Bugs

I had something unique happen the other day while doing some strides after my run- I was completely sidelined and defeated, forced to abandon what I was doing and finish early. Living in North Dakota, it would be easy to expect my reasoning to involve extreme cold, extreme wind, extreme heat/sunlight, extreme hail, or anything else extreme. However, this time it was bugs.

With the advent of sufficient moisture this year, we have seen an explosion of bugs recently. Now, this doesn't necessarily mean mosquitos (which there are plenty of, to be sure) but bugs of all kinds. Last week I was returning home from a trip to the Rockies and was amazed at the number of yellow butterflies in the great plains of South Dakota. It seemed as if in the span of four days they had all bred. I hoped that when I got home we would have something similar. Sure enough, back here in western NoDak we've had monarch butterflies paying us a visit. Just last night they were EVERYWHERE and it was almost impossible to avoid hitting them while driving.

There is still much more than butterflies and mosquitos, though. We also have these annoying nats that simply hover in tight circles and export a loud buzzing sound that eats up the prairie. Throughout the heat of the day they are largely absent, leaving us with only the sound of the breeze and the cicadas, but once the sun and wind start to descend in the west, the nats come out in full force. I realized this fully and completely the other day when I started my run about an hour before sunset, or around 8:30 pm.

By this point the bugs were hanging thick in the sky, but as I discovered quickly, only above the plants growing alongside the road. As I do most days, I stayed in the middle of the dusty gravel road while running, moving aside only to yield to random vehicles. When a vehicle would pass me, I would dutifully move over, only to receive an onslaught of bugs in my eyes, nose, mouth, and on my chest. As the run continued, I began to accumulate black dots all over my chest and stomach. Multiple times I needed to stop my run and try to flush out a small bug from my eyeball, however this proved to be a super-human task because my hands and eyebrows were covered in salty sweat, and getting ahold of anything around my eye was almost impossible. Thus, I finished up my run with an irritated eye and a chest covered in dead, sweaty bugs.

At this point it was time for some striders. I collected myself and tore up the hillside. Without hesitation, I stormed directly into a large cloud of swarming bugs. Both of my eyes caught bugs, while at the same time I inhaled a few others. I instantly had to stop, cough, and rub my eyes. I started sneezing and had to double over on my knees. After a few moments, I stood up and tried another strider, and almost as soon as I had started, I was again sidelined by an atrocious number of bugs. At that point I decided to call it a day. It took me almost 15 minutes to hack up the last of the bugs from my throat (and I could then breathe peacefully), and I needed to get to the sink in the bathroom in order to clean out my eyes properly. Even 24 hours later, my eye was still red from the repeated attempts to cleanse it of bugs. Truth be told, it was a fairly miserable end to a run.

This isn't to say, however, that all experiences with bugs are bad.

The week of July 4th we were visiting my wife's family in central Minnesota. Again, I found myself in a situation where I needed to do a late run, this time starting around 11:00pm, when it was completely dark under a starry sky. I was lent a work headlamp, then took off down the quiet highway on a cool, humid evening. As I've alluded to in previous posts, when I'm running at night and see lights in the ditch or countryside, I always get a little nervous about what may be out there. On this occasion, I started seeing lights right away with my headlamp; something didn't seem right, though. The lights were coming often and close to me. I decided to shut my headlight off and was treated to a tiny explosion of little lights.

Fireflies! They were everywhere! Here on the this rural Minnesota road there were fireflies on both sides of the road simply moving around, lighting on and off, creating almost a natural strobe light effect, topped off by a full sky of stars over my head. I never ran into a firefly, never inhaled any bugs, never got any bugs on my body, and never took any bugs to the eye, and I was treated to an incredible light display right up in my face! After a long, warm, stressful day of driving, it was such a relief to be out in nature as I had never seen it before. We occasionally have fireflies in North Dakota, but I had never seen them like this!

I don't know much about the singer 'Owl City', but I do know that he's from Minnesota and has a song named 'Fireflies', so maybe he's experienced something like this, too. I know if I was an artist, I'd make a song about it, but instead I'm a sometimes-blogger about running-related things, so here we are.

As I make final preparations for an impending move to the state of Virginia, I ask myself- will there be fireflies there? Will I inhale and run through swarms of bugs in the warm, coastal climate? Do the bugs disappear in the winter? I don't know the answer to these questions, but I can say that the abundance of bugs right now is a blessing in disguise. In a landscape that is quiet and dead for so many months of the year, what a refreshing breath of life to have the countryside literally swarming and buzzing with plants and animals of all kinds, including bugs!

The transformation of the countryside really cannot be understated. On the other side of the calendar, the temperature is below freezing for weeks at a time, all of the bugs and birds are either dead or gone, and only the hardiest of animals choose to not hibernate and keep living. Humans are huddled up inside watching TV or Netflix. Now, dads are grilling, lake people are lake-ing, runners are running, farmers are farming, and bugs are pestering all of us. We ward them off with high-level bug spray, campfire smoke, and bug screens. We do everything we can to insulate ourselves from the realest nature we get during the summer. I take different view- I love the bugs. Not only do they show abundant life, but they also show the power of change and its effect on all living things. I have a big life change coming up shortly, and I hope that where I go I can be brimming and full of life in all ways. Of course, some people will think of me as a firefly, and others will think of me as an annoying nat. Either way, I will be refuse to be cold and dead. Here we go.