close encounters of the crawly kind

“As the vertebrate monsters have waxed and waned, the insects have gone on mating and hatching and, as they do, populating every swamp, tree, and patch of soil. We talk of the age of the dinosaurs or the age of mammals, but since the first animal climbed onto land, every age has been, by any reasonable measure, the age of insects too. The Earth is salted with their kind.” Rob Dunn, National Georgraphic September 2010


This month, we will have been in our house a year. We knew when we bought it that buying a house rates right up there with divorce and death as one of the most stressful life experiences so, bearing that in mind, we tried as hard as we could to minimise surprises. Being first time buyers our investigations weren’t exactly thorough, after all, we paid no mind to Annie Wilkes living next door, but someone could’ve mentioned the flies. I remember a conversation I had with a friend, a long time resident of Observatory, before we put in an offer. It went something like this.

Me: We’re thinking of buying a house in Obs.
Her: Good move. I love living here, it’s like living in a village.
Me: What about the crime? Obs has a bad rep for crime.
Her: It’s much better, there’s security now. Obviously you can’t leave your doors open or your stuff lying around in view, but we’ve only ever had a bike stolen, and that was ages ago.

We then discussed which parts of Obs were nicer to live in and I asked her if there was anything else I should know. She couldn’t think of anything. So we bought our house, moved in, and the first night we lay down to sleep in our brand new home, a cloud of mosquitoes drifted down and sucked so much blood from my veins I felt light headed and dizzy the whole of the next day. And the flies! Cape Town has a fly problem, but Obs has a plague to rival Moses leading the Israelites from Egypt scale of plague.  In the afternoons, my lawn would become a quilt of black and green as the flies sought out the last sunny patches to gather in and discuss what part of the our food supply they should contaminate next. Thinking that perhaps the flies and mossies originated in the swamp garden next door, and wanting to double check my suspicion before I called in the Health Inspector, I phoned my friend again.

Me: Do you have a mosquito problem?
Her: God! The mosquitoes in Obs are terrible. You need to sleep under nets, and get a couple of Robocans. They’ll help with the flies too. Oh, and by the way, we’ve sold our house and we’re moving to Wynberg at the end of the month.

Since then, I’ve had a few close encounters with a variety of creepy-crawlies that I’m convinced do originate from the Annie’s swamp garden. I probably wouldn’t have seen most of them had they not been stunned by Pyrethrins (from the Robocan) because, like all things that go bump in the night, they’d have scuttled off the minute I turned on the light. I’ve had run-ins with three giant cockroaches (as in size of my hand giant cockroaches but not the hissing sort you give to your loved one on Valentine’s day ). The first was using my bathtub as a tobogganing course, seemingly after ingesting a kilo of crystal meth. These things are not squash-able; that would be, as Julian put it, like slaughtering a small animal; so half a can of Doom later it dropped, without ceremony or complaint, into the plug hole. I still can’t be sure it was the Doom that killed it; its heart (do roaches have hearts?) might simply have given in on the hundredth lap of my tub.  The second I found ascending the mosquito net over Amber-Jane’s cot. It had become trapped in the mesh and, I’m convinced, had this lucky fate not befallen it, it would have kidnapped my daughter and beamed her back to the mother ship.  The third and by far the largest of the three,  I discovered when I woke at 3am for a wee. It lay upside down next to the loo, legs twitching in the last throes of death.  Thank you Robocan.

An army of crickets live in our back yard.  Amber-Jane’s window overlooks the garden and judging by the symphony of chirrups that can be heard resounding through her room in evening, there must be thousands. Our roof, which we use for storage and hope to one day have the money to convert in to a loft room,  has a resident population of button spiders that increase exponentially every year. One spider produces several egg sacs and each sac contains hundreds, maybe thousands of eggs. You do the math. We have millipedes and earwigs and yesterday I noticed lots of teeny weeny spiders running up the kitchen wall. Our investigations revealed a spider nursery under the kitchen cupboards. ‘They’re definitely not button spider egg sacs,’ Julian said wedged between cupboard and wall on his hands and knees, ‘maybe we should just leave them be.’

The roaches, crickets, millipedes, earwigs and spiders are, at least, identifiable. The weirdest encounter I’ve had in my home was the strange creature I discovered in my bathroom (why always the bathroom?) last week, that inspired this post. It looked as though it may have been a gargantuan cousin of the silverfish, but it was kind of mammalian, with a snub doggy nose and covering of brown fur. Strangest of all were its two arm-like appendages. Julian and I stood over the perculiar corpse, somewhat perplexed. Neither of us had ever come across anything quite like it. I considered placing it in a jam jar and delivering it to UCT’s entomology department. I imagined, just for a moment, that it was some as yet undiscovered species. I thought they might let me name it, or name it after me. Me, a lurgy phobe with a gogga named after her. National Geographic Magazine might even ask me to write an article about it.  Then Julian flushed it down the toilet and that was that.