The Eighth Plague Revisits The Lou

The Eighth Plague Revisits St Louis

Every May in St Louis, cicadas drill their little mine shafts towards the sunlight, shed their outer layer, find a mate, lay eggs and then die.  It’s a Midwestern ritual.  Then there are special cicada species that hibernate for seven years.  Once every thirteen years, an even rarer species emerges.  Guess what folks?  Those happy days are here again.

The thirteen year cicadas are dark green-black ugly bastards with giant round bright red eyes and enormous brown wings.  These are hideous creatures.  It is gross enough to find their little shells everywhere.  Most often I can see those shells clinging to the brick on the front of my house.  To see what emerged from them crawling all over everything is another matter entirely.   Their mating calls made by vibrating tympanic membranes on their undersides sound like a highway was erected ten feet from my driveway.  They start as soon as the sun fully rises and get louder as the day gets hotter.

The little monsters like to nest in oak trees.  My sister Terry’s house is on a corner lot in Kirkwood, one of the oldest townships in St Louis county, lined with huge old oak trees.  Those cicadas just love the oak trees.  I stopped by her house the Thursday before Memorial Weekend to help pack for our lake trip.  The noise was almost deafening.  You could see them crawling all over the tires of Terry’s Hundai.  What’s up with that?  Does the rubber look and smell like a cicada?  If so, eww!  I realized, what I was soon to discover was a few minutes too late, that my hatch back was open and I was parked directly under one of those old oaks.   I quickly  battened down but the security precautions were a little reminiscent of closing the barn door after Mrs. O’Leary’s cow had long since wandered down the road.

I was driving home from Terry’s when I heard a loud buzz and something thumped against the back of my head.  I knew instantly that I had picked up a stowaway.   I did a quick snap to peek over my shoulder at the seatback and there it was, three inches of beady red-eye grossness crawling up my seat.  I whipped my head back around to the front, gripped the steering wheel tight with both hands and screamed.  I leaned forward and to the right lifting my left shoulder off the seat and screamed again.  It was bad enough I could hear it when it was buzzing near me.  The thought of squishing it into my shirt by leaning back was more than I could stand.  After minutes that seemed like hours driving down Manchester in late day traffic, I pulled into the Goodwill parking lot, the whole while I am repeating my new mantra, “It’s just a bug, it’s just a bug, it’s just a bug.” 

I throw the car into park and quickly hop out, flinging the door wide.  I stare at the seat, nothing!  Crap!  Where had it gone?  Did it fly out when I opened the door?  A sickening feeling entered the pit of my stomach.  Had it disappeared into the backseat?  What if it was hiding back there, only to remerge to ride shotgun on my shoulder when I resume my drive home?

What makes this a true Suburban Rednecks story is that this is not the first time this has happened to me.  It had also happened exactly thirteen years previous.  That summer was even worse because, by God’s ordained plan, the lifecycle of the seven year and thirteen year cicadas coincided.  I was just about to move out of the house I lived in with my sister,  Jane.  My friend, Steph,  picked me up to go see a movie or eat or some such crazy nonsense as we were up to back then.  We were driving down Midland Boulevard heading toward her place in Clayton, I think,  when something started buzzing and thumping around in her car.   We had had the windows open that night.  Not able to stand the thought of whatever it was a minute longer, Steph pulled over in the Church’s Chicken parking lot on Delmar in U City.  This is not a part of town that two young white girls would ever be in after dark.  Of course we stood out like sore thumbs.  The cicada was clinging to backseat of Steph’s Toyota.  It was even bigger and uglier than my stowaway.  I remember some nice guy drinking a 40 from paper bag offering to help until he got a good look at it.  We opened up all the doors and flapped something at it, probably an empty takeout bag, until it finally decided that it was not going to find love in the backseat of Steph’s ride and decided to bail for a better hook up spot. 

Back in the present, I start looking all over the driver’s seat of my hatch back like I’m Marge Helgenberger on set of CSI.  I finally spot the little bastard on the patch of carpet between the seat and the door frame.  For one crazy microsecond, I think of reaching in with my bare hand to shoe him out.  Realizing that there’s got to be something in my traveling junk drawer of a car I can use, I keep looking.  I spot an empty plastic grocery bag in the back seat.  Then I think how that will sound when I try to get at him with the bag over my hand and he starts making that god-awful buzzing sound inside the bag.   I find a small stack of scrap paper I had made some notes on at work.  After his futile attempt to escape by heading for the gas pedal, I am finally able to shoo him out of the car and I see him fly away. 

Relieved of my stowaway and in need of some therapy to treat my PTSD, I grab my purse and head into the Goodwill.  Nothing soothes trauma like finding a new skort with the tags still it on for three bucks. 

