Not On My Watch

by Donna Schoenkopf

The mosquito dangles in the middle of the room from a single strand of broken spider’s web.

I smile.

That tiny piece of evidence of the balance of nature validates my experiment out here at Chigger Lake.

My whole life here is an experiment, but MY kind of experiment, which means that I have no grand plans, no schemata, except to keep my eye out for things, whatever they may be.

I want to go natural.

That means, among other things, that I will use absolutely no pesticides out here at Chigger Lake.

Now, all you city slickers, and that includes people who live in small towns, would just about faint with the teeming insect life out here. It abounds. It somersaults its way through the woods and grasses and into my house. You city folk (and I know because I used to BE one) think you have insects with your cockroaches and flies and a coupla spiders? HAH! You ain’t seen NUTHIN’ til you’ve lived in the country.

The unsprayed country, that is.

Here’s something I never knew before I moved here. Every year is hugely different as far as populations of wildlife goes. I attribute the varieties and numbers of species to the differences, year to year, in the weather. The tiniest bit of variation in rainfall and smallest swing in temperature makes the entire cast of characters, plant and animal, change.

Everything in nature is in such delicate balance.

And I get to watch it.

This year I have a bumper crop of spiders, as you know. I have seen spiders that I have never, EVER seen before – elaborate lifeforms I’d never imagined. Yesterday I saw a small spider on my back door. It was black and that shade of orange you see at construction sites. Its body was slender, almost wasp-like because it had a waist, and its legs slender and pointed at the end. It looked like a spider-wasp hybrid.

I have so many spiders that even though I sweep, brush, wipe their webs from everything they build on, the next day there are more webs in exactly the same spots and even more in newer outposts.

These webs don’t scare me or sicken me. They just irritate me because I can never whisk them away thoroughly enough so that they stay away, and this irritates me because I worry about what the neighbors will think. “There’s that crazy old lady’s house–the one with all the spiderwebs.”

I’d probably think the same thing.

So I grumble and wipe.

Most webs are cloud-like, fine threaded masses of fluff that lie clustered at the bottom of chair legs and at the base of the refrigerator and behind the bookshelf against the wall. Only a few are in the rafters and even fewer are sturdy and thickly threaded.

mosquito larvae

Yesterday I wiped the webs from out of my Croc gardening shoes for the third time in three days. When the spirit moves me, I’ve wiped the webs from around the bases of my plants. I’ve dusted the webs from the rafters overhead. I’ve wiped the webs from the one inch space under the bathroom door, but they’re back in minutes, or at least it FEELS like minutes. Don’t get the wrong idea. If you walked into my house, you wouldn’t notice them, it’s just that I THINK you will. You won’t notice them because the webs are subtle. The floor and furniture sort of look like I haven’t swept in a while. The spiders, who are hunters and have to keep a low profile, rarely show themselves, so those puffs just seem like dust bunnies.

And yesterday, not only did I clean up spiderwebs, I saw some spider action.

There was a huge daddy longlegs (the particular species here at Chigger Lake is enormous) up in the rafters and a mud dauber (which is a wasp but has a very sweet disposition and doesn’t sting unless absolutely cornered and is fighting for its life and even then the sting is very mild) had gotten into the house and was flying around up there and happened to brush past the web of the daddy longlegs. This excited the spider so much that it did a little dance. The mud dauber, for no reason I can understand, went back and buzzed the web again. The daddy longlegs did his dance again. And then off went the mud dauber, leaving the daddy longlegs hanging in the lurch. Literally.

And now I shall finally get around to writing about the mosquitoes. I have dangled it from that strand of web for too long.

This year the mosquitoes are thick. The mosquitoes are THICK, I say. They are so thick that when I went out to my shed to get my weed whacker I ran into a swarm of them. Ay caramba! I had been noticing mosquitoes biting me here and there but this was a SWARM of them.

Okay. I had to get serious. No more Mr. Nice Guy for me. I needed to OFF (excuse the pun) the mosquitoes. I had to find out where they laid and hatched their eggs.

The answer: standing water.

Well, I had a pond at the bottom of my hill. The natural place for mosquito procreation. And, again naturally, the pond is frisky with fish. Fish jump out of the water all day long, snapping up all the delicacies flying by. Surely they are keeping the mosquito population, if not totally wiped out, at least mitigated.

