I'm thinking of this one summer, not long after my family moved to Texas, when the entire city was covered in crickets. It was something out of a Charlton Heston movie. A no-joke plague had descended upon the greater Dallas area. By July the whole city smelled like dead fish. A cottage industry emerged of kids showing up to grocery stores with push brooms and shovels and offering to clear the parking lots of all the dead crickets. People were slipping on them. Cars were spinning out. It was a liability. You would get close to a wall and then realize the whole thing was moving, every inch covered in layers of crickets. My dad's tennis league cancelled matches. The flood lights were attracting swarms.
I'm thinking about this Monday night on my porch in Carrollton getting pummeled by grasshoppers taking pot shots at me from the grass. They line themselves up and go for the face. The latest generation of insects making a go at world domination. I was being attacked.
On Amazon J finds a mesh fence you can install yourself for $40. It keeps the bugs out and lets the air in. It's the closest you can get to being inside while still being outside. Or maybe it's the other way around. Sometimes things are the other way around. J comes out with the tape measure. Two minutes later she comes back out with the tape measure. "I forgot everything," she said.
As the dominant species on this planet there's a lot of pressure on us to maintain the illusion that everything is totally under control. If all the dogs in the world, or all the hippos, or all the, I don't know, giant squids, found out that we don't actually know what we're doing it could cause a panic. They might freak out. While I was living on the good ship Anastasis, docked in the freeport of Monrovia, Liberia, a favorite joke among the crew was to scream, "But who's driving the boat?!" every time we'd see the captain in the hallway. And I would like to say again now, fifteen years later, from the patio of my duplex in Carrollton, getting pummeled by grasshoppers: Who's driving the boat?!
The mesh gate arrives on Tuesday and in a box that seems too small to contain a device that will change our lives. I've always felt that big problems require things that come in big boxes. I have a philosophy when it comes to boxes. The bigger the better. "We needed a big box for this job," I tell J. "Big." Bugs outnumber humans two hundred million to one. Last year spiders ate more than double our collective weight in prey. Yesterday I saw a really big moth. A gypsy, maybe.
It seems to me that the stakes down here on the good ship Planet Earth are either incomprehensibly high or incomprehensibly low. One or the other. Not both. I read about the President of a small coastal nation who was disappointed to learn there were no active threats against his life. He asked them to please keep looking. I once had a backpack that came with a warning label: "This bag breaks down over time, just like you."
The mesh gate isn't doing much good there, unassembled on the kitchen table, but I feel like it's starting to help. It's sending the right message. On Tuesday night I smash a grasshopper and leave its dead body to rot on the patio. That's sending the right message too. Wars are not won on the battlefield but in the mind. It was not the explosive power of the atomic bomb that was so terrifying. It was the mushroom cloud.
Thursday night we drink Yellowtail wine on the patio and get eaten alive by mosquitos. J makes an executive decision to install the mesh gate. At any moment anyone can make an executive decision. "I'm making an executive decision," they can say. We put the gate up quickly and incorrectly. "Well, that's the gist of it," J says about the gate, which is open on both sides, and has big gaps at the top and bottom, and flaps open in the breeze. "That's the idea."
That weekend J goes on a trip to Canton and it's just me here alone with the animals trying to act like an authority figure, trying to make arbitrary decisions with confidence and resolve, trying to stick to my guns. "It's not time for that," I say when the dog sets a tennis ball in my lap. I want him to think there's a specific time for tennis balls and that I know when it is. "That's not where that goes," I say, when he puts something somewhere instead of somewhere else. I walk around all weekend pointing at things and making announcements. On Sunday I hold a press conference. The animals follow me back and forth across the living room with their eyes until I wear myself out. I wake up at 2am on the couch, 2 Advil and a SmartWater on the coffee table, the animals sound asleep in the big bed.
Mike Nagel's essays have appeared in apt, Hobart, Salt Hill, DIAGRAM, and The Paris Review Daily. Find selected nonsense at michaelscottnagel.com.