The Bugs of Summer

Overall, I’m pleased as punch for engineering a year and a half of straight summer for myself. True, the weather gods have repeatedly punished my hubris. First, they sent us first six weeks of solid rain while we headed to Hudson Bay last (northern hemisphere) summer. Then, when I jumped from good-old-fashioned-New-England fall to austral spring, rains returned. Torrential rains, pouring from unbroken grey skies, for several weeks straight.

Even with puddles in my rain pants, though, I can find the Zen of rain. Here in Pumalin, while the clouds hide the massive Volcan Michinmauida and rocky spires of the Andres, they give a dynamic misty grandeur to the smaller steep hillsides of forest still visible. Looking out my kitchen window at diagonal streams of precipitation might point me more toward tea than out the door, but once I get out, I remember that the rain never feels as bad as it sounds. This principle holds as true in tents as it does under a metal roof.

But the Zen of bugs—now, that’s a different story. The tabanos have arrived, and have proved a major change in my experience of this place. Summer and winged invasions, it turns out, go hand in hand on both edges of the world.

I’d heard about this phenomenon: how the tabanos’ annual descent made January a far less pleasant time for outdoor adventuring than the summer weather would suggest. But I wrote these complaints off as bug-wimpitude, to which—I must make clear—I am highly opposed.

Now that these enormous, loud, hard-biting but easily killed insects are rudely interrupting my laptop-on-picnic-table session, I’m understanding why these flies are a season, not just an insect. We define seasons largely by what one can do outside; the time of tabanos is one for marching about and traveling by water but not, say, napping in the sun. Self-defense against these pathetically slow winged lumps is not the problem—once they land, they’re toast. But settling into a peaceful reverie becomes many times more difficult in the era of the drone-and-bite.

So where’s the meta of bugs? To give them credit, they might be the most potent antidote on earth to nature-romanticing. Wide-eyed love of snowy mountains and crystal rivers doesn’t fool them. They are the reality-check, the proof of being in nature, not just looking at it. At worst, insect infestations—whether black flies, mosquitoes or tabanos—provoke maddening frustration and a rush indoors. In that way, they provoke even the most ardent back-to-naturist to acknowledge the benefits of civilized life. A cynic might point out that humans spend more time thinking about the preferences and habits of bothersome bugs than just about any other wild creature. Does debating what colors attract black flies or what weather patterns will increase the tabanos count as ecocentric thinking? Perhaps a stretch.

The best things I can say for bugs: they keep you moving, and they keep it real.