You are currently browsing the daily archive for July 20th, 2009.
Splat by greenbroke, on Flickr
When I was a kid, we always drove on vacation. We drove to see the redwoods. We drove to see the Grand Canyon. We drove to see the ocean. We drove to see the mountains. We drove when we moved, from California to New York to Louisiana to New Jersey to Denver to California to Oregon to Tennessee. When I was a kid, we could go 100 miles between fill ups. When I learned to subtract, it was my job to keep track of the mileage because the gas tank indicator was broken on the Chevy Impala. I learned pretty quickly after I messed up once and had to walk a whole mile with Daddy to fill up the gas can while my sister sat in the car with Mom.
When I was a kid, every time we stopped for gas we had to scrape the bugs off the windshield. When I got tall enough to reach halfway across the car, it became my job to clean the windshield while Daddy pumped the gas. I remember counting the carnage of bug splats before I’d clean them off. Driving past farmland was the messiest, through towns the cleanest. Sometimes we’d even watch as the bugs would splat against the glass and make comments about the green, yellow and brown remains. Hey, it’s what we did before there were DVD players in cars. Sometimes the radio wouldn’t have a single station the entire length of its AM band and we had to do something to entertain ourselves.
This past weekend we drove well over 300 miles to and from a family reunion. We drove through miles and miles (and MILES) of farmland, mostly corn, almost all GMO corn.* In the mid-July heat, I was expecting lots of bug splats on the windshield. During the entire trip, there was only one bug splat. One. The lack of splats probably would have escaped my notice if not for that one. It was loud and colorful and rather surprising when it happened. It got me thinking. Where are the bugs?
*How do I know the crops were GMO? It took a little research, but by noting the names and numbers on the signs posted by the fields, I could research what the crops were. There were visual signs as well: perfectly identical, perfectly green, stalks growing in perfectly weed-free soil. I saw a couple organic farms too: the occasional yellowed stalk or variations in height were the give-away signs even before the signs painted on the barns told me they were non-GMO crop fields.
