The Frogmarch

"I've got to pull up my stakes and roll, man." --Jean-Jacques Libris de Kerouac

Thursday, October 19, 2006

I'd Been Afraid to Mention This Before Now

When I was a kid my family lived in a turn-of-the-century house in Charleston, SC. Many of the buildings in Charleston, being elderly, low-lying, and slightly (or very) run-down were infested with palmetto bugs, and our house was no exception. Palmetto bugs are to regular cockroaches as timberwolves are to shih tzus--technically the same thing, but bigger, meaner and significantly less welcome in your kitchen. Every month the exterminator would come and fog the whole house; we'd sweep out the victims and try to get the chemical smell out of the house, and a week later they'd be scurrying across my bedroom floor again.

When we moved to Charlotte later on, we presumably brought some eggs with us, because I remember making a game of new ways to kill roaches--dart guns, hair spray, a toilet plunger, etc.

When I grew up and went off to college, I lived in a row house in Pittsburgh's notorious South Oakland neighborhood ("Do not live in South Oakland unless you are reasonably proficient in hand-to-hand or small arms combat," read the unofficial CMU student handbook). It was cheap, close to all the punk rock clubs, and godamighty it had the absolute worst roach infestation I've ever seen. My roomie and I bought Raid by the case, so we could have a can in each room and a personal can on us at all times. I drew a Raid DMZ around my bed each night in a futile attempt to keep the roaches off me while I slept. On one trip to the bathroom on a humid night I counted 27 different roaches during the time it took me to do my business and clear out.

My housing standards improved after I got a real job, and our house back in Chapel Hill contends only with the occasional smoky brown wandering in from outside, plus sugar ants in the kitchen when it rains.

This is an awful lot of background to get to a simple observation about our life in France, which is this: In our apartment, which is 150 years old, located 50 yards from a major river, and in a country where public sanitation is, erm, not up to North American standards... [looks around, whispers] ... I haven't seen a single bug.

Well, we got mosquitos in the summer with the windows open at night, but not Roach One. It doesn't make any sense to me. I was anticipating the absolute worst. How can this be? I can only assume that here in France they use some sort of deadly carcinogenic Agent Orange/Zyklon-B doomsday pesticide expressly forbidden by the Geneva Accords. Either that, or they have negotiated some sort of truce to appease our insect overlords, who are awaiting the critical moment to strike.

The steps to the basement of our building are sealed off behind a locked, ten-foot-tall solid oak door. What horrors lie within?

Speaking of distasteful vermin: I haven't seen a single mime, either.

Unrelated picture: Guys playing petanque on a Sunday afternoon, Place Sathonay. One scores points for every ball closer to the target ball (the little red one at center) than any of the opponent's balls. Players who are fairly skilled specialize in targeting opposing balls and knocking them out of the way. Remarkable when you consider that petanque is usually played with a woozy afternoon buzz resulting from drinking pastis all day.

I think I'm going to buy a set of petanque balls, just so that when I return to the US I can show up at cookouts with them and annoy the hell out of people with boring stories of how I learned the game in Frawnce, you know.

5 Comments:

  • At 4:57 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said…

    The reason that the roaches don't bother to come in the houses is that a)the rats eat them b) they find enough garbage in the streets to dine on.

     
  • At 5:57 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said…

    ...not to mention that they can't reach the elevator buttons and don't want to face the 6 flight walk-up.

     
  • At 6:42 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said…

    I also have burned in memory an image of a young boy (pre-blog), smashing a multi-legged intruder with a plastic rifle-butt. The audio portion has--fortunately--faded with the years.

     
  • At 10:02 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said…

    Ah, life during wartime behind the roach DMZ; I nostalgically also remember it as the "line of death". And by nostalgia I mean the triggering of a nervous twitch and the hideous sickly-sweet olfactory recall of bugspray that is most likely burned both chemically and mnemonically into my mind. My most treasured memory happened not long after we moved in and before we coordinated the first of several allied bombing offensives with our neighbors in the building. Frogmarch and I came home late one night, walked in darkness through the house to the kitchen where we hit the lights, and witnessed something that until then I had only seen in horror flicks: practically the entire kitchen wall and the cupboards covered with hundreds of roaches, all suddenly scurrying to escape the light. It was then that I thought we should either start carrying torches with us or speak to the landlady about getting an exterminator. Or both.

     
  • At 1:06 AM, Anonymous Anonymous said…

    So, the landlady issued you torches....

    Maybe it just takes a few thousand years of concerted stomping to eliminate roaches in any given area.

    I like the action shot on that game. If I had a Michael Jordan poster to replace that's what I'd replace it with....

     

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