A Sucker For Suckers

Well, I won't get too far into it. Let's just say that someone on Facebook is highly offended by the promotion of the deadly COVID vaccine, and also toxic masking, and you can tell she's serious because of all the capital letters. And:

"I will never go to a hospital as it's wholly unnecessary.

I do not trust man or medicine, I trust myself and God."

Well, she sounds like she has things well in hand. I don't think she's very old, so that helps with the health thing. She goes on to say she's survived plenty of viruses already, and people die of many other things every day, that's how life goes, and doggone it, I'm guessing that--except for a clear tendency toward hysteria--she's probably in good shape so far. So I don't want to be the one to tell her God is planning to take her out.

But it did get me to thinking about how many perspectives there are on taking care of oneself. Take my sister Margaret, for instance.

I don't want to describe Margaret as "medically fragile" because, despite her economy of stature, whe was one stout-hearted, robust, fully-realized human being. She lived as big as anyone ever has. Let's call her "medically"...hmm...let's see..."screwed."

 

She looked everywhere for an answer to her many and varied and ever-evolving pains, not to mention her mortality, which might have been more of an immediate concern to her than it is to most people. She had a number of beliefs that I would call "woo-woo" but I certainly had no interest in arguing about them. Whatever worked for Margaret was A-Okay with me. She definitely had a strong suspicion she had lived before, and might live in some form again, especially when some guru examined her aura and told her she had had polio as a youngster in the 1800s. Or something like that.

 

I guess that offered hope for a better throw of the dice the next time, although two consecutive lives with polio didn't seem that auspicious to me. For the current incarnation, she tended to approach her own suffering by adjusting her expectations and spiritual outlook. Mind over mutter, and all that.

 

So it was no particular surprise to me the day she demonstrated her new theory about mosquitoes. Dave and I were visiting her in Maine and the density of voracious bugs was appalling. Margaret held her arm out and a mosquito landed on it. "Go ahead, honey," she purred to the mosquito, "take whatever you need." And we watched as the mosquito sank her proboscis into Margaret's arm, for a good long while, and then drew it back out and plumply flew away. Margaret explained that remaining calm, revering all life, and allowing the good bug to do what it wanted to do, unmolested, would result in no welt and no itching.

So maybe. But at the time we were out on the shore being blitzed by the little assholes. I was plenty horrified by the onslaught, but when Dave saw the swarm coming--it blotted out the sun--he flew into panic mode. If mosquitoes are motorcyclists, Dave is their Sturgis rally. It was about to get gruesome in a hurry. While Margaret refined her temperament to include hospitality to mosquitoes, Dave took off running. The man could cover a lot of ground in a hurry. The car was parked a half mile away and a couple minutes later we could hear the door slam. Hell, we could hear the sound of mosquitoes in pursuit smashing themselves against the windows. And when we caught up to him, he was busy in the car sending as many mosquitoes as he could to their next lives.

I can't remember if we checked Margaret's arm in the aftermath. I do remember the first time someone offered Dave a couple Benadryls after a particularly harrowing attack. We were eating dinner and Dave was visibly swelling up and audibly anxious about how much worse he would be the next day. But he took the Benadryl. Next thing we knew his forehead was in the mashed potatoes and no one had the heart to remove him from his dinner. He slept for ten hours and woke up unscathed. That's not God, baby doll. That's Benadryl.

Not Pioneer Stock

There's more than one way of getting to the little lake we wanted to visit. We wanted to take the Pacific Crest Trail, famous for scenically containing Reese Witherspoon and her giant backpack in Wild. But the signage was unclear, and we accidentally took a parallel path. After a quarter mile, it dumped us onto a dirt road. In fact, we were on the famous Barlow Road, named after Famous Barlow, who did some honest work felling trees and widening deer trails to allow passage of a covered wagon, or a few hundred thousand, across a major volcano, and collecting a nice toll at a cinch point. Without a doubt, I presumed, this road would transition back into an attractive woodsy trail and meet up with our destination lake, which not only had a mountain view but was likely to harbor gray jays. We like birds that land on us. We'd brought an entire baggie of Cheerios just for them.

"Not to worry," I told Dave, consulting my mental map--old people still have those--"this will end up in the same place if we just keep on it." And so I fervently believed for about four miles. The road failed to adjourn to woodsiness and dust began associating with my pants. I was, in fact, dusty. Like the people on the Oregon Trail, I said to myself.

The Oregon Trail is local history and of much interest to those who trace their heritage to it, but I never got real interested. Seemed so bleak. All dust and slog and sizing up your companions as possible dinner material. You didn't even get to ride in the wagon much. You were too busy fixing your wheel or pushing your oxen out of a rut or dividing a potato nine ways. And you probably started out starving or you wouldn't have left in the first place.

