I’m overweight, ugly, my joints hurt, my hair has turned gray, my soldier doesn’t salute very often, my eyesight and hearing are getting worse, and I think I know why – DDT!
“The Buzz Bomb is coming!” came the call down the street and ten to fifteen kids hit their front doors, grabbed their bikes, and headed out to meet the weekly tour of the neighborhood by the city DDT spraying Jeep. We called it the “Buzz Bomb”, not knowing that it did sort of sound like the WWII flying bombs Germany sent in from France to terrorize England, but because of the weird guttural sound it made as it slowly moved down Fairground Drive in Waverly, Tennessee.
I was always toward the front, racing with one or two others to see who could get up the closest to the nozzle of the buzzing bomb, see the flicker of the fire inside the nozzle where the mixture was ignited and discharged, without running out of air and having to dart to the side for a clear breath of air. If you darted out too soon, you lost the contest.
Often times, two or more of us ran into each other and piled up in the middle of the street, shouting obscenities at each other, and…breathing!
All the while, the driver was oblivious that the neighborhood children were following him as if he were the Good Humor or snow cone man. The cloud came out in a narrow dense stream about 6 inches wide for about 18 inches before expanding the width of the street and rising some 50 feet into the night air. It was impossible to see through the fog until the Jeep was some quarter of a mile down the street. It slowly expanded and dissipated into a fine mist that floated throughout the neighborhood.
The driver was actually one of many Pied Pipers that roamed neighborhoods in the 50s, 60s, and up until the DDT ban in 1973. Kids could not resist chasing the buzzing sound and bellowing white smoke, and parents only warned us not to breathe.
So, that’s what’s wrong with me today, course it’s taken it 60 years to work on my body, to break it down and to get me to this awful state. I know my symptoms sound a lot like old age, but I know differently – it was the DDT mixed with the Agent Orange I came in contact with in Vietnam, and yes, maybe combined with a little passing of time that did the real damage.
There is a push on today to bring DDT back and I think we should all unite and beat down this notion. If we don’t, many more people are going to get old like me.
STOP THE BUZZ BOMB!
4 comments:
Nobody runs behind the Buzz Bomb these days, at least not in this middle-class neighborhood. I suspect there are still kids who want to, but they'd just whippings from grown-ups like me who've changed their mind about the damn fog! No more Peter Pan in this century!
Heck, kids nowadays don't come out of the house anyway! Too lazy, and the activity not exciting enough.
It would almost be worth the risk just to see them get up off the couch or out from behind their blog!
I think they've found that the old ideas about how bad it was were exaggerated. Anyway, I don't think they want to use it here, more in Africa. They say that the limited negative effects would be countered by saving the lives of the millions that die today from malaria and yellow fever.
Hilarious how kids will get themselves into things like that, oblivious to the "danger". Also how people will attribute all their natural ills to ether DDT, or Agent Orange, or whatever. Human nature I guess.
They things we did as kids. OMG! I don't know if they still do this, but I remember as a kid that airplanes flew overhead, spraying chemicals down to kill off the types of worms/caterpillars that would make silky wrappings around trees, killing the trees off.
Post a Comment