The Attack of the Killer Rhododendrons (20 page)

And a big, happy wave of contentment washed over me. The Jazz Fest had been fun, and we had found Formosan termites; the
rest of the trip was a bonus. So we headed down Bourbon Street and into the French Quarter in search of adventure on a Saturday night. It was just after 9 p.m., and the French Quarter was unfolding. Taxis, fire trucks, and cars from the Sheriff’s Office competed with revelers for space on the road. Although the night was young, the trendiest clubs were already turning away the unpretty.

Bourbon Street, old and vulgar by day, is the Promised Land of fantasy and excess by night. Jazz spilled out of one club after another and slithered across the pavement. Three groups of people set the backdrop: those who were lapping up the night, those who were terrified of the night, and those who were throwing up into the night. Neon lights filled my eyes. Members of the David Cobb Evangelistic Association of Gatlinburg, Tennessee, promised to save my soul, and Larry Flynt’s Hustler Club offered to do the opposite. Every bar in the neighbourhood was happy to put a beer in a “go-cup” so that I could—legally—walk the streets and drink at the same time.

From parties on second-storey balconies, revelers hung over the ironwork offering to throw strings of beads to those who asked. I asked, and soon had four strings around my neck. Then eight. Three ladies at a balcony party tried to get the attention of anyone who would look at them. I looked. They were pointing at the ground, having obviously dropped something. “Where is it?” I asked. “Go forward,” they screamed. “Go to the right. Just at your feet!” I found a packaged condom and picked it up. “This?” “Yes. Throw it up!” I am not sure how much fun three women can have with one condom, but they shouted their thanks and blew me kisses.

On our way out of the district, we came across two uniformed police officers. Rob asked them if the street party was largely self-policing. “Noooo, no, no,” they explained. “We’ll be taking people away all night.” Rob asked how early it had all started. “We’ve been hauling away drunks since five this afternoon.”

I liked myself twenty years ago, and hope that I am fundamentally the same fellow today. I liked Rob twenty years ago, and was delighted to find that he was the same fine fellow all these years
later. Rob is committed to social justice, but he is just as committed to finding joy in life. He is that rare sort of person who can use the expression “Nice rack” without insulting anyone.

P
ERHAPS YOU ARE AMONG
those smarty-pants orators who make themselves unpopular at parties by spouting minutiae that are of no benefit to anyone. You may, for instance offer such gems as “Termites
eat
wood but are unable to
digest
it without the help of single-celled organisms known as flagellates that live in the insects’ intestines.” If so, then shame on you. First, everyone knows about the microorganisms. Second, no one cares. Third, it isn’t true. Facts are true. Factoids sound as though they should be true, but aren’t. The reliance of termites on the flagellates in their guts to digest the cellulose in wood is a factoid, according to Professor David Bignell of Queen Mary University of London. And who are you going to believe, the Internet or Professor David Bignell? The flagellates may help, but all termites have the ability to break down cellulose on their own without the help of microbes. If you want to share wisdom at a party, tell people that termites are more closely related to cockroaches than to ants. At least you won’t be spouting a factoid.

Saturday’s heat hadn’t done much to dry the fairgrounds, and tens of thousands of feet had turned large tracts into the sort of ooze that might spawn life anew. For many at Jazz Fest, the highlight of the weekend would be the performance by Carlos Santana. We arrived at the stage, or rather at the lip of a ditch 200 metres back from the stage, twenty minutes before the scheduled start but found the band already in full flight. We seemed to have achieved the perfect sound balance, and I cannot imagine what remained of the eardrums of people 195 metres closer. Rob and I tried to estimate the size of the crowd and came up with something like 30,000. It was as though the entire population of Braintree, Massachusetts, had stopped by to see the performance.

Given that “Black Magic Woman” had been released thirty-eight years earlier, I probably shouldn’t have been surprised that the average age of the folks around us was sixty and that this
number was held down by numerous grandchildren. The grey crowd was slurping back cheap, low-alcohol beer and consuming huge quantities of dope. Never has so much marijuana been consumed by so many who were so old. A lot of the music seemed to sail right over the heads of the shit-faced seniors around us, and I was left wondering if they grew their weed themselves or scored it from some geriatric dealer.

