The Great Stink Bug Escapade of the Shenandoah Valley
Virginia’s hostile hostel inhabitants
I decided to go on a road trip. I didn’t have anywhere in particular to go, but the wintry weather of my PA suburb had lost its trees and dipped into a frigid enough lull that I went full speed ahead anyway.
Where that woefully aimless road led is a hostel in the middle of backwoods Virginia. A smelly, insect-laden and artlessly-designed hostel in the middle of nowhere, Virginia. My circumstances are less than fortuitous, but the universe works in wonderfully weird ways.
On my luckier days, rolls of the cosmic dice have landed me in some pretty interesting places. But today, as the cubes finished their erratic wobble, I found myself in a momentous face off against the odiferous alien inhabitants of my drab new dwelling.
Stink bugs are an enduring phobia of mine. The practical understanding that the creatures mean no harm doesn’t stop them from filling me with a more visceral fear than the hairiest of arachnids or most haunted of houses.
From the smell, to the atrocious micro-thuds, clicks, and vibrations that alert people to their presence, there’s no denying the creatures are something infernal. The abrasive bleats, ticks, and clacks that they make as they touch down on vases, windows, and lampshades are enough to wake me from even my most dreamy and comatose of slumber.
They’re diabolical deceivers intent on no less than world domination — and nothing that this kindly hostel owner tells me is going to change my mind on these odious, prehistoric, sputtering, fluttering, luciferian creatures that have crawled free from the deepest recesses of the netherworld with the sole mission of terrorizing mankind.
Their seeming ability to sneak through solid walls has hardly softened my opinion toward the heinous hellspawns.
As a child, stink bugs were never a worry of mine. I was a naive young tyke that picked ants from the ground and allowed caterpillars to crawl along my hand. I would catch fireflies in closed fists without a care in the world for the residue they left along my palms each time that I freed my capriciously captured and illuminating little prisoners.
But on one seemingly ordinary night in middle school, I awoke suddenly to an itch on my nose. And like the character in every horror movie that wanders into the basement when they hear a sound — I thoughtlessly tried to scratch it…
It was at that moment that my childhood came to an abrupt end. I realized I was an adult alone in a scary world, adrift at sea — unsafe, vulnerable and wandering helpless through a bug-laden, beetle-eat-beetle jungle. For that was no ordinary itch. Alas, it was a fat, wicked, rancid, unholy, six-legged monstrosity crawling impudently across my nose. And as I tried to simply scratch it, the horrible beetle launched into a resounding, cacophonous, and unbearable buzz that sent me leaping from a dead sleep and into a full, wide-eyed, heart-racing panic. It’s a trauma from which I’ve never fully recovered.
If I could go back in time and terminate the stink bug that stole my childhood, I would do it. But the universe has more in store for me than to live my life petrified by putrid Pentatomidae. Nay, I am more than my irrational fear of odor bugs.
As I initially set foot in the room in which I’m staying, though, there’s hardly anything unusual about it. Apart from me being the only person staying in this room full of beds intended for a hostel full of guests, it has a quaint and homey sort of quality to it.
It’s not until I make a phone call that I hear a lone, bulky beetle touch down suddenly on a nearby wall. An omen. I freeze mid-sentence as my eyes dart cautiously from side to side in search of the sound. I quickly turn my focus and make eye contact with a vicious brown bug from the most chthonic pits of the nether realm.
As I spot it, though, it launches immediately into motion. It flies loudly through the room and I can do no more than wait in dilated horror for the hellish spectacle to come to a long-awaited end. I stand motionless — dilligent, measured, and anticipatory — ready to employ my three weeks worth of Tiger Schulmann’s Karate from when I was twelve on a moment’s notice should this insectile invader come too close.
With another loud click, it slams down on a lamp only feet away with a meteoric impact. I devise a battle plan. Electing to spare my prodigious karate skills for another day, I diplomatically decide that smacking the industrious little bug with my travel brochure may be my best option. Coping with the heinous smell that wafts from it is par for the course and still better than spending my night in perpetual fear.
So as I smack the lamp with a rolled-up travel guide, I duck and cover like a grenade’s just touched down. But as I look back toward the lamp, terrified of what I might find in the aftermath, it’s with great relief that I see the carcass of the smelly, embattled aggressor sitting there lifeless beside the light. Being abruptly hit with a speeding train made of Shenandoah travel destinations, he might have a slightly different take on the event. But no matter — I can now sleep!
Until tomorrow…
The serene afternoon in Virginia is a happy reminder of why I decided to drive south. The 70-degree weather offers a temporary reprieve from the winter I’d been so desperate to escape. Apart from being rerouted roughly fifty miles around a winding mountain range in my search for a 1-star Hardee’s — the only food venue open within an hour’s drive of this backwoods town — it’s a great day.
But as I arrive back at my hostel, it’s to discover that I’m not the only one reveling in the reemergence of warmer weather. The stink bug I so brutally dispatched last night had a friend. And he’s come with reinforcements. They march along the walls like army men in lock-step coordination. Omniscient antennae scan the room malevolently. Once they sense my fear, the sentient, shield-equipped battalion of brown scowls toward me one by one, a deep-seated derision in each of their horrid, hollow eyes.
