Invisible Itch Monsters of Malevolence

People have a funny attitude toward nature. There is a brand new subdivision being built behind my house, and the first thing they did was knock all of the trees down. It was quite a tangle back there, but they dozed, blasted, mowed and dug a great big pit, I suspect for an artificial pond. They ran their power lines, laid down gutters, poured the concrete streets and erected light posts. Finally they built houses, two of them so far. Foundation, studs, drywall, fixtures, the whole shebang, and you want to know the last thing they did before plunking down their “For Sale” signs in the freshly sodded yards? They planted trees. We like nature just fine, but we like it on our own terms, which arguably isn’t nature at all.

This is for a very good reason.

If nature is a mother, she’s the kind that spends all of her time playing candy crush and watching “Days,” with parental responsibility extended strictly to yelling, “don’t set your brother’s pants on fire.” Nature hates you. With all of the things out there that bite, pinch, sting, poison and maim us, nature makes it resoundingly clear that she pretty much prefers us to be dead, so that she can feed on our organs and use the rotted cavities to breed her young. If nature isn’t trying to drive us away, it’s exploiting our bodies for its own benefit. Case in point, the harvest mite.

Harvest mites are arachnids, related to spiders and ticks. They are harmless to humans, and are in fact mildly beneficial as they eat the eggs of pests such as mosquitoes. The mites themselves are not a problem, but their larvae are. These demonic offspring go by the folk name “chigger.”

At 1/150^th of an inch, chiggers are invisible to the naked human eye (for some reason our eyes like to run around in the buff). After they land on you, they wander around and seek an opportune place where they are unlikely to be brushed off, but also have access to thin skin they can sink their mandibles into. Then they bite. Contrary to popular belief, chiggers do not burrow into the skin. They just tear open a hole in your tender epidermis and drool their corrosive saliva into it, turning your skin cells into soup. That’s all. The saliva somehow also hardens the edges of the hole, creating a long tube in the skin that can take weeks for your immune and lymph systems to break down and heal.

The itch is that healing process, and it is maddening. It’s one of those things that is, if you are not currently suffering, not that bad. It’s survivable. Yeah, you vaguely recall that it sucks and sympathize with the victim, but whatever. However, if you are currently suffering, there is no power on earth that will prevent you from scratching. “Don’t scratch,” friends, family doctors and the Internet sagely advise, “you can get a secondary infection.” Well, friends can give themselves a swirly, family doctors can shove a speculum up where the sun don’t shine (top left drawer?), and you know what else is on the Internet? 4chan, which is just as bad as chiggers. It doesn’t matter that you risk secondary infections. It wouldn’t matter if it were medically proven that every scratch removed six months from your life; you will use your fingernails, loofa sponges, sandpaper, rusted hypodermic needles, ANYTHING to relive the itch. People have been known to bathe in turpentine to get the itch under control, and as a current chigger victim, I have no problem believing this.

By the time you notice the itch, you have probably already brushed the offending beast away and there is no way to end it. Nail polish helps because it seals the hole, preventing air from being an irritant. However, over the counter medications such as calamine are more effective, at least that’s what Big Cala wants you to believe. In truth the best way to solve the problem is to prevent it from happening in the first place, so they advise wearing long sleeves, tucking your pants into your boots, and avoiding long grass. I would like to note that the easiest way to do that last one is to not go outside. Ever.