An Attack in the Desert

During a vacation in Morocco in 1968, while driving on a road in the middle of the desert, my boyfriend and I were suddenly attacked by hordes of grasshoppers. Not understanding what was going on, we missed the chance to close our windows immediately. We soon realized that grasshoppers were on their last flight, and our car became an accidental grave.

Their incoming number endlessly multiplied, covering our heads, eyes, and entire car. We stopped in the middle of the road, completely immobilized and speechless. We could only mumble, afraid to speak, and have our mouths filled with insects.

About half an hour later, there was a strange peace as the insects’ continuing buzzing had stopped. We dared begin clearing our eyes, face, and ears. It felt like recovering from a horrible nightmare that had paralyzed us.

We started throwing endless dead insects from our clothes, the seats, and the car floor out of the windows. It had to be a slow and thorough process that took more than an hour.

Satisfied with our cleaning job, we tried to open the car doors only to discover that it was almost impossible. Thick layers of dead grasshoppers had reached up to the door handles. We had to push with all our strength mountains of insects before we managed to get out of the car.

Then the difficult task was cleaning the car front before reaching the engine. When we opened up, we found the engine stuffed with grasshoppers.

Because neither of us understood much about engines, we tried to carefully clean it as well as possible. And then, holding our breaths, we tried to start it. We could not even think about what we would do if it did not start.

We were lucky to have hired a simple but dependable car. The engine started, but the car did not move very far. The accumulated insects on the road allowed us only to crawl. We hoped we could manage to reach a small town soon. We were psychologically and physically exhausted. We needed some rest, water, a little food--any kind of food.

We didn’t realize back then that grasshoppers were a source of protein. We missed the opportunity.

C. Rothschild is a former professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and consultant to the UN and other international organizations. She has written three books on Sex Roles and Sex Discrimination, two of which were used as textbooks in American and European universities and were translated into Swedish and Japanese. Her literary work is available in the 34thParallel Magazine and the Winter Anthology of Quillkeepers Press.