Doug Fine: Author, Journalist, Adventurer, Goat-Herder

 

MORNIN’ SAM

The Funky Butte Ranch house probably hosts, per square foot, more insects living full, happy lives (I mean inside, with the people) than, say, 80% of North American human structures. It has to do with the integrity of our door installation: think Old West Saloon. Generally speaking, I consider this indoor diversity a fortuitous homeschooling biology teaching aid. As in, “see that daddy longlegs on the wall near where the goat just busted through the dog door? Can you tell me whether it’s a true arachnid?”

Now, I’m used to primates being subservient to insectoids — five minutes in Alaska in summer bestows on you that humility. But up North it’s usually not a potentially fatal situation, as long as you’re not a caribou (individuals of which species have been know to be driven into suicidal frenzy by mosquito swarms).

But last year it occurred to me, en route to the emergency room, that while every place has its natural hazards (even back in Alaska, where there were no snakes or spiders, there were earthquakes, tsunamis, and whiteouts, the last of which once came minutes from ending my writing career), sometimes the level of danger varies based on the internal chemistry of the individual. I mean, in actuality, not in some New Age whoo whoo sense.

Here in the high desert/ponderosa forest transition zone where the Funky Butte Ranch rests, like anywhere West of the Mississippi if you’re sensible, you get used to checking your boots for tarantulas, brown recluses and scorpions. People think Southwest, they think rattlesnakes, they think mountain lions, they think Arizona’s legislature. But the grimmest natural horror here, I’ve learned over the past two years that the creature has been peaking in its carrying capacity cycle, is fairly new, and thus hardly ever spoken of. It’s the conenosed beetle, the assassin bug, the creature also called, I think in rather poor taste based on the consequences, the Kissing Bug.

The Triatoma protracta is black, the size of a small stink bug when full grown, and sports two antennae emerging terrifyingly from a tiny head that sits on its tank like, lima bean-shaped body. It’s also the manifestation of the ultimate personal test that one has to pass in order to be allowed to stay in this paradise. The test is this: when something really is out to get you, and only you, can you fend off paranoia?

What’s high up on The Kissing Bug Scary List, just below the anaphylactic shock and death that can result after repeated bites (concern about this is what sent me to the ER in ‘09), its selective choice of victims, and its increasing commonness in my valley, is the fact that it, with undeniable foresight, plans its (eventually) painful blood-sucking attacks.

These beasts actually skulk, hiding between ceiling boards or even in pillowcases to plan their nighttime feed on the human hosts with which they have a twisted symbiotic relationship. So twisted, in fact, that in two decades of living in the West of North America, they are the only creatures that have ever caused me to even consider moving to a more civilized, pest control-patrolled kind of lifestyle. No military professor would stage war games like this: it’s just not fair for an insect to be both that smart and that well-armed.

To give one example from a battle late in May, at 3:53 one Monday morning, I felt what turned out to be a remnant crumb of the cinnamon roll from the local organic bakery that my son had smuggled into the bedroom the previous day during nap time. So attuned to possible insect attack by this point, before I was even fully conscious, I found myself waking everyone of all species, having transformed into a ghost dashing into the Ranch House main room underneath a comforter from which I was trying to extract myself and shake out any of what the military calls The Bad Guys. Perhaps 90% of Kissing Bug alerts are false alarms, but it’s the swollen, itching limbs and chins and sensitive between-the-toes areas that keep you remembering the 10% that are genuine attacks.

Everyone in my family remembers these nighttime battles, too. It can be entertaining to them: slapping at myself, at the sheets, waking the house and possibly the coyotes with my Kung Fu shouts as I stumble over child toys and madly kick at the sheets while humming the theme from Shaft.

