Bugs galore

Igo is a buggy place. When guests leave our place at night, we know better than to stand there and talk with the door open.

Instead, we open the door just enough to rush everyone through. We dash outside behind them to say our goodbyes far away from the porch lights and bugs.

I figured these country bugs  — mosquitoes, no-seeums, caterpillars, moths, and now gnats — were just part of the circle of life. I wouldn’t dream of spraying chemicals to kill them. Destroy nature? Never.

Monday night may have changed my mind.

Bruce and I were putting Webster to bed, as we do most evenings after dinner. (Webster’s our affectionate name for this Web site) Bruce worked across the room on the big-boy computer. I worked at the kitchen table on the laptop. 

Some poppy-seed-sized bugs— like fruit flies, but smaller — divebombed my laptop screen. Flit, flit, flit.

First a few. Then a dozen or more. Bugs pelted my neck and face. I looked down. Bugs all over the table. And in my wine glass. I looked up and around the house. Hundreds, maybe thousands of of them.

Every light in the house was abuzz with these —for lack of a better word — gnats. I closed the windows, convinced that the bugs had slipped indoors through hairline openings in the screens. Now that I think about it, the bugs are so small they could have passed through the screen squares if they just sucked in stomachs, scrunched shoulders and turned sideways. 

I flailed my arms and yelled to Bruce, who was oblivious to the bugs that ice skated over his monitor screen and circled overheard.

I grabbed the laptop, ran for the bathroom, shut the door and stuffed a towel under it. That’s where I worked all evening. I only came out when Bruce yelled to come look at the sidelight windows by the front door: completely covered with the crawling, flying insects. (I tried to photograph it for you, but I did a lousy job, what with the darkness outside and light inside.) 

Basically, we had ourselves an insect home invasion. I’ve never seen anything like it.

Second thought, I have. It was about this time last year. Bruce and I drove home from the Bay Area when we stopped for gas at a truck stop around Orland.  A huge black cloud of insects swarmed the station. People ran to pay with shirts over their heads. All the vehicles’ bumpers and windshields were thick with dead insects. 

Nightmare material.

That’s how it looked Monday night in Igo. At some point, those large pale moths that recently hatched from our earlier caterpillar invasion appeared on the windows outside and acted like vacuums. They did their best to suck swaths of the tiny bugs. But there were many, many more teeny bugs than the big moths. It was a losing proposition.

The following morning our place looked like the site of a bug massacre. Inside, dead grayish brown bugs dotted every surface, especially beneath any light source.

Outside, thick piles of dead bugs covered window sills, screens edges and doormats.

I left a message about our insect issues for an expert, Paul Kjos, Shasta County’s agriculture commissioner.

“What’s this about a bug invasion in Igo?” he asked.

Suddenly, it sounded absurd, even to me.

I explained what we’d seen the night before. I told about the millions of morning-after bug bodies.

Surely he’d heard from others, I said.

“Uh, no, we haven’t,” he said. “First I’ve heard of it.”

I pictured Kjos writing a notation: Greenberg: crazy bug lady – Igo.

Even so, he politely answered all my questions. Kjos said it sounded as if our property was visited by what lay folks might call gnats; actually members of the moth family, albeit very tiny ones.

He humored me and asked if I could collect a small sample of the dead bugs and bring them by his office. 

I’m on it.

I’ll get the shovel.