Bloodsuckers!

Warning: This is long… and gross! Do not read without a bottle of calamine lotion nearby.

When I was about 10 years old, my sister and I went swimming at a lake in Fairmont Minnesota. It was full of leeches, but we took our chances. Luckily, they only went for our toes, and my cousins killed them with a mixture of salt and beer.

While growin up in the woods of Wisconsin, I often had encounters with ticks, too. Wood ticks, we called em (not deer ticks), and they didn’t carry Yellow Spotted Fever or Lyme Disease back then, either. One particular summer, I got 10 of them on me, at different times. They usually go for the backs of your ears or scalp, coz they can best latch onto a vein or artery back there. You can feel when they sink their proboscis into ya – it’s like an itch. Must be all the anticoagulants and stuff they’re shooting into the blood stream.

The other day I read that ticks don’t just fall from the trees and land on people and animals; they actually do this thing called “questing”, where they rear up on their hind legs and sniff out body heat and/or the carbon dioxide of animals, in order to find their next meal. Little shits.

Of course, if a tick feeds on someone long enough, they end up puffy and green. That’s how they get on dogs. I was a champ at picking “fat woodticks” off my dogs. Grown men often wouldn’t go near them to get the job done, so it fell to me. The way to kill a fat woodtick is by stomping on it – they burst and leave a big puddle of purplish-red blood.

The regular ticks can be almost impervious to death, in their hard shells. Mostly they succumb to flushing or burning. I remember a few heinous times – once right in a grade school library – where my Ma had to light a match, blow it out, and stick it behind my ear to kill a particularly determined tick that she couldn’t just pick off. It was tricky holding still for that.

Then there are chiggers. What a surprise they were to me, when I became infested while picking black-cap berries in a briar patch on a hill in my yard. The black-cap berries fruit about once every two years, and they surround themselves with a maze of thorns. If you can get through them, you can harvest bucketfuls of delicious berries from about a dozen square yards of briars; enough to make jams, wine, jelly… or just eat them raw.

But chiggers love the briars, and they love sucking blood. They propel themselves into skin by crawling under any elastic their victim is wearing. That’s why people usually get a whole spate of chiggers – living under their skin – around their waistlines or bra areas. The infestation is evident by the tiny red dots spreading over the body, and by the insane itching. When I got them, at least four times in my life (I really like those berries), they kept me up at night and blew my concentration on anything but the itch during the day time.

Of course, scratching spreads the chiggers, they like to reproduce while they’re burrowing in ya, and they can take over a large portion of your body. The best way to get rid of chiggers is to try not to scratch (yeah right) and to coat the area with toothpaste – not the gel kind, the pasty kind. Apparently it suffocates them. One way to avoid getting chiggers is to wear socks over your pants and try not to wear any elastic. It was always funny when my sister and I would prepare for berry picking by taking off our bras first! Of course, we’d be wearing long-sleeve shirts, though.

After leeches, ticks and chiggers, there are the ever-popular mosquitoes, jokingly called “Minnesota’s State Bird”. And yeah, there were a lot of them in the summer times in Minnesota, and also Wisconsin, where I could see their larvae and nymphs dancing around in the Mississippi River where I often swam. I got pretty good at catching them during the day time, and believe it or not, but at night, when one noisy mosquito is intent on having its way with your ear, it can drive you to madness.

A good tactic to reduce mosquito madness is to light a Citronella candle. The citronella plant is a natural repellant to mosquitoes. Also, Avon has a moisturizer called Skin-So-Soft, which everyone in the Midwest swears by. In fact, if you rent a canoe on the Mississippi river, you’ll be offered Skin-So-Soft as a side bonus. Mosquitoes hate that shit more than any bug spray on the market including Off. By the way, here’s a weird fact about Off: If you put on nail polish a few hours before using Off, and then spray Off around outside, the paint on your nails will become sticky and gluey again. I don’t know if it’s still true, but in the 1970s and 80s, the chemistry was such that it often happened.

The version of those little bloodsuckers in Hawaii, though, are almost impossible to swat – they are a thousand times faster than the Midwest mosquitoes for some reason. They look different too; they’re black with white stripes on their legs. My dad and I had to contend with them in Hawaii. Those types just love new blood, too. If you are visiting Hawaii they may swarm ya. A week within arriving on the islands, I had over 40 bites on my legs alone. My dad and I would every so often be able to catch and kill one in midair, by quickly clapping our hands together. That behaviour startled others at times, but we knew what we were doing. Imagine just sitting and hanging out with someone who suddenly drops their book or phone and goes CLAP with their hands outstretched, several times a day.

Now, fleas taught me a valuable lesson in college when I lived in Oregon, and that is: Never take a free used couch as a gift. Especially if it used to be home to three stray cats. Some neighbor of mine thought I could use it, but every time I sat in it, I got the feeling of being poked everywhere with big hot needles. This is the feeling these blood-sucking fleas cause while they’re injecting partially digested blood into their host, as they use a second mouth part to suck blood out of them. I finally figured out I had fleas. Luckily they’re relatively easy to get rid of. I threw out the couch and got lots of flea powder to spread liberally around my apartment. My boyfriend at the time didn’t fare as well as I, as he had a habit of sitting on furniture naked. I think he learned a valuable lesson, too.

And then, just a few years ago, I was introduced to bed bugs, when I was living at a hostel in San Francisco. These bloodsuckers like ta wait until you’re asleep and then strike, sucking blood and dumping their gross chemicals into their victims. If you want to check a bed for them, you’ll find rust-like spots on the mattress. This is how you can tell the bed is infested. Bed bugs, like ticks, can usually survive several cycles in the washer and dryer, too. And bed bugs are somewhat easy to see; they’re smaller than ticks but will hang out anywhere on the skin like some mutant baby, sucking any blood they can get. Some people seem more susceptible to them than others. James got a shit-load, while I only had one or two of them on me over a few months’ time. And I’ve heard a few people brag that they had a potion that would rid a bed of bugs, but I never found out what was in the stuff, or how well it worked.

Itchy yet? Boy, my skin is crawling just writing this!

- Cris Devine