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The Gates Are AliveJune 01, 2007 At unexpected but usually appropriate moments the late Fred Simons of Gay Head (now officially known as Aquinnah, but most of the years Fred lived there it was Gay Head, so -- shall we stet?) would break into a song from The Sound of Music: "The hills are alive -- and it's awfully frightening . . ." I told Fred several times that he should write more lyrics; I probably thought of doing it myself but never got around to it. Now I wish I had. The caterpillar infestation of 2007 is well under way. Yeccchhh! Ride through the woods and it feels like spider webs are clinging to your face. Allie's black forelegs are wrapped in caterpillar-web hose. The last couple of days I've held a dressage whip in front of me as I rode, like Excalibur newly drawn from the stone, to break the threads before they adhere to my face. Two days in a row I've ridden into the barnyard brandishing a whip that looks like goblin's cotton candy. I mean, really, Yeecchhh! These caterpillars are not cute and fuzzy. They're half-inch worms that hump-and-stretch their way across any flat surface they can reach. Clearly they prefer shade to full sun because the barn and the paddock fences are sparsely populated. At the shady end of the ring, however, they're hump-and-stretching along the top of all three rails, up the sides of the mirrors, even around the cinderblocks, which couldn't possibly offer much in the way of nutrition. When I went to bring Allie and Rascal in from the back pasture, the gate was swarming with little hump-and-stretchy black things. That's when I started singing Fred's song: "The gates are alive, and it's awfully frightening / My feet want to run for a thousand years." I almost couldn't bring myself to touch the gate, but how else to bring the horses out and close the gate behind them? It didn't help that I was imagining maggots swarming around a corpse, or dozens of human fingers reaching up from a pit, or giant worms writhing across the surface of a planet. Gross gross gross. "Great green gobs of greasy grimy gopher guts" -- the vision was more fun when I was about eight.
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