BUGS OUT

When you move to a different part of the planet, it’s easy to trip out on the different creatures and foliage. In Mainland Mexico the variety of creatures is fascinating.

When we lived in Punta Mita, my wife became obsessed with scorpions. We heard they could be lethal, especially if you were allergic or a young child. Betty couldn’t get enough of the horror stories regarding scorpions. When the rains came, we started seeing the little buggers. We caught one on our deck one afternoon and put it in a jar. This is one ugly looking arthropod. With its pinchers or claws, insect-like legs, stinger, and a face only a mother could love, you have to wonder what God was thinking.

Betty would pick up the jar and study the darn thing. I know it’s never good to keep an animal in captivity, but we wanted to study our adversary. One night during a pounding rain storm, Betty turned on the light in our bedroom and woke me up from a sound sleep. “I think something just stung me.” She sat up on the edge of the bed. I don’t function well at three in the morning. I opened one eye and saw a scorpion crawling on Betty’s back. I swatted it off and stepped on it. Betty had a welt on her chest. She paced back and forth for an hour waiting for some sign of impending doom.

Being the cad I am, I fell back to sleep.

Betty was now at war. She searched every crevice in our house and killed three more. All clothes were shook and turned inside out before wearing. She had a ritual of surveying every inch of our bedroom before sleep. Sometimes in the middle of the night her flashlight would click on and she would scan the ceiling. I kept having dreams of being in a WWII bomber with searchlights crisscrossing the sky.

After a couple of months we had killed over 20 scorpions in the house. I didn’t find out until later, but a black light will actually make them glow, which would have made them a lot easier to find. One afternoon Betty and I were a mile from shore fishing in our two man kayak. I rested my arm on the side of the kayak and got stung on my little finger by a scorpion. I brushed the scorpion into the water; my finger immediately began to throb. The scorpion must have been with our fishing gear. Betty and I started paddling immediately for shore. Betty, sometimes in stressful times, gets a little bit amped up. “Paddle! Faster!” Then she realized I was increasing my heart rate and yelled, “Stop paddling! I’ll paddle us in!” After a couple of minutes with little progress, she again declared, “Paddle!” It’s about this time that the whole thing deteriorated into something out of a Seinfeld episode. With alternating commands of “Stop!” and “Paddle!” we eventually made our way to shore. I got nauseated from the sting and my finger was completely numb for four days, but there were no serious side effects.

I got stung two more times.

My worst experience happened when I put on a pair of surf trunks and walked into the house to see what Betty was fixing for lunch. Wham! I got stung on my upper thigh; apparently a scorpion had got in my trunks, which I ripped off in a tenth of a second. I don’t particularly think that a naked middle-aged man hopping around in pain is amusing, but apparently my wife found it absolutely hilarious. Listen up, girl, this is serious! That sting was close to the mother lode, for God’s sake!

My all time favorite creature is the Concla. Gilberto, a local, told me that was the name when I showed it to him. We killed the first one on our stairs. Since we were returning from town with friends and had indulged in adult beverages, I didn’t get a close look at it until the next morning. Wow! In the daylight this is one cool creature. This bad boy has fangs and actually sprays a poison. From that day on I was on the lookout for a live one.

Then one day I was working with my neighbor, Bob, in the pump house. He was rewiring the fuse box when a concla slowly made its way out from some debris in the corner. I talked Bob out of killing it. From then on I couldn’t help myself; I would talk other surfers into seeing the concla. The two mile hike to the pump house weaved through dense jungle filled with intimidating, huge spiders every 20 feet. The webs were so thick you had to push through them. The pump house was right out of a scary movie. Dank, dark with a creaky metal door. It was the perfect set up. Tee-hee-hee, I would start giggling like a little school girl, which added to their apprehension.

Once our eyes adjusted to the darkness I warned them not to fall into the well which was about 60 feet deep and had no protective perimeter. I positioned myself to see their faces. The concla had taken up residence behind the fuse box. I poked a stick at it until it came out, extending its legs in all of its glory. The reaction was always the same. Macho men grabbed each other; I think to make sure nobody pushed them into it or maybe for comfort. Then they let out a whispered, almost reverent, expletive never taking their eyes off the creature. After I laughed myself to tears, I went into a dissertation like some park ranger in front of Old Faithful. All of my information came from Gilberto, who at times has been known to elaborate. My audience was spell bound. I loved it. Now when I see somebody freak out over one of our local insects, I’m tempted to tell them the concla story.

Naw, they wouldn’t believe it