Jim Bradshaw: Who gets the last bite at the maringouin fête?

Mid-September  is a demanding time for south Louisiana farmers harvesting the many things we grow, but it is also a busy time for folks who like to eat, dance, and generally pass a good time.
The festivals that go into full swing this month are evidence that we will celebrate just about anything.
The first ones in south Louisiana were based on things we raised on the farm or pulled from the Gulf — rice, shrimp, sugar, cotton — and most of them, besides offering good fun, had the serious purpose of selling our crops to a wider market.
Since then, festivals have sprung up to celebrate just about everything we eat: crawfish (Breaux Bridge), ducks, (Gueydan), frogs (Rayne), rabbits (Iowa), étouffée (Arnaudville), boudin (Scott), cracklin's (Parks, Port Barre), hot peppers (St. Martinville), the omelet (Abbeville), mayhaws (Starks), sweet dough pies (Grand Coteau), barbecue (DeQuincy), and smoked meats, (Ville Platte), to name a few.
All of them are based on things we bite into. But the one coming up in Cankton on Sept. 26 does just the opposite.
It celebrates a critter that bites into us.
I guess it was inevitable that somebody would create a Louisiana Mosquito Festival.
Le maringouin has been the stuff of legend here since the first  aboriginal settler slapped the first little blood sucker eons ago.
The Attakapas Indians claimed the best way to fight off the pests was with a liberal coating of bear fat.
That might have worked as a repellent, or it might have attracted more stingers.
The neighboring Opelousas Indians sold bear fat to traders from New Orleans as a salad dressing that some claimed was tastier than olive oil.
Simon le Page du Pratz, probably the first writer to record Louisiana’s natural history, said mosquitoes were already famous in colonial days “for their multitude, the troublesomeness of their buzzing, and the venom of their stings, which occasion an insupportable itching.”
An anonymous New Orleans writer described them in 1903 as “noisy and numerous, and always hungry.”
Mark Twain said two Louisiana mosquitoes could whip a dog, and that four of them could hold a man down.
He claimed that some of them could bite through an alligator’s hide.
Lawrence Van Alystene, a Union soldier from New York who camped at Morgan City during the spring of 1863, wrote in a letter to his mother:
“If I had a brigade of men as determined as [the] mosquitoes [here], I believe I could sweep the Rebellion off its feet in a month’s time.”
Our marshes have always been prime breeding grounds for mosquitoes.
I vividly remember summer nights when we were driving home from a weekend at the family camp in Cameron Parish.
We prayed fervently that we wouldn’t have to wait for the ferry at the Intracoastal Canal. Most cars didn’t have air conditioning then and the options were to roll up the windows and swelter or leave the windows down and futilely slap at the swarming mosquitoes.
The Rev. William Teurlngs (for whom the Lafayette school is named) wrote about the mosquitoes he encountered when he was a pastor in Cameron.
“I remember going out one night to check the church,” he wrote. “As I walked around the house I saw something that made me rub my eyes in disbelief. … There appeared to be a whole grove of oak trees. But I had no trees in my back yard. Close inspection revealed the illusion to be swarms of millions of mosquitoes.”
He said that when he rode through the swamps, he always carried a branch with leaves on it to brush the mosquitoes off of his horse usually a futile battle.
“At times … I would wave it across my own face and in the next second the persistent little pests would be so thick that I couldn’t see the color of my trousers,” he wrote.
We don’t use branches anymore.
We’ve invented sprays, chemicals and all sorts of zappers to keep mosquitoes at bay, but I’m not sure that all of them work. My dad, who was an honest and truthful man, though sometimes prone to exaggeration in his storytelling, claimed he saw a handful of mosquitoes attack the driver of a spray truck, pull him from the cab, beat him up, and fly off laughing.
Enjoy the festival. Check your pharmacy or grocery store for bear fat.
You can contact Jim Bradshaw at jimbradshaw4321@gmail.com or P.O. Box 1121, Washington LA 70589.