Flying Spray Rigs, 1980

.

There are movies where you see a phalanx of helicopters buzzing over the landscape, making you look for cover for their menacing and provoking posture and teeth rattling auditory emanations. Think of “Apocalypse Now,” “Black Hawk Down,” “Fire Birds,” and such specialized flicks where the monstrous bumble bees fly all synchronized in a tight formation, their noses pitched down, ready to torch and strafe the placid landscape just a few feet under their Gatling gun laden skids.

.
Does anyone remember when such a phalanx could be seen just a few dozen feet up in the night skies of Santa Clara Valley? I only experienced it once or twice myself, and that was quite enough for me. I transitioned into adulthood with the Viet Nam war constantly reverberating in the subconscious background, with the big whoosh-whoosh of its always present helicopter blades just over the reporter's shoulder.

.

In the very early 1980s, the state of California hired a bunch of Viet Nam era helicopter pilots to lead the very public and unpopular war to eradicate the Mediterranean fruit fly from particularly precious agricultural areas in the state. Santa Clara County was one of those precious areas. Lucky for Los Gatos, all of our agricultural endeavors had been long abandoned to residential and commercial interests, thus the state funded helicopter war never zoomed over our heads in the middle of the night. But, every evening at 6:00 o'clock, and again at 11:00, the local news broadcasts would update everyone on the fruit fly spraying and how harmless it was, except to your car's paint; the spray could pock your car's paint job. To my mind, there was always something illogical and self serving when those two observations were made in very nearly the same sentence; the spray eats paint but not your nasal passages or your esophagus and lungs? I guess our bodies are tougher than I always thought.

.
Looking down from the mountain sides facing the Santa Clara valley, when the choppers were spraying in the nearby flatland neighborhoods deemed vulnerable, you could see the low flying wedge of helicopter lights buzzing just above the street lights in a strict and tight line, totally ignoring the familiar grid work of street lights and blinking stop lights. The formation had its own track and no one knew what that was except they used the same back and forth overlapping strokes that we use when mowing a large lawn. We Los Gatos folk had to wonder what it was like to have that menace break up your night's sleep for an hour or two, back and forth, back and forth?

.

Well, it was not really a big deal for us living in the mountain side town. The choppers stayed away from us.