Listen here, Rachael Carson, it’s not that I disagree with you about the effect pesticides have on our environment and future generations. No, I am 100 percent with you on that. It’s just that I have earwigs the size of Smart Cars and they are about to lift my entire raised-bed cutting garden and carry it home to their nest. Now, I picture that nest as a dark, stalactite dripping cave where giant earwigs in evening clothes recline on red velvet couches sipping silver goblets of hydrangea leaf nectar while smaller earwigs gyrate on a down-lit dance floor. Petals nibbled from my dahlias decorate every surface.
I hate earwigs, really I do. The are deeply unattractive, and we all know how I am about that. They are shiny and brown and have sharp little pincers at the front end, unless it’s the back? Anyway, they are mean-looking claw-lettes. At the back end, the real one, is an exit for the poop that sprinkles out of every flower and leaves a kind of morse code on my tabletops. I’ve never been ‘pinced’ but my mother-in-law had an earwig crawl into her ear (is that why they are so named?) and it took a visit to the ER and some real, professional-like, pincers to get it out. Well, that and a liberal dose of olive applied topically, drop by drop. I still gag at that story, years later.
So, Rachael Carson (and Michael Pollan while I’m at it), I am not going to go around and pluck them out of my dahlias, hydrangea, zinnias, basil and echinacea. I do not want to pull back a hand decorated with earwigs. Honestly, I’m sure these bugs are the very same they filmed and blew up in the original ‘Clash of the Titans’. Harry Hamlin barely made it out alive and he had a toga and a sword. I have tried several less “I love the smell of napalm in the morning” methods to send the little buggers packing. I’ve used soapy water; spraying so much of it on my plants they looked like honeymooners in a Catskills tub. I’ve tried rosemary oil, I could have grilled a leg of lamb with all the seasoning. And, I have tried sending in the children to pick (who cares if they get pinced, they are young, they’ll heal). All I got for my efforts was clean, well-scented, traumatized earwigs (and kids) some of which made it into my house on their clothes and the petals of my flowers. Damn it.
That is why (not the Titans, not the terror that flashed through the kid’s eyes as they shook their arms and legs in a St. Vitus dance, but the general ookiness of the earwig) I am bringing in the big guns. I have a secret stash of DDT. No, I don’t. Stop rolling around in your grave, Carson. I have no more or less than any other home gardener, a little Raid, a little Ortho, a rolled up newspaper, a pair of canvas gloves and a 6smile. That was true, until I sent David out to the Agway and he came home with a hefty spray bottle of Apocalypse Now. For those of you who don’t remember, or who didn’t grow up with my mother, a one woman environmental awareness army–and this was in the 60s and 70s, long before Al Gore invented the internet and global weirding–there is a pesticide that replaced DDT. It is nearly as deadly to bugs, if not to robins and finches. Or so they say.
Stay with me, now. In the 42 years that we spent in East Hampton, or at least the time Mom had with us, we were always looking for the shortest way out of the city and into Long Island. We went through the tunnel uptown, passing the rococo furniture stores, their plastic covered ‘Luis 14’ (sic) chairs marching across the display windows, the check-cashing places, lines out the door on Friday, a payday. We snaked through the posh crowd on the upper East side. We drove through dozens of open fire hydrants in East Harlem, we went up the FDR or over the 59th St. Bridge. In fact, I thought, for years, that the 59th St. Bridge was simply the bridge to the country. That’s what we called it, the country. Everybody did back then. There was no “the Hamptons” no flashy cars or private planes. We were all the ‘Bridge and Tunnel Crowd.’ And, in the early years, there weren’t that many of us anyway. Of course, later there were what my mother called “groupers.” The young people who rented houses west of the highway, and poured onto the public beaches like, well, like earwigs out of a dahlia. There, you see, I brought it around. It may have taken a team of oxen and a whip, but I’m back to the earwigs.
About 1976, Mom and Dad discovered ‘the back route,’ the holy grail of second home owners. Just before Bridge Hampton, a simple left off 27, there is a labrynth of small roads with names like Two Holes of Water and Head of Pond. I’m sure everyone knows about these sandy roads now but at the time, as soon as the car made that left (or if my mother was driving, swerved wildly through traffic accompanied by screams and horn-honking), everyone, and the dog Peanut, pricked up their ears and breathed deep the scent of salt water and new-mown fields. Our windows opened of their on accord, AC off and everyone closed their eyes in ecstasy, including my mother, even if she was behind the wheel. Cue more screams and my father growling, “Betty, for heaven’s sake, think of the children.” I must have been about 30 the last time he yelled that. My mother died no more than a year later.
We could drive nearly all the way to our house on these roads. They got smaller and smaller the farther we traveled from the beaten track. They ran along farm fields, potatoes mostly but some kale or beans, a surprising peach orchard, and wild cosmos (not the drink, the flower that is, oddly, bright purple-y pink like the cocktail). Here the vistas were wide, the white flowers of the potato plants startling in the gathering dark. Along with the evening air though the windows came the smell of the pesticide on the potatoes. My mother did the shouting then. “Windows up!” she’d cry as we all grabbed for the handles. “They’re using Sevin this year.” We’d crank like madmen, sealing ourselves into the “Vomit Comet’ (the name of our Buick, christened by my sister and I as we cannoned down the back roads, my mother Steve McQueen in Bullit–and that was just to the A&P).
So, the other day I took the spray bottle in my right hand. It was heavy, freighted with the promise of multiple earwig deaths. It was red, a warning to all pests that their days, nay minutes, were numbered. I felt like Clint Eastwood, flicking back his poncho to reveal his weapon, Bruce Willis, cocking a Magnum as he walks out of some flaming something or other except I was in my bathing suit and a broad-brimmed straw hat. David wandered away to hand pick a bit of crab grass (he plucks up stray grains of sand with tweezers in our front hall–not really, but damn close). I put my finger on the trigger, narrowing an eye at the biggest earwig-addled dahlia. I heard the whistle of the wind over the high plains of …wait, stop, wrong movie. The spray left the nozzle in a wide fan, catching the sun and making a little rainbow of death. I smiled and then I jumped away, wiping the blow back off my arms as David and I both screamed “Sevin!” Just like my mother. The smell was unmistakable. We looked at each other and then slowly, sadly, I shook my head. “I can’t do it,” I said. “I know, darling” David replied, “I know.”
This morning I cut a whole armload of dahlias and hydrangea. Morning is such a good time for that, still cool, the blossoms beaded with dew, the grass soft and damp beneath my bare feet. I carried the flowers into the kitchen sink, shaking them furiously until at least a small town’s worth of earwigs tumbled down the drain. Little Mary-Earwig out in Earwig-ville will wonder where her father went. Well, Mary, he certainly didn’t die from a pesticide, absolutely not from Sevin. Thanks Mommy. And as for you, Miss Carson, you win.
All Stories Are True... 