Words Like Locusts Flew From Her Fingers

Death By Mosquito — One Way Or Another

The Economics of Mosquitoes – Freakonomics – Opinion – New York Times Blog
I grew up in Minnesota. The state motto is “The Land of 10,000 Lakes,” which meant that there was never a shortage of mosquitoes. When I was a kid, I wasn’t allowed to go in the backyard in the summer because the mosquitoes were so bad. At some point along the line, the government started spending money on mosquito abatement in the Twin Cities, the mosquito problem died down, and our backyard was reclaimed. Minnesota mosquitoes didn’t carry diseases, so they were merely an inconvenience. In areas with malaria, however, mosquitoes are far more than an annoyance.

He wasn’t allowed to go in the backyard?!? Man! Talk about over-protective parents! That’s craziness.

I grew up in Minnesota, too. We had woods on one side of us and a big swamp on another side and do you think we had mosquitoes?

Oh yeah. We had mosquitoes.

And we had mosquito bites. Lots of them. But, you know, after a while you didn’t notice the bites so much. Either that or after the first month or so of summer the mosquitoes could sense that we’d already been bit so many times that we were pretty much tapped out as far as good blood went. The mosquitoes were treating us like good farmers treat their milk cows. Letting us recover a bit between assaults.

In retrospect, far more worrisome than the mosquito bites are the chemicals they used to spray on our swamp to kill the bugs. I remember it well — lovely summer days back in the mid 1960s — and the really cool helicopter would come by and spray stuff all over the swamp. Sometimes the mist — whatever it was — would waft on over to where we were playing. But, hey! We weren’t worried! It was the 1960s! More chemicals for a better tomorrow!

Perhaps even more alarming, some of those chemicals MUST have found their way into the ground water and, like everyone in that part of Minnesota, we got our drinking water from a well.

MmmmMM!

God only knows what was in that stuff.