Stinkbug Winters

Folks around here kept mentioning the overabundance of kamemushi this autumn - though in my opinion more than one kamemushi is overabundance - and it recalls to me what one of the wives of the fields across the road said to us the summer we first moved into our new house here, how there were a lot of kamemushi this year - there'd been practically none of those bugs in Kyoto - so there would be heavy snows that winter, and so it proved, big time.

The snow out here had been impressive the previous winter, but it was so heavy our first winter in the new house that only a tracked vehicle could have made it all the way up. The first early snowfall was over a meter, and the snowtop stayed up to my waist all winter. There was only a walking path up the mountain road, up and down which the mailman walked each day, the folks up here using sleds to pull their provisions (food, kerosene) up to their houses.

We newbie city slickers had a 2-wheel drive vehicle (for the last time), so we definitely had to park down below the school and walk up too, but we loved it all: the snow, the solitude, the silence, the vistas...  All that snow on the ground throughout the winter was a welcome challenge, and nothing better for a woodstove fire, warming us at the heart of white...    

Since then (almost 20 years now) we haven't had anything like that snow, or anything like those swarms of kamemushi (in the laundry, in your safety glasses, inside your just-laundered sweatshirt, in your salad, in your coffee. Until this year. At the first unfold last week of a firewood tarp that had been in the tool shed I counted 50 kamemushi, in the second unfold, I lost count, third unfold why bother countin, fourth looks like big snow comin.

Now I get to see if kamemushi walk the walk.

HOW TO SWING A CAT - from the archives

While getting the kids to the table for supper I noticed that Haru the cat was inside the house playing with something over in the corner, behind the trunk. I scooped him up with my right hand, having a dish in my left, and held the squirming beast in place with my left forearm as best I could while trying to open the door to put him outside so we could eat in peace but the cat was playful, grabbing my left forearm painfully with his claws, so I went OW! OW! OW!, grabbed him with my right hand, pulled him away from my left arm and held him out at a distance to my right, when I felt that he must have unusually long arms because he was still clawing my left forearm, then I looked and saw that it wasn't the cat clawing my arm, it was a large hissing beetle the cat had been playing with that had fastened itself to the cat's hair in the righteous fury it was now taking out on my innocent left forearm, and I was going OW! OW! OW! but now had both hands full and couldn't put the cat down or it would run upstairs and hide unreachably under the bed or worse, nor could I get at the beetle, who by now was hissing pissed off pinching for all it was worth the tender skin of my as I say innocent left forearm and I was still going OW! OW! OW! and now Keech was going WHAT? WHAT? WHAT? to me jumping around that way, at which point in the overall desperation I started swatting at the beetle with the cat I happened to have conveniently at hand, swinging the cat in wider and wider arcs (note to cat swingers: it's hard to get pinpoint accuracy and solid impact from a cat; if you hold it by the scruff it tends to flop around when you swing it less than top speed at anything as small as even a large beetle, so you lose control on the first few swings, whereas swinging it by the hind legs or tail creates too great an arc so forget about accuracy; if you're swinging with any sense of urgency, you should ideally have a short stiff cat and a large target), trying for the very first time in my life to hit a beetle with a cat's head, though this fact was unobserved by me at the time, as I was still going OW! OW! OW! while the beetle went HISS! HISS! HISS! and Keech went WHAT? WHAT? WHAT? and the cat went YOW! YOW! YOW! What is this guy trying to do with me? till finally I got the vectors together and swung the cat (thank god we have a living room big enough to swing one in) so that his head hit the beetle and knocked it off my forearm. Altogether a memorable YOWling, HISSing, OW-ing, WHAT-ing family bug adventure of another kind. The bite was not venomous, just a fierce pinch, and so to dinner, cat and beetle not invited.

HEY, THAT'S MY LEAF!

All my life I've been nice to various species, Ever since I got past the frog-snake-salamander-catching age, it's been live and let live. Even in gardening, a worldwide battlefield, I say let's go organic, no insecticides etc. But when I walk out to my quietly growing garden and observe that many of my tomato leaves look like antique lace, gnawing at the edge of which lace is not a cute little aphid-devouring ladybug, but a Bob’s-tomato-leaf-devouring bug, to whom I say "Hey, that's my leaf!" but I'm talking to myself, they never listen, so

I amble back to the house to get some liquid detergent, pour a little into a cutoff PET bottle, then add hose water to 2/3 level to get a good head on it, after which I make my rounds from laceleaf to laceleaf, tipping and flicking the not so lucky notladybugs into the frothy mixture, where they can enjoy a warm bubble bath and come out all clean and dead. While I'm at it, I do the same for the weasely weevils on my peppers, who also love a bath, and dive right in with a little prodding. I do two rounds to be sure. A couple days later the tomatoes and peppers are taller and healthier; the bugs are clean and together with their gods.