Kissing Bugs are smart, stealthy, quick in reverse, and quite literally creepy — they even seem to smirk when you’ve got them in a mid-mattress standoff (which is rare: they’re usually long gone into the night — the attacks always come at night — by the time your limbs start swelling, since one of the most dastardly aspects of their arsenal is that the bite itself is painless, and the painful and itchy poison acts on time-release). All in all, after a vampire, this is the last creature you want to be kissed by. And like the current cinematic vampire infestation, the Kissing Bug situation is getting out of hand around here as Monsoon begins.

To associate the act of kissing with this creature is beyond irony and into cruelty, unless one is referring to the unnecessarily excessive hickey of the drunken adolescent. The conenosed beetle sports two horizontal pincers, which slice together like a medical hemostat to facilitate the injection of the bug’s saliva, which is an irritant much worse and longer lasting than a mosquito, and slightly less painful than a hornet. This is one kiss even as an adolescent I would have turned down.

Now, it will be clear to regular readers of these Dispatches that I’m almost pathologically willing to pay the price for living in a gorgeous wild paradise –- floods, hail, irrational neighbors — but when that forty-sixth Kissing Bug bite last year sent me to the hospital, I began to wonder if staying alive might mandate a real estate decision.

My valley (plus one in South America), is evidently the Kissing Bug world headquarters. The overnight ER doc, seeing my kind of middle-of-the-night, jammies-clad transports all the time, sighed, cut me off from rattling off my list of possible causes of the near-fatal allergic attack symptoms I was displaying — new soap, Chinese-grown black beans, a disappointing episode of 30 Rock on Hulu — and said the closing of the throat and swollen lips I was experiencing occurs when enough Kissing Bug saliva poison builds up in your blood over the course of a summer.

That’s right — they don’t just bite you. To add insult to disgusting injury, these precocious insects, which live in pack rat nests (leaving me wondering why they can’t eat in and suck their blood), also tend to spit superfluously in the wound they’ve inflicted (they should be called the French Kissing Bug). Sigh. I guess, like the rest of us, they’re just trying to feed their families. Ruining my night’s sleep is just a “Mornin’ Ralph, Mornin’ Sam” kind of situation.

“Not your first bite?” the mustachioed ER doctor speculated with his back to me, before spinning and flipping me some steroids.

“Not my fortieth,” I admitted.

“Well, you’re lucky this isn’t the variety they have in Peru,” he asserted, handing me a script for enough further steroids to keep me in contention for the American League batting title. “Something like twenty years down the road it causes your heart and sometimes your neurological connections to break down. Ugly to see. Here we just get swelling.”

“And difficulty breathing,” I reminded him through lips that made Mick Jagger’s look like a sidewalk crack. I wondered how they knew two decades later that a little nasty sneak of an insect caused the heart disease and not, say, the fried tostadas.

“Get yourself some mosquito netting,” the doctor diagnosed.

That South American disease, still unknown in my valley but evidently working its way into California, is called Chagas Disease, conjuring something out of a Frank Zappa album. The Internet, bless its breadth of statistics, tells me I have between a “rare” and 40% chance of transmission with each bite. I’ve enjoyed four bites in the past week.

As a result of this data, I, a fellow who avoids commercial medication whenever possible (even the kind without unnecessary inculcation with Red #11), now stock Benadryl to prevent the more severe of the allergic reactions, and have needed it three times — that is to say, thus far I haven’t had to drive the R.O.A.T. the hour to the emergency room during the ’10 infestation.

That’s just the report from the Medic’s tent. As you can tell, this is a war, and like all wars, some form of P.T.S.D. manifests. In other words, it’s the psychological aspects of the drawn-out conflict that are far worse than the physical wounds. Especially as regards sleep loss. My skin is so polka-dotted, and thus I’m so on-edge, by this point that even a slight uptick in my solar-powered ceiling fan, which in turn rattles my leg hair slightly, sends an alert to my uneasily resting brain and has me bolting upright and shaking out the sheets. Most nights, however, the creature is back having a beer with the pack rats by the time I wake up with a calf looking like George Forman post-Holyfield. On the rare nights I do ID my attacker, I have to find a tissue first, because the Internet says you can spread their germs by touching them. I know I wear gloves when I discover a pack rat nest.

