The Bug Truck

 How often have you heard that we lived in simpler times? When people my age say it, they’re often forgetting the Cold War, the culture war, school desegregation, civil rights protests, Watergate, Iran-Contra, Aids, crack babies, and more. Like Billy Joel said, we didn’t start the fire. It was always burning.

Our parents, who were born during the Depression and celebrated the end of World War II, did seem to have more faith in our government than anyone does now. An issue during the baby boom was dealing with childhood diseases, and our parents dealt with that in much the same way they dealt with World War II, with technology and organized effort.

We had to receive a series of inoculations at different ages to enter any school. Vaccines for everything from the mumps to polio were administered either at your pediatrician’s office, or they would line us up in school and administer a multi-vaccine in the fatty part of our arm using a device called a pneumatic jet injector that looked like something Buck Rogers might use and left a tell-tale ring-shaped scar in your arm for the rest of your life, proof you were born in the fifties or sixties. No one ever questioned it. If you lived here, you got the shot, and nobody got polio.

There were no vaccines for diseases carried by mosquitos or biting flies. In northern states, this wasn’t as much of an issue because the cold weather kept the mosquito population in check. In the deep South, though, disease carried by mosquitos was a genuine danger to children.

The federal government determined that the most effective method to control the mosquito population was to use the chemical Dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane, otherwise known as DDT. Like many Southern states, Mississippi paid men to drive through neighborhoods in a truck with a fog device in the back, emitting a dense cloud of insecticide-laden smoke.

The clouds the spray trucks were emitting must have contained kerosene because they smelled strongly of it. As children, we would either ride our bikes behind these trucks or run behind them, laughing insanely at the spectacle. The whole neighborhood would turn out.

We were so trusting of adults, especially anybody we identified as a civil servant, that none of us ever gave a moments thought to whether this might be dangerous or not, even though we knew the smoke was used to kill bugs.

My grandmother, who had raised two girls during the great depression in Mississippi, which was already desperately poor, didn’t share our trust in the government and begged us not to ride our bikes behind the bug truck. My mother insisted that they wouldn’t be out in the neighborhoods spraying like that if the smoke was any danger to us, so we were allowed to continue chasing the truck without getting in trouble.

We were allowed, that is, until 1972, when the federal government, which had proscribed our use of DDT, decided that it was a dangerous chemical that might give little boys like me cancer, so the state of Mississippi discontinued the use of DDT.

So far, nobody I know has died from riding behind the bug truck. They say some of us who were exposed to DDT might be at risk for Alzheimer’s disease, but I don’t know how they’d ever determine if it was the bug juice or any of the other millions of chemicals we were exposed to.

Nobody ever talked about the government secretly using mind-control drugs in the bug spray, or population control or any of the other things you hear people on the edges accuse the government of these days. We didn’t trust the government not to make mistakes because DDT clearly was one, but there wasn’t this widespread paranoia about what the government might do to us.

Maybe we didn’t live in simpler times. Maybe we had simpler minds and didn’t clutter them with fears and paranoid delusions. Maybe we trusted that the government was people just like us, for all the good and all the bad that might suggest.