12/30/2023 0 Comments Trendy semaphor cologneValerie flew alone back to her father, a new school, and the rest of monsoon season. In the predictable, controlled spaces of Los Angeles, she missed the call of pungent earth after a downpour.īy the age of six, Valerie started traveling without her mother, who stayed on in Los Angeles an extra few weeks or even a month at the end of each summer. Raised in isolated villages and used to waiting for the rain to stop, Valerie expected things to come in familiar sequence, the way nighttime brought bugs, bugs brought geckos, and geckos brought magic. Her mother responded each year by taking Valerie for summer stays in California, while Valerie’s father stayed behind in mountains or marshes, setting malaise traps, counting bugs, and making precise red lines on government maps. By the time she started high school Valerie had lived in Vietnam, Laos, East Pakistan, the northern Philippines, Taiwan, Japan, Malaysia, and Indonesia. Each year, her father sought a post in a new research station. The family was, for the next twelve years, subject to cycles of separation and reunion resolving finally in divorce. Valerie’s arrival in the world slowed but did not reverse her parents’ gradual divergence. Six months later and alarmingly slender for a woman eight months pregnant, Valerie’s mother left the mosquitos behind for a long stay in a clean, cool maternity ward. The couple decamped from Los Angeles for a mosquito-friendly Montagnard settlement in the highlands of Indochina. She surrendered to her husband’s idea of adventure, aroused in his case by a sturdy two-volume edition of Belkin’s Mosquitos of the South Pacific, in her case by dangerously inaccurate recollections of Somerset Maugham stories. Valerie’s mother, in a pregnancy-induced state of wonder, agreed to leave behind a tidy Sawtelle apartment, a shaded parking space, a new refrigerator, and her part-time job at the public library. ![]() UCLA had just granted him a degree in zoology. Cadres of entomologists, including Valerie’s father, were mobilized worldwide to map and measure malaria vectors. ![]() Valerie Trueblood Wells was born that same year under the American flag of a Tokyo hospital still operated by the US army. In 1955 the World Health Assembly decided that it could eradicate malaria.
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