Bugs in a big world.

I have this thing for bugs; it's a love-hate thing. It goes back to my childhood in the Columbia Gorge. I was a grasshopper aficionado; I knew of at least four different types of grasshoppers in the fields around my home. There were small, narrow bodied ones, with clear wings and black markings, that lived in fields. The fields were also home to colored body type grasshoppers that were several inches long, and adept fliers. They ranged in colors from pale yellow to brown, and had yellow and black striped wings beneath their opaque cover wings. The wings resembled fans, which I had seen at the home of one of my Japanese friends. A smaller type of colored grasshopper, usually dark brown, had red wings and made a snapping sound when it flew. In the taller grasses lived short-winged grasshoppers that were black, white, and yellow. This type were stout and strong, and resembled gladiators in their body armor. When placed in a jar with dissimilar grasshoppers, this type would often attack the others. They also were the best grasshopper variety to use for fishing because they could endure a long time underwater without drowning.

But the bugs that were the most adapted to the world of human beings were fleas, spiders, moths, and beetles. I used to look at our dog's fleas under my cheap microscope. They were alien looking creatures; evil blood-suckers that left small itchy bumps on my body for most of my childhood. The beetles came in a myriad of forms. Junebugs and long-horned beetles made our backyard a landing strip. The most common indoor beetle were weevils. My siblings, and my mother, would find them in our drawers and closets, where they had gorged themselves on our wool and cotton clothes. Occasionally, a bug would be seen in broad daylight, skittering aross the floor. My father smashed them with his big paint splattered boots, and swatted them with newspapers. Spiders were everywhere, and busy eating the other bugs, whom they stalked at night. Moths came from closets at certain times of the year. They were plain, and dull in color, gray-brown, and usually small. They died within a week, fluttering madly against our window panes hoping to find mates. In third grade I found my first scorpion under a rock near my school. It became a prized specimen in my bug collection, a pin thrust through its back.

When I was married, we owned a large tulip tree. Each year it became sticky due to aphids. We tried ladybugs, but that didn't work. So we decided to give preying mantis a try. We bought the mantis at a greenhouse; it consisted of a one-inch-long egg pouch that looked like it was made of pale brown construction paper. The instructions said to put the pouch in a jar and set it in a warm area of the house. The mantis would hatch within three weeks.

We put the jar containing the mantis in the kitchen, and because it had no breathing holes, I opened the flip-top plastic lid. On a sunny summer day, we decided to go to the beach. When we returned that afternoon, I noticed there were little patches of something on the ceiling of the kitchen. When I got up on a chair to see what it was, I realized that at least five hundred miniature mantis were hanging upside down ready to jab my eyes out. They were perfect replicas of full grown mantis, and seemed acutely aware of me and their role in the natural world. After I gathered them into the jar, I learned why they are such good predators. They cleaned up that tulip tree like vacuum cleaners, eating not just the aphids but the few ladybugs that lingered there.

For years afterwards I would find one or two resting on sides of our house and my son's school. They were usually about four inches long, green, and ferocious. It was this experience with mantis that made us more willing to house some African stick bugs when my son's teacher gave them to her students for the summer. These thorny monsters were so well camouflaged that once they settled into their reposes on the branches of blackberry vines (their favorite meal) a casual observer would be hard pressed to see them.

Of all the insect world, there are none that I hate more than mosquitoes. I am Type O, and apparently, mosquitoes love my blood type. Wearing garlic around my neck doesn't help. Once I went camping with my daughter to an isolated area in southeastern Oregon. We had spent half the day looking for sunstones, and went back to our campsite on top of Hart Mountain. It had been a good day; we had gone fishing and she had caught five little native trout. After dinner we retired to our tent and I got out a picture book to tell her a bedtime story. I used a flashlight to see the pages. I kept hearing a buzzing sound and realized I'd let a mosquito into the tent. Suddenly I felt something on my temple and slapped it. A few moments later there was something wet running into my left eye. It was making it hard to read so I shone the light at my face and asked my daughter if she saw anything. She gave a little cry and shouted, 'You're bleeding, poppa!" The mosquito had tapped into a vein and though I'd killed it when I slapped it, I'd helped it inject its anti-coagulant.

I cannot imagine a world without bugs. I have seen swarms of neon blue butterflies dining on damp soil by a river in Tennessee, thousands of ladybugs flowing from an upstairs window of a house, a garden spider, big as a quarter, resting in the center of an ornately constructed web in a rose garden, and a legion of ants busily marching in and out of a foot tall ant hill. I don't know what kind of Creator would make such creatures, but surely everything has a purpose, and I am sure that also pertains to the animal kingdom and human beings.