Living with genus Vespa

It is dark and windy, and I walk in an oak grove on a ridge between pewter cold lakes. The Turtle Mountains' woodland in North Dakota is thick with ash, quaking aspen, maple, elm and birch. But oaks, gnarly and spreading, stand out with their brown canopies of October foliage. I look for them: in this colorful forest of bright leaves they are monochromatic and solid, old and set in their ways. I search the branches with my lens and catch a glimpse of a grey swaying hive. Hornets' nest!

Too early in the season to get it down? Well, the nights are already freezing and we are near the Canadian border, so it should be fine. Too high to reach? The hive dangles maybe 17 feet above the clearing, and we have our camper. And John is tall and long limbed, so -- maybe?  Too early in our trip to burden ourselves with a large and delicate object, intricately constructed from saliva and dry wood shavings? Should it travel on our bed for another two months, for there is no other flat space large enough to accommodate its magnificence?

We already have three handsome hornet nests hanging in our house and this lovely hive would feel right at home. So just in case we could get it down and transport it safely I later mention it to John. We go and look, and yes, he wants it, too. But now I have second thoughts, so we call for a lunch break to think it over. The place in the nearby St.John is called N-8 Cafe -- for the owner's son, Nate -- and the soup of the day is listed as 'if available.' We ask, and it is. I check the life cycle of the genus Vespa on line, and there it is, as clear as a great fall day: the last workers in the hive die off in early November, good three weeks from now. No go. No hive. Not now. 

But on our way back to the forest John turns the camper straight into the clearing and parks it under the swaying object of my desire.

"Remember," I say, "it is too early. We cannot do it. It is their home." "I know," he says. "I do not want to take it down. I will just check if they are still there."

My wifely realism sounds a note of alarm. Why climb the camper roof in this sharp wind and struggle with the oak's porcupine of branches just to check? But his logic trumps mine, for what woman in love would say 'no' to this declaration of devotion: "I want to please you. And if it is empty, I want you to have it'."

In no time John climbs the camper and reaches the hive. He touches it, shakes it, listens to it, and then fishes out his Swiss army knife and gently detaches the hive from the stiff embrace of many branchlets the hornets used as its lofty foundation. Grateful, I intercept the offering which is as silent as any late in the season hive should be. Everybody left; the workers died off, and the queen is already burrowed somewhere in a soft rotten stump to survive the winter. If she lives, she will emerge as the world warms up and find a new location for a family home. This nest will not be recycled: soaked by cold rains and torn to pieces by winds it will disintegrate to smaller and smaller shreds, another Andy Goldsworthy-like opus of impermanence, devoted purely to procreation and the passage of time. 

The hive settles on our bed in the cold dark camper. Tomorrow we will return to N-8 Cafe, ask for a really large cardboard box, and mail it home. We will ask our friends Katherine and Richard who live there now to open the box and admire the hive, as we know they will. 

We walk around, photograph and smell the pewter ponds framed with golden aspens. Then night comes and we climb into our camper. John is downloading our pictures. I am starting a cauliflower soup, and the little space is now pleasantly light and warm. I open the refrigerator and there, on top of it, there are two dark and winged shapes sitting on our white pee bucket. Warmed by the cooking stove, alive and present. They look like miniature medieval warriors with horned helmets. 

Yes. It was too early. And we destroyed their home. Never mind they would soon die: they were not ready, and we did it.

The hornets are not even aggressive, just a bit dopey and disoriented, and I release them into the dark forest. Then I take the hive out and place it gently on the ground. Tomorrow we will hang it on another tree, a futile gesture of restitution which has no happy ending. I climb on our bed with a strong flashlight to search. I find no one else. But later I locate another one right by my foot, resting like a tiny domestic dog. This one has to leave, too, and we hope there will be no more.  

The morning brings light and warmth, and we go out to paddle in our Julia. The canoe slides across the blue Pelican Lake like a dry leaf, and we eat our lunch -- served on the paddle -- and drink our clear water from a big square bottle. We return early and unpack. The sun makes us lazy and warms the camper and ... oh no. Two more genus Vespa are already sitting on our water bottle in the sink. Where were they hiding? How many more? Are we surrounded? Should we surrender? Beg for forgiveness? Sprout wings and try to live their wild lives in order to appreciate what huge effort is needed to survive if you are a hornet? We search the camper again -- nothing -- but we sleep poorly.

The following night John is climbing into our bed when he spies a small elongated shape on the comforter cover. At first, his ingrained instinct is to see the ordinary and insist it must be a dark fluff from our thick socks. He wants to swipe it away but he confesses some frontal lobe neurology suggested he turned the light on first. Another hornet.

By now, I sleep with an EpiPen under my pillow. I know: our hornets are not hostile and warrior-like. They are tired, confused and lost, and I do not expect them to attack us. But if they are still in our bed and we roll on one or two, they would have to be saints to resist stinging us. And I am glad our EpiPen is a 2-pack variety: one for me, one for John.

Maybe the uncertainty and unknowing we still feel -- and will feel again tonight when we crawl into our bed -- is a fair price to pay for getting what we wanted when the seasons had not quite turned over and tumbled into winter.  Maybe it is good to feel a bit uneasy. 

©Yva Momatiuk

On the rocks

During the last few days we have been paddling in the Boundary Waters in Minnesota and even nipped to Ontario for more lakes. But eventually the bad drizzly foggy and otherwise nasty weather pushes us south. 

