It's termite season in New Orleans. They swarm nightly, waiting for darkness to inflict their gentle terror. So many, moving so fast, they look like the static on a t.v. screen; their tiny sihouettes filter out the light in a constantly metamorphasizing miasma.
Termites don’t bite, but inspire more fear than the toxic Brown Recluse spider and more annoyance than the mostquito. According to termites.com Formosan termites are the most aggressive and destructive timber pests in the United States, causing huge and expensive amounts of damage to homes and trees. Many of the ancient oaks in City Park felled during the storm had already been weakened by termite damage.
Termites inspire fear even for those who don't own homes. During the summer months, termites swarm nightly. There is nothing to do but extinguish the lights and wait for the tiny creatures to leave. When the lights come back on little brittle corpses litter the furniture. Riding a bike through the swarms, the termites tangle in clothes and hair.
The fecund climate of New Orleans encourages all kinds of exotic wildlife. Right now gnats and flies are thriving on the trash piles all over town. The only positive aspect to their existence is that the small green lizards who feed on them are equally plentiful this season. I like lizards.
The mighty Palmetto is the king of all New Orleans insects. Though Wikipedia wants to credit southerners with this lovely term as merely a euphemism for the cockroach, anyone who has seen the mighty Palmetto knows otherwise.
Palmetto bugs are fearless, and they fly. Like termites, they inspire the insipid screams of a horror movie "heroine." The indestructible Palmetto can grow as big as three inches. My mother talks about all the times she has killed them, only to have the corpse disappear from the trash; I flush them down the toilet. But killing them is inevitably horrible. Their exoskeletons are so strong that it's necessary to use a lot of force. Consequently, the sound of them being smashed is loud and guts splatter everywhere.
Though all of this wildlife information may seem anecdotal, it’s very important to me. Every time I return to New Orleans I see something new that was right under my eyes for my entire life. If anything good resulted from the storm, maybe it was that we can all stop taking for granted what we had.
In the case of the termites and the Palmetto bugs, I’m not sure what we have, except the experience of living in the science fiction film, "Land of the Insects."