Maybe most people looking for a home in America were driven as much by the need to escape something as the promise of a better future. My ancestors had hopes of finding a territory unscathed by religion, so they could put a bunch of theirs in it. You might be seasick in a tub of a boat or eating dust on the trail, but none of it was easy.

This Barlow Road was beginning to get on my nerves. There should have been a tie trail to the Pacific Crest at some point, but it kept not showing up. The dust made me want to push my bonnet back with a weary forearm and say Lawsa Mercy and Saints Alive. Then I got bit by a mosquito. I can go years between mosquito bites if I stick close to home. Then came the second mosquito. I can do math, and I was thinking geometric progression. What's the point of already being in Oregon if we have to be on the Oregon Trail again? The road veered away from the direction I'd imagined the lake was. A fly showed up with a vicious gleam in its compound eye. Dave was squinting at me like he was wondering how I'd go with potatoes. I began to doubt that we were going to find the lake. Maybe this road was going somewhere else.

Maybe Kansas.

But maybe that's not all bad, I thought, rationalizing another quarter mile. Some of the very nicest people I've ever known are from Kansas.

Oh wait. They're from Kansas. Which means they got the hell out.

We turned back. We saw a deer. We had a beer. Someday soon, folks are going to be on the move again, likely without electricity or reliable food sources. But no point going pioneer until we have to.

Dengue Shui

Dengue Fever has popped up down in Key West. Dengue Fever is brought to us by mosquitoes. Unless you're a frog, mosquitoes never bring you anything you want. It's been one thing after another with them ever since our ancestors shambled out of Africa, slapping themselves siilly. People who get Dengue Fever might present with no symptoms at all, or they might die. Which makes Dengue Fever a lot like life.

Nobody knows how to kill the Dengue virus, so they're going after the suitcases they come in on. They're going to try to alter the mosquitoes. Only the females bite people, because they need a blood meal to reproduce, whereas the males are fine with beer and bean dip. So they plan to get a bunch of the male mosquitoes, and introduce a gene that will cause them to drop dead.

So far, swatting sounds easier. Even the prospect of combing through the mosquito population for the ones with tiny mosquito penises sounds hard, and that's even before the gene manipulation. But it's more complicated than that. They want the mosquitoes to drop dead after they mate with the wild female population (Key West being famous for wild females), and thus after they have passed their gene of doom into a new generation. After a few more rounds, no more mosquitoes.

The way they plan to keep the male mosquitoes alive long enough to pass on the self-destruct gene is to give them tetracycline. They're counting on the mosquitoes to be even worse at going the full course on the tetracycline than people are. The only drawback so far seems to be that the manipulated mosquitoes don't mate as readily as the wild population, which makes sense. Existential dread can suppress the libido.

Mosquitoes mostly don't live very long anyway, although some  have adapted to being frozen for long periods and then thawing out good as new. So there might be some promise in introducing a gene for freezer-burn. Other researchers were looking into the possibility of introducing a gene that prolongs the adolescence of the mosquito, causing its own parents to murder the insolent little bastards. In this way the bad karma is off-loaded to the bugs themselves. But this approach was abandoned when it was found that the aggravation of having teenage mosquitoes around caused the female mosquitoes to drink even more, resulting in a spike in Dengue transmission.

There are people worried about this whole venture. Genetic manipulation, it is feared, will have unforeseen consequences down the road, such as a collapse of all mosquito populations. And that might lead to a collapse of everything else on up the food chain, including us, and the likelihood that the final generation of humans will not be itchy is considered an insufficient benefit. Opponents point out that the Aedes aegypti mosquito, which carries Dengue virus, is uniquely adapted to breed in still water in vessels as small as a tire or a bottlecap. So, in theory, a campaign to eradicate breeding opportunities by cleaning up litter would be a feasible low-tech alternative to gene futzing. However, Key West is still in America, which means any official attempt to curtail littering will be widely interpreted as a threat to

our freedoms.

So we're back to square one. The truly American thing to do would be to somehow supply arms to the mosquitoes, all factions, and let them kill each other. That's always worked out well for us.  Or maybe we should just accept the idea that the Dengue virus and its mosquito hosts are going to peel off a certain portion of our population. Except that we don't like bugs to do that. We'd rather do it ourselves.

Maine: A Love Letter

Dear Maine,

Photo by Walter Henritze

As a frequent visitor from Oregon, I have a few observations about you. They are meant affectionately, of course. When you come from a state where everyone wears socks with their sandals and nobody owns an umbrella, you do not take potshots.

