Friday, November 26, 2010

The Mosquito Cloud

I keep a manuscript called Those Little Moments in the Life of a Third Culture Kid. It is a recollection of many of the events, experiences and adventures I had growing up - the same ones that inspire my books. Maybe it will turn into a book of its own someday. This is one of the recollections.





      I grew up in Campo Mata, an oilfield camp in the middle-of-nowhere Venezuela, not very far from the mighty Orinoco River. This was in the 60’s. We didn’t have TV, so most of what we did as kids we did outside - and most of what we did outside had something to do with El Monte, what most folks call the jungle. It was a perfect place to grow up.

      Looking back, I did lots of things that people would consider dangerous. Now I call them adventures. One thing we did a lot was fish for caribes in the river. Most people call them piranhas, but caribes is what the locals called them. They named them after the Carib Indians, who were cannibals and were supposed to be pretty fierce. I guess they left a big enough impression to have the Caribbean Sea named after them too. Anyway, if you were fishing by the river, you were smack-dab in gator and anaconda country too. Little kids like me were perfect lunch size meals for those critters. Of course there were all kinds of other biting, chomping, stinging animals around: sharp-clawed ocelots, Africanized killer bees, hand-sized tarantulas, strangling boa constrictors and finger-sized biting ants that we called Machacas. But the worst of all of them were the mosquitoes.

      Mosquitoes were a big nuisance but, as a kid, I never did understand why my parents were all fired up worried about them. They said that they carried all kinds of diseases. We’d always be getting shots and vaccinations at the clinic to put all the anti-mosquito diseases medicine in our bodies. Those weren’t the only shots we got. We got shots for tetanus and small pox and polio and all kinds of things. We even had to get a gammagobulin shot – whatever that means – and it really hurt. But it wasn’t even the worst of them. That award went to the rabies shots. If you got bitten by some crazy mammal, and it happened all the time, they’d stick the needle straight into your stomach – and they’d do it five times!

      Anyway, mosquitoes were everywhere. It wasn’t so bad during the day, because it was usually as hot as the dickens, and they mostly stayed hidden under leaves in the mango trees until it got cooler in the evening. The problem was, that it was also when all the humans also liked to get out and do things - things like go to see a movie at the outdoor screen at the golf club, or go to a party in the back yard of someone’s house, and there was a party almost every night it seemed. So, to fight back the blood sucking menace, we had the mosquito truck.

      The mosquito truck came out just about every night. It was just a normal pick-up truck, but it had this loud machine in the bed that put out a humungous white cloud of mosquito killer. It was like a great big huge can of bug spray on wheels. I don’t remember where it was – maybe on the machine, or the side of the truck – but I remember the big sign surrounded by skulls and cross bones, and lots of X’es. The sign had just three letters: a “D”, another “D”, and a “T”.

      I remember asking my parents what DDT was. My Dad told me, but all I remember was that it was a word almost as long as Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious, which everybody knew was the longest word in the world, so it must have been the second longest word in the world. He also told me that DDT was the ingredient that killed the mosquitoes, and most any bug. He said it could even kill a kid like me, if I got enough of it in me. When he told me that, I knew I was a goner.

      You see, Billy and Todd and me were the only members of a super-exclusive, no-girls-allowed-ever club called the Machacas, and we spent a lot of time chasing the mosquito truck on our bikes. We did lots of other cool things as Machacas: we jumped the river on our bikes, had secret meetings in our tree house in the mango tree in El Monte, hunted critters in the jungle with our sling shots - all kinds of things. But one of the things we did the most – because it came out every evening – was chase the mosquito truck on our bikes. And our mission was to hide in the great big white cloud of DDT so that the driver couldn’t even see us in his rearview mirror. We were really good at it.

      All I knew for sure was that we Machacas were all going to die on our backs, with our legs and arms all curled up, and black X’es over our eyes, like big dead cockroaches. He didn’t know it, ‘cuz I never said anything about it, but my Dad had basically told me that I was going to die. There was no doubt about it. I had gallons of DDT in my body, to go along with the gammagobulin, tetanus, small pox and polio medicine. I wondered if it would all mix together and turn into TNT or nitroglycerin. I started worrying that I might blow up the next time I ran over a bump with my bike.

      The next evening, after barely moving around the whole day for fear of blowing up, I went outside without putting on any bug repellent. I was going to check something out. If I was really so full of DDT that I was going to die like a bug – or blow up – the mosquitoes probably wouldn’t get near me. They’d know if I was a walking can of Raid. So I stood out in the middle of the back yard, in my shorts and no shirt.

      It didn’t take long. Pretty soon I was being bitten all over my body by a cloud of buzzing mosquitoes. I was never so happy to lose so much blood. I wanted them to suck as much of it out as they could, so my body could start to make some more new blood to replace the contaminated blood.

      When I showed up at school the next day I looked like an alien from outer space. I had swollen, scratched-up bumps all over my face and neck and arms and legs, and each one of the bumps was covered in pink dabs of Calamine lotion. Funny thing was, when Billy and Todd showed up they looked just like me. I was pretty sure that we were all going to live. We never chased the mosquito truck again.

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