When visiting each other's houses at this time of year, country people customarily engage in what is know as "a walk around the grounds."
At my farm, this involves a two-minute tramp around the perimeter of the house to look at the crumbling foundations (character), the untended perennial beds (potential), the stagnant frog pond (with drainage, you could swim) and a dusty old barn filled with a multiplying number of strange objects my father encourages his friends to store there (no, it's not a gin still, it's a brewery, and I've never used it).
While visiting one of my more respectable country neighbours recently, I noticed the seasonal walk had taken on a strange twist. After taking time to admire the mature flower beds, prize-winning rose garden, goldfish pond and renovated barn, my host led me to the patio to see his latest acquisition: a mosquito vacuum.
"We just got it this year," he said. "It's propane-powered; we run it all day. Look." He lifted up the lid from the top of the thigh-high, robot-like contraption. It was full of dried-out mosquito husks. I asked him how much it cost and he said about a thousand bucks.
"Does it actually work?" I asked.
"It's supposed to clear two to three acres," he said, motioning to his lawns. They were impeccable, vast and sloping, embroidered with flower beds and surrounded by mature hardwood forest.
"But does it work?"
"We notice a difference."
"So you can sit outside at night?"
"Well," he said, "we have the screened-in porch for that. We screened it in last summer. For the grandchildren. West Nile, you know."
In cottage country and the rest of rural Canada, the War Against Mosquitoes is full-blown and raging. Folks are doing everything in their physical and financial power to guard against the buzzing menace, never mind that the vast majority of people infected with West Nile never show a single symptom (I sometimes wonder how many healthy people I know already have it). Nobody likes mosquitoes at the best of times, and the risk of a life-threatening illness, no matter how slight, has turned the pest into a predator.
The fact is, most of us run a far greater risk of life-threatening personal injury driving on the highway to our cottages and country houses than we do sitting on the porch once we get there. We could probably sleep naked outdoors every bug-infested night in June and be fine. But no matter. The new mosquito panic has given us an airtight excuse to freak out on a scale grander than ever before where bugs are concerned.
Last weekend, I visited a friend at his cottage. Halfway through the afternoon, he disappeared. I found him crouched in the woods sprinkling a container of pastel-coloured pellets into a mud puddle. When I asked him what he was doing, he looked up at me, wild-eyed and sweaty, face dotted with welts.
"The larvae," he said in a throaty whisper. "This is where they lay their eggs."
"What?" I was confused.
"I'm killing them all before they hatch. Stupid things won't know what hit them."
I was alarmed, but not surprised. I'd heard of people going insane with mosquito hatred before. A friend of mine who planted trees in his university years once told me the story of a guy in his outfit who simply froze halfway through a day of planting and would not move, no matter what. He stood there like a live mannequin, one hand in his bag, the other stuck in the muck, bugs forming a dark cloud around him. He had gone into a state of catatonic shock, a kind of deep distress far beyond panic. It took his co-planters several minutes to snap him out of it. When he finally came to, the fellow picked up his gear, walked back to camp and got on the first bus back to the city, never to return to the mosquito-infested backwoods again.
No, my cottage friend is not alone in his insect-murdering obsession. Some of his neighbours have stuck little huts on their roofs in the hope of attracting bats. Others have put out birdhouses to attract purple martins.
But really, I wonder, how much can a few bats and birds, a vacuum cleaner or a bit of smelly spray do to combat the zillions of mosquitoes? On my soggy little farm alone, there must be hundreds of thousands hatching every day. All through June, the woods are unbearable. You go in to retrieve a stray Frisbee and come out two minutes later swollen and scratching from head to toe. The evenings are the worst: It might look like perfect cocktail-hour weather, but sitting on the porch is like skinny-dipping in a bayou. They fly up your shorts. They bite through your clothes. They get you everywhere. And I mean everywhere.
Some insist it's mind over matter. One of my best and oldest girlfriends, an experienced outdoorswoman, claims to have cultivated the ability to, in her words, "debug." The trick, she says, is to avoid using cosmetic products of any kind and, most important, to stop swatting, itching and fighting them off. Once you stop noticing them, the bugs stop noticing you. With enough focus and determination, she says, you will eventually be left alone.
"You should try it," she said.
I told her to buzz off.
Join the Discussion: