Insect Splatter

As a kid, I liked to drape myself against the silky teal exterior of my parents’ minivan a few minutes after they turned it off. When the hood was warm as a sleeping dog, I’d lean against it, the familiar, oily tang of exhaust still hanging in the air, and pick bugs off the windshield with fingernails I hadn’t yet learned to chew. I didn’t mind the dusty highway scum that clung to my t-shirt after I stepped away, didn’t mind if the windshield was still bug-flecked when I did. I worked idly, with the kind of meandering boredom I did not know, in adulthood, I would miss. Nobody asked me to clean that window—nobody really noticed that I did—but I liked having a vocation. I liked tending the dead.

By the time I got to them, the insects were less bodies than constellations of exploded stars. Wing here, leg there, antennae somewhere. Our van collected the most bugs in Montana, where we visited my grandparents down a long dirt road. I see now that every stay with my grandparents was an exercise in learning death. One night, my sister and I forgot to empty out the plastic kiddie pool in the yard, and the next morning we discovered three chipmunks floating belly-up, their paws stiff and hooked like little apostrophes. The plastic of the pool was the color of blue raspberry, and it gave the whole scene a garish hue, like the bodies had been glazed by a UFO. We were quick to ordain a burial with flower petals and slow chanting, but by dinner the dogs had dug up their graves. We cried, as killers should. I understood this was what it meant to be "hardened by country life." I had read the phrase in pioneer novels and held it close the few times grandpa took a shotgun to the garden gophers.

These days my windshield is smooth, even in Montana. I rarely want to touch it, though truthfully, I cannot say if that’s because the insects are mostly gone or my childhood is. I did not notice the decrease as it happened; I noticed only that, on one visit, most of the bugs were gone. Was that before or after the wildfire came through? Before or after my grandfather died? Can you forgive me for letting one loss leak into another? A 2025 “splat survey” in the U.K. found that bugs on cars have decreased by 66% in the last five years. They’re still dying; they’re just dying before they get to our windshields, their populations winnowed by clouds of pesticides, habitat loss, and shifting climactic baselines.

I wish I’d appreciated the winged miracle of those bugs’ lives—the ones who had the misfortune of flapping between my family and our future—but, if I am being honest, I appreciated them mostly for the reliability of their deaths. The windshield bugs were the sticky film through which I’d first glimpse the ponderosas, the mule in the pasture, the slow wave of my grandfather’s hand from the porch, and the sheep dog who ran to meet our car, tongue flapping and eyes wide, as if only she knew the urgency with which we had to be, each day, alive.

Because we do not mourn creatures we never learned to see, many extinctions are, to the average eye, unnoticed. But weren’t the insects, their bodies stubborn glitter on the glass, the opposite of invisible?