The Attack of the Killer Rhododendrons (19 page)

Each year, on the last weekend in April and the first weekend of May, New Orleans plays host to its great Jazz & Heritage Festival, or “Jazz Fest” to those in the know. Spread over seven days, Jazz Fest attracts all of the greatest acts and more than 600,000 jazz fans, and generates more than $300 million in revenue. And by a strange coincidence, $300 million is just how much damage is caused each year in New Orleans by the Formosan termite.

In the United States, these wood-chomping immigrants were first noticed in 1965 in a shipyard in Houston. Our best guess is that they came from Asia to the southern U.S. in wooden packing material on a military transport ship at the end of WWII. Once authorities started looking, it became apparent that the problem was not a local one, with colonies as far away as Charleston, South Carolina. Formosan termites are now found in eleven states, including Hawaii. Their impact is felt most keenly in and around New Orleans.

These termites play it close to the chest for most of the year, hiding and slowly devouring all the wood they can stuff in their mouths. In the spring, when a group has come to maturity, it sends out winged colony members to find suitable spots to establish new colonies. When they do, they infest as many as half of New Orleans’ 4,000 magnificent oak trees. Even worse, Formosan termites find their way into wooden buildings in the city’s historic French Quarter. Recent study has shown that the problem is now spreading far beyond that section of the city, and the termite population is up, up, up. Global climate change may be making the situation worse; termites like a hot and humid climate, and they don’t like frost. To demonstrate the scope of the problem, the New Orleans Yellow Pages have one page with thirty-four entries under the heading “Escort Services.” Under
the title of “Pest Control Services,” I found 121 businesses spread over eleven pages.

In early August 2005,
The Independent
newspaper ran an article entitled “The tiny pest that threatens to gobble up the Big Easy.” The piece described the enormous cost of trying to control Formosan termites. Just a few weeks after the article appeared, New Orleans was hit by hurricane Katrina, and those who survived had bigger problems than termites.

O
VER BREAKFAST AT OUR HOTEL,
Rob said, “I suppose we are the only ones who have no idea what’s going on.” He meant that we seemed to be the only Jazz Fest virgins in New Orleans. Everyone else on our flight from Houston had been wearing T-shirts from a previous Jazz Fest. Everyone in our hotel was now reading festival programs. Well, everyone gets to be a virgin once.

Rob and I went for a wander in the famed French Quarter. Long the geographical and cultural pivot point of New Orleans, the French Quarter was awash with souvenir shops, restaurants, and street performers. The balconies of many of its two-storey businesses and residences showed off their iconic ironwork railings. Bourbon Street is legendary for its music and vice, but in the uncompromising glare of a Friday morning, it was a woman, past her prime, on her way home from a party that broke up several hours before. I spotted a young fellow in an Orkin uniform filling out a work invoice on the hood of his truck. Recognizing Orkin as a major pest-control firm, I asked him where I might find termites. “Formosan termites?” He then explained that he was more involved in rat and cockroach control than in the management of termites. Even so, if the weather held, he explained, I should have no trouble finding termites, as they swarmed after dark. They needed heavy rains to soften up the ground, followed by a couple of warm days.

I asked if rats were a big problem in the French Quarter. He chuckled at my naïveté and explained that he could kill all ten rats in a building, then come back a week later and kill ten more.

One of the problems is that every building in the French Quarter is attached to its neighbours, allowing rats to have free run. He said that the only way to get rid of the vermin would be to order every building to get pest treatment at exactly the same time. The biologist in me is pretty confident that nothing short of a biblical holocaust could wipe out all of New Orleans’ pests.

The streetcar ride along Canal did not take us into the heart of the hurricane and flood devastation, but the neighbourhood we saw was still in pretty rough shape. Many buildings had been reconstructed and their occupants re-established. A lot hadn’t been. They remained boarded up and the properties fenced in, even several years after the hurricane. With so many FOR SALE signs, it seemed to me that a property speculator with a few dollars would find easy pickings in New Orleans. Banks, grocery stores, pharmacies, homes … even the City of New Orleans City Hall Annex sat empty. But as Rob pointed out, a developer might find every building infested with rats, cockroaches, and termites.

