Pursuing praxis

The many stand alone bungalows (they call them chalets) all have a twin bed, a couch, kitchenette, several windows, full bathroom, and electricity etc. The door locks with a skeleton key, and the shower pipes are all exposed, but it works. All the buildings (save the research lab/shed) are in tan-orangey mud style, with red roofs. It’s very striking with the yellow-green grass, red and brown dirt, bright blue sky, and gray-green eucalyptus – the trees looked oddly familiar before I found out they are Australian. There’s even some Mexican trees around, and of course maize is originally American, and they’ve had to specifically plant native African plants, including acacia. I don’t know my African plants at all, but there’s a frighteningly thorny giant bush down by the creek, so maybe that’s the acacia. The thorns are widely spaced, true enough, but they’re about an inch and a half long, and it’s a dense looking bush. Personally, I’m glad plants don’t have legs. Ever wondered why plants haven’t evolved locomotory apparati, apart from passive means of dispersal? You’d think if echinoderms can manage a water vascular system, some plant would figure out how to manage xylem and phloem and the cell walls in order to move. I mean, it could be like one of those solar-powered cars; not exactly awe-inspiring, but it gets you from here to there, when the sun’s out.

Anyway, it’s mostly farmland around here, and probably some ranch land too. The birds are obnoxious in the morning, and in my eaves at night, and I wake up to rooster calls. They’re lovely, actually, and my only major gripe with the place is the bugs. I’ve been on the bug warpath the last two nights, fending off the ants and beetles and spiders and god knows what the other things are. My first afternoon here (Friday), a B-52 beetle motored in through the open window, loud, low and heavy. He plopped down behind my kitchen table and started the water-beetle GI-crawl in no particular direction. I got out my birding ‘noculars and studied him from across the room. Then, using an upside-down juice glass as a magnifying glass, I got a closer look at him. Black, with a yellow-green V down the back, and long, terrestrially useless hind legs that he had to drag around. I chucked him out the front door and he hit the air flying.

But really, he was the best of the worst to come. The ants remind me of summers in Las Vegas. There are little sand-trap holes everywhere, and little mounds spring up a day after the ground is raked. There are red ones and black ones, teeny-tiny ones and huge ones with heads like portable vice-clamps. Some move slowly and methodically, others zoom about with their butts in the air. All of them are body-snatchers. If I squash a bug and leave it on the floor, probably within 15 minutes the micro-ants will have found it and started working on eating, dismembering, and carting it off. That is, if the medium and big sized ants don’t wreck their plans. Thus ensues a little squabble that spirals into a call to arms and a mobilization of troops, all while trying to make off with the dead body. This is in addition to the (small) roach(es) in my kitchen, the giant black wasps that elect to lazily inspect a room and won’t be guided away, the beetles on little beetle-missions, the voracious colonizing spiders endemic to my bathroom (including the cute brown one behind my mirror, that inevitably I forget about till I’m two inches away without my glasses, then he comes into focus), the strange double-bodied winged things that freak me out and stink when squashed, the 40 decibel crickets, the occasional metallic blue-green fly, a few midges, one mosquito to date, and at least a dozen kinds of moths.

But tonight was the best. I was greeted by a giant dragonfly when I returned to my room around 7:30. I had my windows shut all day, so how he got in I have no idea. I tried to convince myself he was worth having around, since he was enthusiastically eating bugs gathering at my kitchen light, but he was almost the size of a hummingbird, and my adrenaline skyrocketed every time he started flying, because he was huge, and fast, and ran into things with surprising speed and force and repetition, and dive bombed me a couple times (though at his rate, it might be expected by purely Brownian motion). I finally got him with a good dose of bug spray (after working up the courage for several minutes to do it, and after about a half hour of circling each other in my chalet [diameter maybe 18 feet]). He flopped into my dish drainer and I emptied probably a fifth of my can of spray on him. He was still flailing and buzzing about amidst the dishes, and I ended up squishing him between two dinner plates and finishing him off with the produce knife. Pity. He was beautiful, with dalmation spotted wings and a green and black striped body, and he ate lots of bugs. But man. Talk about nerve-racking. I just can’t live with bugs, and it’s a total toss-up as to which are worse – a giant single roommate, or a horde of tiny ones. And now I have to wash all my dishes again, too.

Oh, and I saw two cows today too. A red one and a black and white one, replete with their cute little horns, and attendant cattle egrets. They munched the tall grass under the eucalyptus, next to the cat-tail reeded creek out back of the research shed, with crop fields on the hills beyond. Ah, live bovids – so novel and refreshing a sight!