The mosquitos and ants and black flies were ubiquitous, a part
of life. On a summer day, with nothing to do but drink water and
sweat, I’d spend entire afternoons killing them – swatting
hundreds and hundreds of mosquitoes, until my hands were
stained brown, until my arms were crisscrossed with lines of dry
blood. I never regretted these massacres, because it was a
never-ending series of battles in an eternal war against the
nastiest agent of nature.
I would never deplete their numbers, but I could hope, if I killed
enough, that somehow the mosquitoes wouldn’t attack me while
I slept. I knew there was no relationship between backyard
murder and the humming in the dark, but I imagined that there
was. My desperate superstition. At night, that hum could keep
me awake for hours, sometimes until dawn. I would weep into
my pillow, praying that the mosquitoes would go away. When
that wasn’t enough – because it was never enough, to merely
hope – I taught myself to crush them in the dark. I’d gauge their
distance. Blindly, I would hunt them.
The mosquito seemed so unfair, and from this, I learned what
unfairness means. In every other way, life in the woods was
good: Beautiful parents, an energetic brother, plenty to eat, a
good elementary school, field trips to Montreal and Nantucket,
some distant friends that I could visit, books, movies, everything
a child could want. But the mosquitoes kept things in
perspective: They would never go away, except in the bitter,
bone-chilling winters. The winters would melt into muddy, murky
springs. The relief of leaves and grass – which sprout so
reluctantly in the Vermont countryside – was matched by the
onslaught of vile insects. My nightmares were filled with their
egg-hatching.
All around, in the still waters of the swamp, blankets of eggs
were growing, breaking open, yielding billions upon billions of
new mosquitoes. Only at noon, standing in the beating sun,
could I feel safe. And every evening, as the sun threatened to
set, I’d run home from the woods or the yard, slam the sliding-
door closed. Even the slightest crack in the door or the smallest
hole in the screen could admit battalions of mosquitoes. One
false move could mean lying awake all night, bathed in a sheen of
gritty sweat, slapping every pinch or ache, though most of them
were phantoms, hallucinated by my feverish mind.
But the most fearsome were the spiders: Some crawled across
my pillow at night, others clung to the rim of the toilet-bowl.
Spiders nested in our house-plants or wove webs in the corners
of the ceiling. Spiders are good, my parents would tell me. They
eat insects. But their contribution seemed so minute, so
pointless. I could kill hundreds of mosquitoes, but a spider could
eat only a few in its brief and ugly lifetime.
Some spiders moved so quickly you couldn’t even see them
dart; they’d disappear and reappear a few inches away, as if they’
d slipped through the fabric of space. I despised the
mosquitoes, but the spiders terrified me to the point of hysteria;
their eight fuzzy legs, their clusters of black eyes, the jagged
sickles of their mouths – nothing could be more demonic.
Spider-bites didn’t itch as much as mosquito bites, but they
were bigger, nastier: They looked like burial grounds scattered
on my calves and wrists. Spiders had no reason to bite – only
because they were spiteful or afraid. Spiders bite when they feel
threatened. Well let them feel threatened, I thought. I would kill
them, too – every one of them. I would kill them in their homes,
smash them against walls and dusty windows. I dropped books
on them from above. I became an expert at killing them, too.
The same joy, but surpassing relief.
Throughout the world, insects rule the lives of rural people. In
the tropics, thousands of people contract malaria from the
mosquito’s bite. As they sicken, these people feel burning in
their joints, their bodies shiver, and as their livers struggle to
expel the parasitic microbes, they vomit themselves to death. If
malarial children grow up at all, they can suffer brain-damage,
hemorrhaging, bouts of great energy followed by exhaustion,
anemia, and death. Malaria kills over a million people every year.
In Africa, the bite of the Tsetse fly can sap the strength of the
strongest man; the “sleeping sickness” is exactly that – victims
end up bed-ridden, sometimes forever.
But the mosquito carries more than viruses: It carries lessons in
nature’s cruelty. I used to hear stories of a Canadian convict
who escaped from prison. When he was found, somewhere in
the Canadian forest, he was encased in a sleeping-bag, barely
able to breathe, suffocating in his ad hoc cocoon. After only a
few hours among the mosquitoes, he had tried to find his way
back to jail, because the hum was so maddening. Before that,
early pelt-traders used to cover their bodies in bear-fat. And
during the French and Indian War, battles were won or lost
according to the thickness of the mosquito clouds.
next page
of life. On a summer day, with nothing to do but drink water and
sweat, I’d spend entire afternoons killing them – swatting
hundreds and hundreds of mosquitoes, until my hands were
stained brown, until my arms were crisscrossed with lines of dry
blood. I never regretted these massacres, because it was a
never-ending series of battles in an eternal war against the
nastiest agent of nature.
