COLUMN: The Crickets without Buddy Holly

By Tobin Barnes Flies were one thing.
 
Yup, you may have read that we killed a lot of flies in a counter-intuitive attempt to improve our motel’s business when I was a kid.
 
Of course, it didn’t do a darned bit of good, but there you go.  This was just another part of what I’ve been talking about.
 
And, heck, those flies were nothing compared to the crickets.
 
That’s right. One summer, we had a cricket infestation of Biblical proportions. Moses couldn’t have called down a greater plague...and we weren’t Egyptians--as far as I know--deserving of the wrath of god.
 
(On the other hand, some powerful fly god might have been wreaking vengeance on us for the thousands of fly murders we’d blithely perpetrated.)
 
Image via WikipediaThe stars must have been in perfect cricket alinement and all the necessities of breakneck cricket reproduction in place, because our motel turned into a Yazgur’s Farm for the mother of all cricket Woodstocks.
 
It was crickets till hell wouldn’t have them.
 
Hyperbole is not nearly adequate enough to describe the multitudes of crickets hopping and bopping around, desperately trying to get out of the heat and into our air-conditioned rooms cozied up next to the tourists.
 
Thank goodness, my old man never even considered the use of swatters like with the flies (“Go out and kill 50 crickets”). Even he knew that I couldn’t be the solution to a problem this overwhelming. It was much too vast for a kid, a man, and that kind of plan.
 
Instead, he turned immediately to DDT.
 
Nope, Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring” was not on my old man’s bookshelf. Heck, he didn’t even have a bookshelf.
 
Environmental awareness was not yet part of the scene there in the early 60s, so he hadn’t yet heard of the eco-damage that DDT caused. Few had. And even if he had heard, he might not have cared as long as DDT was still on the market and legally usable.
 
The crickets were all-consuming. They had to go.
 
So my old man sprinkled that white DDT dust everywhere he thought it might be useful. To be most effective, he tried to think like a cricket to divine where he should best spread the poison.
 
And the cricket portion of his mind told him to put it just about everywhere. After all, any place could be housing a cricket convention, and there was to be no cricket fun here, there or anywhere.
 
As unsightly as it turned out to be, he thought he’d bar cricket entrance by putting a line of DDT in front of each motel room door. And because crickets could sometimes be seen boiling out of any random crack or hole, he poured it down every sidewalk crack and pavement hole he could find.
 
We’re talking a ton of cracks and holes.
 
I sometimes wonder whether my life might end up being years shorter because of all the DDT my old man spread around.
 
No doubt, the crickets lives were shorter.
 
And so was the neighborhood dog’s.
 
Before the DDT was used, this dog came around lapping up dead and dying crickets right off the pavement--not appetizing for us but maybe like popcorn for him.
 
After the DDT was applied, the dog continued to dine--now “cricket au poudre,” perhaps--until we noticed and tried to shoo him off.
 
Too late.
 
We never saw that dog again.