Naturalist ticks

The Ticks Don't Care

Years ago when I taught at Unity College, the outdoor recreation
professors drilled a sentence into every generation of students: "The
woods don't care."
It meant that along with being remarkably beautiful, the forest is
remarkably dangerous. The oaks and cathedral-like firs do no more than
stand there when you're lost and running out of daylight. They stand there
all night, too, unmoved, and on into the next morning.
It's hard to think of a tree as a threat. It just doesn't care. But its
inhabitants, like ticks, are a clue about the warning's depth. They can scare
the pants off you.
They're tiny. Some are a quarter-inch wide, but a lot of them, like the deer
tick, are just lumbering specks. If one finds you, it burrows into your skin
and drinks your blood. It can inject bacteria into you. If you don't carefully
tweezer it off your scalp or ankle, the body tears away and the maw gets
stuck. The whole head stays in your skin, digging deeper. Bad infections
can follow.
One of the bad infections is Lyme disease, caused by a bacteria the ticks
get from biting deer and mice. It usually starts with a rash, fever,
headache, and muscle or joint pain. After weeks the pain can get worse,
and after months mental instabilities can set in.
But the ticks don't care, and neither do the deer - who are feeding more
ticks this year because more of them survived the mild winter - and neither
does their habitat.
Years ago some friends and I went camping on Little Chebeague Island in
Casco Bay. We walked around the beach from the ferry stop on Big
Chebeague and at low tide crossed the sandbar to Little Chebeague, which
at that time was overgrown and wild. We found a huge, gorgeous oak tree
in a grassy clearing and set up our tents under it.
While my friends took a campers nap, I got restless and walked down to a
rocky beach to ruminate on the beauty of Maine and its seascapes - the
wild rose thickets yellowing in the September sunlight, the glistening blue
water. Signs of the divine.
Standing on the silent beach, I took off my hat and ran my fingers through
my hair. (It was a long time ago.) I felt a scab. Odd. It came loose. Then I
felt another one. It came loose, too.
On my neck was another one, and wondering what the hell was going on I
brushed it away. I took off my shirt and saw motion in the collar and
seams. Ticks. Multilegged. Crawling. Ravenous.
I shook out the shirt and looked in my hat - the inside band was teeming.
I took my pants off, and in the seams and zipper were ticks, ticks. I
brushed, flapped and picked until they seemed gone, and then I stripped
and dove into the cold salt water and stayed under to soak off whatever
monsters remained.
I don't know, it must have worked. I got dressed and walked back to tell
my friends. We had a collective vision of ticks dropping like paratroopers
out of the oak tree to feast on us and leave us for dead.
The woods do not care.

© Dana Wilde 2008

Naturalist home
The Mind Errant home

All text in these pages Copyright 2008 Dana Wilde.
Photos of Earth objects Copyright Dana Wilde and
Bonnie Woellner unless otherwise attributed.
Photos and graphics of outer space objects courtesy
of NASA unless otherwise attributed.
Contact: naturalist@dwildepress.net