How To Build A Hoosier Hot Tub

With no offense implied or otherwise, I must describe what people in Missouri call "Hoosiers."  Bear in mind, would you, that I have close relatives from Indiana.  My father was born and raised in Mitchell Indiana.  His father was the superintendent of schools for Mitchell.  I know what Hoosier means to folks from Indiana.  In Missouri, and for the rest of middle America, it means something altogether different.  To explain it to my Indy relatives and others not from around here, it is to say something like redneck or trailer trash.  Not exactly yokel, hick or hillbilly as those monikers imply something more like country or backwoods.  Redneck also is a little disingenuous as that term originated to describe farm folk who got their red necks from tending to their fields and livestock all day. 

Mo Hoosiers, or for the sake of this discussion, let’s just call them hoosiers, are not country folk.  You can find hoosiers anywhere.  If you were looking for them in days gone by, you would find them at Wal-Mart or Kmart on a Saturday morning.  More recently, you are more apt to find a very integrated melting pot of shoppers at any suburban Wal-Mart at any time of any day of the week.  You would recognize the females by the muffin top sticking out of their Lee jeans or the three inches of ashy heel hanging over the back of their gold lame flip flops.  The males are a little harder to distinguish because they come camouflaged, literally.  I titled my blog Suburban Rednecks even though I really wanted to call it Suburban Hoosiers because I wanted to attract more than just people with IU stickers in the back windows of their grocery getters. 

Now to the topic of the day, "How to build a hoosier hot tub."  I am lucky enough to have access to all that is needed to design and build a hoosier hot tub.  The key component to the design is the internet.  The internet, wonderful 'invention' that it is, delights in providing people with directions on creating things they would otherwise spend thousands of dollars purchasing for themselves.  My husband is a connoisseur of internet research.  His penchant for googling useless knowledge is outweighed only by his imagination of what he could build.  His desire to make internet purchases is limited solely by the balance in our checkbook. 

He had often spoken of how we could have a hot tub without having to spend several thousand dollars of my hard earned cash.  We looked at them at the home show and occasionally popped in to local showrooms.  One day, waiting for one of his clients to call with a problem for him to solve, he started seriously researching the subject.  He viewed several plans, most involved tall wooden structures popular in Sweden and Denmark.  Then he settled on something doable.  He found plans for making a hot tub from a cattle trough.  Yes, I mean a Rubbermaid stock tank used to water livestock.  In suburbia, you are more likely to see these buried, unrecognizably in someone’s yard disguised as a Koi pond. 

Lucky enough for Jeff, stock tanks are fairly easy to come by near suburban St Louis, MO.  We are surrounded closely enough with property big enough to have horses, sheep, goats, pigs and even cattle that a wide variety of farm and home type stores have sprung up along the outlying cities on the western side of St Louis, St Charles and Eastern Jefferson counties.  We are fortunate to have Dickey Bubb, Orschleins, Rural King and Tractor Supply all within a thirty minute or so drive from our house. 

I came home one February afternoon to find that Jeff had placed an order for the 'heating element' for his hoosier hot tub.  I use the term heating element very liberally.  Jeff had purchased a fairly compact, tall metal firebox that sits down in the water with a large exhaust pipe attached to it.  The design calls for the operator to start a wood burning fire in the box with a propane torch and the box to be placed in the water with hooks that go over the lip of the stock tank to hold it in place.  The hot tub you end up with does not bubble or swirl in any way.  It does heat the water very hot and caution must be exercised in determining the best time to enter the water and the length of time to remain submerged.  It's basically a giant outdoor bathtub that you must wear swimwear to use unless you want to cross the line from hoosier to exhibitionist. 

The fire box arrived and he was itching to go out and buy the stock tank.  What elevates this story from simply wacky to outright insane is that he is convinced he is up to the task of riding out to Dicky Bubb the day after having his head operated on to remove a scalp melanoma.  So on Saturday morning, my husband Jeff clamors into his ½ ton pickup truck with a bandage on his head that makes him look like he converted to Islam at a Friday evening call to prayer at a Medfirst.  Because he is forbidden from driving and has a headache to rival medieval torture, I must drive.  And so it is that in the dead of winter I find myself wandering the back lot at the farm and home debating with my husband that even though I would really love to soak in the new tub with him, we only have enough money for the 150 gallon model and not the 300 gallon one we would have to special order anyway.    One trip to Home Depot later for scrap wood and a propane refill and we are ready to fire up our latest acquisition. 

It is while soaking in the stock tank / hot tub one clear night under an abundance of stars that I came up with the idea for this blog.  I hope you find it as entertaining in reading as I have in living.