Last summer, Sam, Jason, and myself all went through the back fields of my house, gathered a few of the white tent caterpillar nests and set fire to them in my driveway.  It was a beautiful sight, hundreds of tiny creatures crawling for their lives from the massive ball of flames.  Chaos ensued as Jason doused them with WD40 and lit them all ablaze.  A true microcosm of human existence.  The gods douse us in accelerant, light us ablaze, then laugh hysterically as we struggle to survive.

So in honor of this fun we had last year, my younger sister and I did a similar thing today.  My mother wanted me to get rid of the gypsy moth caterpillars that were trying to kill one of our trees.  Thus The Great Caterpillar Sacrifice was born.

I took my sister’s walking stick, wrapped a bit of cloth to it, doused it in rubbing alcohol and WD40 then set it on fire.  I was very excited, this was the first time I have ever made a torch.  So I took the torch and marched forward into battle, lighting huge patches of those furry gypsy moth worms ablaze and laughing gleefuly as they curled up and fell off the tree dead.

Once the tree was finally liberated of all the caterpillars I could reach, my sister had a wonderful idea.  She got together a bunch of rocks and made a small altar in the middle of our driveway.  Using bits of weeds we hadn’t thrown out yet as kindling, we threw several caterpillars that were aimlessly crawling across our driveway onto their newly erected funeral pyre.

Hopefully one day the hosts still left in PA can get together and light more small unsuspecting creatures on fire….well, at least the ones that keep eating and killing my damn trees.  I’m sure the trees wouldn’t mind.

Fear not!  My sister took pictures of the sacrifice and I posted them to my myspace account