It is a service I perform for the vegetable world, which rewards me with its delicious and nourishing fruits, some of whose seeds I save for the following year; it's a deal we got going. As a vegetable vassal I help the scarlet, emerald and golden nobles grow, and they help me get from year to year.

Now if I could get a bubble bath that would hold a dozen monkeys at a time, we could move on into the Renaissance...

THUNDERSTORMS

Thunderstorms rise up in distant jeweled towers all around the far shores of the the striated rose and gray Lake, all quiet on this shore but for the insect song, the high chatter of swallows bathing in the last of the sun, flashing the white of their underwings, bursting now and then into clouds of aerodynamics... The rising columns of clouds insist into the sky, like insect song into silence, like clouds of wings into empty air-- they are each and every moment's thought of the earth, working things out, balancing all, earth and sky negotiating like sea does with shore, like birds do with air, like we do with our employers-- wait,,,,what??

PROTECTING LUNCH

How much of your lifetime have you spent closely examining oak bark? Not too many minutes, I'll wager. Scanning even small areas of oak bark is not a general habit among humans of my acquaintance. Until a few years after I moved here it wasn't a habit of mine either; out of the first 60 years of my life, I don't think I spent more than 30 seconds carefully examining oak bark. I can't imagine why I might even have done it for 30 seconds, but you never know, we were all kids once, with hungry minds, nothing to do and an oak nearby.

But then one day you're grown up and having lunch, say, in your house on a mountain in a completely other country like Japan at just about winter solstice, when all self-respecting insects are dead or asleep - you still with me on this? - and a kamemushi (lit: turtle insect, i.e., stinkbug) suddenly comes bungling headlong through the air the way they do and decides on a spontaneous crash landing, also the way they do, but this time right into your fried noodles, soup or salad. At that point, you are likely to ask the air-at-large that timeless question that so often issues from the depths of the human heart: Where in the hell did that come from? And as timelessly usual, there is no answer from the air-at-large.

But as the evolutionary process chugs along, after this has happened a few times and you've tossed out a few soups or salads or cups of tea or glasses of wine you'd been just about to enjoy, and that question is still cooking on your brain's back burner, one day you're out in a cold afternoon loading firewood into the firewood bag and you notice what looks like several bits of oak bark moving around on the oak bark. Thanks to evolutionary experience, you know that this is strange. So you look more closely, this time with your glasses on. Those moving bits of oak bark are in fact kamemushi, staggering groggily in disturbed hibernation.

If they weren't staggering you never would have noticed them until you unwittingly brought them indoors and into your nice fresh cup of tea, for they have developed over the - what is it, 500 million years? - of their evolution the ability to mimic oak bark, ultimately ruining salad and other enjoyables by crawling together in the bark crevices as the weather cools, when they go into hibernation, their combined oaky carapaces then looking precisely like part of the bark-- as if any creature living is going to bother with stink bugs anyway, this is defensive overkill if you ask me.

What gets me (note considerately avoided bug pun) is that the innocent two-legged, fire-using newcomer, having evolved into a woodstove user less than 300 years ago, in all innocence totes the noxious insects into his warm home, where the stinkers wake up thinking it is Spring at last and bungle through the air as is their giddy Springtime wont, spontaneously crash landing here and there on your computer screen, your tv screen, in your hair, ear, soup, salad etc.; it would all be very entertaining as a video I'll never make.

So having evolved to this advanced point through my relentless pursuit of knowledge and non-malodorous lunch, and a preference for nothing crawling over my WORD text, I have learned to scan oak bark in great detail when filling my firewood bag, so I won't have to throw away another glass of pineapple juice.

Evolutionarily speaking, I have thus far managed to slash my kamemushi experience by up to 95%. I'm aiming for 100% and I'm getting there, but as most humans must be aware by now, you can't evolve overnight. Want the rest of my salad?

JUST FIVE MINUTES

A brief but deep delight it is, to 'steal a moment' (as though one's time is another's property), sit quietly and watch - enter insect time - as a male dragonfly, after a ziggy cruise back and forth on glassine wings, perches at last atop the tip of the tallest limb on the plum tree, a prominence carefully chosen as affording the best location for displaying to all the flitting dragonladies - for the few days allotted - bright red masculinity in all its charm, while a few branches below, a large garden spider has been busy all her life weaving a broad web of such geometric complexity as to astound mathematicians and evolutionaries, and of chemical complexity so simple as to be far beyond our most advanced chemical reach, and all without an advanced degree, a cutting-edge lab or a vast production plant.

Meanwhile a tamamushi, peacock of the insect world, buzzes lazily by, so splendidly winged as to be in no hurry to light anywhere, a beetle of refractive iridescence way beyond Warhol's wildest dreams, and not at all commercial, simply having emerged that way from a cocoon somewhere in the wood into living beauty surpassing any jewel, winging slowly past on the quiet evening air...

Just 5 minutes of your time...

Photo via What's That Bug