I may have mentioned once or twice that I was raised in a city.

Growing up in a city had certain advantages and disadvantages.

The easy availability of gasoline, for instance: advantage.

Lack of visible stars at night: disadvantage.

Wonderful libraries and restaurants: advantage.

Being surrounded by asphalt and concrete: disadvantage.

The culture at large served to reinforce my man-made surroundings, the sense of being cut off from nature. This was the 70s, a decade that celebrated the triumph over the natural world. Remember “Better living through chemistry!” and “Without chemicals, life itself would be impossible?”

Food was tending in an industrial direction. The TV dinner and the canned sausage were ascendant. Who needed real orange juice when you could drink Tang?

Clothing was entering the Space Age, too. I remember a blouse my mother wore that was made of a wonder-fiber with a glamorous and vaguely South-of-the-Border name: “Qiana.” This new material was so exotic that the normal rules of spelling didn’t even apply: it didn’t need no stinkin’ “u” to go with its “Q!”

Qiana was silky and shiny, the embodiment of “groovy.” It came in colors no one had ever seen in the wild. At the time, I had no idea that its birthplace was an oil barrel, or that it was a Franken-fabric dreamed up by the evil geniuses at DuPont.

I preferred cotton. I liked the look of Qiana, but cotton breathed better.

What can I say? Even back then, I ran hot.

Despite a penchant for natural fibers, I thought of the out-of-doors as a place of lurking danger.

It actually was a place of danger in one small but significant way: the bee sting.

Last week, I described the havoc a tiny sweat bee could wreak – if you happened to be allergic to bee stings. Turns out I’m allergic, just not seriously.

My mother, on the other hand, is seriously allergic. The kind of allergic that takes you to the emergency room if you get stung.

A curious yellow jacket circling the Olshans at a picnic could elicit the kind of response you’d get if you shouted “Gun!” in a roomful of Secret Service agents: arms flailing, bodies diving, the slamming of car doors, the frantic talking into sleeves.

Well, maybe that’s a slight exaggeration.

But bees did have a real aura of danger. Wasps, too. My mother was armed with an EpiPen so she could self-inject with adrenaline in case of a sting.

In short, we were locked in a Cold War with the Hymenoptera nation.

A bee was nothing less than a furry little assassin in yellow and white. Or orange and white. Or just black. Or black with some purplish iridescent parts.

At any rate, a merciless, no-blooded killer who wouldn’t think twice about stinging you to death. Or your mother!

These completely ludicrous childhood thoughts were running through my mind on Saturday, down by Shermans Creek, as a black cloud of bald-faced hornets boiled out from a hidden nest a few feet away from my face.

I’d been working the starter cord of a gas-powered pump in a small shed. I had noticed the empty mud-dauber nests on the walls of the shed, but those were nothing new, and hardly threatening. I’d even noticed a new hunk of something tucked up near the roof of the shed. But it was hot, and I was eager to get the pump running, so I didn’t pay the hunk much attention.

Mistake!

Lucky for me, the old instincts kicked in as the hornets attacked. I was in full reverse before I even knew what I was doing. The hornets weren’t really interested in a chase.

Only one of them bothered to sting me.

But I can assure you I was thinking about EpiPens and anaphylactic shock, and whether the new soreness in my throat was fight-or-flight adrenaline or the beginning of the last allergic reaction I’d ever have.

Happily, I survived.

But I learned that the micro-dose of venom a sweat bee delivers with its sting is nothing compared to the hornet’s payload. Even now, five days later, there’s a five-inch blotch on my arm that itches from time to time. And a couple of nights ago, at the worst of it, it felt like I was wearing a feverishly hot, insanely itchy blood-pressure cuff around my bicep.

So. Perry County.

Sweet air, beautiful mountains, spectacular birds: advantage.

Venomous winged death enforcers: disadvantage.

This column was published in the Perry Co Times on 09 September 2010

For more information, please contact Mr. Olshan at writing@matthewolshan.com