The Little Bastards

The Prayer:  Dear gods, of any name, please cease punishing us with this plague. Scour the earth of these wicked creatures, if not now, then at least before blackberry season. So be it.  

Courtesy of some poor soul off the internet

Seed Ticks: For the experienced, two words that elicit immediate and involuntary scratching, perhaps even panic.

It is midnight, when I wake in my bed from a deep slumber, bolt upright, and make a mad dash to the bathroom with only the moonlight to guide my path. In the darkened corners of my sleeping brain, an awareness of itching or bites in my nether regions has brought me sprinting toward the light.

In the bathroom I drop my boxers and take a gander: it is not good. Dozens of red welts, each punctuated by a microscopic black spot, speckle my privates. The British food item of a similar name comes to mind as I give a horrified gasp. There is nothing to do but grab the tweezers and begin extricating the little buggers. One painful tweeze at a time.

Seed ticks, the larval stage of their full-size brethren, are born hungry. Before they can grow up to be big, healthy ticks that menace man and beast, they start off needing a blooded host. When they hatch out, they do so by the thousands, and if you are unlucky enough to brush against an emerging cluster, the larvae happily detach from their home — a blackberry bush or a low-lying tree branch — and attach to your body. Being shy and retiring creatures, they prefer and seek out the more private and sensitive tissues, taking multiple sampling bites along the way before burrowing in to feed.

They are almost invisible, so the first sign of their presence is often that midnight wakeup call. Some years ago, on an overnight at a primitive campsite, we received such a call: nestled in our sleeping bags, an ouch, an itch, a fumbled grab for the flashlight, the evidence dotting both of our bodies. We looked at each other and nodded, hastily rolled up our sleeping bags and packed away our tent, shouldered our backpacks, and hiked seven miles under a full moon to the jeep. Then we drove, squirming, an hour and a half back home … where we immediately went to work tweezing the bastards out of our skin.

Chiggers and Red Bugs: A merit badge of spring and summer you never wanted to earn.

You are 5 years old, proud of the three gallons of plump blackberries you picked with your family. But later that evening, around your waistband, behind your knees and between your legs, the red bumps begin to appear, soon followed by horrible itching. You would rather claw the flesh off your bones than endure any more. Mom and Dad call the kids together, all in a common misery. One at a time you are brought into the den, inspected wearing only your birthday suit, then doused with rubbing alcohol and calamine.

Recovery: The itching and scratching remain as a reminder, long after the culprits are gone, that the mighty are easily felled by the mitey. For treating both chiggers and seed ticks, Southerners swear by the aptly named Chigarid, a smelly camphoric first marketed in the year 1963. I travel with a bottle in my shaving kit, for to be caught far away from home in the midst of an outbreak is to contemplate dark thoughts indeed.

But for actual recovery time I’m reminded of the old saw about poison ivy: it takes 14 days with treatment or two weeks without.

Happy Blackberry Season!