margaret erhart
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an acre of grasshoppers

6/16/2020

3 Comments

 
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Meanwhile, I’ve been killing grasshoppers. It’s a messy business, best handled by chickens, but I’m not quite ready for chickens. Grasshopper eyes are big and hard to ignore, like a baby’s, or a chihuahua’s. Their bodies are a beautiful vibrant green, or pinstriped, or rusty red. They wiggle their antennae when I approach, indicating I’m not sure what, but I certainly understand from their attention to the situation that they are sentient beings. They are full-bodied, even the little ones. They don’t squash easily so that’s a method I can’t bring myself to use. I catch them in a bug net and drown them, and even then I frown and turn away as they wiggle and seem to fight for life. I squashed one in the drowning bucket today simply because it kept surviving. It found a blade of grass and rode that like a life raft. It swam back and forth in the bucket like a dog chasing a ball. I killed it in fury and in doing so crossed a line I hadn’t known was there. 

It’s easy to kill in a rage. I wanted that animal dead so it would stop devouring my young red twig dogwoods. I wanted it dead so it wouldn’t move on to my cucumbers and scarlet runner beans. I justified its death and the death of all the rest of them. This creature is taking life, so I’ll take its life. An eye for an eye. Tip for tap. But add fury, rage, anger to it and the game changes. 

​To kill that obdurate grasshopper, or any grasshopper, force is required. As I said, their bodies are firm and the older ones are downright armored. Which is why I chose drowning. It seemed both effective and once-removed from the killing process itself. But when the stubborn one didn’t drown and didn’t drown and didn’t drown, I gritted my teeth, literally, and moved into a different gear. You’re making me have to kill you with my own hands, I thought, and this resentment led to a brief swat of irritation, then moved quickly into anger. It took no time at all to dump that anger on the creature whose instinct for life was at least as robust as mine. I pinned it to the side of the bucket with a stick. My jaw ached and I could feel the ugliness rising in my chest, and suddenly I didn’t know myself. I was in an altered state for just a moment, but a moment out of proportion to the very small size of the creature whose life I was taking. 

And what is the size of a life? We think we can kill an acre of grasshoppers more easily than a herd of horses. We think we can kill a herd of horses more easily than squeezing the life out of one man. But for me, in that moment of anger, the hierarchy of life held no meaning whatsoever. I was utterly without protocol, pushing my hands through a curtain made of feeble human gestures, in order to complete a job I had begun. I was blind to what I was actually doing, and the anger made possible—and just—the taking not only of this life, but any.
3 Comments
Grace Osora Erhart link
6/16/2020 01:32:17 pm

Oh how I can relate! Reading your grasshopper sad adventure allows me to pause from the weary work of watering my garden and mention my own recent killing spree.
I had it so much easier! We were getting infested by these Chinese bugs called “stink bugs”, they came here sometime around 1999 (I believe on a cargo ship.) Well, once you find one you find many. They don’t bite, but multiply in your house, they seem intelligent, moving away from my shadow as I came close to get them, certainly not as beautiful as a grasshopper. I was taking them outside and letting them go until I realized they were foreign invaders so...
The easiest way of killing them is to drop them in a bucket of soapy water then they don’t live very long, their exoskeleton become depleted by plain dish soap in about a minute.
My 32 year old daughter was crying out “your karma, stop killing!!” But I had enough, after two weeks of letting them go outside it was time for business. It was easy not to feel as much guilt because they were invading a country where they shouldn’t be.... I amaze myself that I don’t even feel bad anymore. I grab them with the tissue and into the soap! I didn’t know I had it in me either, however I now have a new love for all native insects, flies spiders, ants, let them come in and visit me !!!!! I don’t know what I would do with big beautiful grasshoppers, luckily we don’t see too many in CT and I can enjoy their handsomeness. I feel your pain!

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Shep Erhart
6/16/2020 01:43:12 pm

Wow, Margaret. Thank you for shinning the light into the darkness of entitlement, arrogance, justification, privilege, righteousness, etc. Not to mention the veil that descends on my heart as irritation escalates to anger to forgetting. Forgetting that I am deeply connected to that tiny no-see-em bug that i easily crushed this morning on my arm as i lay in the sun after a dip in the bay. Totally justified because i felt the discomfort of it's pin prick bite. Somewhere deep in my cultural code is permission to destroy that which causes discomfort. How that escalates to crushing a human life to preserve the comfort of my tightly held prejudices is now painfully evident. I too am on the spectrum. I could be that policeman -- if i didn't have some help in policing my mind and it's conditioned inclinations. And i too could have brushed away that tiny insect this morning instead of taking it's life without skipping a beat. Or maybe my heart did skip a beat. Maybe next time I'll be listening for it's still small voice -- the one i'm listening for now as i search the storm of media input. Thank you for the reminder.

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Linda McMichael
6/16/2020 01:48:29 pm

We have a grasshopper either inside our garage or just on the other side of the garage door. We've never seen him, but every evening Jiminy performs his cheerful two-note song. I looked forward to it. Then I asked Richard what grasshoppers ate if they got inside a home. He looked it up. Clothes, furniture... Oh oh. So now we don't leave the connecting door from the garage to the house open in the evenings, but I still go out there to listen to this exo-ventriloquist's beautiful music.

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