Bathtub Bug is Dead

guestpost by wonkie

Our house has on-demand hot water. Turn on the tap, wait while the cold water pours out, wait for it, wait for it…the heater kicks on and gradually you get warmer, warmer, hot! The heater is right below the kitchen sink, so hot water out there is easy to get. The bathtub, on the other hand, is about thirty feet away.

I like HOT baths. I like a bath so hot that it reminds of the scene in Shogan where the white sailor is boiled alive. I get my bath hot by turning on the water and letting it run for three or four minutes to clear out the cold water. Then I plug the hole and let the hot water fill up the tub. It’s an old-fashioned deep tub and I like to get neck deep in it.

About that hole…when we bought our house, the tub had no plug. I used a washcloth, which worked pretty well. I planned to buy a plug next time I went to town.

Later on, a friend came to stay in our house to care for the dogs while Paul and I went to Ireland. When we returned, I asked her how things went and she said, “Great, except it took me a while to figure out how to take a bath.”

That’s when I realized that I had been planning to buy a plug next time I went to town for six years. That was four years ago. This is reminding me of the dehydrated apple core that lived on the dashboard of my car because I kept forgetting to throw it in the trash.

My forgetfulness problem isn’t age-related. I’ve always been like this. I like to think that I have higher things on my mind than apple cores and bathtub plugs, but the truth is I normally have very little on my mind. I had little on my mind the day I killed poor little Bathtub Bug.

I was cleaning out the tub one day—I do remember to clean occasionally—when I spotted a tiny creature struggling to climb the steep, slick walls of the tub. The poor thing could get no purchase, so I gave it a boost up to the rim. My tub is mounted against a tiled wall. Someone long ago grouted the crack between the tub and the wall, but the grouting shrank or hardened or something and anyway there’s a crack there. The crack has been there ever since the day ten years ago when Paul and I looked at it and said, “We need to buy some grout and fill that crack.”

As soon as I set the small creature on the bathtub rim, it scuttled toward the crack. Then it stopped, turned around, and I swear to God it looked at me. No actual eyes that I could see, but I’m legally blind in one eye, so not seeing detail is normal. I did squint at the bug and noticed some features. It seemed to have a lot of legs. It looked like a miniature brachiopod. Though the front and back looked very much the same, it seemed to know which end was which. We contemplated each other for a bit, and then the bug aimed itself at the crack and disappeared.

After that, encounters between me and Bathtub Bug were fairly frequent. I rescued Bug from the tub a couple of times when the tub was empty of water and was visited by him a couple of times when the tub was full and I was sitting in it. Bug seemed to live in the crack.

I got curious about Bug so I looked him up in my Field Guide to Insects. It turns out that Bug wasn’t an insect at all. He was a crustacean! Also an indicator of rot. That caused worry whenever I was in the tub. Was the rot beneath me? Was the tub, with me in it, going to fall through the floor? I live in a one-story house, so we wouldn’t fall far, but I worried anyway. That is, I worried when I was in the tub. Outside of the tub, I thought about hydrangeas or walking the dogs or where did I leave my Kindle etc. I didn’t think about Bug or rot.

I got used to seeing Bug whenever I took a bath. I got used to thinking about rot whenever I took a bath. I asked Bug, “Are you eating the wood beneath the bathtub?” No answer. Bug’s wanderings along the bathtub rim seemed friendly.

Then one day tragedy struck. I’m an idiot or I would’ve seen this coming. I ran the cold water, plugged the hole, let the tub fill up with nearly boiling water and, when I came in for my bath, Bathtub Bug was in the hot water.

I fished him out as fast as I could. Poor little guy had curled up like an armadillo in a vain attempt to protect himself from the heat. I set him on the bathtub rim and watched, but he never uncurled. Bathtub Bug was dead.

I never saw another bathtub bug. However, a tree fell on our house and dented the roof right over the tub, which resulted in a visit by a house repair guy who said that there was rot in the wall of the bathroom in the corner by the tub. He fixed the roof and a chunk of wall.

Is there a moral to this story? I dunno except that I miss Bathtub Bug. The tiny slugs that now crawl out of the crack just aren’t the same.