I saw a mosquito on my porch yesterday, flitting about up in a corner of my porch where it thought I couldn’t see it. It was the mother of all mosquitoes, a huge one that probably laid all the mosquito eggs this side of the Mississippi Delta. My first thought was, oh no, no, no. you don’t. You are not going to fly in here a couple of months early, all fashionable with your blood-sucking bite and ruin this gorgeous Spring morning. No siree Bob. Mr. Mosquito, you got to go.
It was always this kind of unexpectedly warm day that made a special formula kick in for me when I was a kid, the one I had made up to survive until the end of the school year. First, I knew that I could get through March because there was Spring break. I could do this, I told myself. Then I knew that April had Easter weekend in it, which would be an easy month because teachers went to church, met Jesus again, and came back to school giving us easy assignments like, “make a leaf collection,” or “write a poem about your mother.”
By the time they returned to their old personalities, it was May Day, basically a fun day on the playground, and then after that there was only two weeks until the end of school. Those days were filled with tests that didn’t count for anything and afternoons spent in the hallway because of a tornado drill, or a tornado warning, or watching movies about tornados. In other words, I told myself school was a wash basically from March on.
Once my special formula kicked in, I began to think about nothing but summer things, which meant I thought about nothing but my favorite thing about summer – going to camp. For six weeks every summer from the time I was seven, my parents, God love them, shipped me off in a duffle bag to Wisconsin to live in a cabin with three other scary boys who looked like they’d been on a Navy SEAL team. Buzz haircuts, camo clothes, assassin-type pocketknives and 200-watt flashlights that could bring in a helicopter at a thousand paces. It didn’t matter. I loved camp. My cabin mates may be put in a strangle hold in my sleep but camp for me was the bomb.
We did all the normal things one thinks of at camp – the swimming, the hiking, the cook-outs, the over nights, building totem pole, telling ghost stories and all that, but there was also a lot down time in the course of six weeks, times when we sat around trying to figure out what to do with ourselves.
So, when we’d bored of comic books and playing crazy eights, we found easy entertainment in any number of insects that had made themselves at home in our cabin, bugs like horseflies and daddy long legs and June bugs. Because we were situated near a lake, the perfect breeding ground for mosquitoes, so there was a ton of them around also. While to an adult it wouldn’t seem like an insect would make a very good distraction, we were not adults. We were devious, slightly demented boys, a few Navy SEALs trying to find ways to outdo each other on any given day.
I think what began with a series of experiments on horseflies, for example, grew out of a revenge we felt for the huge red whelps they left in the small of our backs when they bit us – even through a t-shirt. We had no compassion for horseflies whatsoever. They were good for sticking a hook when we went fishing, but that was about it.
I think the next part of the story, the part where we extracted our revenge on horseflies, can be partly blamed on something one of us saw on Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom, a show narrated by Walt Disney, who managed to equate everything in the animal kingdom to insurance, an amazing feat when you consider the animal kingdom has little need for any kind of insurance.
I believe what aired in early June was an episode on amphibians, toads to be exact, and shortly inot the program, after Walt had explained Mutual of Omaha’s relationship with amphibians, there was footage of a toad snatching a fly right out of midair, all in slow motion, which was new for TV at the time.
“Did you know,” one of my cabin mates began, “that toads have tongues that are three feet long?! Yea, I saw one shoot out of a toad and grab a fly in slow motion on Wild Kingdom!”
“Three feet? No Way!” I blurted out, “I’ll get the toad, you guys get the fly! This is going to be great!” And off I went to the forest to find an amphibian, our hero in this story.
Back in the cabin, I plopped the toad down on our desk table, and the guys gathered around.
“Wait! I said, “how are we going to keep the horsefly from flying away?”
Oh, that’s easy,” my friend Scott said, and, holding the fly between two of his fingers, quickly tore off its wings and placed the hapless horsefly down in front of the toad. With razor eyes that scanned its next meal, the toad sat motionless. The fly, on the other hand, actually looked kinda pale. I remember at that point hearing a slight ga-lump, similar to the sound a drop of water that hit you on your forehead. I think that was the moment when the three-foot tongue came out… but honestly, none of us ever saw the tongue. One second the fly was there, the next second it was gone.
We four boys just stared at each other.
“Did you see anything? I asked the others.
“Nope, maybe we did something wrong,” Scott said, “Let’s try another fly.”
Rounding up a couple more horseflies, we quicky learned that a toad will only eat about seven happy meals before it runs out of steam, and we still hadn’t seen anything the infamous tongue from Wild Kingdom. We even rounded up a new toad and other choices like a June bug, an earthworm which was kind of dumb I thought, a daddy log legs, and alas, the catch of the day, a real live hornet.
Now this was going to be interesting, we thought. Like a Marvel comic. The Hornet versus the Toad.
Carefully removing the wings using tweezers, Scott placed it down in front of the toad.
What happened next can only be described as one of the grossest things I’ve ever witnessed, and mind you I was raised by a urologist, so I’ve seen a few gross things. The hornet disappeared and then gradually, we saw the long slimy worm-like blob of the toad’s tongue peel out of its mouth, a long pinkish roll of flesh like on TV, about three feet long. It kept coming and coming and untwirling across the table, and there buzzing at the very end of it, on the tip, was the hornet, stuck, yes, but driving its stinger in with a vengeance.
I don’t remember anything else except all of us running out of our cabin to get as many of our buddies to come and see this marvel of nature, the abominable spectacle of an unraveled toad’s tongue. Sadly, by the time we had returned, the toad and the hornet had disappeared, presumably back out to the woods, leaving us with nothing more that a puddle of slime on our table.
Yet, in the back of my mind, I could hear the great Walt Disney speaking:
“In the Wild Kingdom, animals like the amphibious toad can never predict where their next meal is coming from. Here at Mutual of Omaha, we are here for you when resources like horseflies and hornets are scarce and times get tough.”
Then, I heard Walt Disney introduce a special insurance rate, one for toads, and one for hornet and… maybe even life insurance for that first mosquito that appears out on our porch, too early for its own good, sometime in March.