Grasshoppers

       I had forgotten about grasshoppers.
       Or maybe I had repressed my memories of them -- as a kind of protective measure.
       All those memories came back to me yesterday as we entered the grasslands.
       In fact, I grew up in on the prairies -- in Saskatchewan, Canada. There, we didn’t have to go out of our way to see grasslands. They were around us -- everywhere, endlessly, often without even a bush to break the monotony (or beauty, depending on whether you like that sort of thing – which I, obviously, don’t).
       Growing up, grasshoppers were far from Pinocchio’s little friend, Jiminy Cricket, and nothing like the playful title character from Aesop’s “The Ant and the Grasshopper”.
       These grasshoppers were a plague, a scourge and a horror. Descending on us every few years, they devastated the farmers’ wheat crops. And although I lived in the city, the grasshoppers visited there too. 
       Imagine walking to school at the age of seven, and realizing that each little concrete square on the sidewalk ahead has at least three grasshoppers on it – all waiting to jump nearly as high as your head the moment you get close. Imagine at the age of ten, one of these two-inch hard-bodied monsters leaping again and again between your bare leg and the inside of your trendy super-flared jeans. Imagine at the age of 15, gleefully riding a speedboat to the center of a lake, looking forward to water-skiing, and then leaping in the water only to realize that the entire surface of the lake is covered with drowning, struggling grasshoppers -- only a few inches below your eyes. 

       Then maybe you can begin to understand why, 30 years later, I became increasingly quiet as we drove into the grasslands and found grasshoppers leaping about. Maybe you can understand why the little hairs on my arms stood on end, and didn’t lie down again.
       I quietly mentioned to my friends, a terrific retired couple, that I was not fond of grasshoppers. But they, having grown up in a place other than Saskatchewan, laughed it off. “Grasshoppers?” they replied. “They’re food for the birds.”
       Then imagine, maybe half an hour later, a grasshopper being sucked into the car's open sunroof and slamming you in the chest and then bouncing onto your leg. Would you do what I did?
       I screamed.
       And then I screamed some more while I grabbed a nearby map and started swatting at the beast, who looked up at me and refused to die.
       The wife, who was driving, rapidly halted the car on the shoulder of the dirt road. Ashamed, I immediately reported from the back seat that everything was absolutely okay. Really. There was no need to stop.
       The husband slowly got out of the front passenger seat and gently opened my door. I told him all was fine. He stood there until I exited the vehicle. Then he started looking for the bug. And with a bit of direction from me, he found it -- still alive -- inside his baseball cap, which had been beside me on the seat. He lifted out the bug and then wiped his hands on the grass after it spit on him.
       Afterwards, the husband insisted I hadn’t really screamed. He said it was more of an “almost scream”. He said it seemed like I was actually trying to contain myself. Although his wife didn’t say anything, she was kind enough not to disagree. 

       You can see why I consider these people friends.

       We also saw some birds, of course. I’ll write about those in my next posting.