Killing Beetles

Essay

I am sorry for what I did.

If you don’t understand, that’s because you never walked out onto a raised loading platform with a full sack of dead beetles over your shoulder.

What we love, we harm, and vice versa, sometimes in equal measure.

By J.D. Daniels

For many years I worked the night shift at the Insect Building, assembling replacements for all of the green and gold Japanese beetles I had killed the summer I was an exterminator. The Insect Building was a towering pair of stone slabs offset ninety degrees, like a giant upended V8 engine. I walked through the dirty plaza to the onyx door at its base. Somehow I had a view from above of myself, and also of the stories-high pillar of fire shining and smoking there at the hinge where the Insect Building’s halves met, doing their best impression of the two tablets of the law. I worked in the Insect Building all night. Then I woke from my dream in my shotgun house at the corner of Preston and Brandeis in Louisville, Kentucky, and I shaved my face, took a hot shower, drank a cup of coffee, and drove my Nissan hard-body truck or, later, my Pontiac 6000 to whatever my so-called real job was, whether it was valet-parking cars for diabetic hillbilly amputees at the hospital complex, or …

Dispatch

Interstate 70

A chronicle of the March 14th pileup and its aftermath.

Dust storms can be deadly. A sudden, wedge-shaped cold front from Canada caused this one.

The interstate in eastern Colorado and Western Kansas is like a gangplank laid on dirt.

By Ian Frazier

On Interstate 70 in northwest Kansas, just past the exit for the town of Edson, a dozen or so skidmarks cross the pavement. Some go straight, some bend toward the median strip or curve toward the right-hand shoulder and disappear in the longer grass. Shiny, dusty, Rorschach-blot stains from various fluids fade in the sun as the traffic rolls over them. Most drivers probably don’t notice this piece of road-script that goes by in a tenth of a second like the scrawled pen markings at the beginning of an old film. The breadth of the geography draws the eye away, to the horizon and the High Plains sky. The skids are between mileposts 28 and 29, eastbound. On March 14th, at 3:22 in the afternoon, a dust storm kicked up by a cold front moving east from Colorado suddenly swept over the eastbound traffic. Visibility darkened to zero and vehicles began to crash. The collisions continued for fifteen minutes. By the end, 71 vehicles had become involved in the pileup in the blinding dust, with 46 …

Killing Beetles

Interstate 70

Louisville Man