THE HORNET’S NEST

Guest Post by Hardscrabble Farmer

PREFACE:

I wrote the following essay almost fifteen years ago and it was one of the pieces that brought me a great deal of grief and upset when I was later revealed to be a terrible person with bad thoughts and the temerity to write about them online. At that time I didn’t really think through the things I was writing or where I was posting them like I do these days. I was reacting, viscerally, to a world that had suddenly gone through a seismic shift beneath my feet; this was right after the 9/11 attacks and in the evenings when my wife and I would sit under a much darker sky than on previous nights, my thoughts were troubled by the changes that has taken place in the America of my youth. The safety of my son and my wife were my greatest concerns and I was reacting in the way that most husbands and parents would react. I was angry and looking for someone or something to blame when I should have been taking the corrective actions in my own life that I eventually discovered years later.

The events of the last few weeks brought to mind this essay and when I re-read it after more than a decade it didn’t seem as harsh or bitter as it had been taken back then, nor did it come across as hateful of bigoted as it may have been perceived at that time. It just seems like…common sense. Of course I have made major changes in the way I live my life since then and I believe that the prudent course of action these days is to simply sit out this phase of history, to climb high above the turbulent waters of modernity and leave the struggle to others while we try and maintain the better parts of what we’ve become for another time, after the flood. Social Aikido. The writing style is a little too self-conscious for my tastes these days, but writers are allowed to develop organically, like anything else and there’s nothing wrong with having been a clumsy writer if it helps you to become a better one eventually. There’s no crime in being an angry young man if it helps you to become a wiser old one. I am happy to say that the little boy in the story is a grown man living on his own now. He has the ability to look after himself and to fight his own battles without my intercession, but I think that in looking back this was a valuable lesson for him even if it meant that I would have to pay the price for having taught it.

My son learned a valuable lesson this past weekend.

Despite the fact that he is only five-and-a-half years old, he has any uncanny ability to see into the heart of matters and to come to conclusions based on experience, rather than on concepts.

While playing with several of the neighborhood boys on his backyard swing set on Sunday, my son was stung by a wasp. I knew, almost instinctively that this was the case, by the sounds of my son’s cries. It started out as a reaction to the painful needle prick of the sting, but quickly intensified into a higher pitched cry as the poison began to spread.

Years ago my wife and I were walking back to our home, holding hands, when we passed by a neighbor’s greenhouse. Out of nowhere, a hornet tapped against the soft underside of my chin and stung me. I remember my initial response was to slap at the hornet with my free hand and to grab at my quickly swelling throat. The pain was very much like a burn, a pain that ascended rather than abating, as in the case of a cut or puncture wound. “I just got stung by a hornet.” I said to my wife.

“Are you sure?” she asked me.

“You’ve never been stung before, have you?” I asked her in reply.

“No. Why?”

“You would never have asked that question if you had.”

I sat down on the grass until the pain diminished, my wife, thinking that I was kidding around continued on to our home, alone.

My son came running to me, not so much because of the sting, but because he listened to what I had told him about being stung.

“If you are ever stung by a bee or a wasp,” I had warned him, “Run as fast as you can. Don’t stop until you find Mommy or I.”

“Why, Daddy?” he had asked me with real interest.

“Because there might be more of them, and one thing you don’t want is to be stung by a nestful. Run as fast as you can.”

As my son sat on my lap, his hot, salty tears cut tracks through his dirty cheeks.

“I ran, like you said.”

“I am proud of you for remembering.”

“He only got me once.”

“You did the right thing.” I said.

His friends stood around, adding valuable commentary and support.

“It came out from under the sliding board and stung him,” said one boy.

“Got him right on his knee,” said another.

“There’s a whole nest under the sliding board,” the oldest kid in the group observed.

“Look at it swell!” said another.

I held a piece of ice on it while my wife mixed up some baking soda and water. My son stopped crying, more because of the presence of his friends than for any other reason, and wiped his nose.

“It really hurts,” he said quietly.

“I know it does, but it won’t for long.”

My wife smeared the paste onto his little knee, and I asked him what he thought I should do about the wasp nest under his sliding board.

“Kill them,” he said with quiet assurance.

“Are you sure?” I asked, giving him an opportunity to spare the insects.

“I’m sure. Kill them all.”

My wife said not a word in the exchange, although I know that it did not please her at all. She still believes that we could all get along, the lions and the lambs, the wasps and the children, if we just tried to understand one another. She knows that our son and I have a connection that she does not share. He asks me questions that she never hears from his lips, about the world, nature, our place in it and our obligations and duties. Sometimes it pains her to hear him talking about hunting and warfare and patriots and death because she sees him as a mother sees a child; helpless, soft and vulnerable, always in need of her protection. I, on the other hand, see him as a man sees his child; full of promise, fearless and in need of the information that will spare him in the future.

Mothers protect their young, if they are good mothers, and fathers teach their children to protect themselves, if they are good fathers.

My wife feels that she will be able to do something for him if he is in need. I know that I will not always be there, that one day my son will have only himself to depend on, and I want him to be ready for that day.

The boys gathered together in a loose knot and prepared for the attack. They briefed me on the physical location of the nest, its approximate size and shape, and even an estimated enemy count.

“Hundreds,” one boy proclaimed.

“Thousands,” said another.

“It’s about this big,” said the oldest boy, a thirteen year old, holding his thumb and forefinger together in a circle the size of a half dollar.

