Did you know that scorpions glow in the dark?

Did you know an adult male can jump 6 feet and run screaming at 30 mph?

These fun facts and more follow my two-week vacation out West. You got my postcard, right? Because I sent it. Maybe it got lost in the mail. Damn postal service.

I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, “Ha ha! It was 45 degrees in California and 80 degrees in Lewiston! Loser! Loooooooser!”

I know that’s what you’re thinking because roughly a hundred of you sent me text messages, Facebook messages, phone messages and a telegrams to keep me posted on the weather at home.

TAP TAP TAP. 75 degrees in Auburn. Stop. 40 degrees and raining in L.A. Stop. Ha! Stop. Ha! Stop. Ha! Stop.

It’s true. There I was on the Santa Monica pier, shivering in a winter coat and wearing one of my wife’s goofy hats. It was drizzling. The wind was gusting. Went to get a photo of me with the pier Ferris wheel and my camera blew right into the ocean.

There I was on a glorious beach in San Diego, the water blue, the sand white. It was a beautiful scene that I took in from the rental car with the heat cranked and wearing one of my wife’s goofy hats.

To get to Phoenix from southern California, we had to drive through the mountains on roads that wound dramatically through the canyons. Beautiful drive. Breathtaking, really. And there was plenty of time to take it in since there was 10 inches of snow on the road and traffic had slowed to 5 mph going downhill.

My phone was squawking the whole time, messages from home from people wishing me joy on my trip.

“Snow all melted here! You could be riding your dirt bike on the trails! Ha! Ha ha ha ha!”

It was fluke heat in the East, fluke cold in the West. When we got into Phoenix — they put a desert in there, you know — it was windy and gray. You could hear the tumbleweed swearing as it rolled by. Javelinas learned to walk upright so they could blow on their hands. At night, the coyotes howled. “Ahhhoooooo, it’s freakin’ cold out here. Ahhooooo …”

I probably got 200 messages from home while I was out West and every single one of them contained some variation of the words “80 degrees,” “like summer” and “ha ha, loser.”

It isn’t supposed to be like that. When you head South or West in March, you’re supposed to be the one sending jubilant, borderline cruel reports back home. Pictures of yourself in shorts and sandals leaning against a palm tree. You find clever ways to illustrate the dramatic difference in weather between there and here without actually saying it. “If you need extra snow shovels, help yourself to the half-dozen in my garage. I’d write more but one of the Beach Boys just kicked sand in my face and I’m going to kick his butt.”

If you’re sunning your delicate psyche in Boca Raton or Marina Del Ray, you secretly hope New England will get walloped by a monster storm. Eighteen inches of snow, whipping winds, bitter cold. The Germans call it “schadenfreude.” In California, they just giggle a lot while reading the national weather reports out on the veranda.

That’s how it’s supposed to work. Back in Maine as well as other states that reside beneath Canada’s skirt, we just shrug it off and say things like, “Well, at least we don’t have earthquakes. At least we don’t have smog and snakes and insects that can kill you. It may be cold, but at least we won’t die of a sting just walking in our backyards.”

Then we go off to cry and rub salve on our frostbitten appendages.

I’ve always scoffed at those rationalizations because I love California and if the big earthquake were to come while I was visiting, I’d be happy to make a new home on the Island of Los Angeles. I stand by that opinion, too. The ironic weather didn’t get me down while I was out there because L.A. is L.A., no matter what the weather is doing. Being in L.A. is like being in heaven with a big HOLLYWOOD sign instead of pearly gates.

Then we got to Phoenix. The weather started warming a few days in. Meanwhile, it was cooling back in Maine and some semblance of winter was coming back. I kicked off my shoes, took off my wife’s ridiculous hat and went out to lean against a palm tree for a photo.

That’s when the scorpions came.

They glow under a black light, you know. Everybody in Phoenix keeps a black light nearby because that’s how you know where the scorpions are at night.

So, we’re prowling in the backyard of our rented house and shining our little black lights everywhere. We do it just for kicks when we go out there. We don’t really expect to find scorpions. Stories about rattlesnakes and killer bugs in Arizona are largely over-dramatized, you know. People live there their whole lives and never run across either. That whole “shake your underwear when you get out of the shower because scorpions love underwear” kind of tales were invented by people who live in Maine and are bitter about the sun and warmth in the West.

But lo! The very first rock on which I shined my black light revealed the coiled menace of a scorpion not a foot from the back steps. Those alien claws, that horrific tail with its dangling stinger. Scorpions are so sinister to look at, a mere glance at one is like poison. And this one glowed so vividly under the black light, I thought it was a joke — some plastic novelty left there by some haw-hawing member of my party.

But then the scorpion crawled. Crawled! It twitched its primeval tail and its horrible little legs and it moved across the rocks like some tiny war machine out of hell. Watching that bug move gave me a chill so intense and bone-deep, it didn’t leave me the whole trip.

And there were more of them, a virtual army of scorpions scattered across our quiet little neighborhood like an arachnid army. We found them clinging to the side of the house beneath an orange tree. We found them in the crushed rock at the side of the house. We found one particularly plump scorpion hanging out at the edge of a neighbor’s driveway, out there in the wide open just waiting for a bare foot to come by and step on it.

That chill. For the rest of the trip, I checked and re-checked my bedsheets before I crawled in. I shook my shoes before stepping into them and stopped wearing underwear because everybody knows scorpions like underwear.

So, there was cold and rain in California and deadly arachnids in Phoenix. When we stepped off the plane back home, the temperature had dropped to 30 degrees again. Irony all over the place. That’s vacation for you. If there’s anything you can be certain of, it’s the startling uncertainty.

By the way, when you get my postcard, don’t mind the swear words. I was in a mood.

Mark LaFlamme is a Sun Journal staff writer. You can schadenfreude his frostbitten appendages at mlaflamme@sunjournal.com. 

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