Owing to the pouring spells of rain we’ve had of late, I found myself face to face with a massive beetle this week.
It was just sticking to the window, minding its own business and trying to go unnoticed, but with the sun spotlighting it like the next runway model meeting the bigtime, you couldn’t really help notice it. Trouble is, it nearly gave me a heart attack, since I couldn’t see it too well against the harsh sunlight, I almost mistook it for a cockroach and freaked out.
How, you ask, can I so seamlessly mention harsh sunlight and pouring rain in the space of a paragraph? To answer that, I’ll have to explain to you the four seasons experienced in my city: mild summer (December to February), summer (March to May), wet summer (June to August) offensively out-of-place summer (September to November). Hope that handy guide helps.
My dad decided to play uppity landlord and promptly evicted the beetle. I don’t blame him, this guy was huge. But if that was to be the end of the story, I’d have to fill the rest of this post with fluff. Safe to say readers, that was not the last we saw of it.
This beetle instead goes the clever route and decides to try its luck again later that night. It slipped under the door. How a creature that big manages to fit itself under a door frame baffles me but after watching an eight minute video compilation titled Cats Are Liquid, I don’t question such things anymore.
So I come across this beetle, which my dad has now nicknamed Beetle Bailey in honour of the Sunday comics, later at night walking along the floor. I don’t know if you’ve ever had the chance to watch a medium sized insect walking anywhere, but they’re large enough not to be too quick in their scuttling. It’s a bit hypnotic, because their stride is instead quite rhythmic, so I’ve been gazing at it for about ten minutes.
Now a tiled floor and a plywooded doorframe is barely a poor man’s substitute for the woodland outdoors (actually who am I kidding, I live in a city), and you never realise this more acutely than when you see an expert climber trying to navigate a smooth wall.
He’s getting nowhere fast. A good reason for that comes down to an old story I must first bring up: we once had an event I cannot remember now that needed some prettying up around the walls. Now we live in a rented place, so getting anything permanent on the walls was out of question, so what did we do? Whacked on some smooth, shiny gift-wrapping paper. The perfect quick-fix. Of course years later, it’s still stuck on there, so don’t let the “nothing permanent” bit trouble you too much, but I digress.
No Spider-Man he, he puts a tentative foot up the wall and ingloriously slides down.
Never mind. With the conviction of a beetle who cannot understand why a smooth, yellow gift wrapping paper should be any different from a tree bark, he tries to scale the foil wall again.
I’m not sure what beetular physics is at play here, but the effort of trying to hoist himself up front first onto a shiny vertical surface dealt him the decisive blow of flipping him over onto his back. Beetle Bailey is in trouble here, me thinks, as flipping onto the back is usually some sort of endgame for insects, since it leaves them fairly helpless. I have absolutely no intention of touching it, fraidy cat as I am, but from afar I can’t help thinking, what is it going to do now?
Well I didn’t have to think for long and neither will you readers, because here’s what it did next—
It flopped right over, doing a 180 degree turn, not by rolling over its side, but as close as I can describe it, by arching its back and propelling itself up length wise, from the head. Just imagine your favourite action person (or rather, their unsung stuntsperson) but you’ll need to mentally shrink them down to a round tiny brown bug.
All this happened in the blink of an eye, twice it did this and twice I was astonished. It’s not something to get used to quite easily!
But if you thought that was the end of its athletic achievements, it then demonstrated some A-grade thievery stunts and gave a 101 in burglary by showing me exactly how it got in, by slipping under the door to my grandparents’ room. A mere slit of a gap. Conquered by this tall, fat beetle.
Now I haven’t much to say unless you have an active imagination, but I’m just saying that if limbo was an Olympic sport, and if the rules of sport could’ve stretched a bit to allow a beetle raised on home soil to represent the country in the Games… I’m not saying it’s very likely, but we’d certainly come home with more medals. Namely, gold for strangest competitor (gender neutral), world icon (Beetle Bailey as he is, according to my dad) and perhaps even deadest contestant (squash. He’d do our squash team some good I imagine.)
Look, I know I know, if we focused on the possible, we’d work on getting limbo recognised as Olympic sport.
It’d probably be a very aesthetically appealing sport, sort of like diving, synchronised swimming, ice skating, with the judges giving “limbees” a score out of ten. Most graceful beetle might be in the cards.
Anyway, the point of all this is, I’ve lost a beetle. Now as I’m writing this at 2 AM, one can only imagine the many possible directions this post can take by the time dawn breaks and shines its light on the tiled floors of my grandparents bedroom…
Update: I awoke this morning to hear the tale from my dad. Far from counting its stunts as luck, this Beetle decided to journey further, and was found by my dad early the next morning in his bathroom.
MattWilliamsonLive 