When I was little I was afraid of dodge ball, the flying monkeys in The Wizard Of Oz, and Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever. In adolescence I remember feeling horribly humiliated by girls making fun of my hairy legs. Well, that’s just the hazard of growing up. Childhood fears are universal. Basically the only things that have materially changed over the years are that now kids are afraid of the death of the living world, or of coming home to find your parents have been hauled off by ICE agents, or of the likelihood that one of your little classmates is going to second-amendment your little ass right there in 7th-grade English. As for adolescent humiliation, it’s all same-same, except now you will be shamed online for being a whore or being so ugly you should just kill yourself.
So except for a sharp uptick in existential dread and a reasonable expectation that our habitable world will soon cease to exist due to the greed and fecklessness of the ruling class, everything’s about the same. I certainly hesitate to diminish the horror of the Wicked Witch of the West and her monkeys. True, we also were told that we might die at the hands of Nikita Khrushchev, but I don’t remember that being so frightening. We had desktops to duck under for that, and by that time most of the wooden ones had been replaced by stout Formica numbers made out of the cutouts for the sink from kitchen counters. They were nuke-worthy.
I was also afraid of heart attacks, for a while there. In third grade a bunch of kids ran in from the blacktop and said one of our classmates had had a heart attack. He probably just fainted. It’s hot in Virginia and there weren’t a lot of coronary events in the eight-year-old set. It was a silly fear. Unlike Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever.
I don’t know how many people got RMSF back then. But it wasn’t zero. I heard about it often enough that it was easy for me to see it as a threat. Running with scissors might put your eye out, but Spotted Fever could kill you.
You get it from ticks.
Stinking ticks. Absolutely nobody likes them, not even entomologists. Ticks are revolting. They have hard little flat bodies protected by something called a scutum. You don’t even have to know what a scutum is to know it’s disgusting. They look like scabs with legs. And they can crawl all the way up your body to your hairline or even stop at a convenient midway hairline and you’ll never even feel them.
Once they’ve found just the right spot to be disgusting in, they cut out a hole in your person, jam in a barbed anchor screw, and glue themselves to you with tick cement so they can comfortably and efficiently infect you with any one of a score of diseases you don’t want. You are the host: they are the guest that stays too long, empties your fridge, and puts cigarette holes in the curtains.
With the climate warming and humidity rising all over the world, ticks are having a heyday. There’s a suckee born every minute, is the tick mantra. Now there’s a new one: the invasive Asian Longhorned Tick, first spotted in New Jersey and bent on empire. Next up we’ll have a tick with tusks, tail spikes, and rotating scythes on their hubcaps.
Nobody likes ticks. Not even opossums. The PR firm hired by the Opossum Anti-Defamation League has been spreading the rumor that opossums eat, like, five billion ticks each, but it’s not true. They might swallow a tick they’re grooming out of their fur, but they’ll do it with their lips pulled back. Ticks are awful.
Nobody wants them. But here they are. They been around since the Cretaceous and we know it because some of the early ones finally died in tree sap and hardened up. What we need is more amber, people. Lots more amber. Also, a new president.
So what you’re saying is more orange rock, less orange c…, like some sort of resin-stance movement?
My neighbors informally gather most nights to talk and watch their children ride bikes while the dogs chase them. Occasionally we play catch football or soccer with the kids. Soccer is apparently a new concept as the 11 or 12 year old who is the main player doesn’t know the primary rule of no hands allowed (except by the goalie or the ref).
Anyway, last night we were talking and the soccer playing child responded to something I was saying about my childhood that ticks must have been an issue.
We thought ticks were horrible and looked for ticks on us or attached or just hanging out waiting for someone to walk by. We’ve learned in recent years that ticks can fly. They use static electricity to pull themselves to their prey.
Here’s the point. Compared to their numbers today, ticks in the Sixties and Seventies were rare in my neighborhood and the adjacent Pine Barrens. There were three reasons. It was a new development where the vegetation and topsoil had been cut down and scraped away. The township sprayed DDT every night in the summer. Deer and white footed mice, the primary hosts were rare. And we had regular wildfires.
These days in NJ we do have the occasional wildfire, but mostly the full scale conflagrations of the past ARE a thing of the past because of controlled burns. Those are mostly carried out on state lands, which does leave a lot of private land covered in ready tinder.
White tailed deer were rare when I was growing up, mostly because they had been hunted so heavily that new deer had to be imported (from Virginia, I think), which of course brought along a lot of new ticks. Today there isn’t anywhere near as much hunting and deer make their homes in tiny patches of forest and golf courses all over the state. Seeing a deer is a regular occurrence and seeing a tick-loaded deer is normal too.
I’m not sure that white footed mice were ever rare, but they’re doing quite well for themselves these days as evidenced by the number that show up in my kitchen each year.
My personal feeling is that the lack of fire and probably DDT are the main reasons for the explosion of the local tick and chigger population.
We spent a lot of time in the woods as children, didn’t spray ourselves with pesticide and rarely found a tick on ourselves and had no idea what a chigger was.
Today I have to spray myself before going out into my backyard, let alone into the woods behind my house. Maybe because I have hairy legs I generally get some warning if a tick is climbing up.
My family spent a lot of time camping, but we only encountered any number of ticks in Virginia. There were crazy numbers in the fields around one campground. I was walking along a trail and noticed that the grass bordering the trail was covered in a blue-ish gray dust. Looked closer and the dust was thousands, maybe even millions of ticks waving their forelegs and hoping to hitch a ride to breakfast.
I still meet starry eyed nature lovers promulgating the myth that possums seek out and devour ticks, although the memes to that effect on Facebook seem to have finally gone away. There’s still some local nature centers peddling that myth. So much for doing your own research.
This is why the dog is not allowed on the bed.
Once, a couple decades ago, Paul and I were hiking in Ashland Nature Center, which has a wide variety of trails and different ecosystems (piedmont, valley, etc.) A large, friendly dog was following us all over as we hiked. Until. We were going down a grassland trail. We called to the dog, but he turned away, almost visibly shuddering. We should’ve listened to the dog. He knew something we didn’t. We came out of there with ticks, which we had to look for and pick off each other.
More recently, I pulled one off me that had apparently been on me for some time. I hadn’t been doing any yard work, but I had visited my friends who have two black labs. I was petting them and cuddling them, and I can only think that it sprang off a dog and onto me, and crawled up under my dress. I didn’t realize that they could use static electricity to spring onto one. Now I’m even more creeped out about them.