Maine is not a large state by western U.S. standards, but if you start at the bottom and work your way up on the coastline, you will have gone north and south enough times to develop your own polarity. The underlying granite is corrugated and pleated and it trails its fringe into the sea like a hippie mama. As a consequence, most people in Maine seem to live somewhere on the water, and with a substantial acreage, too. It's cheap. No one has much money and they get by selling each other antiques, plowing each other's driveways, repairing each other's plumbing, slapping on each other's additions and installing each other's generators. They've got a homemade sign up in their yards with their specialty and phone number, and the economy lumbers along at a perfectly adequate clip. By contrast, our economy in Oregon is based entirely on selling each other coffee drinks. We too are poor, but alert.

The magnificent granite also rears up inland, surfacing like whales. It's not unusual to see a whole pod of granite slabs cresting the soil right in the middle of the woods. And it's easy to see things in the woods. Out here we let our forests get quite unruly, but people in Maine like to tidy theirs. They keep a hacksaw handy-by, clip out any unsightly saplings and chip up the debris, leaving a neat duff floor and a view to the nearby water.

The houses have a big patch of these tidy woods in the rear, a vegetable garden out back, and a massive lawn bounding across the property and hooking up with the neighbors'. It is possible to ride a mower for several hundred miles most places, and right to the bottle redemption center everywhere. People come home from work and hop on their mowers, pushing the speed lever up to the max to outrun the black flies, and then they've just got time to boil up some lobsters and go to bed. That's only in the spring, of course. Later they're outrunning the mosquitoes. There's a day or two between black fly season and mosquito season, and folks get on their phones to tell each other just when that is. "They took off yesterday here in Winthrop," they'll say. "They should be clearing out of Waterville real soon." It's party time.

Everybody in Maine knows how to take a lobster apart, and they eat the green stuff, too. No one is squeamish about dropping them in the boiling pot, either. I tend to cringe a little every time I see it, but I don't have to slice my pork chops off a live pig. They drop their lobsters right into the steam, and then every one of them will maintain that the lobster doesn't feel it. There's no logic in this. They say this for the same reason people insist dogs mustn't eat chocolate. More lobster for me; more chocolate for me.

But my favorite thing about Maine is the architecture. That's a big word to apply to the houses that lope over the landscape, and implies a degree of deliberate design that isn't actually in evidence. What really happens is someone back in the 1800s builds himself a house. He builds himself an outbuilding down the way. In the intervening years he accumulates children and odd building materials, and every time he gets a dab of money together he scabs on a new room. The new room gets put on wherever there's the least granite. After a hundred years or so, the house is lurching across the yard and threatening to stagger into the outbuilding. Winters are harsh. At some point, it just makes sense to hitch the house up to the outbuilding, poke in the last interior door and grab the hacksaw without even going inside. And bingo, there's your architecture.

There's nothing about this arrangement that makes sense, from the standpoint of artistic composition. It's not what you'd get if you sat down and designed a house that size. But somehow it speaks to me. It reminds me of my own interior landscape. I start with a modest idea, lose track, struggle for nouns, forget where I'm going, hook one random thought to the next, and before you know it, I've made an essay.

Photo by Walter Henritze

Vampires Among Us

The first mosquito was annoying. It wasn't until I slapped the second, a minute or two later, that I was flooded with panic. It hit me like that white flash of shock you get when you've only popped into the store for some cigarettes and maybe one game of video poker and suddenly a few hours later you remember you've left the kids in the car with the windows rolled up and a case of Ho-Hos and a little bottle of something to help you get some sleep. Pure dread.

I ran around the place looking for my strong, lean, brave man but when I found him it was too late. He was already slumped over, whimpering, drained, anemic, and a little pudgy. The pudge was due to a uniform layer of fused welts swelling his body a half inch in every direction. "I'm gonna die," he said.

He doesn't scare easily. This is the guy who maintained for years that "anybody can quit smoking. It takes a man to face lung cancer."

Mosquitoes adore Dave. They plan their holidays around him. When they're done with him they all go off and lie down, patting their bellies and burping and maybe watching a little football. For years we have employed him at barbecues to stand a little off to the side and draw mosquitoes. They'd be ecstatic. We'd hear them yelling "wheeeeeeee-oooooo" with the Doppler effect kicking in as they zoomed overhead. If we brought him enough hot dogs he'd stand over there all afternoon and smack himself like a masochist with Tourette's.

One time, in Maine, my sister and Dave and I walked through a mosquito-drenched forest to get to the beach (this is him on said beach with his socks stylishly pulled up as far as they will go to cut down on exposed skin). We expected the beach to be windy enough to repel mosquitoes and it was, except not these mosquitoes. Dave bailed out in fear when he got to the water and discovered they were still there. He ran a mile back to the car, shut himself and a few hundred mosquitoes inside and maniacally slapped the living crap out of every surface in it. Anyone happening upon the scene would have been concerned enough to call the authorities, after first pulling back a few miles.