While waiting for a pizza in a restaurant in the French Quarter, Rob and I spotted a couple of termites fluttering wildly through the air above our heads. And then a few more. And then a lot more. The New Orleans swarming of Formosan termites had begun in full. To us, they were as delightful as dancing sprites under a full moon, but to the restaurant manager they were pure evil. He dashed around closing windows before any more could enter and attempt to set up shop.

Now closed, the outer surfaces of the windows were covered with termites, presumably drawn in by the restaurant’s neon lights. Back on the streets, we found that the termites had a curiously clumped distribution. A termite trap at one corner was well attended, but another just a half-block away had no visitors at all. Termites are not very good fliers, and Rob suggested that a big swarm might indicate a large nearby colony sending out its next generation.

H
AVING SEEN TERMITES SWARMING
in the French Quarter, the only thing left was to speak with a termite expert. Regrettably, our local contact had been called out of town on family business, and we needed an alternative. Digging through my files, I found a newspaper clipping that made reference to the City of New Orleans Mosquito and Termite Control Board. The telephone directory had an entry for the board, and after a few misdirections I was put through to Ken Brown, a research entomologist. Ken immediately invited Rob and me to join him and his colleague Ed Freytag at the termite laboratory in the USDA building at the north end of City Park.

We were lucky enough to arrive on a day when the laboratory’s technician was knocking termites out of infested wood collected
from a military base. As he banged bits of wood together, huge numbers of termites dropped out. I gathered that the creatures were going to be used in an exhibition at New Orleans’ soon-to-be-opened insectarium.

We were told that the winged reproductives, more formally called “alates,” that we had seen the night before included both males and females, not very different in size. However, the specimens in front of us were mainly wingless workers, joined by a number of big-jawed soldiers. In a colony, workers do all the grunt work. Soldiers are about the size of workers but are aggressive. They have teardrop-shaped heads with nasty mandibles and a gland that exudes glue. They use these attributes to defend the colony when threatened. Neither workers nor soldiers stray far from their nests or the shelter tubes they construct of mud, wood, spit, and poop to protect them while searching for food.

Ed said that we couldn’t leave the lab without being bitten by a Formosan termite soldier, and so he dropped one each into our hands. As long as we kept the skin of our palms stretched tight, the soldiers had nothing to clamp on to. But as soon as we creased our skin, they grabbed us. This is probably something that you don’t want to happen if you are, for instance, a bug, but it didn’t hurt us any more than having a hair pulled out.

Ken and Ed were incredibly cooperative, and gave us 25-cent answers to nickel questions. For instance, they explained that, until recently, fundamental aspects of the termites’ biology were not well understood, even whether they had a preference for one type of tree over another. We heard that it takes about five years for a termite colony to mature to the point where it is producing dispersing alates. By that point, the house probably has sagging floorboards; when you first notice you have termites, you already have a huge problem. Formosan termites survived two weeks of flooding following Katrina. Those survivors had probably invaded abandoned buildings, and the city was likely to see an enormous increase in the scope of its termite problem.

We learned that the Formosan subterranean termite is only one
of nine termite species in Louisiana. The others are bit less obnoxious, and so don’t get all the bad press. In fact, Formosans are not the only termites introduced to Louisiana from abroad; they are joined by West Indian powderpost drywood termites. We were provided with an identification guide to the termites of Louisiana and a fact sheet on brown widow spiders, another invasive species. On the general topic of introduced species, we were told that the City of New Orleans was putting mosquitofish into swimming pools of abandoned properties in order to help keep down the mosquito population. I found this a bit strange. Mosquitofish are considered one of the 100 most horrible invasive species in the world. Aliens were being introduced to control other aliens.

And then Ken made us very happy. He said that he could arrange for Rob and me to follow along on a building inspection in the French Quarter the next day.

