Some years ago, my husband and I took a trip to Panama, and of course we visited the canal. Of particular interest to me was finding my great-uncle James (nickname Jinks) Jervey\u2019s name, as he had been an engineer on the canal building project in about 1903. Sure enough, the list of names in the museum included his. I took a picture to show my father, and we went to watch some ships go through.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
As one apparently does in Panama, I started thinking about mosquitos. I recalled a story about Uncle Jinks\u2019 experience on the canal, told to me by my father. Uncle Jinks was tall, maybe six foot two, and the mosquito-net enclosure that he slept in wasn\u2019t quite long enough. One night he woke up with his feet completely numb. He realized that the soles of his bare feet were in contact with the net. When he pulled his feet away, he left behind two thick, black, perfectly foot-shaped clusters of mosquitos. Apparently, he did not come down with malaria, but I know a lot of others did.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Mosquitos! I live in Alaska, where they are mockingly referred to as the state bird, and you can buy cartoon T-shirts of people being carried off by them. And I do remember that time in the spring of 1980, when I took the two-day bus ride from Anchorage to the ferry terminal in Haines and spent the night (illegally) in an open gazebo in the park in Haines Junction. I woke up with my eyes almost swollen shut.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Even so, my most epic memories of mosquitos come from my childhood in Virginia. Of note is that time my sisters and cousins and I found ourselves camping out at Sandbridge. We must have had a tent, but it wasn\u2019t secure, because we were tormented from the get-go by enterprising mosquitoes, whining and whirring and looking for an opening. My father used to say that when they approached, they were crooning, \u201cI\u2019m your cousin, I\u2019m your cousin,\u201d but after they bit you, they would run off squealing, \u201cNo kin! No kin!\u201d He also was fond of saying that the Lord made mosquitos, but the devil made them bite.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But I digress. The way Laura tells it, she had finally, just barely, drifted off to sleep in our makeshift tent, when I suddenly screamed at the top of my not-inconsequential lungs, \u201cDarn it, mosquito! Go away!\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Laura moaned, \u201cEvelyn! I had just gotten to sleep!\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Whereupon I snarled in return, \u201cShut up and let me<\/em> sleep!\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Hmmm. I have spent half a century wondering how I should get even with Laura for that time we were making butter creams and she dipped a tiny, boiled potato in the bitter chocolate and fooled me into biting into it. But it kinda looks like I had it coming. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Some years ago, my husband and I took a trip to Panama, and of course we visited the canal. Of particular interest to me was finding my great-uncle James (nickname Jinks) Jervey\u2019s name, as he had been an engineer on the canal building project in about 1903. Sure enough, the list of names in the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[159,329],"tags":[73,261],"class_list":["post-538","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-powhatan-to-alaska","category-travel-stories-and-other-flights-of-fancy","tag-camping-out","tag-mosquitos"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rightasrainonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/538","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rightasrainonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rightasrainonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rightasrainonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rightasrainonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=538"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/rightasrainonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/538\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":566,"href":"https:\/\/rightasrainonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/538\/revisions\/566"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rightasrainonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=538"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rightasrainonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=538"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rightasrainonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=538"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}