It’s a bit humiliating to witness the steps a human being will take in the course of all-out combat with an insect that outnumbers him by about, oh, fifty million to one. The thing about insect infestations is, they’re infestations, a plague. Kissing Bugs don’t have twins, triplets or Octomoms. They hatch larvae in the tens of millions. I don’t even know what the tabloid headline would be for the number of survivors in a good (or for me, a bad) year. Millio-Mom Files For Public Assistance While Getting A Manicure or something like that.

So flushing even one bug per night is probably not going to have a significant effect on the overall Kissing Bug breeding trajectory. It might even increase it, by creating more carrying capacity in the ecological niche of the Funky Butte Ranch (and I had so recently thought that my cats had cleared the land of pack rats). I flush them alive, by the way, my already over-burdened Histamine response system trying to avoid squishing-related germs. As a result, I live in fear of their re-emerging from the toilet: this has already happened twice, Fatal Attraction-like.

After one horrible middle-of-the-night phantom attack last week (it’s these pseudo attacks, the cinnamon-roll-crumbs-that-feel-like-insects, the wind through the window that freaks me out of sleep, that are somehow the most traumatic, perhaps because they feel unresolved, my sacred sleeping space still invaded), it occurred to me that the only thing that would be effective would have the unfortunate side-effect of adversely affecting the humans’ genes in said ecological niche: ask any exterminator’s life insurance agent.

In fact, discussing the physical battles — and they occur several times per week, on average, once the last frost is past (with each bite taking as long as a week to stop influencing my day) — is almost missing the point. Life in anticipation of these vampyric insect Ninjas is becoming something akin to existence on the tense border between Somalia and Ethiopia. A decided lack of trust exists, especially at night.

The changes the Kissing Bug War have inflicted upon my life are possibly most deeply manifest in my home decorating. The first thing that a visitor might notice is, forget pillowcases or duvet covers — the bugs crouch in these: my bedroom now looks like a flophouse when the housekeeping union is on strike.

Then there’s the mosquito netting: after the first attack of the ‘10’ season left my right knee resembling a grapefruit, I finally shook off my denial and took the ER doc’s year-earlier advice, affixing all I had at the time, which was some surplus dome tent mosquito netting, to my ceiling, from which the literature says the germ-riddled attackers like to lower themselves, Samurai-like, after the humans are asleep. I accomplished this with push pins in the shape of ladybugs, in the hope that these might be somehow intimidating to any would-be antagonists. Awkwardly reaching for the ceiling with a stool placed on my mattress, I couldn’t help wondering, “why aren’t any of the planet’s nicer species the ones benefiting from Climate Change?” Indeed, Sherlock Holmes looked at who benefited from a crime, and I’m starting to wonder if insects might be behind Climate Change. Do politicians accept contributions from bugs? I know that they can run, but can they contribute?

Because there were gaps in this ad-hoc, hastily-constructed protective layer (think Child’s fort), the bites continued — even picked up. Being half-made of solid, synthetic material, the tent netting had the side-effect of increasing my already-stifling pre-Monsoon overnight evening indoor temperatures to the mid-triple digits.

And the insects loved it — the whole comedy of errors. The Kissing Bug might be the only member of the insect kingdom with a sense of humor. Its very body language bespeaks a comfortable knowledge of its many advantages over the primate. When confronted, the beast appears to squat on its haunches and smile at you, like a Bond villain who enjoys his work. My own body language is closer to that of the no-prisoners tension you might have seen in a Cold War Berlin searchlight operator.

By June, I noticed I was never not scanning for ambush. Bedtime thus took on the aura of a pending battle. My sweetheart and I coordinated look-outs, our pre-bed conversation was conducted in the clipped tones of a tactical meeting (”it can tell when we’re looking at it”) , and even our toddler explicitly scanned the walls before story time. And if did spot one — oh, if I did spot one, you’ve never seen any SWAT team bust into action faster.

