Hive Mind
The wasps took residence in the barn the year I was twelve. The first hot morning after school ended, we noticed them, hundreds around the barn door, where a baseball had cracked the siding, they moved in and out in deliberate and mad delirium. Dad said, “Leave them be, they’ll leave in Fall.” So, we went the back way into the barn, past the unused milking stanchions to the granary for chicken feed or oats for the hogs. This small room which had formerly been used for separating milk was the inside wall where the wasps lived. Here you could sit on the floor, press an ear to the roughhewn planks and listen to the furious rush of noise like a horse’s breath after a good run.
The insects worried the dogs, chased the cats and stung every one of us at least once that long summer. I was a repeated target, I felt, and had a handful of wasps’ stings after failing to check the underside of the gooseberry bush. Before reaching for a large bunch of the jade colored berries I had minded the thorns but ignored any other warning. When I dropped the fruit and saw the two black and yellow bodies, I stomped everything into a pulpy mash. My hand ached and itched long afterwards, and when volleyball practice started it seems the stingers punished me again every time, I slapped the ball.
But as the colder days and nights came, fewer and fewer wasps buzzed in our world.
Right before the first snow in the valley, long after the logging roads were frozen, Dad home from a day in the woods, pried off one piece of siding, pulled the nest out of the wall and burned it with his welding torch. As it began to flame three golden wasps crawled onto the ground and curled to miniscule question marks.
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Thirty years later at my first house my husband and I patrol the yard, flip small paper nests off the house or power wash them from below the deck. We try to stop them from decorating the second story beneath the eaves, as well, but with cedar siding attacked by woodpeckers, the creatures find their way in. Until far into summer, when we must concede the back of the house to them, we feel in charge. Late September, as we sit inside, or prepare dinner, the wasps crash into windows or bounce off the outside walls, little soldiers looking for a breach.
My father told me little about swarming things. He was a logger, he allowed me to know timber, but not always trees. This seemed short sighted and there were times this lack of seeing the bigger picture limited me. I live in a town where I listen to people like I use to listen to the wasps through the barn wall. In Safeway I try to understand the language and signals they use. How this dance keeps the hive together. As my husband walks through the store people seldom respond to his greeting and then they turn to stare. A black man and a white woman still disturb some and it is those mad bodies I watch closely, never knowing what will stir them to swarm; I must see all the signals.
The playa smells like France when the tide goes out (sans fish) or France smells like playa in spring (sans coyote scat). The cracked bed of sand and grit and alkali rolls into cups the closer you get to the lake and under each the world is softer and softer until you sink a bit as though everything underneath wants to escape or swallow you.
