I was startled into an impromptu Capoeira dance, whirling and slapping at my face and arms, as if trying to put out little brush fires. A moth had attacked me. It did not live to tell its friends of my demonstration of fear. I stood over the crushed body and roared: the Big Game Hunter had triumphed, again.
My first bride had a no-kill policy with regard to insect life, and I spent many years coaxing bugs back into the bush. Bride Two embraced the “shock and awe” method of insect removal, which enabled me to conceal my fear of wildlife.
I was employed at the Marble Hill Nuclear Power Plant when I survived my first moth attack. I lived in Southern Indiana at a time when the greater part of the state did not observe Daylight Savings Time. Marble Hill was an hour’s drive away, into an area that did observe the biannual flip-flop. I left the house at 4 a.m., drove for an hour, and arrived at 6 a.m. I left the job at 2:30, drove for an hour, and arrived home at: 2:30. (Bride One was the original Time-Traveler’s Wife.)
My drive to work was along dark country roads, and in the Spring, I would roll down the windows of my VW Rabbit, and punch the darkness, the roaring wind offsetting my full-throated singing. One night, I was popped on the cheek by a thing fat, fuzzy and winged. I screamed, regained control of the car. Something fluttered on the floorboards. My right foot on the accelerator, I “stomped the yard” with my left. Movement ceased, and I continued my trip in terror. I bolted from the car when I got to the plant, and as I signed in, someone asked about the dust on my face. I found a mirror, and horrified, slapped the stuff from my cheeks. Later, I inspected the floor of my car: great chunks of wings and body parts indicated that the “moth” had been of prehistoric size. I whimpered, glanced around and recovered. I stood at the door of my car and roared: The Big Game Hunter.
My house on Orange Street, in Indianapolis, was loaded with me, Bride Two, three kids- 4, 5 and 16, and mice. Lisa, my oldest daughter, pointed out the intruder:
“Dad — there’s a mouse in my room.”
I sighed, thinking, “Be a man for the kids; be a man for the kids.” Mice terrify me. The height and weight disparity between the average me and a mouse does not reassure me. But I had to respond to The Kid’s cry for help.
A friend had, long ago, left his shotgun and his son’s BB gun at my house; they were promptly and safely stored away. The shotgun was empty, but BBs I thought, rattled in the little rifle. I got the weapon, and went hunting.
The mouse was trapped beneath a bookcase/desk in my daughter’s room. Red eyes winked in the beam of my flashlight, and the mouse’s belly pulsed in fear as it cowered in a corner. My pulse boomed in my ears as I cocked the BB gun.
Pop! Yeep! Pop! Yeep! I popped him again and again, and he yeeped, jumped, and stayed alive. (Do “air rifles” shoot air?) We grew weary of the air show, the mouse and I, and I finally coaxed it into a brown paper bag, and released it in the back yard.
My roar did not drown out the laughter of The Bride and The Kid, who knew the trembling, terrified truth that lay behind the Big Game Hunter’s cry.
This column first appeared in June 2009.
cjon3acd@att.net