Life in the Woods

Partly influenced, I’m guessing, by Thoreau’s Walden—nine years ago my bride and I moved to the mountain woods of North Carolina. We, too, “wished to live deliberately.” In my own experiment I’ve discovered that “life in the woods” is indeed mostly idyllic, but have also come to realize that ole Henry David might have glossed over a few unpleasant drawbacks to “a primitive and frontier life.”

I could, for example, mention the multiflora, climbing wild roses with long flexible canes that take over everywhere. Multiflora, I learned, is known as an aggressive plant not only because of its invasive spreading habit. Once as I hacked through a thicket of these arching canes, a thorn hooked into my upper lip. Thoreau does describe fishing, but in his narrative he is the fisher, not the fishee.

The Walden woods hermit also fails to “front” what for me has been the “essential fact of life” in the woods, namely insects. Sure, he describes a battle of some ants—but they’re battling each other; he’s not battling them. I’ve been bitten by mosquitoes, gnats, flies, and ants and have been stung by wasps, hornets, and yellow jackets, and right now, carpenter bees are enlarging the honeycomb of tunnels they have already chewed into the wood of my house.

The worst woodland insects don’t just bite and run but instead come to stay for a visit: insects like chiggers—even the name is disturbing—which you can’t see but which raise large itchy welts where they’ve burrowed under your skin. But at least chiggers voluntarily vacate the premises after a few days and at least you can’t see their horrifying appearance. Neither of these ameliorations is true, however, of my least favorite essential fact of woodsy life, . . . which is ticks. Ticks look like tiny bloody crabs. They crawl on you, stick their heads into your body, suck your blood, and afflict you with terrible diseases. I spread insect poison all around my cabin every spring, and still there they are. The woods are a ticking time bomb: tick, tick, tick.

You might think you could avoid the little suckers by staying out of high weeds, but several times I’ve found them crawling on the floors and walls of our kitchen. Once I even found one on my car’s steering wheel. How does a tick get on the steering wheel of your car, and what’s it doing there? Trying to drive!? Trying to drive me crazy!

Of course the most repulsive place to find ticks is on your own body. I was first introduced to these unwanted guests as I sat on our deck. Ticks dropped from tree branches above, landing on my head, neck, and shoulders like Black Ops forces. Paratrooper ticks! Thoreau didn’t even hint at such a nightmare. We now refer to our deck as “tick town.”

Once they’ve landed on you, they usually hightail it for your head since they like to hide in your hair, and once they get there, they “attach.” I have found ticks crawling on nearly every part of my body. And just last summer—this is really true—I touched my nose and felt a scab where there was no scab, so I pinched and, sure enough, I had a hitchhiker.

Now as I said before, ticks are disseminators of disease, but the Internet has reassured me that ticks need to be attached for more than 24 hours to infect their hosts. So your best defense against tick-borne disease is early detection—which further means your best defense is self-touching. A lot of self-touching. When you see a mountain man running his fingers through his hair, don’t assume he thinks he’s James Dean; he’s probably just probing for parasites. When I pinched the tick off my nose, I pondered exactly where he was going. As I said before, ticks prefer hairy hideaways, so it occurred to me that his destination might have been my nose’s interior. Now I’m not necessarily recommending routinely conducting tick touch tests inside your nostrils, but if you’re in the woods, how could you risk not doing so? You just have to feel around; you don’t have to pick.

At the end of Walden, Thoreau says he left the woods after two years for as good a reason as he went there. I’m betting . . . it was ticks.

(This piece originally appeared in NuTHOuSE. Written at Wildacres Retreat.)