Florida Wildlife: It’s More Than Spring Break
Part II: La Cucaracha
by Karen Williams - Oviedo Voice - Aug. 14, 2003
I heard all the vicious rumors before moving to Florida: “The humidity hovers around 200%.” “The state bird is the mosquito.” And according to that eminent demographics expert, Jay Leno, “Florida is where America goes to die.”
I also heard that the state used an abacus to count ballots, and I was warned about urban sprawl and traffic congestion. (I didn’t believe that for a moment. If over-crowding were a problem, why would a million
people-a-minute be so eager to move here?)
And I further refused to believe the stories about cockroaches roaming at large in Florida and coming in three sizes: big, bigger, and gargantuan super-sized. I deemed that to be a mere cockroach-and-bull story
disseminated by the locals to keep us northerners out of Shangri-La. As it turned out, I was wrong about the roaches.
The night after we came southward-ho-the-wagons, I encountered him in the bathroom: brownish with orange stripes, sporting antennae that would pick up NBC, and bigger than any bug had a right to be other than on an exterminator ’s billboard. Dropping my usual aversion to killing so much as a fly, I raised my foot, regretting only that I wore a sneaker and not a hob-nailed boot.
Just as I was about to send the insect to his own personal tunnel of white light, he scaled the wall and lodged behind the bathroom mirror. But he couldn’t quite fit, and his little wiggling legs stuck out past the mirror
as if to say, “Even icky creatures that live in putrid surroundings can have their cute moments.” I went from disgust to grudging amusement. Disarmed, I dropped my intentions of killing the creature and breaking my
mirror in the process. Instead, I named him Conroy and decided we could co-exist as long as he spent most of his time wedged behind the mirror. I wasn’t about to let one lone roach who thought he was an ostrich give me the heebie-jeebies.
I don’t know what Conroy did for kicks at night--perhaps skated on a bar of soap and dangled from the toilet paper. But every day, I would see his legs sticking out in roughly the same place behind the mirror. We had a plan, a rhythm, and we’d stay out of each other’s way.
Yet I hadn’t reckoned on my elderly mother, also a member of our household. One day, looking distraught, she emerged from the bathroom. “There’s a BIG bug in there!” she informed me. “I saw him running across the floor!”
“That’s, uh, a palmetto bug,” I explained. If that euphemism were good enough for the locals, it was good enough for me. If I so much as mentioned “cockroach,” she’d be flying back north, with or without a plane. To my mom, cockroaches signified filth. Years ago, she had utterly disowned a relative after that person’s house became infested due to roaches in a sack of potatoes.
"Oh, it’s Florida,” I continued light-heartedly. “You know, a bug here, a bug there--kind of gives the place atmosphere.”
“Well, I don’t like that BIG one, and I’ll get him one of these days,” she warned.
That boded ill for Conroy. He’d better stay lodged behind the mirror if he knew what was good for him and his hard little shell.
Things went well for about a week. Each time I entered the bathroom, I’d check for the twitching legs. And there they would be, sticking out from the mirror as if to declare, “Isn’t it wonderful when an advanced species and your human species can co-habit?” All I could do was shake my head and smile, pondering what other odd wonders Florida might hold in store.
And then one dark and stormy night (kind of like every other night, come to think of it), my mother emerged from the bathroom, her cane in one hand and a rolled-up Miles Kimball catalog held aloft in the other. “I got him!” she announced. “I got the BIG bug!”
I had a sinking feeling that she hadn’t captured him with a butterfly net. “I swatted him with the catalog and flushed him down the toilet!” she grinned, looking as pleased as Hannibal after crossing the Alps.
My eyes misted over. Conroy in a watery grave? I turned my face to the wall. And then I heard it. Scratching sounds. Lots of little scratching sounds--coming from inside the walls. Could it be more Conroys? Lots more Conroys? I didn’t know whether to laugh, or cry, or call Orkin.
Conroy was gone, but I had the gnawing feeling that his memory would live on. And suddenly I really didn’t want to lay eyes on the state bird.
Copyright 2003, Karen Williams
