After yet another paddling trip in Texas I headed "home" to my desert base of operations, a half finished cabin in the Chiricahua Mountains in SE Arizona. I’d made it a habit to stop by the cabin between trips, do a little carpentry, gather some stone from the hills for the fireplace & chimney and consume mass quantities of chicken fried steak and iced tea in the Portal Store café.

I drove up the long, bad dirt road to Paradise (really, that’s the name of the place – so called because back in the silver mining boom-town days it really was paradise…a dozen bars and nearly that many whorehouses. Looking at the remaining foundations you can tell which was a bar and which was a whorehouse simply by their location. The bars were along the road; the whorehouses were on the hill. Theory is, no one would walk that far for just a drink).

So I drove up into Paradise and bedded down under the cap in the back of my truck. I had the reading lights on and was finishing up some small-town newspaper I’d pick up along the way in Texas when an insect began to annoy me by flying tight circles around my head. I tried to reason with him, saying, "Look, if you don’t cut that out I’m gonna smack yer ass with this newspaper". But he didn’t stop, so I rolled up the paper and prepared to swat him.

And he promptly flew right in my ear. On a direct line, zing…nothing but net. Yowza! This was a fair to middlin’ sized oblong bug, in my ear, still buzzing. So I did the naturally stupid thing – I stuck my little finger in my ear. And just managed to touch his buggy little butt, sending him scurrying even deeper into my ear, still buzzing somehow. His buzzing is getting more feeble now though….M’zubbbb, M’zubbb. And even deeper inside my ear, even more feeble…M’zubbb…m’zubb. And then the buzzing stopped.

Oh man! I don’t wanna have to drive down off the mountain to the hospital. I’m not even sure where the nearest hospital is, Benson maybe, or Wilcox; like a hundred miles away. And why did I ever see that damn Star Trek movie with the bug in Chekov’s ear? What if it’s a female, looking to lay eggs? What if I start hearing M’zubbb, M’Zubbb in my other ear?

After managing to thoroughly freak myself out with ideas like these, I finally fished out a clean Jerry-tube, melted the end down to a conical point, repeatedly filed it with water, sealed it and flushed my ear.

That seemed to work, although to this day I still M’zubbb…M’zubbb