The trouble with summer in South Florida, if you can ignore the heat, the humidity and the hurricanes, is the mosquitoes. It may be my imagination but it seems like the critters are larger, more numerous and way more aggressive than when I was a kid. The mosquitoes that make it impossible for me to go outside at dusk not only bite me, they also chase me. The singular experience of being pursued by a swarm of hungry mosquitoes is part of what gives life in South Florida its unique charm.
It does not help that my elderly neighbor stores her collection of used aquariums outside her house in her densely overgrown backyard, against the fence that separates our properties. I am not quite sure why someone would collect used aquariums, but she has many. Is it possible that she admires them or finds them lovely? Is she planning to eventually stock with them fish? Does she plan to breed mosquitoes for fun and profit? Does she consider the mosquitoes to be her pets? Stranger things have happened, but in the meantime, they fill with water every time it rains, and the mosquitoes breed lustily and relentlessly, spilling over into my yard.
Living with this plague makes me long for the days when fogger trucks were a fact of life in Fort Lauderdale. In the 60’s and 70’s, these were the trucks that sprayed a dense, white fog of mosquito repellent, covering neighborhoods with a thick cloud of insecticide and reducing visibility to near-zero for vehicles unlucky enough to be behind them. Highly efficient, this insecticide killed every mosquito for miles, along with all other insects, most lizards, low-flying songbirds and, sometimes an elderly person with pulmonary disease. But there were no mosquitoes. This was regarded as progress.
For the life of me, I have no idea what they were spraying. It may have been straight DDT for all I know, but I know that after a summer of mosquito spraying it was not unusual to discover 2-headed snakes and 6-legged frogs.
In those days, houses were not air-conditioned. Our house, for example, had many banks of jalousie windows that were each opened and closed individually and slowly. Once or twice a month the idyllic quiet of the summer afternoon was broken by the sound of kids on bicycles riding down the street like modern day Paul Reveres, shouting “Fogger!” at the top of their lungs.
This was a call to action. All available hands were roused to start closing windows as quickly as possible, because if the insecticide got into the house, it remained there for days, hovering like a mist of dry ice and permeating the fabrics of sheets, towels and furniture with a metallic medicinal smell. This only happened to us a couple of times, but I remember the entire family walking around for days afterward, with subtle headaches and a vague feeling of well being. When Bippy Carlson was reputed to have given birth to a child with a tail, it was just assumed that that’s what she got for keeping her windows open when the fogger truck rolled by.
Once the windows were closed we waited, sweltering in the summer heat, for the fogger truck to pass. We knew the threat had passed when we saw Jimmy Brooks ride by; Jimmy spent his days following the fogger on his bike. Are you surprised that he eventually graduated to sniffing household solvents and then cocaine?
Looking back from our green and sterile modern perspective, it’s amazing that no one ever questioned the wisdom of gassing the entire neighborhood as part of a mosquito eradication program; I suspect that we just considered it the price of progress. Looking at my neighbor’s collection of old fish tanks makes me long for those good old days once more. I wonder if she has pulmonary disease?