I took the conservative figure and moved towards the swing set with my wasp killer spray firmly in hand. I approached with some degree of stealth, as my age does not necessarily provide me with protection against angry insects. I moved in under the sliding board to determine the exact location of the hive and noticed it was almost exactly the size of a half dollar and populated by no more than a dozen highly agitated wasps clinging to their papery gray nest. I calculated the direction of the spray and an avenue of escape after I let fly so that I might return as soon as possible to building my stone wall in peace.

I could see my son, standing at a safe distance; chalky white baking soda caked on his knobby knee. Around him were his friends, every one of which was staring in fascination at the unfolding events beneath the sliding board. I fired a jet stream of toxic chemicals at the nest and watched with a mix of curiosity and animal dread as the offenders issued forth in a squadron-like formation headed for safety. They began to lose altitude almost immediately and to fall in a soft rain on the lawn, jerking and twitching in their death throes. I pried at the moist nest with a stick and dislodged it from the green sliding board and crushed it with a flip-flop for good measure.

The threat removed I headed back to the porch with a trail of young boys following at close quarters, laughing and joking about the insect carnage they had just witnessed.

“Cool.”

“Did you see that?”

“Neat!”

Within minutes the boys were busy with some other game involving a large ball, wiffle ball bats, and a forty-five-foot holly tree in the back yard. The dogs were barking and the smell of charcoal fires drifting in from other yards filled the air. There was laughter and the sounds of a world in perfect harmony.

When my wife first moved to the East coast it was after spending the previous twenty years living in Hawaii. She felt threatened by any bug or spider she encountered, and it was only after several years of patiently explaining what each little critter was and what role it played that she was able to react in anything other than flat-out panic at the simple experience of seeing one of these creatures. Spiders are good, I’d told her and flies are generally a nuisance. Horseflies and gnats, like mosquitoes, served no purpose that I could determine, and bees, well, bees pollinated things and made honey, and if you were unlucky enough, you might get stung, but it was usually your own fault. Wasps and hornets on the other hand were extremely aggressive and territorial and woe unto the man or woman that stirred them up. They have their place in nature, but you wouldn’t want a nest of them in your bedroom.

I had made my determinations not on what others had told me, but upon my own experience. I did not make a habit of chasing down colonies of chiggers, nor did I lose a single night’s sleep if I had to put a tick to the torch. Sometimes bad things happen to good insects.

Before my son fell asleep that evening I sat on the edge of the bed with him and he asked, as he does every night, “What do you want to talk about?”

“You were very brave today,” I said in all seriousness.

“Thanks, Dad,” he said softly.

“Tell me about the wasps again.”

“I wasn’t doing anything to them,” he said and then paused. “I’m sorry you had to kill them.”

“I guess I am too,” I responded. “Do you think it would have been better for them to stay under your sliding board building their nest and making more wasps?”

“No. It’s my jungle gym and we play there all the time. Some little kid could have been stung. He might not have run like I did and then they could have got him.”

“That would have been bad?”

“It would have been awful.”

He started to close his eyes and he began to breathe deeply and regularly and within a few minutes he was fast asleep. I crept quietly from his room, looking back once for a brief moment before closing his door.

My wife was sitting on the deck in the cool night air and I sat down and had a glass of wine with her and talked about the weekend and what we had accomplished and what we had on our plate in the week to come. At some point during our conversation she asked me about my new baseball shirt I had worn that day.

“What about Wichita?” she asked.

“You don’t want to talk about it,” I said.

“I wouldn’t have asked,” she said, knowing full well where this conversation was going.

I tried to be as brief and as unemotional as possible about the story, and she listened quietly as the details were related.

“So I guess the episode with the wasp is a metaphor to you.”

“No, not really. I mean I didn’t think about it like that at the time.” The breeze picked up and you could smell a storm in the air, although it was far away from us.

Our conversation drifted off to other things and we watched as the stars dimmed, one at a time behind the veil of clouds above.

Perhaps there is a way to look at the world where actions are separable from outcomes, but I cannot imagine how. I cannot see how ignoring a problem does anything to solve it. Usually, as I have witnessed at least a thousand times in the past, things only get worse by degrees until action has to be taken. Nothing becomes easier to deal with by letting it go. I know some people who would have made the swing set out of bounds to children for the rest of the season. They would have explained to their child that the wasps are simply living creatures as deserving of their place in the world as little children, and that killing them would be an awful act, vicious and cruel and unwarranted. Of course they would have no recourse with the wasps if their child were stung, but somehow they would be able to rationalize and justify the behavior of the wasp and pass it off on Nature. They would no doubt comfort their child no differently than I did, tuck him in bed with the same love and concern, but they would make the child pay the price for the actions of a wasp. And knowing insects as I do, those wasps would make their nest in the same place the following year and the year after that and soon the jungle gym would go unused by the ones it was meant for, while insects enjoyed their comfortable surroundings, courtesy of the tolerant. Nature knows what it is doing, even if we do not. It teaches those who are patient enough to observe, and it judges harshly those who fail to obey the laws it has made.

I do my best as a parent. Sometimes I fail, and sometimes I do the right thing, but I never forget for a moment that what is most important is to prepare my child for the future. I don’t care much about what’s popular or trendy, but rather I look to the past for the lessons to teach.

Later today, when I get home, the yard will be filled with kids again, as it is every day, and they will be playing and shooting arrows and digging holes and sliding down the sliding board, laughing.

One thing is certain; that wasp will not sting again.