A Biblical Plague

There’s a grasshopper outbreak in Albuquerque right now, which may not sound like much, but actually, it’s quite disgusting. They’re all over the place, scampering wildly away from every step you take, like ripples on a pond. On runs, I’ll sometimes accidentally step into a particularly undisturbed area of them, and they’ll ping off the bottom of my hat’s brim, like hailstones. There are so many, they’re showing up on the weather radars.

At night, they plaster themselves to the outside of my screen door, like remora.

The other night, I found one on the floor of my living room. I’m not really squeamish about bugs, but these are so big. They’re the size of a NYC roach, which is an entitled, pushy size for a bug. So I put a water glass over this one and decided to collect it in the morning.

When I lifted the glass off and poked it with a tissue…it was still alive. These things can survive for ten hours without oxygen. If you thought that the plague of grasshoppers was one of the more nancyish plagues, think again. These things are like the walking dead.

(I picked it up in some tissue and threw it outside. Even disgusting grasshoppers have a right to live, I guess.)