I had two-hour pre-Dawn stand-offs with individuals in the bathroom — the bastard unfailingly sneaking cleverly in reverse just far enough behind the toilet or mirror that I could see him but not reach him. Forget showering — with shampoo in my eyes I’d become a prime target. It was at these moments that I began to feel like a resident of the Amityville mansion finally catching on.

Every time it was the same scenario. The Kissing Bug clearly understood the muscular dynamics of the human hand, and proved harder to wrangle than a goat. Until I pretended I was leaving the bathroom once and for all and he inched out. Eventually I usually got him, by pulling a cop-at-the-dangerous-doorway move, armed with my standard issue Automatic Tissue, all the while well-aware that the sacrificial lamb might have been a decoy, the whole diversion planned back at the Rat Cave.

It can be frustrating to be mocked by an insect. I have neighbors who have shot at them. And others who have simply surrendered and moved away, abandoning expensive riverside ranch properties to the Kissing Bugs.

Life since summer began has, if anything, gotten more intense. Feeling (or, more commonly of late, dreaming of feeling) anything — anything at all — unusual in my bed now triggers usually fruitless and always manic sweeps with my headlamp (again, think Cold War Berlin), something in my sleep neurons telling me I might, just might, feel something toxic nibbling or crawling on me. The situation is literally out of hand. I’m guessing that the typical reader will empathize with the strength of will necessary to even move a limb at 2:47 a.m. when your partner is asleep on said limb, let alone to jerk an entire bedding set off the bed, just to check for what everyone knows is a 10% chance of finding a bug. Talk about losing hearts and minds. I might in fact be losing both.

And still we have not yet arrived at what is by magnitudes the most horrifying aspect of the War Of The Kissing Bugs. I’d noticed it anecdotally, but it wasn’t until a neighbor stopped me at the river crossing maybe three weeks ago and made the “roll down your window” gesture that I fully grasped the gravity of the situation, which had at that point, as Monsoon approached, arrived at what I would describe as a sort of World War One stalemate.

“You having problems with Kissing Bugs?” Myrtle asked

“We are,” I admitted.

“We did too, I got bit fifteen times — had to go to the ER. You know Buddy, from Bump County Pest Control? He came by yesterday, sprayed maybe an hour, even here in my rig. And let me tell you, they started falling from the rafters -– dozens of the f—–s dropped dead. My cat, too, but he was old.”

I instinctively pulled my face further back into the R.O.A.T. as Myrtle continued.

“Let me know if you want Buddy’s cell number. Used him back when I had the bar — what he sprays with is food safe — ‘cept for that one woman who was allergic.”

“But she was old?” I hazarded.

“No, I just prob’ly shouldn’t have changed the tap on the day we sprayed.”

Then Myrtle laid the show-stopper on me. “Who’s their target at your place?”

“Sorry, I don’t think I heard you right.”

“Who’s their target?” Myrtle clarified. “Who do they go after?”

“Their target? Um, now that you mention it, I guess I am the only one getting bit.”

“Yep,” Myrtle said, spitting out some sunflower seed shells into her hand. “They only go after one member of each household, usually. It’s me in my house. Look at this forearm.”

Then I was, predictably, treated to a graphic display of wounded limbs and distended midsections, the depiction of which I will hereby spare the reader. Suffice to say I suggested to Myrtle that maybe her best course was to head to the ER now.

So I was the Funky Butte Ranch Kissing Bug target. “What an honor,” I thought, taking none of the joy of that “you’ve got sweet blood” compliment folks used to give me as a kid when I was the only one getting drained by the Atlantic beach-side skeeters every August. Then, as Myrtle bumped away in a hail of sunflower seeds and a smog of diesel, I actually started taking some solace in my martyrdom.