We're not supposed to have mosquitoes in Portland. Screen porches are unknown. We only keep screens on a couple of windows to keep the cat in. Even Dave gets no more than a bite a night at worst, from the single mosquito in a mile radius. But suddenly this year we have mosquitoes, and their arrival coincided with the temperatures rising to near a thousand degrees, and at night we left a couple windows open a crack, leaving all the lights off. Dave woke up with a mosquito biting his lip, which swelled enormously. He looked like Angelina Jolie with a beard, which is surprisingly attractive. "What more can I do?" he wailed, and other than trying it again the next night with his pants off, I couldn't think of a thing.

The reason we have mosquitoes this year is the record-breaking rains we had in May and June, brought to us by the same folks that brought unseasonal snow, monster hurricanes and successive hundred-year floods. Mainly people like James "Global Warming Is A Hoax" Inhofe, who also doesn't think much of universal health care. If Dave ever gets out of the ICU, that's who I'm sending the bill to.

Moon Over Loon

Why would a girl from Portland, Oregon go all the way to Maine to see a meteor shower? It's a reasonable question. Why not North Dakota?

Dave ("Mosquito Feast") hadn't had a good case of West Nile fever since our last trip to Maine, so he was rarin' to go. Walter and Linder had arranged for a bunch of us to spend a week in a magnificent house on the coast, where we had mid-Augusted before. (Retired union folk on a fixed income don't "summer," but that's okay.) It's a loon-laden and ospreyed-over locale, and beautiful, and would be plenty quiet if it weren't for the loons. This is not a complaint.

The only rule at the Punch Bowl on the Eggemoggin Reach is to do what you really want to do, as long as you wouldn't be doing it otherwise, and a big help in this regard is that the place is unmolested by the Internet. That gains everyone a few new hours a day right there. First there's the sleeping-in competition. Linder always loses; she claims she never dreams, so she has to settle for watching the real sun rise over the water instead, followed by a few hours' communion with an eagle or a seal, while swatting hummingbirds away from her left ear (honey, what's in there?). Then the rest of the crew comes to and tucks into breakfast (leftover cake and ice cream). Someone always steps up to make something deadly for dinner, and the rest of the day is spent as we wish.

We became accustomed to the local soundscape: the chirruping of the osprey in the cove, the hootling of the loon in the reach, the clattering of the helicopter in the meadow. The helicopter would be Chris and Hetty's. Chris and Hetty take "dropping in" very seriously.

Monday (lobster night!) many of us spent the day in the Punch Bowl, the shallow little inlet where the water hits the hot sand at high tide and warms up like any other bathtub full of starfish and barnacles. Tuesday (crabcakes) Linder was gracious enough to give watercolor lessons to all interested parties, even though she does that for a living. I brought a box of pastels instead and indulged in hours of painting en plein air, which is French for "under the pooping birds." This is also how Jackson Pollock got his start. Bruce, Elizabeth, Walter, and Donna continued their efforts in watercolor Wednesday (lobster night!) and Thursday (sauteed shrimp). Dickie gathered items off the forest floor and made a table out of them. Jeannine trolled the house for feet to oil up and rub. Elizabeth devoted her days to fashioning fabulous and slimming bead jackets for stones. Stones, she explained, are modest. Mornings, she exercised on a yoga mat, knees clasped, rocking gently back and forth, back and forth, echoing the ambient sound of the waves slapping and farting against the shore.

Maine has been rainy and cool, alternating with cool and rainy, all summer. So we hauled in some of that fine sunny weather Oregon has been known for since the Republicans bollixed up the climate. You're welcome, Maine--it was nothing. We've had a surplus. We also checked out the forecast for the meteor showers. They were expected to peak on Wednesday. Wednesday afternoon. No sunglasses are that good, so we crawled up to the roof at night with nothing over us but the whole Milky Way and a thin blanket. The meteors, being stones, were modest. Dave, swaddled in mosquitoes, attracted a giant diving bat. This sort of thing no longer surprises me.

Dave and I kayaked for loons. Your standard loon, natty in vest and tie by Frank Lloyd Wright, is un-harrassable as a matter of personal policy: he will dive when approached, popping back up in the next zip code with a bellyful of anchovies. But on our last visit a loon putzed around us just a few webbed feet away, diving under our boats, and Dave watched him so ardently that he tipped right over. It's all about context: same heinie one might see any given morning getting a good scratch in the bathroom is a far more glorious thing when it's heading into the drink in pursuit of a loon. The loon thought it was funny, too. He told all his friends about it, all night long.

The only mandatory event at the Punch Bowl is the daily Watching Of The Sunset, convened on the capacious west porch. The sun is toasted with wine and spirits, everyone seated in a comfy chair, Dave standing off to the side, dimly visible inside a cloak of mosquitoes. On Friday (lobster night!) we took in our last sunset, Dave's new West Nile belly rash glowing rosy in the fading light.