Worst Bug Stories:
A segment of a TV show last night brought back memories of a bad bug year, and the things we'd do to keep them at bay.
Summer months in the woods - bugs are always an issue. Most of the time, they are a slight and manageable nuisance. Other times, dry seasons, they are no problem at all. Once in a great while they are a threat to sanity.
The year I was 15, my younger brother and I worked all summer for a farmer, peeling pulp logs. There aren't many farmers in our area. Farming with such a short growing season, and such poor thin topsoil is a tough way to make a living. Such backwoods farming almost always includes some logging. That was where we came in. In those days, the logs, when they were delivered to the mills, had to be free of bark. To peel the 100 inch logs we were paid room, board, and 3 cents a "stick." We would use a leaf spring from a Model T Ford and strip the bark from the logs. Every day we would cut and peel 100 logs. For our efforts we made $3.00 a day.
I have a lot of good memories of that summer, in spite of the bugs. It was when I learned to use dynamite, kissed my first girl, and really learned to drive. The farmer had a 1947 jeep pickup, and I had to drive my brother and me through the forest to get to where we were cutting. That machine would truely go anywhere.
As a side note, we were also expected to shoot any timber wolves we saw. The farmer was always loosing young stock (cattle) to wolves. We carrried an old .30-30 Winchester carbine with us. Unfortunately, the speed of the bullet was too slow, and the wolf would jump as soon as he saw the muzzle flash when we fired. We just weren't doing too good hitting wolves. One day, the farmer came home with a 6 mm Remington, a gun with a high muzzle velocity. Wolves couldn't jump that fast.
As to bugs... Every ten years we would have an inundation of army worms. These catapillers would eat all leaves. In a bad year, the decidous trees would be completely denuded. The advent of a army worm population peak brought a corresponding influx of black flies. About the third year after an army worm infestation, the black fly population peaks and they can get to be a nuisance. The year I turned 15 was one such year, and the worst I remember.
When bugs are bad there are certain places you stay away from. Low areas and deep woods are eschewed in favor of high country and lakes large enough to have a good breeze. When you are logging, you have no choice. Deep woods and low places are where the trees are.
When we were in the woods, the flies were so prevelant we were apt to loose things like the axe, our peeliing irons, our lunch, the chainsaw, and worst of all, the citronella, or bug dope. If we set them down for a minute, the flies camoflauged everything to the point where you couldn't make out the shape of ordinary objects. We'd have to move over the ground waving our hands to scare up the bugs in hope of finding our missing belongings.
We worked six days a week. On Sundays, after services at the little country church, we would fish out of the canoe on the St. Louis River. The flies were so bad the deer would be out in the river with only their noses sticking out of the water. Sometimes we'd count 100 deer noses on our stretch of the river.
Working in the hot humid weather was bad enough, but the flies made it truely miserable. We used citronella, but would sweat it off in only a few minutes. The farmer, a thrifty soul, would allow us one bottle of citronella a week. We could easily have used it up in a day.
The thing I saw on TV that jogged my memory, was a method of keeping bugs out of your eyes. If you were working, you could put up with the bites, if the flies would just stay away from your eyes. They never would. Tom Angwassig, an old Ojibwe, came by our cutting site one day. He was wearing a wreath of jackpine twigs fastened around his head with a bandanna. We asked him why, and he said it kept the bugs out of your eyes. Tom fixed us up with head bands from strips of canvas torn from an old tarp, laced the head bands with jackpine boughs and pronounced us proper jackpine savages. The pine needles hanging in front of our eyes affected our vision somewhat, but not as much as the bugs had.
The pine boughs were a nuisance, We'd end up with sap in our hair, but it was still preferable to bugs in our eyes. From that day on, for the rest of the summer, the first thing we did, on reaching the logging site, was to arrange our pine bough bonnets.
PG
A segment of a TV show last night brought back memories of a bad bug year, and the things we'd do to keep them at bay.
Summer months in the woods - bugs are always an issue. Most of the time, they are a slight and manageable nuisance. Other times, dry seasons, they are no problem at all. Once in a great while they are a threat to sanity.
The year I was 15, my younger brother and I worked all summer for a farmer, peeling pulp logs. There aren't many farmers in our area. Farming with such a short growing season, and such poor thin topsoil is a tough way to make a living. Such backwoods farming almost always includes some logging. That was where we came in. In those days, the logs, when they were delivered to the mills, had to be free of bark. To peel the 100 inch logs we were paid room, board, and 3 cents a "stick." We would use a leaf spring from a Model T Ford and strip the bark from the logs. Every day we would cut and peel 100 logs. For our efforts we made $3.00 a day.
I have a lot of good memories of that summer, in spite of the bugs. It was when I learned to use dynamite, kissed my first girl, and really learned to drive. The farmer had a 1947 jeep pickup, and I had to drive my brother and me through the forest to get to where we were cutting. That machine would truely go anywhere.
As a side note, we were also expected to shoot any timber wolves we saw. The farmer was always loosing young stock (cattle) to wolves. We carrried an old .30-30 Winchester carbine with us. Unfortunately, the speed of the bullet was too slow, and the wolf would jump as soon as he saw the muzzle flash when we fired. We just weren't doing too good hitting wolves. One day, the farmer came home with a 6 mm Remington, a gun with a high muzzle velocity. Wolves couldn't jump that fast.
As to bugs... Every ten years we would have an inundation of army worms. These catapillers would eat all leaves. In a bad year, the decidous trees would be completely denuded. The advent of a army worm population peak brought a corresponding influx of black flies. About the third year after an army worm infestation, the black fly population peaks and they can get to be a nuisance. The year I turned 15 was one such year, and the worst I remember.
When bugs are bad there are certain places you stay away from. Low areas and deep woods are eschewed in favor of high country and lakes large enough to have a good breeze. When you are logging, you have no choice. Deep woods and low places are where the trees are.
When we were in the woods, the flies were so prevelant we were apt to loose things like the axe, our peeliing irons, our lunch, the chainsaw, and worst of all, the citronella, or bug dope. If we set them down for a minute, the flies camoflauged everything to the point where you couldn't make out the shape of ordinary objects. We'd have to move over the ground waving our hands to scare up the bugs in hope of finding our missing belongings.
We worked six days a week. On Sundays, after services at the little country church, we would fish out of the canoe on the St. Louis River. The flies were so bad the deer would be out in the river with only their noses sticking out of the water. Sometimes we'd count 100 deer noses on our stretch of the river.
Working in the hot humid weather was bad enough, but the flies made it truely miserable. We used citronella, but would sweat it off in only a few minutes. The farmer, a thrifty soul, would allow us one bottle of citronella a week. We could easily have used it up in a day.
The thing I saw on TV that jogged my memory, was a method of keeping bugs out of your eyes. If you were working, you could put up with the bites, if the flies would just stay away from your eyes. They never would. Tom Angwassig, an old Ojibwe, came by our cutting site one day. He was wearing a wreath of jackpine twigs fastened around his head with a bandanna. We asked him why, and he said it kept the bugs out of your eyes. Tom fixed us up with head bands from strips of canvas torn from an old tarp, laced the head bands with jackpine boughs and pronounced us proper jackpine savages. The pine needles hanging in front of our eyes affected our vision somewhat, but not as much as the bugs had.
The pine boughs were a nuisance, We'd end up with sap in our hair, but it was still preferable to bugs in our eyes. From that day on, for the rest of the summer, the first thing we did, on reaching the logging site, was to arrange our pine bough bonnets.
PG
Brutal!
