Tick Talk

"How about this hike?" I showed my niece Elizabeth a photo of rolling, flowered hills.

"Never done it," she said. Huh! She's done every hike there is.

"How come?"

"Ticks," she said briefly.

Lots of ticks?

Lots of ticks. Last time she ventured out that direction, her dogs came home looking like armadillos. They had to take a Dremel tool to their ears.

Lifer Lewis's Woodpecker

"But it's supposed to be beautiful. I wouldn't mind trying it. We just have to make sure to stay on the trail."

"I'm out," Dave put in. Dave is a Portland native and has never had a tick on him. He's only ever seen one, and that was one he pulled out of me on a camping trip somewhere else. But he has an abiding and well-earned horror of insects. Mosquitoes plan their conventions around him. On a bad day he can fetch up a pint low. It doesn't calm him down to point out that ticks are more in the spider family. He is certain that if he goes into tick territory he will instantly succumb to any of the diseases they carry, such as Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever, Babesiosis, or The Willies.

Elizabeth and I both grew up on the East Coast. My father used to do a tick check on me after every trip to the woods. It can't be that big a deal to do a tick check on children. If you've ever seen them skinned and laid out you can tell there's not a lot of acreage there, even on the tubby ones, and I was small. We figured we could be careful and check ourselves afterwards.

Because ticks are thoroughly disgusting. They look like a picked scab with hooks for legs, and they will trespass at will on your body, undetected and without permission, their revolting legs moving slowly and deliberately like the chin hairs on a hag that's gumming a baby. They are scouting for soft, damp spots. I have some of those.

Elizabeth had threatened to show up in Hefty bags but she didn't. I tucked light-colored pants into my socks, a t-shirt into my pants, a long-sleeved shirt over all, and slung on my binoculars. I was one Tilley Hat away from full-on birder-nerd fashion.

The hike was beautiful. The weather was grand. The paths were clear. Anytime Elizabeth wanted to examine a flower, she toed the line at the edge of the path and folded over at the waist like a crane. We were careful. And we didn't see a tick. We saw birds and lizards and flowers.

So we pronounced the hike a roaring success, stopped for ice cream, and toodled home. My tucked pants had done the trick, and although we were in open country and never passed under any tree limbs, I scoured my head with my fingernails several times just in case. All clear.

Then I took a shower. Shampooed up. And there, right on top of my head like an oil man scoping out a national park for the best place to drill, was a tick. It had not dug in and was easily, if queasily, introduced to Mr. Toilet. But all night long, nerve clusters in my skin went off randomly, doing tick imitations.

I'm not telling Dave. The Willies are super contagious.

The Wraith

When I have visitors, I like to take them on mountain hikes because that's my favorite thing to do, and so I'm pretty sure it's their favorite thing too, even if they don't realize it at first. These are five-star humdinger hikes, with meadows and hummingbirds and paisley drifts of wildflowers in every color and vistas of volcanoes on the horizon and a scatter of beeping pikas and, theoretically, maybe even a fat furry marmot: every component, in other words, of true happiness. And the hikes are mostly flat, too, except for being inclined at a sharp angle. Remarkably, several decades'-worth of visitors have--independently of each other--referred to my hikes as "death marches." I'm sure it's meant affectionately.

When Linda and Walter came for a vacation actually devoted to hiking, I made sure to front-load the event with my very favorites, figuring they would be left breathless by, probably, the beauty. And then we went to hike on the coast, where a surprising portion of the beauty is at sea level.

Everyone loves the ocean. People in the personal ads always say they like long walks along the beach. No one ever mentions death marches. Walter and Linda were thrilled. The waves roll in and out and people stand before them mesmerized, as though they are watching infinity in a frame, and are somehow comforted by that.

I'm not. It creeps me out. The ocean is just fine from a distance, like a hundred miles, but up close it's all drowny. There's nothing but water out there and most of it is over my head. There's teeth and tentacles and stingers and slithering and darkness and death. It reminds me of the very dwindlety of life, crushed under time, the waves inexorable, doom, doom, doom, and some day one of them is going to take me out. Somewhere out there is my wave, getting a suggestion from the moon and a spin from the rearing continental shelf and beginning to crank my way. I can't look.

But there are distractions. The cliffs are a frozen snapshot of lava hitting the sea. Birds coat the sea stacks. Every tidal puddle is its own neighborhood. We tread the sand for hours and nobody gets even close to dead. I begin to relax.

