Towards the end of October, my family and I went to Lake Erie to celebrate my Aunt Treva’s birthday. Aunt Treva’s son, Nathan, has a fishing charter out of Oak Harbor, so we stay at Turtle Point Marina in what we affectionately call “The Big House.” It has its own private beach and access to the channel so we can fish and swim — when the water isn’t freezing. The kids usually sleep in a pile in the living room, but this year my nephew Cam and Nathan’s son, Mason, shared a room. They’re growing up and I don’t like it.
About five minutes down the road from where we stay is Magee Marsh. They have around three bald eagle nests, the last time I counted. You can’t swim there, but you can walk the beach, find beach glass, watch the eagles, and walk various trails. It’s a beautiful area with an abundance of wildlife, including biting flies otherwise called barn flies or blood flies.
They are the bane of my existence.
I’m a prime target for them, I don’t know why. Just lucky, I guess. Their bite zone swells up, itches until I’m driven crazy, and nothing helps. One year my legs were covered in dozens of bites. I doused them in cortisone cream and chamomile lotion, I even tried deodorant and clear fingernail polish. Nothing. I considered amputation.
I had hoped, since it’s fall and temperatures are cooling down, that the menaces would be dead. No such luck. Ten minutes into my beach walk the hoard made an appearance. I felt like a horse swatting them away. In the onslaught of their biting, I found two crinoid stems, a pretty amazing shell fossil, a few hag stones, and a couple of pieces of beach glass. The weather was perfect and the lake was calm, so I put up with the flies. I did manage to squash a few of them. Only 80 million to go.
While we were leaving, my youngest nephew, Whit, heard his dad and I talking about the flies and how we both were apparently magnets for them. “Why?” he asked. I said I wasn’t sure, some people are more delicious than others, so they bite them. “Why?” Because they need blood to have their babies. “Why?” I have no idea, I said.
It’s easy to get frustrated with a kid asking “why.” Especially when you know that kid is doing it on purpose. But Whit wasn’t asking to be annoying. Whit was asking because he was curious. His little brain is growing and soaking up whatever it can. He wants to know things. He’s feeding his curiosity. There’s a phrase I think we all know: Curiosity killed the cat. It’s a violent phrase when you think about it, meant to deter someone from being curious.
How absolutely awful.
Curiosity is a wonderful thing. It can help you to be more empathetic towards others, it can help your doctors treat your illness better, people who are curious are smarter than those who aren’t. Don’t get mad, it’s a scientific fact. Curiosity drives knowledge, research, and invention. It shouldn’t be punished or treated with groans and impatience. Our brains crave stimulation and kids more than others.
When Whit was asking his questions, I realized that I let myself stop being curious. At some point in my adult life, I stopped asking why. I just accepted that I didn’t know something and moved on. I’m a child of Google. In school we were encouraged to research our questions first before asking a teacher. I can appreciate that getting asked “why” day in and day out has to be exhausting. I’ve done my fair share of babysitting and dread the “why” phase. Though, I have to wonder, is it better to be curious together?
In case you were wondering, biting flies need a protein found in animal blood to mate and produce eggs.
Curiosity may have killed the cat, but satisfaction brought it back.
Contact Carrie at: newsroom@news-banner.com
