Yellow Jackets

              It was one of those bright August Saturdays when the heat lets up and you realize there actually are other seasons.  Feeling energetic, I gassed up the mower and headed toward a patch of weeds that had been bothering me all summer.  The first pass was gratifying--it left a clean swathe of disciplined dandelions.  I was midway through the second when I saw the yellow jacket.  It landed on top of the mower. 

            "Stupid insect," I thought, "I knocked him off a flower and now he's trying to sting my machine." 

            Then a Napalm-tipped dentist drill entered my lip.  Another in my thumb.  I started to run.  I yelped back to the house, arms windmilling, looking like one of those multi-limbed Hindu gods slapping twelve places at once.  Inside, I found that they were on my clothes.  I ripped off my T-shirt and ran back out the door.  They were waiting.

            The dog thought my dance was a game and jumped up and down, barking.  They didn't sting her.  I cursed this fact, and her, and the entire sum of unstung creation.  The final verdict was seven stings.

             That night I returned to the nest.  I poured in gasoline and insecticide and did everything but plow up the ground and sow it with salt.  It didn't make me feel any better.  I had a hot bath waiting back at the house which didn't help either, but then I took a massive dose of Scotch, which did.  I went to sleep, had predictable nightmares, and woke up hurting only a little less.

            I quickly found out that I was part of a fraternity.  "Oh, really?"  I'd have to say.  "Sixteen?"  No one, it seemed, had been stung as few times as I had.  I almost

contemplated stirring up another nest to prove my manhood.  Then the killing started.

            Every time I saw a yellow jacket or a wasp or a bee, I'd try to kill it.  Which made no sense.  I knew they served a purpose, and the ones that harmed me were dead.  No matter.  My reaction was automatic--it just happened.  If I saw a bee on a piece of clover I'd smack it with the shovel.  No thought was involved.  I still remember the two yellow jackets I saw eating a dead cricket.  They were head-first in the corpse, their hind parts wagging happily, actually cute, like Chip and Dale with an acorn.  I brought down my foot and smeared them into the sidewalk.

            The implication of this was disquieting.  Here I was, a humane person, dealing out vast quantities of unnecessary death.  It didn't take much reflection to realize that I was re-enacting in my backyard the process that led to the extinction of species--and races.  That murderous gleam in my eye was a twinkling off the scales of something very old and frightening that lies sleeping in us all.

            Then cold weather came and I thought it was over.  I actually pitied the members of one nest I'd been watching.  Yellow jacket drones die over the winter, and I watched their activity go from furious to frazzled to zilch.  It was sad.

             Then, right before Christmas, I went down into a seldom-used room in the basement of my house.  There were wasps everywhere.  Like little heat-seeking missiles, they had come down the chimney in October looking for a place out of the cold.  A warm December day had revived them and they left their cracks and crannies.  I swatted until my arm was tired, then remembered a story about frontiersmen wearing down their trigger fingers of herds of bewildered buffalo.  It didn't stop me.  “You can't have wasps in the house.”  It was raining outside.  There was thunder.  Lightning strobed the window.

            A black widow spider was illuminated against the pane.  It was the perfect metaphor for the moment.  I killed it too.  When I was finished I swept the bodies into a dustpan.