I think it’s time to give you an update on the bugs. Canada has all kinds of nasty biting and stinging insects and I think I’ve given blood to most of them. I’ve been chewed up by mosquitoes, black flies, deer flies, a horse fly, and now I can add ants and no-see-ums to the list.
No-see-ums are biting midges, what the First Nations woman back in Ontario referred to as the sand flies, which she said came out after the black flies have disappeared. I’m lucky so far not to have been bitten by a tick. At least I haven’t been bitten by a tick that I know of. It’s hard to tell with little blood smears all over my arms and legs.
The black flies are mostly gone. I see a handful in the evening after the supper hour, enough for me to put on glasses to prevent them from doing the suicide dive into my eyes, but I haven’t needed the bug net since the day before arriving in Thunder Bay. The mosquitoes are nasty at night when I’m setting up my tent and in the morning when I tear it down, but I don’t see many out on the highway when I’m walking.
The no-see-ums are problematic because, as the name suggests, you don’t generally see them until they bite. They were biting most of the evening yesterday, and then I had a lot of them in my tent, some that were already on me when I first went in, and then a whole bunch more when I opened the tent to see what was making the noise in the woods near me. You can see these tiny bugs with the head lamp. In fact, the light makes them dance around like crazy. But you can’t catch them. You have to wait for the pain of the bite and then, with the speed of a rattlesnake, you smear their little bodies across your skin with your hand. It’s great sport actually, if you can handle the bites. But the good news is that insect repellent actually works on the no-see-ums.
But the repellent doesn’t seem to work for all bugs. The worst are the deer flies and the horse flies. I don’t think that anything other than covering up exposed skin works. And it needs to be loose clothing since they can bite right through it. They’ve been bad since I left Thunder Bay, but today has been the worst by far. I’ve had about a dozen horse flies buzzing around me since 9:00 am, five hours ago. Right now, I’m taking a break and I’m wearing my rain coat and rain pants for protection. And this, on the first sunny day in the last eight.
You might think, “Oh, what’s the big deal about a few horse flies?” So let me put things into perspective.
If you’ve never seen a horse fly, they look like a giant mutant house fly, like comparing Godzilla to an iguana. Only the females bite – they need blood to produce eggs – and if you get bitten, it will feel like someone is extinguishing his cigarette on your skin. And then there will be throbbing pain, followed by a maddening itch. Then you’ll have a lump at the bite site for a couple of days. Horse flies like the sunlight, so sometimes you can save yourself by moving to the shade.
Imagine you wake up to a beautiful day. You have your morning shower and coffee, kiss your spouse and children goodbye, and drive off to work. But when you arrive, you have a dozen horse flies buzzing around you. They stay with you all day, landing on your exposed skin every twenty seconds or so, sometimes getting caught in your hair, probing your ears, and all the while, you hear that incessant buzz. You can’t concentrate on what you’re saying on the phone, you can’t work at your computer in peace, and you’re afraid to use the toilet because that’s when you’re most vulnerable (indeed, I received a bite when my pants were down). You can let them land and fly off again, but you have to concentrate because if they land and don’t fly off, you have to try to swat them before they bite you. You’re afraid to stop moving because they buzz ever closer and land more frequently when you are at rest. Best to keep moving, even if you’re exhausted.
You might think, hey, I’ll just take a day off and lose a day of productivity, except that you don’t know if they will be there again tomorrow, and maybe the tomorrow after that, and maybe for three-weeks worth of tomorrows. You can’t afford three weeks without productivity. But for today, imagine that this carries on until the evening when the sun finally starts to set and you are at home in your sanctuary. And then your spouse says, “How was your day, honey?” What will you say?
And that’s where I’m at right now. Walking is my job for now, and it hasn’t been a fun day at work at all. Every other part of the day is perfect. Nice weather, flat highway, wide paved shoulders. But the unrelentingly attack of the horse flies has ruined it all. And no matter that I repeat the mantra “I am responsible for my happiness”, the horse flies can get under your skin (haha, a little pun there). There are many examples in literature, all the way back to the Roman Empire, of people being driven mad by the persistent attack of horse flies.
I have had one or two horse flies buzz around me in the past. But I haven’t seen anything like what I’m experiencing today with a dozen or more flies circling me all at once, without a break for five hours. In fact, I haven’t seen a dozen horse flies in any one spot in my whole life. I’m looking at the landscape around me wondering what kind of ecosystem it would take to create these monsters. I haven’t seen a sign of habitation since I entered this province, or for the last 30 km of Ontario.
Perhaps this part of Canada is owned by the biting insects.
