Tuck Your Pants In

There is a particular kind of humility that comes from being food. Not metaphorically. Literally. The moment you understand that something the size of a sesame seed has been feeding on you in your sleep, and that for the full duration of its meal it ranked higher on the food chain than you did, is the moment certain philosophical questions resolve themselves. You are not the top of anything. You are a buffet that happens to walk around. Up here in the Bend, that's a seasonal revelation that lasts about as long as the ground isn't frozen.

Which, lately, is most of the year.

We are heading into what the knowledgeable folks call the autumn surge in tick activity. Spring gets all the press. People pull on hiking boots with the first warm day and feel invincible. Fall is when ticks make their second push, and it catches people off guard because by October you've stopped thinking about it. The thinking, stopped, is exactly when they get you.

For readers in places where tick season sounds like something that happens to other people: up here in the upper Midwest we have blacklegged ticks, also called deer ticks, and they carry Lyme disease plus a whole menu of additional unpleasantness. They are small. They are patient. They are unmoved by your feelings about them.

The standard protocol in these parts is what I'd call the porch method. You come in from the woods, you strip on the porch, this is a precaution and not a performance, and you check. Yourself. Your dog. Yourself again. Big Earl at the grain elevator says he checks himself three times because the first two times he's too hopeful to spot anything. That is the most honest thing Earl has said since he started treating the commodity reports like scripture, and I include the time he predicted a corn rally based on the book of Leviticus.

The porch method works. Mostly. The trouble with mostly is that it takes exactly one tick you missed, in a spot you can't see, attached long enough, to start a conversation with your immune system that you did not invite and did not schedule.

Here is what I've learned this year. If you find an attached tick and get yourself to a clinic within 72 hours, there is a single dose of doxycycline that can head off Lyme disease before it gets started. One pill. Your doctor has to decide it's right for you, and around here the answer is almost always yes, because around here the ticks are carrying the bacteria and everybody knows it. Pass that 72-hour window, though, and the door closes. Then it's a longer course of antibiotics, or watching and waiting, or both, and the calendar starts working against you.

There's a wrinkle in the testing, too, and it is the kind of wrinkle that makes medicine feel like it was designed by someone who enjoys explaining things. Lyme tests detect antibodies. Your body takes weeks to produce enough antibodies to show up on a test. So you can be infected, test negative, and be told you're fine when you aren't. Then weeks later, once your immune system has had time to gear up, you test positive. The test tells you something happened. It doesn't always tell you what's happening right now. The result is a little like those old tide charts. They'll tell you something, but you still have to look at the water.

Now where was I? Right. The tick.

There's also the matter of co-infections. Lyme isn't the only thing these ticks carry. Anaplasmosis, babesiosis, ehrlichiosis, those are just the ones I can spell on the second try. Some require different treatment than Lyme. You can have more than one at a time. I mention this not to alarm anyone but to be straight: the tick that bit you wasn't ordering from one page of the menu.

Pastor Holmgren preached a few weeks back about the difference between vigilance and fear. Vigilance is checking the lock on your door. Fear is never leaving the house. I thought it was a good sermon, which I do not always, and it applies here. You tuck your pants into your socks. You do the tick check. You save the tick in a sealed bag with the date written on it. You stay awake to your own body for a few weeks. But you still go outside. You still garden and hunt and walk the dog and do all the things that make the outside worth being in. The alternative is letting something the size of a sesame seed run your whole calendar, and that is a poor arrangement for a creature that doesn't even have a calendar.

One more thing. The University of Wisconsin has been running trials on something called Tick Tubes. You put out treated nesting material for mice, because mice are where the Lyme bacteria live before ticks pick it up and carry it to us. Treat the mice, reduce the ticks, reduce the risk. Target the problem closer to its start. Mild winters mean more mice surviving to spring. More mice mean more infected ticks. More infected ticks mean more of us discovering, in October, that something small and determined made itself at home behind our knees without asking.

They're forecasting a mild winter this year. Something about El Niño. Big Earl has opinions about El Niño, but I'll spare you those.

I'll be getting some of those tubes. I'll still be stripping on the porch. I'll still be checking myself three times, because Earl was right that the first pass is too optimistic to be of any use. He's right about more than he gets credit for, but don't tell him. He'll bring it up at euchre and Pastor Holmgren will hold it against me until Easter.

Ticks don't negotiate. They want one thing and they go after it. The least we can do is be equally single-minded about not giving it to them.

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