In the week before the province declared a lockdown, we fled the city to spend some time at my brother’s cottage just outside the town of Haliburton. While I’m a city boy through and through (a fact reflected in my photographic practice), I do love to hike through the woods and shoot against the grain, so to speak. We visited a nature reserve, pristine trails beside a creek, low light in the November gloom. All the leaves had fallen, but because it was mostly a cedar forest, there was still a lot of greenery.
My wife and I live in antiseptic circumstances. High above the city streets, shuttered in our condo, it’s easy for us to self-isolate. Covid-19 is not the only thing we keep at bay. We’re high enough that we don’t get bugs either. No ants. No centipedes. No spiders. We don’t get many winged insects. We never have mosquitoes. House flies and bees are rare. It’s refreshing to muck around in the woods and reacquaint ourselves with the real world.
We spent the night in a wood framed cottage beside a lake. As I do every night when I settle into bed, I pulled the straps of a mask over my head and turned on my CPAP machine. As I do every night when I sleep with a CPAP machine, I slept soundly and woke up refreshed. In the morning, I sat upright and pulled off my mask. Something fell from the mask, bounced off my shoulder and landed on the floor by my feet. Although the bedroom had filled with a pre-dawn light, it was still too dark for me to make out what had fallen on the floor. I groped for my cellphone, flipped on the flashlight app, and knelt on the floor. It was a big stink bug or, to be more precise, a western conifer seed bug.
My imagination set to work. Where had it been when I pulled off my mask? Had it been sitting on my head as I slept? Yes, that must be it. It was sitting on my head, and when I pulled off the mask, one of the straps dislodged it and it fell onto the floor. That’s a little disturbing, but not as disturbing as the other possibility. Maybe it had spent the night on the inside of my mask only to be released when I pulled off the mask the next morning. That possibility makes me shiver with disgust.
I found a Kleenex, picked up the bug, and flushed it. I realize this is a useless gesture. Even in the local area around the lake, there must be billions of these stink bugs crawling under leaves, hiding on the bark of trees, teeming everywhere. One flushed bug won’t make a difference. Even so, it gives me some comfort until I can make it back to the city and the safety of my high fortress. I have to keep the bugs at bay.
