In the midst of dire headlines and global horror, sometimes the greatest, most devastating terror strikes you right in your home, right in your bedroom, in the middle of the night.
I was awoken the other night by an unpleasant itch on the bridge of my nose. In my dizzy half-consciousness, I brought my hand up to investigate and was jerked into a state of alarm by the all-too familiar whining hum of mosquito wings cruising past my ear.
“Ahhh!” I shouted and shot up and turned on my bed-stand light, waking my wife. I could feel the swelling already as the miniscule monster’s poison spread beneath my skin. Right at the top of my nose, right between the eyes.
My wife knew what to do. She sat up, groggy, and clicked on her own lamp. I got out of bed and went to turn on the overheads. We’ve become used to the routine these past two weeks. At some point every night, one of us wakes to that psychosis-inducing hum, then the other. We turn on the lights, count up the bites, arm ourselves with rolled-up newspaper, and start the hunt. Because once we know that there’s a mosquito in the room, the prospects for sound sleep are hopeless.
We found it and killed it, exploding a dime-sized spot of blood on the wall, just as we had most of the past 10 or so nights. But we were still bereft. Ten nights of this, 10 nights of sleep interrupted at ungodly hours (sometimes more than once a night!), the panic, the itching, the maddening frustration of fruitless search, had left us in a bleary fugue state. We looked at each other in disbelief. We weren’t thinking straight. I was at the end of my rope.
“This is worse than the Holocaust,” I said. I’m glad my ancestors who perished in Hitler’s gas chambers were not around to hear me.
I am guilty of hyperbole of the worst kind, to be sure. And of a self-centeredness that betrays serious moral failings. But the problem is this: it’s November. Mid-November, 2015. The fact that my wife and I are being woken up every night by mosquitoes in our bedroom in New York City is legitimately a sign of apocalypse.
I grew up in the New Jersey, went to college in Connecticut, moved to New York upon graduation. I’ve spent 44 years living in the tri-state area. Autumn is very different, these past few years, than it used to be. To my mind, mosquitos in October are an anomaly. When I was a kid, we’d surely have had two nights of frost by this time of year, and the mosquitos would have died or gone into hibernation for winter. It was 74F in Central Park last week. In November.
So, climate change. We’re setting new record temperatures every year now, and we’re already seeing plenty of negative effects. (Any climate change-denying politician is hereby invited to spend a night in my bedroom to experience firsthand the nightmare future he or she is helping to ensure for our planet.)
We’re well into what biologists are calling our sixth “mass extinction event”, eras when lots of the world’s species die off in short order. This is the first mass extinction event that’s being caused by a single one of those species, though.
But while lots of species languish and die, changing conditions allow others to thrive. Mosquitos, for example. They love warm weather. Mosquitos are thriving. And with them, the deadly diseases they carry and infect us with. Did you know that mosquitos, via malaria, are responsible for one half of all human deaths since the Stone Age? That statistic always blows my mind when I think about it. And we worry about sharks.
So yes, it’s worse than me and my wife being pushed beyond sanity by the buzzing and the biting. Although, I’m telling you, in the heat of the moment, it seems like nothing could possibly be worse. Right on my nose! Right between my eyes! Things look very grim for humanity on this planet. In lots of ways, by many metrics, it’s worse than the Holocaust, and we’re just as responsible for the fact that it’s happening.
Adding insult to injury, this month also brings news that terraforming Mars into a habitable home for the future of mankind is looking less and less like a possibility. Such a bummer. I took my kid to see The Martian last week. We marveled at Matt Damon planting food up there in his space station. Such fortitude, such ingenuity – we loved it. It was enough to provide a little hope, even.
Sigh. Nope.
