March of the Armyworms

My parents had built a small house on Hilton Head Island, which they rented to some couples for a few years and, when Dad's turn came to retire, decided to move in.  This was the summer between years of my graduate school and since my stuff had moved down with them, I spent my summer there.

Yep, that looks like 'em!

It was the year of the armyworms' burgeoning, which, like that of the locusts is dependent on weather conditions, migration, etc.  It wasn't enough that they were out to eat every green thing they could find, but they made their way into the house and just dropped out of seeming nowhere.  The house on Hilton Head was built on a cement pad, so all the HVAC was in the ceiling.  Somehow they got into the ventilation ducts and would crawl out onto the ceiling and dive-bomb you.

They would drop on your head, onto the book you were reading, into the frying pan - it was a nightmare for a creepy-crawliphobe like me.  Worse, they didn't stop at night.  I had brought a lot of reading material with me (not really major-related - stuff like Vonnegut and Dos Passos) and I forced myself to stay awake at night, reading, so one wouldn't land on me and, well, crawl up my nose - the example that leaps to mind.

In the daytime I figured my parents could keep an eye on me to make sure I wasn't becoming a caterpillar hotel.  I was probably cruising for a psychotic episode from sleep deprivation, so it wasn't so surprising that the one time that one did drop on me while I was in bed (reading, but having gotten sleepy and let the book drop to my side), I nearly had a heart attack.

I didn't see it drop, I just heard a suspicious "click" - and looking around madly, I saw nothing.  That is, I saw nothing until it moved.  It had landed on the bookmark resting on my chest and was, coincidentally, the same approximate color as the graphics on the bookmark.  Everything went flying.   I'm sure I was much too traumatized to scream and only managed a "Ggglggllgglggghhhhh!" as I defended my honor against a helpless larva.  I spent the rest of the night pacing the house.

Although I moved to Hilton Head permanently (despite that episode, the giant flying cockroaches, and the spiders as big as the diameter of a tennis ball that were fast but very stupid and thought if they stood stock still that they were invisible while you went to fetch a flyswatter from the other end of the house) and stayed for about 6 years, we never had another infestation of the army worms.  I moved after that to New York City where cockroaches might have been abundant, but they were small and slow and squished easily under a rubber glove. 

Their natural history interests me, especially after reading Locust : the devastating rise and mysterious disappearance of the insect that shaped the American frontier by Jeffrey A. Lockwood.  But I really never want to have to go through the march of the armyworms again.