"What's that?" Walter asks, pointing at the shoreline.

I raise my binoculars. It's a murre, and it's all wrong. Murres shouldn't be standing at the shoreline all by themselves. Murres should be diving for fishes and flying in bunches and jamming the tops of sea stacks and pooping on rocks. Murres definitely shouldn't be shuffling their feet and letting me walk up close enough to take a picture.

My murre is dragging a wing and has a major gash on her breast. My murre is going to die soon. I long to wrap her up in a fleece and drive her all the way back to the mountain and leave her in the custody of a kindly marmot with a well-stocked larder and a dab of mercurochrome. But I turn to leave. I got the message, friend murre. It's all teeth and tentacles and darkness and doom out there.

March March

The beauty part is, we can always blame Elizabeth. We're good hikers but we need that initial punt in the heinie, and our niece is a grade-A heinie-punter. She's the pull-cord for our two-stroke engine. So she's the one that suggested we go for a waterfall hike in the gorge in March. The Columbia Gorge hikes all have a lot in common: they're green, full of waterfalls, and straight up. That's a package deal. They're green from all the water. They're waterfally from all the upness. If you start walking in the Gorge, you can't get very far without starting to climb. And once you start to climb, it's hard to finish, because there's always more up. Devil's Rest, at least, seemed to have an end point. Nothing about the name warned us off. Everyone likes rest.

And because the Gorge has so much Up in it, you can run through several latitudes and months in one day hike. You can start at the bottom in September with the happy woodland critters, and emerge a mile up in January, eyes peeled for trampling caribou. Elizabeth promised we'd stop when we hit snow. We were only going to gain a half mile elevation on this  hike, but we're not in our summer shape, and we got warm right away. "Can't believe people won't hike in the rain," we said to each other, too smug. "Look how beautiful it is. We should've worn shorts and a T-shirt," we said, too snug, unzipping everything we had on.

The View

The snow appears abruptly when you're hiking uphill. First you round the bend and see a little starter patch. Then more and more patches, until they coalesce into a snowfield with intermittent mudslides. The weather personages had forecast light rain, and sure enough there was a whole ton of light rain up there. Nearby trees began to disappear. After a few miles, the first viewpoint presented itself as a wide spot with a sheer dropoff, beyond which squatted a cloudbank thick enough to break your fall. It was magnificent: somewhere below us stretched the majesty of the mighty Columbia churning through the basalt. Or, the shimmering pink sands of Waaka Waaka where the plumious frondle-trees waved in the breeze and tiny pocket monkeys played castanets and dropped petals in our Margaritas. Could have been either, it was hard to tell. We stepped away from the edge and kept shlorping uphill through the snow and mud. Devil's Rest was a view-free bunch of boulders in the forest at a point high enough to funnel a gusting wind in our direction. There was a break in the light rain, in the sense that it was now coming at us sideways. We zipped up, hunched over our sandwiches, and speculated about the freezing point of mayonnaise.

Dave, through clenched teeth, sent out something about Elizabeth and me being entirely too gung ho. There was something about a ho, anyway. I mentioned that the guide book said there was a different way down, conceivably through Tahiti, and that we should be able to make out signs. We peered through the fog and finally noticed signs of hypothermia, and went down the way we came, with the mighty Columbia rumbling below and Dave grumbling behind. Periodically the snow, mud, and downward momentum sent him ricocheting down the trail and into a voluntary face plant on a Douglas fir to stop his slide: shluck shluck shluck SHLOOOORP bink-bink-bink-bink-BAM. Ha ha! Funny Dave!

"I thought," he said tightly, peeling bark from his beard, "we were going to stop when we hit snow."

Elizabeth explained. Usually, when we hit snow, it's passable for a while, and then it suddenly gets too deep to traverse, and that's when we were going to turn back. This snow, however, had remained thin, albeit slick. "So," Dave said, "what you meant was, we would go until the snow was in fact impassable, and at that point we would not continue passing. We would not, as you say, violate any laws of physics. Is that it?" Shluck shluck shluck SHLOOOORP bink-bink-bink-bink-BAM.

"Right," Elizabeth said. "You okay?" she called down.

He was probably okay. He didn't say much the rest of the way down. We got to the car and cranked up the heater until we'd knocked the rime off the interior of our cell walls. "That was great!" Elizabeth chirped when her larynx thawed out. "It'll be even better next time," she said, poking Dave until he seized her by the poker.

"Next time," Dave said, "snow means snow."