The cliché states everything is
bigger in Texas. We’ve all heard it. We also see it frequently on bumper
stickers, license plate holders and especially on tacky men’s shirts with a big
arrow pointing down. While a lot of that is just plain hyperbole, there is one
department where I can say it’s true categorically: Bugs.
Since I moved here several months
ago, I have come to realize the insect population here is supersized. At first
I noticed mosquitoes the size of my fist, then swarms of gnats that formed near
force-fields around any light in the apartment. The past month or so has seen an
invasion of a different sort. As it turns out, crickets are attempting to take
over Austin.
It’s not exaggeration to say they
are everywhere. For some reason I’m not fully aware of, we are having one of
the largest cricket seasons anyone down here seems to be able to remember. The
lawns were alive with jumping bugs. They got into every nook and cranny of
people’s cars. At night their chirping resonated through tightly closed windows
and sliding glass doors. They coated the sidewalks, making you feel like you
were literally walking on eggshells as they crunched under shoes and shopping
cart wheels. The front entrances to the grocery stores were particularly
vulnerable to becoming locations cricket-related atrocities, to the point where
I think I saw a somber group of them erecting some kind of tiny memorial to
their fallen comrades.
They have their ways of getting
revenge though. About ten days ago I was walking into an HEB grocery store
early on a Saturday morning when I heard a high-pitched shriek. A poor girl of
about eight or nine years old had made the egregious error of pulling a
shopping cart out of a rack (a rack? A row? You know what I mean, when 30 or 40
of them are rammed together making a kind of shopping cart conga line just
inside the entrance). This stirred up a nest and several dozen of the little
buggers when bouncing around her legs and feet.
I know I have squished many of
them. Some intentional, some just in the wrong place at the wrong time. So it
was only a matter of time before I was attacked. That time came last week.
Lying in bed with a book after a
hard day’s work, I relaxed minding my own business in my bedroom when out of
nowhere, I huge black object flew at me out of my peripheral vision and landed
directly on my right shoulder. After I made a noise that sounded strikingly
similar to a young girl grabbing a shopping cart, it hopped away and dove
between the wall and the head of my bed.
I immediately went into
self-preservation mode, throwing the book to the side (a bad choice really as I
gave up my only weapon at the time) and assuming a defensive posture. I saw it
hop behind my tall dresser and I knew what I had to do. Leaving it there was
out of the question. No way could I sleep with that thing jumping around in
there since as soon as I turned off the lights the chirping would begin, and
believe me these things are loud enough when they’re outside, let alone when
they’re operating from right underneath my sock drawer.
Jumping off the bed I closed the
bedroom door, threw the cover off the bed and stuffed against the small opening
between the bottom of the door and the carpet. Having thus cut off his escape
route, it was Thunderdome. Only one of us was coming out of that bedroom alive.
First, I had to flush him out. He’d
fortified himself in the corner of the room behind the dresser, and the space
between him and the walls was too small to get at it with the broomstick I’d
grabbed from the closet. First I pulled
the dresser away from one wall, but he cleverly just shifted to the other wall
and camouflaged himself in dust bunnies. I grabbed the dresser and pulled it
away from the other wall, but I still couldn’t get to him. I pulled it out
further, planning on either swiping at him with the broomstick or destroying
his compound with a fresh Swiffer when he used the distraction to hop out from
under the dresser straight underneath my bed. Clearly I was dealing with a
master strategist here.
I dropped to my stomach and scanned
under the mattress. He made a move for the wall again. I slid the broomstick
across the floor in a sweeping motion, and at long last he made his first
tactical error. He jumped out from under the bed into open carpet. I grabbed my
broomstick and made an offensive charge. Sadly, my swings were about as
accurate as Alfonso Soriano with runners in scoring position. He hopped left,
then right, and at one point I’m fairly certain he used his little cricket legs
to flip me the bird. One more
sweeping motion across the carpet drove him further away from the wall, however
and a second sweep made contact. I had him on the ropes, and I pounced. A few more whacks from the broomstick and it
was all over. Victory was mine.
As I sighed much like Martin Sheen
at the end of Apocalypse Now, I surveyed the damage. My dresser was askew, the
bed had been moved and the sheet thrown against the bedroom door. You had to
respect the fight he’d put up. I buried my worthy opponent in a way befitting a
loose cricket in an apartment; with a wadded up Kleenex in a trash can full of
old grocery and gas receipts.
While I came out victorious over
the insect world that night, I will not let it go to my head. I will train
harder and longer, so the next time some bug wants to disturb my night’s sleep,
I have one thing to say…