I would never deplete their numbers, but I could hope, if I killed
enough, that somehow the mosquitoes wouldn’t attack me while
I slept. I knew there was no relationship between backyard
murder and the humming in the dark, but I imagined that there
was. My desperate superstition. At night, that hum could keep
me awake for hours, sometimes until dawn. I would weep into
my pillow, praying that the mosquitoes would go away. When
that wasn’t enough – because it was never enough, to merely
hope – I taught myself to crush them in the dark. I’d gauge their
distance. Blindly, I would hunt them.
The mosquito seemed so unfair, and from this, I learned what
unfairness means. In every other way, life in the woods was
good: Beautiful parents, an energetic brother, plenty to eat, a
good elementary school, field trips to Montreal and Nantucket,
some distant friends that I could visit, books, movies, everything
a child could want. But the mosquitoes kept things in
perspective: They would never go away, except in the bitter,
bone-chilling winters. The winters would melt into muddy, murky
springs. The relief of leaves and grass – which sprout so
reluctantly in the Vermont countryside – was matched by the
onslaught of vile insects. My nightmares were filled with their
egg-hatching.
All around, in the still waters of the swamp, blankets of eggs
were growing, breaking open, yielding billions upon billions of
new mosquitoes. Only at noon, standing in the beating sun,
could I feel safe. And every evening, as the sun threatened to
set, I’d run home from the woods or the yard, slam the sliding-
door closed. Even the slightest crack in the door or the smallest
hole in the screen could admit battalions of mosquitoes. One
false move could mean lying awake all night, bathed in a sheen of
gritty sweat, slapping every pinch or ache, though most of them
were phantoms, hallucinated by my feverish mind.
But the most fearsome were the spiders: Some crawled across
my pillow at night, others clung to the rim of the toilet-bowl.
Spiders nested in our house-plants or wove webs in the corners
of the ceiling. Spiders are good, my parents would tell me. They
eat insects. But their contribution seemed so minute, so
pointless. I could kill hundreds of mosquitoes, but a spider could
eat only a few in its brief and ugly lifetime.
Some spiders moved so quickly you couldn’t even see them
dart; they’d disappear and reappear a few inches away, as if they’
d slipped through the fabric of space. I despised the
mosquitoes, but the spiders terrified me to the point of hysteria;
their eight fuzzy legs, their clusters of black eyes, the jagged
sickles of their mouths – nothing could be more demonic.
Spider-bites didn’t itch as much as mosquito bites, but they
were bigger, nastier: They looked like burial grounds scattered
on my calves and wrists. Spiders had no reason to bite – only
because they were spiteful or afraid. Spiders bite when they feel
threatened. Well let them feel threatened, I thought. I would kill
them, too – every one of them. I would kill them in their homes,
smash them against walls and dusty windows. I dropped books
on them from above. I became an expert at killing them, too.
The same joy, but surpassing relief.
Throughout the world, insects rule the lives of rural people. In
the tropics, thousands of people contract malaria from the
mosquito’s bite. As they sicken, these people feel burning in
their joints, their bodies shiver, and as their livers struggle to
expel the parasitic microbes, they vomit themselves to death. If
malarial children grow up at all, they can suffer brain-damage,
hemorrhaging, bouts of great energy followed by exhaustion,
anemia, and death. Malaria kills over a million people every year.
In Africa, the bite of the Tsetse fly can sap the strength of the
strongest man; the “sleeping sickness” is exactly that – victims
end up bed-ridden, sometimes forever.
But the mosquito carries more than viruses: It carries lessons in
nature’s cruelty. I used to hear stories of a Canadian convict
who escaped from prison. When he was found, somewhere in
the Canadian forest, he was encased in a sleeping-bag, barely
able to breathe, suffocating in his ad hoc cocoon. After only a
few hours among the mosquitoes, he had tried to find his way
back to jail, because the hum was so maddening. Before that,
early pelt-traders used to cover their bodies in bear-fat. And
during the French and Indian War, battles were won or lost
according to the thickness of the mosquito clouds.
next page
The Mosquito Lessons by Robert Isenberg
r.kv.r.y. quarterly literary non-fiction
summer-fall 2007
summer-fall 2007
