So says the bloody Sergeant in Macbeth. When the no-see-ums were out, we members of the cast knew what the bloody Sergeant was talking about. The chainsaw jaws of those tiny diptera cut into our unprotected scalp and hands. Tiny gashes cried out for help. After a bombardment of what are sometimes called sand flies, gnats, or midges–most heavily at dusk but at other times during the day or the night as well–the backs of our hands were red with slapping and decorated with little dots of blood, our ears itched like crazy, and our scalps were on fire.
No real-estate agent tells you about the no-see-ums unless you ask a pointed question. No Chamber of Commerce pamphlet tells you not to go near the marshes when the gnats are out. Quietly, the natives of this area say no-see-ums are placed here by God to keep the Yankees out.
How can you tell you are becoming a native? Because if you are native, they don’t bother you as much. They even seem to go to tourists first. They are like alligators or copperheads or Marine fly-overs: you just learn to live with them. The "Beaufort salute" is a swipe with your hand in front of your face, to keep them out of your eyes.
The one-two punch of tiny mosquitoes and even tinier no-see-ums can leave a tourist dizzy and drained. It is the female of both of those species who is to blame. As Macbeth says, "Blood will have blood." These female flies are blood-hungry. They need it to feed their babies-to-be, and they may get it in a kamikaze raid, knowing that their bite hurts and that many of them will be killed by wildly slapping hands or madly itching fingers. If they could think and laugh, they might chuckle at the spectacle of grown men and women slapping their heads, looking like the little moron who kept hitting himself because it felt so good when he quit.
To defend against them, people spray a fog of Deet in the air and walk into it, as if they were testing perfume and inhaling toxic waste at the same time. Other people, even non-smokers, ask cigarette addicts to blow smoke in their hair, to make no-see-ums cough and get sick. When I sprayed Off directly into my hair, I got the strong impression that the little buggers were slime-skiing between my hair-follicles, enjoying themselves on the slalom course. Either that or they were still biting as they died.
The only chemistry that seems to work against no-see-ums, as far as the intelligentsia of Beaufort can tell, is an expensive skin cream (or lotion or spray) marketed by the Avon lady and local drug stores called Skin-So-Soft (no , I am not an Avon lady). The product started life as a skin-rejuvenator, something like Oil of Olay, but actors on location in some country below the Equator discovered that the product they were applying on their face to keep it forever young was also keeping the bugs off. Something in the product–its viscosity, its deep chemistry, or its cheap perfumy smell–worked to keep the gnats from doing their job.
Here in Beaufort the gnats breed in the marshes, the tidal wetlands. There are so many of them and they breed too fast for us to have any clue how to control them yet, though perhaps we may be able to trap them using an approximation of human scent and a zapper. We may all soon be installing bat-houses on marsh property, since bats seem to love to eat small diptera and mosquitoes. And those scientists who like to alter DNA might be able to shift a gene or two in the no-see-ums so that they develop a taste for alligator blood and leave us humans alone. As they now are, they have evolved until they have become flying motor-mouths, with powerful swept-back wings covered with spots for camouflage. As soon as they land, they dig in until you slap at them, and even then they seem to die happy, having succeeded in their mission to make your life miserable and feed their children at the same time. My scalp itches just thinking about it.
I remember one horrible time when I had to wade through pluff mud to the edge of the swamp grass to collect a floating kayak paddle. I was in shorts and a flimsy shirt, wearing high rubber boots, and the boots stirred up the no-see-ums. I felt like a water buffalo at the edge of the water hole, where all the killer flies hung out. Water buffalos go crazy under such attacks.
You will pay for foggers, for aerosol cans, for creams, for lotions. They all stink and sting. Skin-So-Soft costs about $7 for a little bottle of lotion, but it does spread thinly, and it does seem to work. Perhaps it is a Yankee invention, to help us remain in beautiful Beaufort.
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