as you were (i)

part one

Nov 07, 2024

When I was no bigger than a bean, my mother straddled Oregon cliffs, rubbing her belly as the Pacific bulldozed jagged rocks. Actually, that’s not right—when I was a bean, she’d disappear for hours, barreling through red lights and haunting stairways.

Dad spent those evenings cruising around, searching for her. Her favorite haunt became the Safeway parking garage on East Johnson. He’d find her standing at the tippy top of those dimly lit stairs, nibbling the webbing between her fingers, praying a good samaritan would throw her down.

It was when I became a gecko—that’s when the whole cliff-standing thing started. She’d put her feet right on the edge, half on dirt, half on air, sea-sawing back and forth, back and forth against a measly hyphen of earth.

I’m not sure how he knew where to look, but dad always found her balancing up there, her hair breeze whipped and salt stiff, rubbing the flesh above the holes becoming my ears.

He’d creep up behind her as if she were a bird trapped in a kitchen, prone to throw itself at anything sky-like. He’d seatbelt his arm over her shoulder and pull her back to solid ground. They’d listen to the inky Pacific eat the continent with its soothing waves. Then he’d kiss her iodized brow and Bataan march her to his Chevy, stroking the small of her back, telling her, “don’t worry about a thing hon, we’ll come back at first light for your Honda and, you know what? On the way back, we’ll stop by the diner for some pumpkin pancakes; how’s that sound?”

Dad never lost his cool through all this. He never blew his top or went on long rants about “responsibility.” He never asked any questions, either. On those drives back from the cliffs, he’d stay mute, smiling and reaching over now and again at stop signs to give mom one of those comforting we’ll get through this knee squeezes he picked up from the movies.

Mom never looked at him on those drives, even when he squeezed her knee; she was pure concrete, her sallow eyes boring holes through the windshield she’d fogged up with her whiskey hiccups. As soon as they’d get home, she’d waddle inside and collapse facedown on the couch, pressing gecko-me tight between the cushion cracks to spend the night with dust bunnies and pennies.

As I grew from bean to gecko and gecko to squirrel, mom’s sojourns to high places became increasingly frequent. Dad spent his nights tracking her down and his days calling therapists and doctors. He and grandma were planning to ambush mom with an intervention, to tie her up in a facility that has “group” and a roommate who’d gone through the wringer once or twice and would sit on the foot of mom’s bed and give her the pep talk but their scheme fell through when the grasshoppers invaded.

“Invaded” is the correct word—it’s impossible to refer to it as anything other than an invasion. Everyone west of the Mississippi turned in on a routine Tuesday and woke up Wednesday, finding their Kentucky blue and chokecherries swarming with black grasshoppers the size of pepper mills. By Friday, their hundred-year oaks and sunflowers were chowed into black mounds of thick sludge, so oily and heinous, the rats wouldn’t come within spitting distance.

No one had a clue where they came from. Nobody could answer “Why now?” or “Why here?” The news networks immediately trotted out a menagerie of sweaty, thick-spectacled entomologists who’d squirm in the off-white tungsten, stuttering out some barely coherent “expert” perspective intended to make sense of it all.

On day one, the invaders were thought to be rare grasshoppers once exclusive to South Africa. A few days later, a fresh gaggle of talking heads claimed, “actually… they’re not grasshoppers, not at all! New evidence suggests these are, in fact, estranged relatives of the emerald-ash borer.” A few days later, that too was malarky—“those other guys jumped the gun on the whole emerald-ash borer thing; our latest sequencing confirms the buggers are mutant versions of a rare lanternfly found in Chilean monkey puzzle trees.”

After the initial weeks of theoretical back and forth and misinformation, the Entomological Society of America demanded a stop to the pissing contest of gene sequencing and guesstimating and, instead, began marshaling its resources in the name of triage, coordinating with Big Ag, DOI, USDA, and local municipalities in a futile Hail Mary to safeguard crops and parks.

To combat misinformation, the ESA & USDA mailed out pamphlets, official pamphlets, telling the public, with absolute authorial confidence, what they knew for sure:

The grasshoppers (despite controversy, the invaders continued to be called “grasshoppers” in general news parlance) are toxic. Their venom is harmless to humans and animals but poses an apocalyptic threat to all forms of vegetation;
They are a Western phenomenon. It appears the hoppers are unique to the US and have no appetite for anything east of the Mississippi;
They are loud. (This one was obvious; no one needed a pamphlet to confirm it. On the rare occasion dad talks about the hoppers, he goes on about their god-awful, sub-natural bass frequencies that’d cut up rugs in your stomach 24/7. They were loud enough to shake the TV to the point of blurring and make the loose skin boil around your jaw. I’ve always imagined mom and dad in the dining room enjoying the last chicken breast and potato they’d see until the crops came back, talking about ultrasounds and epidurals as the good china rattled in the cabinets, their faces like poked jello);
The fuckers are hard to kill. In the early days, they were burned en masse, but this practice was halted when early burn communities reported increased cases of goiters and vertigo. It turns out that the heat denatures the protein responsible for making their venom harmless to humans; thus, the plumes of smoke became highly toxic. Burning them is banned, and they appear immune to all known pesticides, but…
The fuckers can be killed. They’re regenerative but aren’t immune to a classic stomp…if you do it right. Post-stomp, they’d look all blown to smithereens, but in an hour, little black tendrils would unfold from the smashed bits and worm their way together to form complex tapestries of organs and skins and wings; the repaired hopper would walk off and get back to the buffet like nothing happened. The ESA/USDA pamphlet advocated a “Crush & Cut” strategy where you’d crush them flat and cut the remains into at least three parts (if the hoppers were cut in half, it’s likely a complete hopper would spawn from each smushed half, doubling their numbers, but (apparently) if the body chunks were less than a third of the total biomass, there wasn’t enough cellar verve to spawn the rejuvenatory tendrils.)

