Read by Michael Flamel

I was still a city kid when the first Hornet from Hell tried to kill me—but the crime was not attempted in the city, a concrete row-house paradise pretty much free of bees and wasps, although the mosquitoes more than made up for it. Lacking indoor air-conditioning, we pretty much had to sit out on the stoop in the evening, drink iced tea and give blood. Our parents would wave folded up newspapers to try and cool themselves a bit and chase a few of the plague carriers away.

We kids—there were around 40 of us, counting both sides of the block—defended our blood supplies with punks – smallish, hand-held cattail-like things that you lit and surrounded yourself in a circle of them, seemingly protected by the punk’s  slow-burning smoke. They were somewhat effective, but more importantly, they were a slowly burning object that we were allowed to play with, and being kids, we would occasionally pull one out of its sand-filled wadder ice cup to threaten an ant or burn a hole in a leaf. In the fifties, this was high entertainment.

But my initial hornet assault occurred when I was all growed up and camping out with my young family and a couple thousand close friends feeding the mosquitoes in an open field in Schwenksville PA. We were all volunteers working to set up the Philadelphia Folk Festival, a large event held every August on the Old Poole Farm, which was a good hour outside of Philadelphia, where we all grew up and so, we city mice had to learn about camping the hard way. (Canvas tents are not a good idea after it rains, a bedroll is not an acceptable substitute for a mattress and nobody thought to bring a pillow their first year.)

Dawn always broke blisteringly hot, and we would crawl out of our damp moldy prison cells pretty early in the day and seek refuge under the giant tarp we had all chipped in for the second year.

So if you kept moving your chair (acquired after that fun first year, where we pretty much lived like savages—which we still did afterwards but at least we had a place to sit down) you could stay in the shade and hope for a breeze, every one of which was accompanied by a standing ovation, during which we could hold our arms up and air out our pits.

August, we soon learned, was yellowjacket season. Instinctively knowing that their colony would die out with the first freeze, they went into a frenzy, attacking our food and anything sweet. So there I am, lying on a chaise lounge (This was somewhere around my fifth year, and I was now borrowing a truck to haul my stuff [and my wife and kids and their stuff] to the Fest site.), staying hydrated with a 7-Up (Anyone who thought daytime drinking in August was a good idea did not think so again.), when I forgot an important lesson: Gently shake open beverage cans before drinking out of them.

And so, I swallowed a yellowjacket that had crawled inside, quickly jumped up and did a spit-take, but no insect appeared. It was too busy repeatedly stinging my throat before finally dropping down into the acid lake death that was better than it deserved. I was not allergic to “bee stings” (the vast majority of which are actually caused by wasps, not bees), so if it had stung me on the arm, we would apply some moistened meat-tenderizer containing powdered papain, which denatured the venom from the sting (honest; instant cure!) and take a Benadryl antihistamine. With only one wasp involved, I was theoretically not in danger of having an anaphylactic reaction where my throat would swell up.

…Except that I had been stung repeatedly on the INSIDE of my throat, which was now swelling up. Fellow campers came running with ice packs to apply on the outside, and my wife went into the medical supplies and crushed up somewhere between six and eight 25-mg. Benadryl tablets for me to swallow. A doctor from a nearby campsite came over and kept an eye on me (She probably thought, “OOH! I might get to do a tracheotomy!”) until the Benadryl kicked in. and, witnesses report, I told REALLY funny stories for the rest of the day.

Years later, when we bought a house and built a garden, I was wheeling a wheelbarrow from behind the garden to one of the raised beds in front and stepped directly on top of a yellowjacket nest. I had not known until then that you could lift a loaded wheelbarrow three feet in the air while keeping it moving forward. I dumped the load and ran—which, experts will tell you, is useless. Well, so is standing on top of a nest of thousands of angry, highly aggressive hornets. At least I didn’t fall down.

When they had chased me far enough away, they went back to their nest—but I was still getting stung! OMG! They were inside my shirt and socks, so there I am stripping off my shirt and tugging wildly at my socks when Central Casting sends in the obligatory dog walker. She started to stay “What in the world…?” when what in the world became obvious in the form of dozens of red welts appearing all over me.

I thought about the amount of venom I was now carrying and said, “I need to get to the hospital fast.” She alerted my wife who came running. I yelled “Get the car keys!” She was trying to say something, but I interrupted. “You can scream and cry and ask questions later; right now, I need you to break the speed limit.”

Luckily, I had married a smart, beautiful, intelligent woman with a lead foot. As soon as the first medical person saw me, I said ‘yellowjackets” out of a rapidly closing throat, and they hit me up with epinephrin (the same stuff that’s in Epi-Pens), put me on an anti-anxiety IV, and I told more really funny stories.

After a few days home, I went out at night with a red-lensed flashlight and found their nest-a simple hole in the ground with a single sleepy guard on top. I worked at Rodale Press at the time. Every building had its own cafeteria, and every cafeteria had a large commercial ice machine. At the end of the workday, I filled my two biggest camping coolers with ice, drove home and waited till dark.

After the nest had settled in for the night, I dragged the coolers close, established an escape route and had my wife at the ready with a red flashlight and a can of Pam—works just as good as insecticidal oil at taking down gallant flying nest protectors. Under the light of red, she heavily sprayed the few visible guards and kept spraying until the nest was coated. Then I dumped cooler #1. Nothing came out of the nest, so a placed a large clear glass bowl over the nest hole area and then dumped the second load of ice on top of that.

By noon the next day, the ice had melted and we saw lots of yellowjackets frantically bouncing off the inside of the bowl as the sun turned up the heat inside the nest. We had been advised that they would not try and dig their way out and left them to their sauna until the first hard frost, removed the bowl, dug up the nest, set it on fire and said terrible things about the previous occupants.

After that, we had to share our Fall crop of raspberries every season, but there were no new nests close enough to impact us.

Until last year, when I was waddering a giant coir-lined open steel container and some familiar scary faces emerged to greet me. I was able to fend them off with my trusty variable spray nozzle until I could duck inside the house. Found the old flashlight with the red lens cover, bought a new can of Pam and went out late to reconnoiter. Their hole was at the outer edge of the large coir container liner; too close for a massive ice drop to work.

So, I called around and found a nearby ice-cream wholesaler who sold dry ice by the pound. Armed with an ally, I spread the pellets over the area after dark while he took out emerging jet fighters with the oil spray. After I emptied the bag, we covered the whole assembly with several sheets of clear plastic and shook hands for a job well done.

…Until late the following week, when my trusty assistant had to tell me that he had seen yellowjackets come out of the bottom of the (mostly rotted) coir. So we rinsed, lathered and repeated, this time using double the amount of dry ice pellets and longer sheets of clear plastic. (Yes, there were plants in the containers, but I was willing to sacrifice them, and so they survived.)

A week or two went by and they started to appear again. There were probably a dozen easily accessible escape hatches in that decade-old coir. What were we going to do?

“How about nothing?”, asked my sometimes-wise assistant Sean; “That’s what you always tell people on your radio show, right? ‘Just leave it alone and find something else to worry about.’” He reminded me that the only time they had directly attacked was when I had unknowingly tried to drown them, and that otherwise, despite being near the front door, had shown no further signs of aggression.

“Nothing,” I said.

“Nothing,” he answered.

And we all lived happily ever after. ❖