Did You Ever Stop and Think About Scorpions?

My parents moved to Mesa, AZ shortly after they married. Many things there were new to them, including air conditioning, citrus trees in the yard, and scorpions. My Mom was very worried about scorpions. She had heard horror stories about deadly scorpions attacking babies, so when I was born, she took a lot of precautions. She set the legs of my baby crib in glass jars. She made sure my bed was away from the wall and no part of the bedding touched the floor. Some of my earliest memories are of looking at books with my mother and younger brother and sister – books with pictures of scorpions. She made sure that we knew the dangers of scorpions.

Several years later, when my brother Don was a little boy, my mother asked us to clean out the storage room and added, “Be careful – and watch out for scorpions!” Don looked at her and asked, “What’s a scorpion?” My mother was stunned. She had spent so much time teaching the older kids about scorpions, and she had assumed that the same knowledge had been acquired by the youngest. But it hadn’t.

The summer I turned 16, a normally dry river near our home flooded. I drove down to see the raging waters. I parked the old Plymouth Valiant about 50 yards from the edge of the water, and walked to the river’s edge. After watching the river for awhile, I turned to return to the car. I was amazed to see the ground in front of me moving! Closer inspection revealed that the ground was covered by hundreds of scorpions, scrambling over each other. They had been there as I walked to the river, but I hadn’t been paying attention and walked right through them. But now I had to hustle through the scorpions to get back to my car.

Many years later, my brother Craig and I took our children scorpion hunting near our sister’s house in Mesa. Scorpion hunting is done at night, using ultraviolet lights. Under the ultraviolet light rays, scorpions glow an iridescent green, and are easily seen. What a sight it was, seeing green scorpions hanging on the branches of the citrus trees we were walking under, clinging to the block walls of the neighborhood, and shining in the brush we were walking through. It made me wish I had worn boots instead of thongs! But once they are seen, they are easily picked up with tongs or, in my brother’s case, chopsticks, and dropped into a big jar of cleaning fluid to die. We later made them into paperweights and bolo tie slides.

Last year on television, I saw a news story of a man in Indonesia who lives in a room with 5,000 scorpions who crawl all over him and in his mouth. He was shown covered with scorpions, and the reporter mentioned that he gets stung by the scorpions an average of 30 times a day. But he is past feeling it, so the stings have no effect on him. I was left wondering, how did he get that job? Did he seek out the opportunity, or did someone else press him into it? And why on earth did he stay in there instead of running to safety somewhere else?

What scorpions are WE living with that we a too comfortable with?