge that our mosquitos are providing sustenance for the bats that, perhaps because of the abundance of bugs this rain-saturated season, appear especially plump and enthusiastic as they swarm against the deepening sky. That’s both the mosquitos and the bats. Come winter we might even remember their presence somewhat fondly. That is unless a few of the mosquitos survive, as they invariably do, and track us indoors well into autumn.
Ralph Gardner, Jr. is a journalist who divides his time between New York City and Columbia County. More of his work can be found at ralphgardner.com
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