A Language Older Than Words - Derrick Jensen [145]
I woke up before dawn on Friday to perform a final check on the hives before strapping them four tight to a pallet. By now, because of swarms, I had about 320 colonies. I finished strapping about seven in the evening, and drove to meet the trucker at a restaurant. We returned to the drop. I had arranged for my friend the wasp farmer to help me with his forklift. He would place the pallets in the back of the trailer, and I would use a pallet jack to position them inside.
The truck was too small. I couldn't fit pallets two wide, which meant that in order to accommodate anywhere near all of my hives, I would have to remove many of them from the pallets to hand stack them in corners and spare spaces. Had I not been anticipating the massed arrival of cropdusters the next morning, I would have sent the trucker on his way and called another broker. But that was no longer an option.
I loaded what pallets I could, then began to hand stack. Plugged with honey, the hives weighed a hundred to a hundred and fifty pounds a piece. The bees, of course, were crawling everywhere. Sometime during the night the netting covering my face developed a rip, and I began to get stung. Since it was dark, I couldn't see the tear, and so didn't know where bees were getting into my suit. Holding a hundred-and-fifty-pound box full of tens of thousands of bees, you can't simply drop it to scrape away the stinger. And there was work to be done. For the first twenty or so times, I relied on my ability to wall off pain. For the next twenty, I cursed, not too loud because the wasp farmer was a devout Seventh-Day Adventist. For the third twenty, I begged the bees to stop. After that I lost count.
About seven-thirty in the morning we finished. We had been able to cram all but eight of the hives into the semi, and put the rest in the back of my pickup. I took off my suit, and at long last began to scrape stingers, their poison sacs by now long empty, off my face. I stopped to get some quick breakfast, and the waitress pointed out I had bees crawling in my hair.
I drove all day. The truck ended up miles behind me—some sort of problem getting gas money from the broker—but I had given the trucker careful directions to the drop site. It was a twelve-hour drive, and I looked forward to unloading the bees— another night's work—and finally going to my rented house in Carlin, Nevada (another hour-and-a-half drive), and sleeping for a couple of days. Then I would move the bees to their summer sites.
But that's not what happened. All day as I drove, I kept hearing the bees die. Of course they were hundreds of miles away. Perhaps it was Backster's "primary perception" brought to a conscious level. All I know is that I perceived first their distress and then their deaths all through the day and into the evening, and when the trucker finally arrived at the drop, I was not surprised when I opened the doors to see a two-foot-deep river of dead bees, honey, and melted wax pour out the rear of the trailer. The trucks refrigeration unit had broken down, and the inside had grown hot enough to melt beeswax, hot enough to kill bees. 1 was sad, I was tired—exhausted really—my head hurt, and my arms and legs ached. But I was not surprised.
I spent the night unloading the remains. The next morning, dawn creeping over the mountains to the east, I drove home, too tired to feel anything. I slept.
Not only bees died in 1985. I died also, from Crohn's disease, pain, internal bleeding, and self-control.
Looking back, it's clear I've had Crohn's since I was young, but it wasn't diagnosed until I was twenty-four. As a child I often had stomach cramps that doubled me over, or left me pressing my face to the surface of my desk at school, closing my eyes, and going away. Also, my growth spurt was late—I was five feet, two inches, in eighth grade, before shooting to six feet by the end of high school—something I've since learned is symptomatic of Crohn's. And then there's my metabolism: