the wages of hubris

For nine months, I have been quite smug when the topic of home invaders comes up.


Sure, I have been fending off ants, cockroaches, land crabs, assassin bugs, spiders the size of dinner plates, biting flies, biting gnats, mosquitoes, crickets, bees, bats, swallows, geckos, lizards, and snakes (OK. Snake.).


But I always amaze my neighbors when I say I have never seen a scorpion in the house. In fact, I have never seen one in Mexico.


Well, ¨had¨ never seen.


When I was a boy scout, we would visit a fossil bed in central Oregon for weekend camping. It was the perfect boy spot. Open spaces. Heat. Lots of rocks to crack open. Cliffs to scramble across. And a cool river for a swim at the end of the day.


If I was in a non-social mood, I would slip away from the camp fire and wander off to look at the night sky or, in my fondest dreams, to catch a glimpse of a coyote loping across the desert.


On one of those adventures, I crept up to a ridge, lying down at the crest, to see if I could spot any wildlife. I was Cochise on the hunt.


But there was nothing. The moon lit up the valley as bright as any stage, but nothing moved.


Then I felt something on my right hand. A scorpion. I had never seen one before. This one was small. Dark. Perhaps because of the moonlight, it looked menacing and fascinating.


Sensing that I was neither a good meal or even a hint of imminent danger, it scampered off in search of something to eat -- something to keep it alive for just one more day at a time.


I thought of that incident when I spotted my first Mexican scorpion this week. I was on my way out the door to shake a rug when I saw a small brown object on the floor.


I immediately knew what it was. We seem to be hard-wired to recognize some dangers.


It was probably the shape. Nothing has that chunky rectangular shape topped off by an inquiring question mark tail.


I nudged it with my foot to see if I had a corpse on my hands. It was so still, it could easily have been dead.


It wasn't. It started an evasive scamper.


For one brief shining moment, I considered the life option. I had not killed the scorpion on my first encounter: why kill this one? After all, it was headed right toward the door.


Hard-wiring won out over compassion.


For all of their fearsome appearance, scorpions die easily. But not without retaining the hope for venomous revenge. When I picked up the carcass, the tail was still moving slowly in the small hope of scoring a point against my own goal.


For nine months, I have walked barefoot in the house. Common sense tells me there is a reason to modify that practice.


Unless I want to ante up on another hubris lesson.