Saludos Amigos

Mom and Sis are emigrating. They packed up the old house this week and are headed up to Winnebago country, the land once prowled by Black Hawk and his ornery band.

(Well, of course, he roamed that area up until the Bad Axe Massacre of 1832. Ah, don’t worry, I’m not going to get started on that.)

But, in many ways, I am excited about this turn of events. Besides the fact that I will now be relieved of a significant degree of painful nagging in my own local area, this move also signifies the end of a long, full-circle family journey.

They are moving to a spot not far from the grave of the original Bamboo, the first to travel to the United States of America in 1850. He was only buried there some 150 years ago. It hasn’t been that long, I know exactly where his grave is, and I hope to visit that spot for the first time very soon. His untimely death, occurring only a decade after his arrival, was one of those historically seminal events, sending what remained of his clan scattering somewhat randomly across this great country.

Like the original, I am not too sure why Mom and Sis are migrating back up to that neck of the woods. I haven’t completed my survey on that yet.

In fact, no distinct reason exists today for the great immigration of my ancestors to the US and as far as I know they didn’t pass the reason on down through the family. I don’t even know how the original man died since, I am told, any number of cruel things could have caused a sudden death in 1860. But, according to what I read, it typically takes some time to figure these things out.

Even the most recent Big Move is a mystery. For example, it could be due to economic reasons, a new job, looking for better pay, brighter prospects and the like. Maybe Mom and Sis were hounded by an unscrupulous landlord or victims of organized discrimination in the area they left behind. It could be a religious or political statement, I am not too sure.

Maybe they told me but I don't remember. Sometimes it’s hard to tell with Mom and Sis.

When attempting to make sense of this, it comes to my mind that people are often like Gypsy Moths, the Lymantria dismar, flitting around here and there with no great reason for the wide range in their movement. Originally from Europe and Asia, unleashed to infect the continental US in the late nineteenth century, this particular pest spread its wings over a vast area, leaving destroyed American forest trees suffering in its wake.

Because we let it go for so long at first, recent attempts to contain the Gypsy Moth have repeatedly failed and it will most likely come and go, silently continuing its violent expansion no matter what we do.

The endless gift of the Gypsy Moth, by the way, was given to America by Etienne Leopold Trouvelot, born on the day after Christmas 1827 in Aisne, France. Curiously, he had a good reason for migrating to America. It’s said that he came to the US to escape France during the coup d'etat in 1852. That may be true, but I seriously doubt he knew what he was getting into here.

He could have been made more aware if he had just paid attention. Only twenty years or so before Trouvelot quietly settled down in Medford, MA, the defiant Black Hawk was quoted out in Winnebago Country saying something like this:

“You know the cause of our making war. It is known to all white men. They ought to be ashamed of it."

In my mind, wise old Black Hawk, savage as he was, could have easily been predicting the curse of the Gypsy Moth. But, honestly, Black Hawk never knew of Trouvelot’s mistake, Trouvelot probably had never heard of Black Hawk’s omen, and none of us today can share any blame for that.

It’s weird, though. We’ve never been able to contain this Gypsy Moth like we do the Mexican Fruit Fly. The Anastrepha ludens is also not our friend. It does not earn a “Saludos Amigos” from me. It infests the fruit orchards of the lower states with confounding regularity.

The difference is we jumped right on the problem.

As a result, federal legislators speak at length on the pest, pundits offer this grand plan or that, and massive controlling measures are put in place to attack and prevent its spread. These exhaustive efforts are deemed somewhat effective and we have to stay on top of all that because, well, the Mexican Fruit Fly is a voracious pest. It could gravely injure our fruit production and our national economy if we blindly allow it to do so.

Being somewhat of an amateur gardener myself, I worry about all these pests and the effect they have on our economy.

Last year, I grew my own eggplant. Yes, eggplant in the singular, not eggplants in the plural. As it turned out, my highly limited green thumb could only produce a single, solitary fruit. Yet, it was a gorgeous purple color, plump and incredibly delicious. At the end of the summer, after months of high anticipation, I cradled it inside from the garden, sliced it carefully, breaded it tenderly, and then deep-fried the hell out of it. And, of course, I made a huge splash out of the deal. With a glass of wine, a side of pasta and shredded mozarella, to me it was fantastico!

My family wasn’t all that impressed.

Not long after the lovely eggplant dinner that I prepared, Grandmama, my mother-in-law, struggled in one day from an excursion to the local market. She has to go on occasion because she knows I won’t buy the things that she likes, owing to her enormous sweet tooth. She slammed a few overflowing bags of sugary goodies, cookies and potato chips on the counter and uttered another one of her pointed declarations towards me.

