The summer of the hoppers

 

I didn't plant this guy. He did what cottonwoods have done for centuries--he just took root, grew up from a slender little fellow, no bigger than a cone flower. Mijn vrouw and fellow laborer out back didn't much care for him growing up where he did, but I just couldn't drop him, given his honorable dedication.

These days, it's looking downright pitiable. How it is they devour the cottonwood but let the far more exotic red bud alone ("You need to pray for that tree daily," our friend the landscaper said when we put it in.), I'll never understand, but there's no accounting for taste.  Just witness the peaked condition of what should be a healthy cottonwood kid. It's a skeleton of its former self.

Let me show you.

There at it as we speak. I ought to make a game out of it. How many danged hoppers can you find?  

Or how about this?

I know, I know--some claim cottonwoods are little more than weeds on steroids. This youngun' is imminently replaceable. All I've got to do is catch a floater from the other side of the house.

But the grasshoppers this summer have been downright awful. They absolutely loved the marigolds, took care of them before they touched anything else.

It was good of them not to eat muskmelon, although they made holy the plants. 

Amazingly, we had plenty of peppers, even though the plants suffered horrifying desolation.

And, of course, they showed up everywhere, a veritable hoop skirt of hoppers with every step into the prairie out back. There's no escaping them. Wherever you look, the little buggers show up. This one thought himself a goldfinch.

When, Monday, I did the lawn, I rejoiced in the deaths the Toro and I could inflict on the multitudes. That mower of mine must have munched hundreds, really. I'll admit it--I loved it, aimed right at them. Besides, they're really lousy airmen. They fly without any kind of flight plan, and their landings are right out of an old keystone cops movie. If there's a grasshopper flight school, it's a joke.

Anyway, the lawn was thick, so I picked up clippings, dumped them on a bare spot in the garden, where I've already ripped out the ragged tomato plants, just left all those clippings heaped in a pile. A half hour later, when I picked up a rake and intended to spread out that mess, look at what I found.

There's a history here, of course. Once upon a time Henry Hospers himself saw to it that the local CRC pastor (the first in Orange City) got a free ride out of town after he (Hospers) discovered that the dominie had been writing folks in Michigan and in the Netherlands warning them that northwest Iowa wasn't a welcoming place: after all, no one had a crop for three years. Rocky Mountain Locusts (I don't know how they're named in Dutch, but it couldn't be proper) devoured everything, in some places even pitchfork handles. They ate onions and potatoes right out of the ground and in a three-year reign ran a lot of homesteaders right out of the territory.

Hospers wasn't a big believer in transparency. He was furious with the pastor, so furious that if you would like to find that CRC dominie's grave, you've got to drive a couple hours west to the Harrison, SD, cemetery. 

Things were bad back then.

I've got no reason to complain. 

Not much of one anyway.