Hornets and the Swarming

A post about bees on I Am the Cheese reminded me of an incident from my childhood where I’d been attacked by hornets. I wouldn’t say it was one of the defining moments of my life, but it was an interesting lesson in the effects of pain on revulsion. I am naturally bothered by large insects and generally have an instinctive desire to terminate them whenever possible. Oh, they’re fun to look at from the other side of a glass in the zoo, sure, but when they’re on the loose and wandering around your living area, I generally want to kill them as quickly as possible.

When I was five, I had a “secret fort” in the woods that a couple of friends and I had built. It wasn’t really much of a fort, just a few logs piled up and covered with ferns. But it had been fun to build. I’d left my “tool box” there, a metal box filled with the sort of little tools you’d give a five year old. A plastic hammer and some erector set parts. I’d forgotten it there over the winter, and come back by myself to get it.

I remember stepping on something that crunched when I entered the clearing. There was a buzzing sound under my feet. I could feel it even through the rubber soles of my shoes. I remember wondering what it was. Had I stepped on something electrical? Then they came.

They swarmed me, everywhere, dozens of them. And then crawled onto my body, stinging and biting angrily. To a five year old, they were huge. Just one of them filled my hand. It was revolting to touch them, and painful because they bit and stung my hands as well, but the pain was such that I overcame my natural revulsion to touch them and grabbed them anyway, squeezing them until their little bodies popped. I screamed, of course. If you’ve ever been stung by a hornet, you know that it’s quite painful, and for a five year old, that pain is magnified simply by inexperience with pain itself. It was horrifying.

I managed to escape from the woods and run home. Fortunately, I have no known allergies. They were hornets, and left no stingers to find. There were only a few red spots here and there. My body dealt with the poison incredibly well. But my mind – not so much. For years afterwards I would occasionally suffer from nightmares about being swarmed. And I have never forgotten what it felt like to have their squirming bodies in my hand as I squeezed them to death, and how they popped when they died and how they bit my fingers and stung the sides of my hands.