After leaving the USDA building, Rob spotted a fire ant colony and decided to collect some for his research collection. Another introduced species, they aren’t called fire ants without reason. We skipped around to avoid contact with them, but Rob got nipped anyway. “It stings,” he said, “like a fine needle dipped in vinegar and pushed slowly into your skin.” It made me wonder how he knew what that felt like.

The taxi driver taking us back to the heart of the action was positively loquacious. Various hurricanes during his many years in New Orleans meant that David and his family had been evacuated on six or seven occasions. Each time, they had waited out the storm further inland and then moved back home, but post-Katrina had been very different. By the time of our visit, the city’s population had returned to only half its pre-hurricane numbers. Driving south on St. Bernard Street, our driver pointed out homes that were still unoccupied—either rotting quietly where they stood or actively throwing themselves at the ground.

A little later, in a restaurant in the French Quarter, our server, Rebecca, gave us her take on the failure of the world’s richest country to help fully restore New Orleans. Even though she understood
the need to get the French Quarter back on its feet quickly, there was a lot of resentment that the same sort of effort had not been made on other, more hard-hit districts.

After dinner, we walked the evening streets for two hours and didn’t spot a single termite. The swarming was over for now. Perhaps we were lucky to have seen them at all.

A
T THE APPOINTED TIME,
Rob and I met Perry Ponseti at a two-storey apartment complex on St. Philip Street in the French Quarter, for the building’s termite inspection. It was part of the USDA’s anti-termite initiative called Operation Full Stop. An inspection is paid for partly by the USDA and partly by the building’s owner. Inspections are conducted as frequently as once per year.

The building’s resident caretaker was waiting for us. He was the nervous sort, and very keen to please. I suspect that if we found termites, he would feel that the building’s owner would find some way to hold him responsible. He insisted that the most recent inspection, made just before Katrina, had found no termites.

“A college education—that’s what it’s all about!” said the caretaker. He swept the narrow courtyard as we worked along it. He justified every little thing about the building that wasn’t in perfect shape, as though we had the ability to lower his wage for the peeling paint and uneven pavement stones.

Perry had been working in the field for nine years, had made hundreds of inspections, and had found active termite colonies in about one-fifth of them. He emphasized that almost every building in the French Quarter had been damaged by termites at some time, and that all buildings were being treated to avoid further damage. Perry explained that Formosan termites stay in the centre of the wood, avoiding the outermost bits, making detection all the more difficult. “What looks like a two-by-four is just hollow, and crushes in your hand.” And that is what makes Perry’s work so crucial. Caught in time, a building can be treated. Left untreated, a single house can support tens of millions of termites. At this point, the war has long been lost.

The inspection began with the building’s exterior. Perry immediately found a doorsill showing evidence of old damage. Perry poked and tapped at the wood to find weak spots, and in suspect areas used an infrared camera to look for spaces in the wood that might represent excavated tunnels. He was particularly attentive to spots where pipes entered the building as possible entryways for termites. One of the great challenges was to distinguish between water damage and damage caused by termites.

Perry was incredibly professional. He had an important job to do and needed to be thorough about it, but he also recognized that he was invading people’s homes at a time of day when many were just waking up. At each door, the caretaker knocked and called out, “Mr. Termite Man’s here!” If I were Perry, that title would really get up my nose after a while.

One of the building’s residents asked if the use of yellow light bulbs would help to avoid attracting swarming termites attempting to establish a new colony. Perry rolled his eyes, made a sad face, and dismissed the idea as often-repeated misinformation. “Nobody should turn
any
lights on,” he said. The last unit was inspected and, like the others, found to be free of current termite infestation.

Back on the street, Perry showed us some nifty apparatus used in the war on Formosan termites. In the early days of termite monitoring and treatment, holes were bored through the concrete and down to the earth outside of buildings. There are thousands or perhaps tens of thousands of these holes in the French Quarter, each capped by a metal disk. If inspection of a hole shows evidence of termites, the same hole can be used to apply insecticides.