I search the room for weapons, but nothing seems as though it can rise to this colossal challenge before me. So after a minute of debate that seems to stretch into an hour — as the 6 legged abominations scuttle and plottingly plod across the walls surrounding me — I vacate the room in search of a swatter.
After only a few seconds spent rummaging through the hostel’s kitchen like a superhero urgently gathering gear, I manage to find one hanging conveniently along the wall. But I’m stopped in my tracks by a screechy old voice that echoes ominously through the darkness.
“Ya tryin’ to kill a stink bug?”
A seventy-year-old woman with a limp and teeth stained by a few too many decades of tobacco smoke looks toward me with a waiting and too-toothy grin.
Apparently, a new guest has arrived at the hostel. And apparently, she’s aware of the insect infestation, too.
“If ya swat it, it’s gonna stink,” she explains as though I’ve never heard of the foul monsters before and hadn’t already considered the dire stakes at hand. By her nearly-lost demeanor, she doesn’t appear to be equipped with a better solution.
But as we stand there in the darkness of the kitchen, her breathing a weighty breath and a fly swatter hanging temptingly a few feet to my left, it’s clear we’ve reached an impasse. A noir series of shadows sprawls across the room and spells a queer sort of drama. The swatter teeters idly with the barely existing breeze of a slowly rotating ceiling fan perusing in from a nearby room.
Sensing a tension building in her kitchen through the murky blackness of an approaching dawn, the woman who owns the hostel makes a pointed approach. “Stink bugs?” she asks. Apparently, she, too, is aware of the problem!
But the charmingly rugged Virginian goes to chivalrous lengths to solve it. I follow her meekly back up toward my room — momentarily forgetting about the hardened, wieldy karate warrior I am deep inside my bones.
“Where did you see them?” she asks with a voice somewhere in between Indiana Jones and John McClane.
I point out the insects to her like she’s a teacher and they’re bullies on the playground. Then, in a godly feat of control, she retrieves from the closet a BugZooka. She brandishes the store-bought, industrial-sized beetle dispatcher with the grace of a savior in plain clothing.
She proceeds to vacuum up the room’s stink bugs and retrieve them from a receptacle at the end of the device — now brimming with the hellborn creepy crawlies. She drops them out of the window and maternally shows me how to use it, too, in case the aggressors should decide to return. Though I don’t think I have the resolve to stomach dealing with a cup full of vacuumed scuttling stench goblins, the vacuuming itself I’m confident I can handle.
With the kind, old hostel keeper having meticulously vacuumed the five stink bugs free from my room, I assume that I’m in the clear. But as hours roll on, I learn just how wrong I am.
With the hostel owner asleep and a room now infested with eight stink bugs crawling through it, I fatefully decide that it’s time to take matters into my own hands.
Equipped now with the Bug-Zooka, it’s clear what I have to do. With the colossal contraption designed to eviscerate insects, I feel again like a Hollywood action hero ready to brave the Amazon. I tentatively stalk up behind one of the funky fiends crawling through the carpet beneath me. And with a deft motion, I slam the suction cup to the ground and attempt to vacuum the foul creature.
But instead of traveling down the tube of the vacuum… the vacuum pulls from the insect a horrible concoction of unearthly odor while leaving the stubborn insect standing there blithely unbothered. With my weapon backfired and my face covered in figurative ash, I make a final decision: I’m not staying here another night and not even a Mr. Beast-arranged money challenge can change my mind.
With the horrible scent suffusing the room, and this useless weapon in my hand, my bravado quickly returns to the oblivion from whence it came. I hunt down the foes with whatever blunt objects are available, hoping these quick little thuds don’t interrupt the wafting snores of the two people besides me actually sleeping in this stink bug-swarming inhabitation.
With the help of a sleeping pill, I get one final night’s rest before preparing for my departure. I wake up, though, to a stink bug staring at me from atop my bedpost. He knows what I’ve done.
There’s another on the lamp again, a few inches above his fallen comrade and engaged in a feverish, ritualistic resurrection chant. There are three more on the ceiling, two more on the carpet, and four more crawling along the wall toward me.
As they begin cornering me, I launch instantaneously from the bed like a dragonfly out of Hades and begin gathering my things faster than a wife who caught their spouse cheating. I power through my lack of caffeine in a desperate attempt to get my belongings into the car before these stink bugs lay eggs inside of them.
Do stink bugs lay eggs? I’m not sure, but I don’t want to find out the hard way and I’m horrified of what I might find if I google the question.
With all of my bags packed hastily into my car, I engage in one final stare-down with the stink bug’s leader as I prepare to flee and never come back. “You win this round,” it says within its eerie, loaded stare.
I dart toward my car and drive away without looking back, the guttural croak of the leader crying out behind me. I put my foot on the gas and drive faster than a family escaping the haunted demons of a house purchased for a suspiciously sparing price. As the hostel shrinks in the rearview mirror, I can’t help but wonder whether it would have been kinder to simply pour gas on the porch and drop a lit match.