Man, are there a lot of bugs this year.

The funny thing is, for the longest time before and after we moved out here I had the idea that there weren’t any bugs in New Mexico. I have no idea why. My late mother-in-law, reeling with ecological guilt, used to say “they don’t salt the streets here” in her beloved Des Moines. Maybe it’s the same kind of thing.

One of the reasons I wanted to move out here from Maryland was because there weren’t any bugs, you see. In one respect, I was right: because of the cold, there are certainly more insect-free months here. There have to be fewer mosquitoes, too, because it’s usually so dry, though the ones I do meet up with are awfully ravenous. Something to do with an average of 14 people per square mile, probably.

But there are insects, all right. I figure about 600 species of flies, mostly, all sizes. The other night I was sitting outside with my dinner, and two flies dove right into my gravy — they didn’t buzz around and accidentally fall in, they dive-bombed straight into it! What makes New Mexico flies special is that all of them bite: the itty-bitty gnat things, the welterweights, what look like house flies, and on up to great buzzing things the size of Vietnamese pot-bellied pigs, only hairier. At night in the summer, it’s moths, or used to be. A few years back when we lived higher up in the mountains in San Cristobal, there were so many, it was ridiculous. I was almost afraid to breathe for fear of suffocating from them. They’d pour in through the screen-less windows and thud against my computer monitor until it drove me insane. Big ones, too. But it doesn’t seem that there are that many in these parts just now. Could be it’s the weather.

In Maryland we used to get these tiny little beetles that would crawl through the screens and fly in our faces while we tried to read at night. We also had blacksnakes in the eves, but that’s for another post. Here in el Norte, I’ve hardly ever seen a snake — fewer than back East — but I did find a baby scorpion crawling across the kitchen counter once. None of those last few are actual bugs, of course, and neither are the black widow spiders that live behind the power supplies and cabling in the corner underneath my desk. They never venture out, apparently, and I’m not complaining.

Actually, with the possible exception of the big red-and-black ants that go after my sweetie every time she goes outside in her little flat sexy nothing sandals, most of the insects here are live-and-let-live. Ah yes, the Code of the West. I guess you can tell there aren’t many grasshoppers this year, because I haven’t mentioned them. They would definitely be an exception to the Code, although they never bit me personally. Now that I think of it, so would the box elder bugs, because they only recognize their own kind, aided by the fact that there are so many of them.

It’s not like we’re overrun with box elders, either, so the whole thing beats me.