The Year OF The Flies

When I was 16 years old, we had what I found out later to have been the worst fly infestation in living memory in Bruce, Wyoming. Without having to reveal my exact age, this was in the mid-1960s. The whole sexual/musical revolution hadn’t quite reached my door by that point (unfortunately) but that summer - around about the second weekend in August to be precise - we had an infestation of the blue green fly that was like a biblical scene. It had been a dry hot summer up to that point for the most part at least. But we had one heavy spell of rain that lasted about three days during July and it was that, mixed with the heat, they say, that gave rise to such an extra-large number of flies being produced. We live about half a mile from a large forest and it was here amongst the rotting warm tree and leaf matter that the fly infestation was born, so to speak. Two weeks later, there were so many flies in the woods that they began to expand and expand outward, until one morning, when I woke up; I thought that we were in for a thunder storm. It was hot, but the sky was a weird dark glowing sort of thing. It was simply clouds of those flies. We all got bottles of the best pest control products we could buy and started spraying everywhere. Back then, there was no such thing as organic pest control (except in the dreams of some hippy types) and I’m sure that we did ourselves more harm than the flies would have with all that trigger-happy spraying. The whole science of flies getting rid of them and preventing them from being born was all in its infancy, so the only weapon we had to hand was a kind of long dagger and not a nuclear bomb, if you like. The thing that worked best was probably the mosquito control bomb. It was a large aerosol can that smelled like pure poison (which it probably was) but it was the best mosquito repellent around and it worked a treat on those dumb blue green fly swarms too. We also had no such thing as the internet back then, so you had to rely on neighborly advice, advice from the radio and television stations and… well, advice anywhere you get it, really. The animals suffered a lot from it but it was a constant battle that we were losing as to how to get rid of flies in the house. That was an interesting time, but nowadays the fly predator solution mixed with the fly traps means that those days are simply gone. Now it’s all about organic pest contr