At the Fair Grounds Race Course in Mid-City, Jazz Fest was in full swing. The sensory onslaught was enormous. With eleven stages running simultaneously, we did what everyone else seemed to be doing; we walked the fairgrounds in a counter-clockwise circle, spending fifteen minutes at each stage before moving on to the next one. The air was filled with the expectation that wherever you were headed would be more exciting than wherever you were.

Some acts were great, including the Tulane University Jazz Ensemble, and some were simply outstanding, such as Richard Thompson. Others were peculiar, like Jumpin’ Johnny Sansone’s Harmonica Review. At each venue, I couldn’t help but think how odd young people would find it to see their grandparents bouncing and swaying to a combo of keyboard, base, drums, and accordion. We strolled and ate and drank and stopped to listen, and then strolled some more. When we got to the main stage, we found acres of folks reclining in lawn chairs. “Are they waiting for a shuttle launch?” Rob asked. They were listening to a group called Papa Grows Funk, which was good, but not good enough to deserve the
idolatry of many thousands of people. And then we twigged. Most of these people were staking out a bit of turf for the Stevie Wonder concert due to begin in three and a half hours.

Shorts, sandals, wide-brimmed hats, and T-shirts were the order of the day. Many of the shirts proved that their owners had been to an earlier Jazz Fest, or to some other music festival, or to a Kmart. Some shirts were more profound than others. A man gave high-fives to strangers while wearing a shirt proclaiming, “I high-five strangers.” “I ♥ dorks” and “I ♥ sailors” were circling the fairgrounds. The shirt of an amply endowed lady told other women, “Don’t be jealous.” Showing a higher level of self-realization than most of the crowd, one fellow sported a shirt explaining, “I’m not an alcoholic; I’m a drunkard. Alcoholics go to meetings!”

And the closer we got to the performance by Stevie Wonder, the highlight of the day, the more it looked like we were in for a thorough soaking. When the skies finally opened, the crowd cried “Ooooh!” This was no spring shower but a cloudburst that would have had Noah frantically scrambling over last-minute details.

Wonder started on time despite the rain, and settled into a string of less than fully inspired pieces. About thirty minutes in, he performed a preachy little number whose refrain was “I can’t believe,” which seemed to indicate that he was not particularly keen on hate, crime, American wars overseas, high gasoline prices, and the Large Hadron Collider particle accelerator. The rains continued, and about half the crowd left.

And then a beautiful thing happened. Wonder and his band launched into “Don’t You Worry ‘Bout a Thing” and “Signed, Sealed, Delivered.” The crowd began to sing and dance, and the rain didn’t make any difference at all. The band came at us with one hit after another, and everyone seemed to know all the words. Those who stayed to the end left the grounds on a high. In terms of termites, the soaking rain was just what we needed.

T
HANK GOODNESS FOR TERMITES.
Without them we would be up to our necks in undecomposed plant matter. Luckily, termites spend
their lives munching away on dead vegetation, saving us the bother of cleaning up every tree that falls. They become a nuisance only when they stop eating the things that we want removed and start chomping on things that we would rather keep. Like our homes.

To be fair, there are only eighty-odd species of termite that do significant damage to buildings. On the downside, that damage is significant, particularly in tropical India, Africa, and Central America. It is difficult to determine the annual cost of termites globally, including building inspection, prevention and control of infestation, and repair of damage, but the figure is somewhere in the billions of dollars.

Thank goodness for anteaters. Without them, we would be up to our necks in termites. With over 2,600 species of termite described, there certainly are an awful lot of them, despite the anteaters. At the more modest end, with an average colony population of just 6,400 individuals, groups of
Microcerotermes septentrionalis
termites are about the same size as the human population of Alajärvi in Finland. The residents of Dilovasi, Turkey, and the residents of a colony of
Cubitermes speciosus
both number about 42,000. At 1,360,000 inhabitants, an average colony of
Nasutitermes macrocephalus
exceeds the population of Benin City in Nigeria by 200,000. Topping the charts at over 7 million residents per community are
Mastotermes darwiniensis
and Hong Kong.

