(Un) Fair Weather Friends
Meredith Phillips tries not to be scared of Texas’ bugs.
As a native of a tiny northeastern state with low self-esteemand a small, dense, and collectively grumpy population, I fell pretty hard for Texas and its contrasting qualities the first time we met. It took very little effort to transplant myself to a happy life in Austin, and in the four years since I moved here, my love affair with the state that loves itself has blossomed. But since then, I’ve slowly been coming to terms with a secret fact, something the Lone Star welcoming committee and the PR people manage to keep quiet. That is, aside from being the biggest and proudest, Texas may well be the scariest state in the nation.
The other day at a party I overheard a girl issue a warning about alligator fish. I demanded an explanation of this new threat, and she told me everything she knew: alligator fish are bottom feeders with big chompy teeth. They skulk around Texas lakes and rivers as if evolution passed them by, chewing on the extremities of swimmers who get in their way. A freshwater barracuda, if you will.
Alligator fish are just the latest in a list of unusual and unpleasant vermin I’ve discovered since becoming a Texas resident. But our home state shouldn’t only be remembered for its critters—it’s also host to threats from the sky. Don’t look up, Texas has much more ominous weather patterns than I would have predicted from my previous northeasterly roost.
VERMIN
For these purposes, the term VERMIN means anything pesky, scary, or gross that wants to attack you or wants you to host it.
A few months afterI moved to Austin and realized the gravity of the bug situation, I began to theorize that maybe what I needed to do was move significantly closer to one of the poles. It seems that the further you get from the equator, the slimmer the odds that you’ll suffer, either physically or emotionally, at the hands of vermin on a mission.
Infestations
In January of 1994 my friend Heather and I moved into a tiny, clean apartment on the east side of town. Almost immediately, the bathtub started filling up with silverfish. Clearly, an empty bathtub is better than one full of bugs, but the silverfish were wonderful, mild-mannered guests compared to the next infestation: cockroaches.
Thanks to the exterminator, most every roach we encountered that year was already doing the slow, gyrating dance of death: lying on its back, one foot pawing aimlessly at the air and antennae waving slowly. A roach would stay in the pre-death coma for days, and eventually expire. But just try to move a roach in that state, and it will haughtily resurrect, ready to show you who’s boss.
With a tree roach, you almost have to meditate before the fight. To kill one takes about seven dead-on whaps with a hefty shoe, and at some point during the scuffle the roach starts to fight dirty: it will fly at your head, or leap into your bed and hide under your covers, or try something else so utterly jarring that you lose your cool, and thus, your aim. We eventually discovered that it is possible to even the playing field; you can stun a roach by spraying something at it over and over again, until it’s damp and drugged and exhausted. Water may not work, but a healthy dose of Windex is better than going into combat against a dry roach.
When the roaches backed off, which they eventually did, some really creepy things started happening. We would regularly encounter tufts of gray fur in the pantry, and we’d hear scratching and thumping and running in the walls. Since we never saw this visitor, we decided he was a squirrel. This was easier than considering the other possibilities.
Our final infestation was ladybugs. Commonly regarded as one of the more appealing insects, even ladybugs are disconcerting when there are more than 12 of them gazing at you when you wake up in the morning.
We moved.
Snakes
In North America, only four varieties of snakes can kill you: rattlesnakes, cottonmouths, copperheads, and coral snakes. All of these thrive in the Lone Star State.
A co-worker announced one day that he had an enormous snake threaded through his air conditioning system, trying to get into the house proper. He was leaving the office to meet the snakecatcher at his house.
The compromised air conditioning must have been the factor that aggravated the situation, because most natives of this state would have tried taking matters into their own hands before calling in the professionals.
Every East Texan I know has a framed picture of their mom or grandma posing next to a cottonmouth that she mauled to death with a stick after it snuck up through the commode. West Texans have a video of their baby sister whupping a rattler’s ass with a garden hoe.
And what other state can count snake farms as part of the tourist industry?
If Texans seem sort of blasÈ when it comes to snakes, it’s probably because they’re used to them, and because at least they’re big enough to spot easily. What’s an occasional snake to people who can’t even wear open-toed shoes in the yard?
Things to Hide From in the Yard
I was sitting on my friend’s porch when she, gazing upward, asked, “What is that woolly thing that just fell from the sky?” This was my second run-in with an asp, but the first time I saw one fling itself off a roof.
My introduction to asps, the tiny, furry beasts that hump along the ground in a deceptively benevolent manner, was in a parking lot. The longtime Texas resident who pointed it out explained that if an asp touches or bites you, it hurts more than you want to imagine, and then you go numb. Not your whole body, just the extremity where the asp bit.
I wanted to get my car and run over the damn thing, but she wouldn’t let me.
It’s difficult to conceive of such a vicious strain of caterpillar, when the fiercest pest in my past had been a black ant, a benign insect who did nothing but sully the kitchen counter with its feet. And not only do asps hurt you, but it’s premeditated; they hide on roofs, concealing themselves from view while carefully selecting a target. Then they launch.
Fire ants, another fire-and-brimstone pest, aren’t quite as discriminating. They will eat anything (or anyone) until there isn’t any left.
The fire ant native to Texas isn’t as much of a problem as the South American species that was accidentally introduced several decades ago. These super-aggressive ants don’t have any natural predators up here, and are forcing Texas’ native fire ants into submission and possible extinction by devouring all the low-lying potato chips and toes they can find. The answer to this problem?
University of Texas researchers are gearing up to introduce another non-native pest, this time a fly from South America who specializes in tormenting fire ants. That’s right, the tactic they use is to hone in on the South American fire ants and scare them into hovering in a ball. It’s hard to hunt while you’re hovering, so the native ants will finally have a prayer against the South Americans. But don’t both kinds bite us? And do we really want to introduce another bug with no natural predators who specializes in torment?
Flying Friends
While swimming at Hamilton Pool in Travis County, a beautiful grotto with a blue-green waterfall and stalactites galore, my friend Manuel casually swatted a beeaway from his leg.
This bee held a voracious grudge, and stung him twice without dying.
It kept coming back and Manuel spent about a half-hour dodging it. His only effective recourse against the bee was to run and plunge into the pool and swim underwater, covering as much distance as he could. The bee, who had no trouble distinguishing Manuel from the people it wasn’t mad at, hovered directly above the spot where he went under. But apparently seeing under water isn’t one of the talents of a killer bee.
Eventually the bee backed off, and we learned later that had Manuel actually killed it, it would have released a pheromone that would have attracted its cohorts to the scene of the crime, and they would have swarmed and perhaps maimed the lot of us.
As Manuel put it, “It’s no fair to make a bee that you can’t even kill without fear of getting killed yourself. Soon they’re going to rule the world, these bees.”
Luckily, it didn’t seem to have an interest in following us home.
Things to Check Your Bed For (Every Night)
Other things to hide from include scorpions, who travel in pairs and are frequently found in apartments or houses recently constructed where a field used to be.
My Library
