The Rape of a City

             

 

I have a yard man. He cuts my grass with rapid efficiency. Showing up every weekend, he never fails. My yard is one of the best looking on the block, it’s become a source of pride for me. My yard man drives an old pickup truck toting a trailer bearing his zero turn beast, a weed eater and a few cans of gasoline in battered red cans. It also carries a small push mower which is all he needs to knock out my small yard.

This past weekend while chewing through the grass of my backyard he got stung four times in quick succession. He wasn’t sure what exactly stung him. The next night after work, I walked the backyard in darkness, using my mobile phone flashlight I discovered the source of his bane. Nestled in the rungs of an aluminum ladder I have affixed to the side of my storage building was a hornet’s nest. It was the size of a deflated basketball, ominous and deadly like a miniature Imperial Star Destroyer straight out of Star Wars.

 

 

When I shared my discovery with him, he was more than eager to make a return trip to destroy it. Were I to be stung by these hornets I’d be angry too. But I’m getting soft in my old age because suddenly I didn’t want harm to come to the nest. But we all have our own truths. Mine is I’m a capitalist at heart. Alex Keaton has nothing on me. I’m a believer that capitalism wins out. In this country, you can be or become anything you want to because of capitalism. Want to be a doctor? Make good grades and get a student loan. You can become a doctor. The money buys the goods. I won’t find a better yard man who charges me what he does for attending to my yard. So, I complied. I bought his weapons of destruction: two cans of wasp killer. 

 

Before he showed up to do the dastardly deed, I walked back and surveyed the nest again. Cast in my flashlight’s beam, the nest looked almost harmless. I did some reading about hornets. Their nests which are comprised of a substance similar to paper, are perfect in their construct. The hornets build the nests by mixing chewed wood with their saliva to build multiple chambers, each serving a purpose in their complexity. Hornets are a boon to gardens. They eat everything that eats a garden. They feed on caterpillars and insects that devour growing vegetables.

Arriving with a coal miner’s helmet with a huge flashlight mounted atop it, he took the wasp spray and proceeded to engulf the paper nest in a sickly looking white foam. It reminded me of AFFF foam we used in the Navy to put out fires, only instead of saving lives, this foam wrapped around the nest, suffocating its inhabitants and acting as a corrosive to melt the nest into oblivion. Under the focused beam of his headlight, I watched the nest deteriorate, none of its denizens putting up a defense. The nest simply diminished along with each insect inside, who were seemingly ensconced after a day of toil, feeding and tending to the larvae and the needs of the queen. 

Both cans were emptied. I saw sluggish movement within the nest, victims of a life ending firestorm. I wondered what God thought of all of this. Were these hornets created for the sole purpose of angering a fellow creature higher up in the food chain, soliciting his ire enough to eradicate their very being simply because they felt his passing mower was a threat, a force to be reckoned with? 

I watched the remnants of the nest dripping onto the ground, soon to be a memory. And looking at the spent spray cans on the ground I realized capitalism had won out, but at what expense?