Splat
I had a speaking engagement in Cowlitz County on Thursday and I figured I’d return home on Washington Route 4 instead of Oregon Hwy 30. Highway 4 is a bit more scenic and goes through or side skirts a few cute little towns. It was a longer trip, but somewhat nicer.
Though the sun had set a beautiful cloudless blue evening sky was visible. Somewhere west of Puget Island is started raining, or so it seemed. I looked up and there wasn’t a cloud in the sky, so I turned on my wipers and got a major smear. I realized it wasn’t raining at all but rather my windshield was the death spot for thousands of insects. Every time I drove by a swampy area it would happen again.
Windshield washers can only go so far and I’ll have to take a razor to the windshield today to get it clean again. I haven’t seen that many bugs on a windshield since some of my Canadian excursions when I was in my 20s.
Folks who live in these areas must be driven crazy from all these bugs. It reminds me of just how bug free it is where I live. I am thankful for that.
posted by The Guy Who Writes This at 4:00 AM
8 Comments:
Sometimes those bug swarms have definite spike that might only last a few days. I have run my windshield wiper fluid dry driving through grasshoppers or locust a couple times. The weirdest bug migration I ever witnessed was a endless stream of Dragonflies headed south. My girlfriend and I happened to find ourselves, no doubt driven by some bilogical urge, in the dunes not too far from the south jetty. It was near the end of summer and those things just kept parading by non stop. They seemed to stay in a narrow band following the top of the dune line , all headed toward Seaside. They left us alone and we reciprocated.
Made me wonder if it is an annual event, perhaps part of a seven year cycle or if they just all decided to go get elephant ears and ride the bumper cars together.
Having contemplated this problem long and hard, the solution was suddenly at hand, in the form of an ice cold bottle of locally brewed ale!! Don't drive anywhere except at mid-day!! Been perfecting the art of timing ale runs to occur at precisely mid-day. After many years of research, I can finally declare that this theory bears at least another decade of summer study to draw any concrete conclusions.
It occurs to me that the gooey windshield may have been a godly retaliation for Friday's post.
We had the cicada migration in Phoenix every year while I lived there, and in KF we have huge green clouds of midges that die off as the summer progresses, leaving literal drifts of tiny little green dead bugs in places where the wind gets blocked by a wall or whatever. It's sort of wonderfully morbid- great piles of dead insects. If you don't wash your car for the whole summer, it turns green.
Out here our cars turn green from the rain. I've had cars that grew moss and ferns on them.
yeah i had grass growin in my truck carpet when i lived in coos bay.
I was shocked when I first saw that, Pril. Now I just go in with a string trimmer.
Don't use just any string trimmer. Get a stihl and hook it up with the trimmer implement you want.
That's advice i freely offer because I saw it on another board just a few hours ago. Its fresh!
otally off topic but I would buy anything Natalie Gulbis tried to sell me. Anything.
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