Now that I thought about it, the Kissing Bugs really did crawl right over my sweetheart, which we know because that’s where she often captures them — at the unguarded border where our two bodies meet in bed. Yes, of course, the Silverback in me was glad the bugs were targeting me, rather than my sweetheart or our son. Of course, I and my insurance company would rather they left me alone, too, but all things considered, a few months of scratching per year wasn’t too big a price to pay in order to protect my family.

Until, at the peak of the stifling pre-Monsoon, and getting on two weeks ago, one punk bug made the Very Serious Mistake of striking my son. Behind the knee.

Now (and forever more) it was personal. They starting attacking civilians. It’s become a guerilla war by nearly every definition — it’s seasonal, nocturnal (I own the day), and no one wears uniforms (unless you count the nighttime full-body mummification I briefly attempted in triple digit temperatures until deciding that death by suffocation was worse than death by Kissing Big), and the casual daytime observer might not even know a war is on.

Indeed, at this stage in the carnage, and I’m not proud to report this, you see how group hatred starts. I’ve become irrationally jumpy and resentful toward any dark bug. In practical terms, the result of this escalation of hostilities is that a lot of innocent insect blood is being shed in the rarely closed-door Funky Butte Ranch house these days — it’s smoosh first, ask questions later, unfortunately. (The Internet tells me to seal all windows and doors, but the Ranch house doesn’t even have sealed ceilings. Most days you can tell the wind direction from inside.)

Anything that looks even remotely conenosed, or black, or dark, or insectoid, is pretty much doomed for the foreseeable future — until wintertime, probably. I’m in protecting-my-family mode.

I acknowledge that I’m dehumanizing (de-insectizing?) the bugs here — lumping them all into the category of the enemy. But a trip to the ER, possible long-term heart damage and an attack upon his son will do that to a fellow. In truth, I’m willing to negotiate. I yearn for peace. I just don’t think the Kissing Bug has it in him. Its aggression is genetic. There. I’ve said it. Still, I’m open to a diplomatic solution. Peace with dignity. But I’m not holding my breath. In fact, I might be lucky to still possess functioning air channels with which to take breath.

The poor harmless daddy longlegs (like all neutral civilians in every conflict) are suffering the most from this regression into Total Savage War, as my reflexive sleep-time slapping-of-the-thighs is causing them to wonder what the heck they did wrong: if you’re a nocturnal crawling creature, my advice to you is to stay out of my bedroom for several years. Until the psychic healing is further along. I don’t even complain when I awake with a shriek to find my sweetheart vigorously swatting the side of my neck, believing she “saw something moving.” I don’t really know what this war is about, and I’m all-in.

My son’s bite, by the way, itched for about four days, leaving him fascinated with the aloe and tea tree oil applications we gave him in an effort to keep his discomfort minimal, as well as some of the colorful new words he’s heard his Pop using in the middle of the night. I’m still seething at the violation of Geneva protocol.

And the attacks continue — they’re probably peaking now that Monsoon is here. The worst assault of all occurred just two dawns ago — my eyes rocketed open to the familiar itching/pounding sensation as my skin tried to leave its confines in what felt like three places. I leapt out of bed. My balance off due to blood loss, I stumbled across my drowsy but already-startled dog, thus creating a cacophony that neighboring ranchers could no doubt hear, and, if Myrtle was any indication, understand.

Limping from the dog encounter, I still wasn’t fully awake when I popped what I thought was a Benadryl, but turned out to be my sweetheart’s post-Partum vitamins. I sighed, preparing my groggy pre-sunrise self for another groggy day (which happened to be the day of a video shoot) as the pain built and I was privileged to discover that I’d been bestowed with the bad kind of Kisses to my right arm, left middle finger, and blessedly just to the side of a third place I’d rather not name (its function is suggested by waving the middle finger). What must’ve been a zaftig assassin had come and gone, poisoning my dreams and my epidermal layer.