I was no bigger than a squirrel when the hoppers came to town. Mom woke up covered in couch droll Wednesday morning to find the hoard masticating her precious yard into black sludge. She beelined out there and spent every day after swatting those bastards off the rhododendrons with her tennis racket.

That’s when her disappearing stopped.

There was no time to straddle cliffs or play with coat hangers; there was no time for anything other than absolute war.

Mom lost a dogwood and her tomatoes in the initial siege. The next day, she lost the zucchini, a couple of firs, and some maples—carnage she lays at dad’s feet because he was the “inconsiderate fool” who “just had” to drag her to the “useless” OB/GYN for her third-trimester check-up.

She didn’t wince or fire off a cliched shiver when they slathered her belly with the cold gel. She was lost in the ceiling, imagining the bloodbath in her yard, steeling herself for the horror of returning home to find tarpits of black goop where her father’s maples should be.

She said nothing to the doctor—nothing to the nurses or dad; she didn’t turn to see squirrel-me flickering black and white on the screen, waving hello!; she just gave a toothless, shut the hell up and leave me be smile when the doctor gave the all clear.

Her legs bounced the whole ride home, her hands yo-yoing fist..palm..fist..palm. When they pulled into the driveway, she sprint-waddled to the garage, strapped on dad’s leaf blower, and ran into the yard.

She hadn’t figured out how to turn the thing on, but as she marched to the center of the yard, the grasshoppers were in full retreat—the water to her oil, seeking refuge beyond the property line, seemingly repelled by her simple proximity. She was too preoccupied with the starter rope to notice.

Dad watched from the driveway.

She looked up as the blower rumbled to life, manhandling its tube into battle position, holding it with both hands like Montana’s little friend. There she was, in the center of her yard, blower revving, posed Moses-like in her manufactured dry ground, admiring the purity of her cottonwoods, squash, maples, and half-eaten yet still lovely hydrangeas, smiling in euphoric victory as the too-big blower made her potbellied frame look anemic and frail.

Dad hadn’t seen her that happy in a long, long time.

They looked at each other and laughed.

Once she discovered her powers, she spent the days patrolling the property line, chalking the whole thing up to some interspecies baby on board! detente communicated by an unseen amniotic musk. She refused to leave home and got excited when her nipples leaked. She’d scoop the discharge with two fingers and anoint the tree trunks with her premature milk, never wasting a drop. When she got tired of patroling or leaking or anointing, she’d sit in the yard’s center, practicing lamaze, circumscribed by a fleet of whirring Honeywells enlisted to perfume the afternoon air with the magic stench geysering out her widened mouth, reminding the hoppers she’s not one to be trifled with.

Strangely, mom was no outlier. Across the western US, there were a couple dozen reported cases of these so-called “repellant pregnancies”—households that enjoyed immaculate, flauntingly verdant yards that would soon meet the feet of their little ones while millions of other newborns remained condemned to take their first steps on frigid concrete or crumbly pavement, ignorant to the whisper feet make in summer grass.

When it was time for me to breathe, I broke mom’s water, but she refused to leave the front lines. Dad tried the old Bataan march to the Chevy, but she dug in like a mule. He called the doctor, who begrudgingly rushed to the house with his instruments. After a long night, I came out screaming in the bath, my trebly shrieks competing with the hoppers’ low purr.

If I get drunk enough, I can still feel that cold porcelain on my skin and the tiles boomeranging back my shrieks, rubbing my soft melon in them like a dog who shit the rug.

While dad rinsed the birth slime off me and signed the paperwork that made me “Brandon,” mom got back to sitting outside like it was any other day. She’d have me out in the yard with her, patrolling the grounds and tending the veggies every day for the next four months until the hoppers got up and left. Vanished as quickly as they came.

Some “experts”—to the extent they were still considered experts—suggested they’d burrowed, fat and happy into the earth to hibernate like cicadas while others argued the hoard had migrated. There wasn’t as much public clamoring to understand why they left; all that mattered was they were gone.

To deal with the sludge, our town borrowed snowplows and bulldozers from Portland to plow it into temporary mountains erected in church parking lots and public school blacktops that loomed over us as the landfills were dug.

The blacktop of what would, one day, become my elementary school served as the foundation for one of these mountains. When the landfills were ready, the plows and dozers hauled the mountains to their resting places. But they sat there for weeks, enough time for the sun to bake sludge bits into the blacktop cracks. Years later, when I’d get knocked down at recess, and the boys piled on me, pressing my face tight against the blacktop, I’d catch a whiff of hopper sludge, an odd hybrid of turned Velvetta and Chanel No5.

That’s the extent of my first-hand knowledge of the hoppers—smelling their petrified filth. I was too young to hold any real memory of them. Sure, I’ve heard stories and seen the old news clips, but I can’t say I’ve spent much time thinking about them.

They’re only top of mind, flashing before my eyes now because mom’s calling…and mom never calls.

There was something funny about my phone’s vibrations that dredged up mom and the hoppers—the way it jiggled my thigh fat, radiating through it like a pebble breaking calm waters, told me it was her before I even looked.

continue…