The utility company worker climbed out of his truck after backing out of my driveway and raised his hand toward me and my granddaughter. “There’s a hornet’s nest right there,” he called out. “You keep that little girl away from here. Those hornets were giving this truck THE BUSINESS!”
My street is a slim slice through the neighborhood, but semi-truck drivers still challenge the tight and twisted course. On this day, I stood on the porch with two-year-old Myah, showing her the large trailer that had ripped down wires and interrupted delivery of Sesame Street’s Elmo. From 10:25 a.m. to 12:37 p.m. that day, we would pop from our gopher holes and onto the front porch to watch the police ticket the driver of the truck, and the contractors and employees of the utility company as they assessed the damage. We marveled as the contractors rode lifts toward the wires above the street. But the utility worker’s warning resonated with me because of an incident a week earlier.
Drivers often pull into the driveway I rent, back up, and turn around. My eldest child has accused me of having become an old, “Get Off My Lawn” kind of man, and the evidence might be found in my irritation with the “driveway turn-around” people. One day, in a fit of pique, I parked a car at the foot of the driveway (a deterrent to the turn-arounders) and while I was offloading merchandise, I had to repeatedly swat away a persistent insect. I thought no more of it until my roommate-daughter cried out to me one day: “Dad! There’s a bald-face hornet’s nest over the driveway!” Lauren, the Internet researching queen, found information that noted that, among its many aggressive traits, this hornet remembers faces. She bought two cans of wasp and hornet killer and I went out at night to launch a 15-foot spray at the nest. I saturated the nest with most of the contents of one can, then ran like hell.
The next day, I cautiously approached the nest, looking for signs of life. I found plenty: The hornets were about their buzzy business. It rained most of the rest of that week, preventing the use of the “destructo-juice:” Must not wet a wet nest. My landlord stopped by, and I warned him of the peril of wandering about, cell-phoning beneath the nest two feet above his head. He told me that he could have an exterminator come out and chop down the gray paper nest, but like Bill Murray in “Caddyshack,” I was gonna get that gopher, uh — nest.
On a rain-free evening, my daughter and I “kitted up,” and crept into the hot night. I wore a long-sleeved jacket with the drawstring hood pulled tight around my head, and Lauren wound a cloth around her hair. Armed with three cans of “killem,” we stood at right angles to each other and unloaded the full contents on the deadly dome. A cautious inspection showed no signs of either the living or the dead, but that may be due in part to the total coverage of the nest with the fatal foam. In the morning, the ground was littered with dead hornets, and I did not regret rejecting my daughter’s insistence on cutting down the nest and dumping it into a bucket of water. “Killem can says wait 24 hours,” I said. The next evening, I took pictures of the dead, and as I zoomed in on the nest, I saw in the viewfinder a bald-face hornet landing and entering an opening.
I’m going to need a bigger can…
cjon3acd@att.net