Crossing the American Narrows on our way back to the US we run a maze of old railroad tracks, confusing industrial bridges spanning who knows what, and changing lanes which twist like dry spaghetti. The rain is still coming down in a cold nagging drizzle, the way it did all last week in Canada, and we are hoping for better paddling weather here. But this place does not look promising.  

"Have you ever seen a stranger border crossing?" asks John. The U.S. customs' officer does not look too good, either: pockmarked and somber, he offers none of the usual "welcome home" stuff. He takes our passports and asks about any fruit or vegetables we may have with us. John tells him we just ate our last two apples. 

"Any onions?" the guy asks, and his expression darkens.

Onions? Onions? How does he know? Yes, we do have one onion. Maybe, like John, I should offer the greatest possible information and tell him that being a crazy mushroom picker I carry onions and sour cream wherever I go. But this guy may be looking for a deeper meaning accessible only to him. Onion rockets? Onion bombs?

"What kind of onion?" he asks. This is getting slippery. "Red. It is a red onion. One," I stress. He startles a bit, as if this revelation confirmed his nasty suspicions, and waves us into a side bay. Two agricultural inspectors, both women, approach our truck. 

"So, you've got some onions?" one asks, knowingly. "What kind?

"Red onion," we reply in unison. "One. One onion."

She wants John to dig it out. He obliges and she eyes it critically. "Oh, it is red. That's OK," she says. "You can go." 

We wait until her co-worker opens a heavy barrier separating us from the free people who are allowed to keep all kinds of onions. The free people of International Falls, Minnesota. We roll into town and can tell by boarded up storefronts and front yards decorated mostly with old cars and appliances this place is down on its good luck. Large murals cover whatever they can. 

We need to look for the usual four: food, gas, water and propane. And: flu shots. A community pharmacy clerk calls the town's health department for us ("no, they are not from here, just traveling") and sends us to K-Mart. But what K-Mart! We are seated in two comfy chairs behind a red curtain, get help with filling out forms, and are allowed to select the arm (left) which we like to have stabbed. All done, we ask where we should go for lunch and two pharmacists deliver in unison: "Sandy's Home Cooking!" 

The home cooking place is a warm and crowded codgery. This is our name for back country cafes where old codgers sporting stretched suspenders and backs wrecked by decades of farming congregate daily for their refills of truly terrible coffee and some corner-of the-mouth gossip. There is a FREE WI-FI sign but not a single laptop, tablet or a smart phone anywhere in sight: are we in some foreign country? Here you talk. And eat stuff which is definitely bad for you but seems to put heat in your body and keep it there. 

Our warmth persists much of the dismal day, so when it suddenly stops drizzling and we find a rapids-free sweep of the Little Indian Sioux River meandering among tall reeds, we put in. Julia goes in the river first, then our gear, and we are off, upstream. Finally! 

Not really. Soaring over tall birches, pines and cedars, a flapping wing of rain overtakes us in no time. The rain comes down so fast we get drenched before we yank our rain gear from their dry sacks. For some idiotic reason, we try to flee and paddle like mad upstream to escape the deluge. I have to watch for barely submerged rocks but all I see are fat droplets whipping the river into an array of watery stalagmites, which raise and collapse like miniature pistons. Mesmerized, I want to photograph them, but we come to what appears to represent our senses, and turn back. John hoists Julia on the roof of the camper with seats still attached to speed things up. We throw our soaked gear in. And then it stops raining. Yes. And I do not even have a single picture of beautiful rain stalagmites. Subdued, we pull into a small forestry campground beneath a massive elephant rock. 

Morning is overcast. I read the campground's bulletin board and learn that Boundary Waters bears can recognize camping food coolers left unattended in cars. And they rip into vehicles to get to them. Smart bears. 

A man approaches our campsite and asks if he can cross it to get to the top of the elephant rock. He cradles in his arms a plastic bag filled with what looks like a fine grey gravel. His face is solemn and I suddenly know why he is here. 

"Is this what I think it is?" I ask, and he says yes: these are his mother's ashes. She loved this lake, these rocks, and used to come here often to hunt grouse. A crack shot, she liked to teach others how to do it well. Worked for Honeywell, supervising four engineers involved in the Gemini program and the Apollo. Met all the astronauts. Later in life she suffered congestive heart disease and had to move to a nursing home. But last time he called her she told him she could not talk because she was too busy: she was cooking dinner for all home residents. He managed to tell her he was clearing her house which needed to be sold, and she asked what he did with her bottles of bourbon. She had more than 40 of them stashed all over the place, and he already gave them to her friends. Ah, she said, that's good, but did you find an unopened vodka bottle? Yes, I did, and I put it in the freezer. Great, she said, just bring it over when you come on Sunday. And two hours later the home called because she died. So he will scatter her ashes on the rocks and go for a 35-mile hike. Three days.

I walk over and put my arms around him. "Thank you, Ma'am," he says simply, and I sense this is it. There will be no more words, just his short climb to the top of the elephant rock and the ritual of parting with what can still be touched of the woman who gave him life. She was a crack shot, and loved her bourbon, and this lake, and her life, too. We do not meet him again but late in the evening we climb the rock and see a grey layer of fine ashes scattered on a sloping ledge overlooking the darkening lake. 

"Goodnight, Mother," says John. 

His mother, too. And my own. Goodnight, Mothers. 

©Yva Momatiuk