They’reeee Baaaackkkk….

No, I’m not talking about those wily, technology savvy spirits who poke through the television as in the horror movie classic, Poltergeist. I’m talking about something way worse…a million times more frightening and horrific. I’m talking about caterpillars, people. They’re in, and my sanity is out.

Surely one of the “World’s Dumbest Fears” (right up there with Pogonophobia, or fear of beards), I developed this absurd phobia when I was around six years old, the year of the “Plague” on all of the houses of upstate New York. That summer I lost my innocence (not THAT innocence) as the Gypsy Moth variety of caterpillar descended upon us with a vengeance like the wrath of locusts in Egypt. I remember stepping out of my house to play in the sun, when suddenly I was turned into a gruesome victim a la “When Animals Attack,” and half a dozen squirming, hairy, pulsating ‘pillars began to make their way up my legs at an alarming speed (well, OK, in reality you needed a time-lapse camera to see their actual movement, but that’s what it seemed like “in my head”). I immediately began flailing around like an ape on crack and ran into the house. I never went outdoors during caterpillar season again.

But seriously, folks, it was bad! Their mass munching in the trees could be heard all around…their droppings sounded like a hail storm…they made hideous carpets across driveways; neighbors were sweeping them away with brooms. All of this formed in my young brain a serious phobia that persists today and gives me an animal-like radar for sensing when one is in my presence, even if miles away.

A year later, in the second grade, my school decided to add torture to the curriculum. We were each given a clear film canister complete with green mush and a baby caterpillar and had to track its growth into a hideous beast and then a ‘beautiful butterfly’…Yay! (FYI: butterflies are NOT beautiful. They are caterpillars with wings). The experiment almost gave me a nervous breakdown and probably started my path towards later neurotica. Luckily I met a girl who was equally scared and we became fast friends. Unluckily, at seven she was too “smart” for her own good and told me we had caterpillars living in our arms (she had misunderstood the word capillary). We started punching our arms at recess and came home with bruises.

But I’m not seven anymore, and in my mid-thirties, it's no longer acceptable to scream annoyingly and jump around spastically just because a caterpillar is inching its way across the neighbor’s lawn three doors down. As my brother once sneered, “It’s not like it’s going to catch you.” Still, what can I do? I don’t want to waste my already ridiculously expensive therapy sessions overcoming this phobia when there is so much more to ‘work through’! And I don’t think I can succumb to the shock treatment my brother once recommended (being tied up in a chair while he pelts them at me). Plus I am an “outdoors girl” now. It doesn’t fit my profile.

Yet as I rode my bike recently on the local bike trail, my radar was on red alert, as gauzy sacks laden with larvae threatened to burst open from the trees above and shower down on me as I sped by. Should I resort to cycling and hiking in a full body net? I don’t have the answer to that yet. All I know is…don’t be surprised if you don’t see me till mid-July.