Objects in Your Mirror are Larger Than They Appear

"It's just a bug." That is what the social worker on the unit told me the other day when I related the heroing tale of my treacherous drive to work. Normally I would agree with him. Most bugs do not bother me, nor do spiders or snakes for that matter as long as they are not pit vipers. Even in Pennsylvania, we have a few species of those. But this was no ordinary bug. This was a monster, by far the largest dragonfly I have ever seen, and I have been in the rainforest in Costa Rica so I have seen some pretty big bugs. This thing did not belong in the Eastern Allegheny Mountains. But it was there, and it was IN MY CAR AND IT WAS GOING TO GET ME! NO REALLY!

Actual size photo of a different man eating dragonfly.

To begin the story, it was any normal Monday. I was driving along my usual road with the once polluted river on the left. There was the strange house with rusty farm equipment and a chicken running loose in the front yard on the right. There was an SUV in front of me, a pickup truck behind me and we were all going 10 mph too fast. Any normal Monday. We all turned right on the US highway and made a fast left on the two lane road that is badly in need of widening. There we all tried to drive 10 mph too fast, but were as expected slowed down by a school bus, dump truck carrying gravel or some old guy who just does not get the point that some of us have somewhere to be at 08:00 and drives 15 mph too slow just to piss us off.

It was somewhere in that transition between going too fast to too slow that I heard the loud buzzing noise in the back of my car. It did not take too long to identify the creature that was making the loud buzzing noise looking in my rearview mirror as it was a HUGE BLUE DRAGONFLY WITH A FUZZY TAIL THAT WAS A BIG AS A WOOLLY WORM. I am not exaggerating this. I am not the kind of person that would normally fear a dragonfly. This was the sort of nightmarish creature that only appears in B rated science fiction movies from the 50's with names like "Attack of the Killer Dragonflies". This abhorrent monster was keeping me company on the way to work while trying desperately to get out of the back window by pounding on it with sheer force and not succeeding. So there I was on a busy road in a line of cars being deprived of any reasonable chance to arrive at work on time and there was nothing I could do about it. I tried the usual interventions. Open the rear windows, no bites. The dragonfly briefly strayed from the base of the window to the top so I tried opening the sun roof thinking maybe it would continue its upward ascent. No go. The monster went back down to its point at the base of the window where it had been on guard most of the trip. I should point out that it was about 55 degrees outside and opening the windows was not exactly pleasant, especially at speed greater than 40 mph. It was a sacrifice I was willing to make if it would get this creature out of my car but it never did work. I had that bug in my car the whole trip and worried the whole time that something awful might happen like it might fly in front of me and get in the way of my view or poop on my leather upholstery or worst of all...

IT MIGHT TOUCH ME! Bug germs! Ewww!

By the time I got to work, the dragonfly had wedged itself between the glass and the shelf below and I was not ready to have a dragonfly carcass decorating my rear window. Like it or not, I was going to have to extract the monster myself. My first attempt by trying to scare it out with a pen made it dig in even deeper into its hole. By then all that stuck out was the tip of the tail which looked surprisingly like the stinger of a scorpion to me. A bigger woman would have just grabbed the tail and pulled the dragonfly out herself. I am not a big woman. In a panic, I dived into the front seat to extract a tissue from my ever present tissue box that resides in my car for my ever allergic sinuses and with that, I grabbed the dragonfly/woolly worm tail and extracted it.

The dragonfly, apparently finding itself under attack, turned around and attacked back, twisting its body around on its tail 180 degrees and attaching to the tissue with a steel grasp. Up until this point, I had not realized that dragonflies had flexible tails. But apparently, the Mothra species does, and this one turned quite readily. I was at least able to get the tissue out of the car along with my radioactively altered friend who had decided he did not want to let go of the tissue and clung to it for dear life as a shook it like a madwoman trying to get it off. Thankfully when it finally did let go, it did not go back into my car but took off into the strange environment it had been transported to. Sadly, the "big city" is mostly concrete and urban blight and this creature came from a mostly wooded area. It may not feel all that comfortable in the blocks of row homes it will find here. Perhaps there will be enough trees to survive in the cemetery across the street from the doctor's lot. (How's that for irony?) I honestly wish the dragonfly no harm. I just do not want it serving the role as my new navigator.

One thing was for sure. I was not going to offer it a ride home.