On Saturday, we arrived at Jazz Fest a little later than we had the day before, and the action was well hotted-up. Being the weekend, families were out in full party mode. Even so, this seemed a time and place for adults to have their music fun. In contrast with Friday evening, it was hot and sunny, and while most people had slapped on a hat and slopped on sunscreen, a fair few were going to be tender the following morning.

The Gospel Tent was fairly throbbing, with every seat filled and as many people standing in the aisles as the wranglers would allow. A few folks stood and swayed and spun with their arms raised, broadcasting their faith. Song after song, I’m not sure that I could have held my arms up that long. They were devout and must have
had a lot of practice. Rob wondered which lobe of the brain would light up if subjected to a CAT scan during that sort of religious frenzy.

Bottled water was selling for $3, and those in the know were refilling their bottles at slowly dribbling water fountains. While filling my bottle, I fell into conversation with a woman named Audrey. She was New Orleans–born and bred but had moved to South Carolina after Katrina. I asked if she was planning to move back. “The sincere answer is that the longer I stay at Jazz Fest, the more likely I am to take my house here off the market.”

We arrived early for a presentation by pianist Chick Corea and vocalist Bobby McFerrin. The tent was packed. Someone had mistakenly given a microphone to an organizer on a power trip, who then started issuing stupid instructions. “No flags. Period. I mean it! Absolutely no flags!”

Thirty minutes after the set was due to start, the duo came on stage and began an agonizingly slow warm-up. McFerrin slapped his chest and sang, “Dibbly-dibbly-dibbly; do-whap, do-whap.” Corea pecked at the keyboard like someone in his first typing class. It wasn’t a crowd-pleaser. “Spiggety-spiggety; dab-dab-dab.” “When are they going to start?” asked Rob. Then it occurred to us that it wasn’t a warm-up; this was the set. After three pieces, we left in search of some real music.

We arrived at the Gentilly Stage to catch Diana Krall, one of my all-time favourites. As we waited for the show to begin, Rob and I chatted with Melissa, a social worker from Monterey, California. She started the conversation by asking why I was writing notes; perhaps she thought that I was a reporter for
Rolling Stone
magazine. Melissa explained that she was visiting her crazy aunts and would be volunteering the following day at a furniture-distribution centre for folks rebuilding after Katrina. She wasn’t convinced that Rob and I were being honest when we described our quest for termites.

Krall was as spectacular as I had hoped she would be. She wasn’t afraid to cover tunes by Fats Domino, Nat King Cole, and Irving Berlin, which seemed to be exactly on track for the fans at
Jazz Fest. She ended her set with “‘S Wonderful (‘S Marvelous),” which it truly was.

T
HE FIRST TWO DAYS
of Jazz Fest were great, and the whole event is so damned important to the city of New Orleans that the First Grace Methodist United Church was moved to declare, “Blessed Are Those Who Fest.” But we still hadn’t seen a Formosan termite. We (mainly Rob) had been talking to almost anyone who would talk back, asking them about termites. Some claimed that they ought to be swarming as soon as the sun went down. Others said that we had arrived a month too early. Some said that the French Quarter would be alive with termites, while others directed us to the rather more rundown wooden buildings beyond that. A Voodoo priestess explained that her landlord fumigated her shop once a year and that the state had made a big sweep through the French Quarter, but she confidently predicted that we would still be in good shape. We had seen heavy rains, and the day was now warm and sunny. In May, this is the recipe for swarms of termites.

Back at our hotel, I spied a film crew setting up for a poolside interview with a gospel singer. I spotted some largish insects swarming around the camera lights. Wings … a centimetre long … brownish … They looked like termites to me.

“Rob! Quick! I found termites.” Rob grabbed his forceps and a glass vial, and we were off. These termites were the dispersing reproductive form. The camera crew didn’t seem to mind us working around them as Rob picked ten termites off their white backdrop screen. It wasn’t a lot, but it was a start. The fellow in charge of the microphone derisively referred to them as “Formosans” instead of “termites,” in the same sort of way that he might have said “Belgians.” The collected termites bashed against each other in the vial, and we feared that they might knock their wings off, so we slowed them down by putting the vial in a coffee cup filled with ice. Later we picked up a small bottle of gin to pickle them.