August 8, 2023: Midnight at the Oasis -

Rick and I spend much of the summer at the mouth of the Deschutes River. He fishes, and I mostly hang out around camp, a green and shady oasis in that hot, dry country.

Zoom in:  oasis.

Zoom out: hot, dry country.

(Above the campground, where there was a fire earlier this summer. The dark green trees at center are the campground. Across the Columbia are the brown hills of Washington State.)

It’s a state park, and it has spotless (with caveat following), well-ventilated bathrooms, plus individual shower rooms with locks and hooks and benches. There are two areas for tent campers, and one with electrical and water hook-ups, for people with trailers. We have a trailer! You can just see it on the left, under some trees. 

I once mocked trailer campers – they weren’t OUTSIDE! They had sinks and beds and bathrooms and air conditioning! They weren’t CAMPING. Then we got our first trailer, and I converted immediately. It’s bliss. Life is good. For us.

But I worried whether life was good for the gnats. The gnats are the bathroom caveat above. Early in the morning, there are a lot of tiny dead gnats on the bathroom sinks. They aren’t a problem; they don’t stink or bite or bleed. They can be wiped away with a paper towel. There are just a lot of them.

I wondered what dreadful human activity was killing those gnats in the bathroom, during the night. Poor gnats! Then one day I asked Rick*, and he said nothing was killing them. They just don’t live long.

We see a lot of dead ones in the campground bathroom because this is the perfect place to be a gnat, and the bathrooms have lights, and gnats LOVE lights, and they come in the door when it is opened at night, and they have a big party all around and beneath their beloved lights, and then some of them die - right on schedule! They were going to die! Gravity makes them land on the sinks, directly below the lights.  Nothing is wrong!

I got this explanation several years ago, and it really pleased me. It still pleases me.  I am so used to thinking of death as a problem caused by something unfortunate; maybe if we hadn’t screwed up the planet, those gnats would have been able to live long, fruitful lives!

Not so! They would still have lived the exact same normal, short, gnat-lives! At the campground, they just get a big light-party on their way out!

This has changed my feeling about the morning paper-towel cleanup. Goodbye, gnats! Happy trails!

*Update: Since it had been a while, I wanted to double-check that I was reporting Rick’s life-of-a-gnat explanation correctly, and I said, “Hey, can we talk about gnats?”

“Diptera!” said he with excitement. “Two wings!”

“Okay,” I said, “noted.  Did you once tell me that the dead gnats in the bathroom are not a problem, they would have died anyway, and that they just fall down onto the sinks because the sinks are right below the lights?”

“I’m not sure those are gnats,” said he. “They might be very tiny caddis flies. I’d need to look at them more closely.”

“Okay, but whatever they are, do I correctly remember you telling me that there’s nothing bad going on?” 

“Or maybe midges,” said he.

“So…, could we, just for the purposes of this discussion, call them gnats?”

“I’d need to look at their wings,” he said. “They should be see-through.”

Conversations with Rick can go like this.

Two days later, I burst out, “DIPTERA! Two wings! But it’s not Dip and Tera! It’s DI! And it’s PTERA! Like Pterodactyl -- Wing Fingers!!”

Later, I announced, “Helicopter! I looked up Helicopter! It’s HELICO!  And PTER!!  Helix Wing!”

Conversations with me can go like that.

Additional update: I went into the bathroom today, and a couple of women were staring at the wall above the sinks. There were two big green grasshopper-type somethings up there. One woman said, “No, it’s not a praying mantis. It starts with Skuh….”

“Those things suck all the juices out of the gnats,” said the other one, “and drop the husks on the sink.” 

“No, no, I know, I know!” said I, bouncing up and down, eager to share the Good News that the gnats had died a happy, natural death. 

I explained the gnat circle of life. They didn’t buy it. Not for one second. Never mind that the grasshopper things would have needed several human lifetimes to get through the gnats in question.

I took a photo back to Rick. “Katydids,” he said. “They aren’t predators.” I looked it up: they eat leaves, the occasional flower, and as a rare treat, a dead bug. They were more likely to clean up dead gnats than cause them.

Anyway! Do come visit us on the river. We have wine. And conversation!