Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, May 27, 1995 TAG: 9505300071
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: RICHARD FOSTER STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: STEWARTSVILLE LENGTH: Medium
It started with a loud, eerie hum that filled the sky.
Then they appeared in Vernice Wright's yard, with red bulging eyes, glistening grey-black shells and transparent, shimmering wings the colors of the rainbow.
They were chanting "Pha-roah! Pha-roah!''
At least, that's what it sounded like to Wright. And it couldn't be more appropriate, she says, because she feels like she's being visited by a biblical plague.
Her yard is alive with locusts.
For centuries, the inch-long bugs have emerged from the ground in parts of Bedford County on a 17-year cycle to mate and die. But before they go, they leave a big mess.
The locusts live underground for years in a sort of suspended animation, living off moisture from roots. When they finally dig their way to the surface - en masse - they dredge up muddy tunnels and create dime-size holes in the dirt. After they mate, the females scale trees and bushes and, with a sharp appendage, dig into twigs and branches and lay their eggs.
The bugs don't eat a thing, but they can destroy trees. And after they die, their brown empty husks litter the ground.
Wright was born in Bedford County in 1927 - a locust year. Every 17 years since, the winged critters have been back. This is the fourth - and worst - invasion she can recall. And this year, her house is locust central.
People from miles around have been driving by to take photos of her yard and the thousands and thousands of locusts living there.
"Everybody's been coming by to look at it," she says. "This is the worst place, I hear."
As you roll down the window of your car, the locusts' high-pitched cries are loud and unending. Wright's yard is riddled with locust tunnels, like a golf course pocked with tee holes. Piles of dead locusts, brown and withered, lie beneath her maple trees and crunch under foot in the grass. Among them, fat larvae twist and turn. On the trees, some of the young push through the husks of their dead parents.
The twigs and branches of Wright's delicate peach trees and grapevines are broken and splintered. "They like anything tender," she observes as she pulls a dead branch off a tree.
Overhead, locusts fly by, hovering like helicopters in a holding pattern over a busy airport. They scale tree trunks and climb flowers, joining end to end as they mate. If you stand still, they fly onto your arm or leg. In Wright's once-thick grass, dying locusts buzz frantically like electric alarms, their wings beating a death rattle.
Her grandson's dog, Buck, a small black-and-white spotted beagle mix, chases the bugs as they fly by. Wright encourages the dog. "Get the bugs, Buck! Get 'em!''
She shakes a tree, letting loose a black cloud of locusts. She lifts a bird bath in her yard. Locusts fly out. "They get under everything," she says. "I've never seen it this bad." In the evenings, when it's cool, she and her husband, Cecil, go into the yard with 5-gallon buckets, fill them with bugs, and pour in a mixture of bug spray and water.
She reaches out and snatches the docile bugs by the wings, pulling them off the bricks of her house. When you go inside, you can hear the dull roar of the bugs, even over the air conditioning.
"You just get used to it, I guess. They haven't really gotten wound up yet. After a while, it gets so loud your ears are ringing."
Some brave locusts have journeyed down her chimney. When they do, "You hear them hollering," Wright says.
"It's just a lost cause. The more I pick, the worse it gets. I guess I'll just have to give up."
But as she looks out at the flying locusts and thinks of all the eggs the industrious bugs are laying, she says, "Just think what it's going to be like in the next 17 years."
by CNB