There are amphibians there, too, as well as up here on the hill. I’ve seen two kinds, one your regular brown toad, which lives in tall grass and under things and gets fat and sassy just like Jabba the Hutt, and the other is the Amazonian-like tree frog, a small, graceful thing, the color of new apple tree leaves on its back and head which blends to cream on its belly. It’s maybe two inches long, with beautiful exotic eyes. They like to stick to my sliding glass doors. Once one got trapped between the glass and the screen for several days, I guess, because when I found him, he had become almost grayish. He leaped to freedom when I pulled open the screen but I think he was discombobulated because he kind of flopped around on the deck until he oriented himself and skedaddled.

But I digress. Back to the task at hand—looking for mosquito breeding places.

There was one area of suspicion. It was the most neglected of the civilized area of the property. Yes, you guessed it—the Area of Suspicion was the accumulation of crap behind the shed I’ve been bitching about cleaning up for at least two years. I was sure to find a breeding ground there for those little bloodsuckers.

I walked out behind the shed and took inventory of what was lying around. There were a couple of sheets of white metal siding left over from building my house. I had a bunch of disjointed metal poles left over from a clothes hanging apparatus I bought. I had the chicken coop full of potting pots. I had wood left over from building the deck. I had an old satellite dish and modem from HughesNet. I had two metal bed frames. Some tools. An old tire.

Where would those mosquitoes hatch?

Upon closer inspection I discovered standing water in tiny places ... in upturned cans I had saved for potting plants. The top of the trash can had indentations in it in which stagnant water stood. The wheelbarrow. An old tire. There were mini hatching sites here and there in unlikely places.

I began dumping out water. It was going well until I got to the tire. It proved to be a real pain. I turned it on edge, expecting water to flow out but it just swirled around the inside. I tipped it over. The water just ran to the other side. I would NOT give up. I tipped it this way and that way. I rolled it. Nope. Finally I realized there was no way to get the water out of the damn thing outside of siphoning it out so I carried it over to the “orchard” and laid it on the ground. “I’ll fill it with rich soil and plant a tree in it later,” I thought.

I went back and surveyed my work. Pretty good. All water dumped. A semblance of a system to where and how I had moved everything—wood here, siding there, poles there, satellite dish and modem over there. Now to REALLY civilize the area.

I got the weed whacker, plugged it into the outside plug that Peewee installed for me (a really good thing to have, let me tell you), and began to cut through the tall grass that had grown there for two years. Nice. I couldn’t stop. I began mowing down the dead sunflowers which stood shoulder high and grew down the hillside. Ahhh, those dried husks were gone. I began trimming the edge of the east yard and the space between the shed and the house. Beautiful. I weed whacked the mound of tall, lush grass that grew where Peewee had dumped a surprise load of manure, a gift, two years ago. He knew I wanted manure and he mounds it at his place from all the cattle he raises. He had scooped some into his dump truck and brought it over one afternoon.

The mound stands in front of the shed and used to be my compost pile. Now, besides the thick grass, only a single crape myrtle grows where I planted it a couple of weeks ago. It’ll be a huge shade tree on the north side of the house and splash that whole side with color. Pinkish purple. I swept the weed whacker over that mound, carefully avoiding the crape myrtle until the whole area was lush, lush, lush deep green grass, mowed and neat.

Then I stood back and observed my work.

All mosquito hatching sites had been eliminated. All wildness had been tamed. Everything had been done without using a single chemical.

Now, as I write this, I think about pesticides and Silent Spring by Rachel Carson, written back in the 1960s. All that time ago and pesticides STILL rampant on the Earth. That book had changed my life and my thinking. Hasn’t anyone else been affected?

I think about spraying my house and my land and how I could never do that. I think about how pesticides poison everything they touch and how everything is connected to everything else in the Universe. I imagine the little green tree frogs dying after having their meal of flies and mud daubers. I think of the spiders lying dead and dried up in the corners and recesses of my house. I think of the fish in the pond jumping high in the air, not to eat mosquitoes and dragonflies and flitting critters, but gasping for breath because the water is poisoned. I think of the aquifer below me, that vast expanse of underground water, receiving the toxic blend from the world above.

I think of all that and say:

Not on MY watch, baby!

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