Tuesday, July 6, 2010

"Exterminate the Brutes"

We are in Kingston, having motorsailed 11 hours from Cobourg. Well, motored really, as the wind contributed but little to the effort. It was a hot, humid, hazy day. And buggy. Very buggy. Flies, beetles, wasps, gnats, flies, butterflies, bees, flies, spiders, ladybugs, flies, spiders, and flies. Where do they come from, 10 miles from the nearest land?

As the afternoon wore on I found myself (always the engineer) contemplating the solutions to this problem. With each bite of a fly the solutions that came to mind became more extreme, until I concluded that what was really necessary was to drain the Great Lakes.

That's right, drain them, pump them out like a fetid swamp. This would at least help to dry out the area and reduce the number of flies. If combined with a cloud seeding operation to dump all the moisture in Indiana, a massive DDT spraying program, and then the erection of an air conditioned dome over the entire area to reduce the sweltering humidity, one might make the area livable.

After a beer at the Pilot House in Kingston, I calmed down a bit:  perhaps just draining the Lakes was all that was really necessary.

We are off to the Thousand Islands next.

No comments:

Post a Comment