One Fourth of July about 15 years ago was a memorable experience. It was hot as the devil’s kitchen in Crenshaw and I was recuperating from a motorcycle mishap.

It was about 4 p.m. And I was reclining on the front porch of a friend’s shack with my bad leg propped in a lawn chair, cursing the cast and the heat and the absence of a cold beer. I had just smoked my last cigarette and the truck was practically out of gas and frankly, there were no prospects of situational improvement.

My friend’s personal situation was no better than mine and to top it off, his estranged mother-in-law drove up and eyed us loafing on the porch.

She blew her horn. Several times. I looked at my buddy and grinned.

“You better go see what she wants,” I said. “She might have brought you a watermelon or a glass of lemonaid.”

He mumbled something unprintable and walked down the driveway in the heat to see what she wanted. I didn’t really think it would have anything to do with watermelons or fresh beverages and it didn’t.

After a brief conversation, he walked back up the driveway and said, “She don’t want me, she wants you.”

Now that was a puzzle and a danged (ed. note: Harpole’s first choice was expletive, not slang) inconvenient one, too. I rounded up my crutches, found my hat and hobbled out to her car. What could she possibly want with me. I scarcely knew the women. I seemed to remember that she had at one time attended school with my mother, but that seemed unlikely to have anything to do with whatever business was at hand.

She rolled down her window. I got a brief rush of cold air coming from inside, but she didn’t offer me a seat, so I just stood there on my crutches and waited.

After a minute or two she said, “People tell me you have done some of just about everything.” She said this in a tone of voice that reminded me of a prosecuting attorney or a suspicious Arkansas sheriff, so I carefully considered my reply.

“People will talk,” I said, “and much of the time they don’t bother themselves overmuch with the facts.”

“What do you know about getting rid of a nest of hornets?” she asked.

Well, I didn’t have to think too hard to scratch up a one word answer: “Nothing.”

Thinking that was the end of the conversation, I turned to begin the long hobble back to the relative shade of the porch.

“I’ll pay somebody fifty dollars to get ‘em off the cornice of my house,” she said.

I looked at the empty cigarette pack blowing across the yard and at the empty cooler, lidless on the porch, then at the gasless truck rusting in the yard and finally at the busted leg and said, “Let’s go take a look.”

Now as little as I knew about the hornet wrangling business, I realized that a scientific approach would be prudent. I hunted up a notebook and a tape measure and rode with her to the eviction site.

First, I measured the height of the cornice — a safe distance from the nest, of course. The distance from the ground to the point of attachment was eight and one-half feet. The hornets were fairly active in the afternoon heat, so I had her drive me home to do the rest of my research on the assault.

I don’t recommend that you try this at your home (or anybody else’s for that matter) but it did work once.

The tailgate of the truck was almost three feet from the ground. That left a little over five feet to deal with, and I could reach higher than  that.

I poured a little of the neighbor’s lawn mower gas into the truck and drove straight to her house. I left the tailgate down, rolled the windows up and backed it under the target.

Them varmints buzzed and flared up for about five minutes and settled down, mostly back into the nest. I waited for another five hot minutes, eased the door open and made a stealthy retreat home to find a good, heavy-duty trash bag and waited until dark.

Normally, when somebody does anything crazy, word leaks out beforehand and there are all sorts of rubberneckers who show up to see if your chute don’t open, or where you miscalculated somewhere and your bike hits a car instead of the ramp or where you used too much gunpowder or something, but that line of reasoning don’t apply to hornet wrangling. That show falls into another category and must be televised or skipped over altogether.

About an hour after dark, I tightened up clauses in my will and shook hands with my friends who suddenly had something else to do, preferably in another county, and set off with my trash bags. (I used two just to be on the safe side.)

I walked straight to the truck (I decided the crutches might just get in the way), slipped the bags over the nest, twisted the nest loose and tied a knot in the bag. I had ‘em and they were as mad as, well, hornets.

I collected the bounty and went directly to the first watering hole and resupplied the beer and cigarette stock. I knew those cowardly loafers would show up and volunteer a lot more with the beer than they did with the hornets, so I put the sack in the cooler on the porch and the beer in the refrigerator in the camper.

Over the years I have had a lot of fun thinkg of how much entertainment I could have provided in general by pitching that bag into a record producer’s office or a lazy attorney’s study, but it’s unlikely that I’ll lay hands on another nest.

Takin’ it easy,

Ricky Harpole