The summer mosquito war

June 14, 2009 01:32 am

— The city's mosquito fogging operations have begun. It's not like the spraying that Norman promoted 40 years ago. They're after the offspring of the same bugs we battled as kids.
They tend to congregate round creeks and ponds, something we had many of growing up in northeast Norman. The winged beasts were our nemesis on summer evenings. Fireflies were for catching in peanut butter jars but mosquitoes were fair game for nightly swats.
Our summer mornings were devoted to baseball practice, riding bikes and fishing in farm ponds.
Afternoons were for mowing lawns, throwing newspaper routes and playing ball games at Lions Park. On good days, a bike ride to the air conditioned Norman Public Library was tops. There, in the basement children's area, the water fountain spurted the coldest water in town and the librarian looked the other way if you kicked off sneakers, forgot to wear a shirt or pretended to read.
Late summer evenings, however, were reserved for loafing. In a patch of gravel under a streetlight, teen-agers passed wisdom. Frayed cutoffs. No shirt. No shoes. No problem.
Each night, a few minutes before 11, the talk stopped and the race began. It was down a hill, a quarter mile or so on a dirt road, across a creek and then onto the home stretch along a paved road to Tiny Tim's market, a convenience store that really did lock up at 11 p.m.
The clerk knew us by name -- Mike, Paul, Larry, Jeff, Danny and a few others who rarely shared their given names with us. We only called them by nicknames -- Blue, Newt or Stride. The clerk kept the door open until we got there. If you had a dime, you could share a Dreamsicle with your brother, the remains of which dripped on your shirt and attracted bugs all the way home.
Fridays, however, were different. The city fathers had decided we country folk needed a good dose of insecticide to eradicate mosquitoes, fleas and ticks from suburbia.
The best way, our leaders deemed, was to mount a compressor and spray gun on the back of a surplus Korean war jeep making a sort of Rat Patrol contraption that spewed DDT into the night air.
The weekly wait began at dusk early in June. Without anything resembling a muffler on the spray rig, the jeep could be heard coming from town. "The DDT man, the DDT man," we yelled, alerting those kids who had turned in early to return to their posts.
As it neared, we made nickel side bets on who could ride their bicycle through the toxic fog and get closest to the spray nozzle. The driver seemed oblivious to our madness, never slowing down or glancing back at the scores of banana seats and high-rise handlebars preparing to overtake his rig.
The driver's mission was defined. Never mind that DDT was a suspected chemical carcinogen or that pond fish would show up floating a few days later. His tinted goggles, aviator hat and dangling cigar let us know this was war, it was summer in Oklahoma, mosquitoes were the enemy and prisoners were not authorized.
Andy Rieger 366-3543 editor@normantranscript.com
(This column was published earlier in The Transcript and is included in a collection of reader favorite columns published by The Transcript).