It was the final straw. No one wants to sleep in a Green Zone. I grumbled in self-pity as I limped back to bed following yet another rendition of the thrice-nightly Ritual Shaking Out of the Comforter. A few minutes later, my sweetheart heard my scratching.

“You OK?” She mumbled sympathetically.

“I think so.”

“Benadryl night?”

“Would’ve been — now it’s just a lot of iron and calcium. Probably a blessing — I don’t want to be zonked for the shoot.”

(Pause to concentrate on devotional scratching. Then I dropped the Big One.)

“Maybe we should spray. Myrtle says her guy uses natural stuff. Only one person and one cat died from her last two encounters with him.”

“Um.”

At that moment our toddler squirmed in the next room. Sang a few lines of the “I Love Monsoon” song he’d composed the previous morning on our hike. My sweetheart let that answer the exterminator question by gesturing toward the music.

“But if I’m getting bitten like, twice per night, and that causes long term heart or nerve damage, what’s the difference? At least if the pesticide causes it, I won’t be waking up and dispatching all small insect life with Extreme Prejudice. Plus, they’ve already starting coming after our kid. He must have my body chemistry. We could spray, then go on a month-long trip, maybe take the goats.”

My sweetheart let me go on fantasizing. In fact, it’s 4:43 a.m. two nights and one bite later, and I’m writing now, idly scratching various wounds and scared of my own bed (my body is like a calendar of my bites). I’m pretty sure my sweetheart is right and I don’t really want to poison my own home. Still, the upshot of all the continual snapping awake, in practical terms, is that my overall REM minutes are probably down 30% in recent weeks. With no end in sight.

One way of looking at this is to observe, probably not totally inaccurately, that I’m 30% dumber since the Kissing Bug onslaught began (at the very least: this assumes no Chagas-related neurological damage). After all, REM sleep is crucial to our healthy brain function and a good night’s sleep is known even to counteract several hours of watching Fox News. I’m certainly putting the auto-spell correct to the test far more than normal, as much from typing mechanics as Flowers For Algernon syndrome. But equally true, I’ve found, is that creativity resides in that Interzone between sleeping and waking. And when I can decipher my handwriting, I’m finding some pretty trippy ideas hatched in my notebook in the morning.

Inspiration aside, I recognize that the safe course to take, perhaps, in an ecosystem in that has you sneezing, flooded, hailed on, or in danger of terminal insect attack a third of the year would be to move. This is the course of action Douglas Adams suggests for Woody Allen since, judging by his films, New York makes him neurotic.

But since I believe living in Carbon-Neutral Paradise helps allow me to maintain mental and spiritual health, I think I’ll choose what I call the Iocaine Outlook. A sort of Ninja Training wherein I build up resistance to the various afflictions, dangers and toxins in my chosen ecosystem, and, hopefully, emerge stronger. This is the strategy Westley uses in the Princess Bride in his battle of wits against the evil Vizzini.

Like The Man In Black, it’s my belief that you never know when acquiring resistance to a poison (be it juniper or Kissing Bug saliva) might prove useful. If it doesn’t kill you first. If Climate Change has the same effect on the migration of Chagas Disease that it is having on bark beetles and political inertia, well, I might have to revisit the exterminator option again during my Ninja Training. Or at least get more cats.

Someday, though, I’m thinking to keep my spirits up as the first hummingbirds of the day begin to experimentally buzz the feeder outside my window, I might have to challenge an arch-villain to a battle of wits involving the saliva of the toxic Kissing Bug. I sure hope the immunity comes soon, though, because even as I type I’m having trouble bending my recently-Kissed middle finger. And I sense something moving on my left shoulder blade. Could just be the wind. But how can I be sure? And what is that crawling on the wall?

 

 

No Nefarious Insects Can Keep Life From Being Oh-So-Sweet When It’s Goat Ice Cream Season

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