I Dream of DDT

Amidst attending school in the Ft. Clayton elementary school where I was a beaming and bright A student and running the streets and local hillocks for adventures came the DDT truck.   It announced death to mosquitoes, biting flies, ticks and every other creeping, crawling insect it contacted including the fireflies of our wondrous delight.  The oil slicks gleamed their multi-colored sheen as they drifted down the hilly streets.

You could hear the low thrum, thrum, thrum of the diesel engine and the mad cheers of the throngs of kids behind it as it made it's way through our paradise.  From blocks away the cheers and yips and yells as kids were drenched in the aerosol spray from it's spray rig boom. 

 

 The kids gleamed too, high from the vapor and equally poisoned by the chemical, their brains dancing in the street amidst the dying bugs as they floated away in the stream, dead, inert, gone.  Oh we were all "forbidden" to chase the evil truck, many swats to our rear ends took the place of the fine run...temporarily at least. 

David and I, helped by Margaret tried to protect the insects we liked, the fireflies and lady bugs and big beetles by capturing them as best we could and putting them in jars until the day after the evil truck passed...then they would be released to go on their way.  Little did we realize they were being released into a dead zone of built up DDT that would kill them, albeit slowly, anyway.  We felt like heroes and rescuers of our little friends as they were released back to their shortened lives.

Panama

I feel the warm rain as it pours down from the heavens above, as the black clouds build in the afternoon and then spread themselves heavily over the isthmus.  My isthmus.  Days spent in the safe-as-a-convent streets and casetas of Fort Clayton.  Floating paper boats down the rushing gutters to the grates that take it all away.  It rained daily for weeks at a time in the summer and just slacked off a bit the rest of the time.  The water so warm, stained deep red by the clay that was the soil of the jungle in front of our house.  We played in the thick, slimy mud and slid down the many hillside ravines created by our butts.  We picked fruit, mostly ripe mangoes which served us well as lunch.  Lemons and limes for lemonade and limeade were as available as water.  Bougainvillea's and tall magnolia trees bloomed everywhere and the place smelled of lilacs and red earthy mud.  The jungle was just that, a jumble of huge leaves and a multitude of tropical trees and vines that seemed most impenetrable, especially for small kids.  It  was, for us, another world full of unknown dangers and dripping water from the canopy above. It was "off limits" by all measure but was the boundary of our smallish world.

David Woods was my best friend as we grew older and a pretty girl who lived two houses down named Margaret joined in our reveries as well.  I found myself infatuated with her at the ripe old age of six and she was equally fond of me as well. Margaret made a lemonade stand which she set up on the entrance to the housing area and made a decent amount of coin from the comings and goings of the residents.  It was very warm in Panama and her icy lemonade was cold and delicious and, best of all, free to us boys.  David and I were dear buddies, played ball together and whatever adventure and mis-adventure was at hand we both shared in.  My father made toys that we all enjoyed, he even made an 1/8th sized wood jeep that matched the one that sat in our driveway.  It had the guts of a pedal-car and we would take turns chasing iguanas up and down the street in the little jeep.  The iguanas grew to four feet in length and those monsters were very challenging to capture without getting bitten so we mostly chased smaller ones and limited the keeping to one or two around the house.  My mother loved them when they would lounge in the sun on our veranda flicking their tongues to catch the errant flies and bugs that were so common.  There were many, many lizards and birds that frequented the lawns and trees that surrounded the house.  Multi colored parrots called from the jungle and monkeys screamed insults to one another as they ran from tree to tree or past our government homes.  We had all the free pets we ever wanted.