“Hey, you honyock,” she began, “have you seen the price of eggplants at the Big V? They are only 99 cents a pound. You probably spent more on just watering that mushy thing out there in that pitiful garden of yours!”

With that, she grabbed a huge bag of salty, sweet nothingness, a gallon of 2 percent, and then waddled down the stairs to her dark lair, her evil laugh echoing in my lonely kitchen.

Now, you see, I am watching the price of eggplants very closely. I am waiting for any indication that the government’s plans to control pests like the Mexican Fruit Fly are failing. If the price of eggplants starts to wander up in scale, I will be ready to act quicker than the CEO of Halliburton.

I have a new plant growing in my garden this very second. It already has 4 or 5 blossoms on it. If successful, I may be the envy of the Ville, owning a bonanza of eggplants by the end of the summer. I might corner the market, here, who knows.

But I still don’t know why Grandmama likes to call me a “honyock”. I have no Hungarian or Polish relatives in my ancestry that I am aware of.

Even stranger, though, like nomadic people and Gypsy Moths, with all our knowledge on the subject of migration which we’ve gathered after years and years of experience, the population of the Mexican Fruit Fly here in the US is still difficult to determine. How many are there? Why are they here? What do they want from us? There are many reasonable, logical answers, plenty of estimates on this subject, ranging from the radical to the conservative. It all depends upon who you believe, I suppose.

I was reading one of the many reports on the American effort to control the Mexican Fruit Fly just the other day and highlighted, for your pleasure, the following excerpt:

“Trapping is not a good method to estimate populations of this fruit fly. However, cutting fruit after harvest or late season is a good method of estimating populations. If a fly is trapped in an orchard, then all fruit from that orchard is quarantined for two weeks. More sterile flies are released in the area. If a second wild fly is found then the quarantine is extended for a year (Robacher 1993).”

Things, it seems, have definitely changed since old Trouvelot’s time.

This is understandable. I am told the United States of America was at one time a repository for a number of globally migrating pests and coup d'etat-escaping Frenchmen, a natural sinkhole where all the world’s gypsies, moths and fruit flies could comfortably roost, eventually eliminating the marauding Black Hawk and dramatically eradicating tall forests with equal pleasure. Hell, I heard we damn near invited them in, tragically unaware of the hidden side effects.

Not now. I guess we’ve finally got smart.

Now we boldly speak of trapping, sterilizing and quarantine. We've trained our extensive knowledge of science to nip this problem in the bud. We may not be able to corner the Gypsy Moth, but we’re damn sure going to contain the fruit fly. We’ve saddled up and we’re headed to Mexico. (That means you too, Newt!)

These are tough, drastic measures but absolutely necessary if we are to protect our resources. The future of our country depends on our quick preventive action. We simply can’t leave this fruit fly problem or the potential of staggering eggplant costs for our grandchildren to suffer. Our kids won’t have lived through it and they won’t remember how it all began. They may not find any distinct reason for it, no historical record to analyze completely. They might fail to identify the problem properly or simply choose the wrong course.

We are in a much better position today to compare what works with what doesn’t. We don’t have to look that far in our past to realize our mistakes and the graves of our ancestors are still very close to our own homes. We tread over their dusty old bones every day and with every careful step I am sure we will leave an equally awesome legacy for our grandchildren to ponder.

And I think we’ve known the cause all along, but with regards to the memory of Black Hawk and his kind, we are still conceitedly not so ashamed of it.

Back in backwater Missouri, as Mom and Sis prepared to speed off to the Land of the Winnebago this past week, I grabbed Sis by the shoulders for maybe the last time and bid her farewell on her journey. I told her that, to my understanding, she had nothing to fear from the native population up there, as it was wisely cleaned out long ago. By all accounts, she should be welcomed with open arms and dancing in the streets, as long as she doesn’t transport any fresh fruit or homemade goods.

But I reminded her to have all her identification and papers in order, lest she be detained by one of Sensenbrenner’s black-booted gendarme. Allowing any confusion in this regard, I warned her, would not be bueno.

Finally, I whispered in her ear, “Whatever you do, be like the Gypsy Moth, not the Mexican Fruit Fly. Identifying with the latter could be disastrous.”

Sis gave Mom and The Wife a tired look.

The Wife shook her head and spoke for her entire generation, “Uh, yeah, don’t know how it happened … but we’re all hoping his condition will one day get better.”

Cheers,

Mb