I Hate Bugs #3: Rainforest Leeches

Aaaand we’re back to the tropics again to look at a creature out of my worst nightmares.  I realize leeches are far, far removed from insects (they’re in the same class as earthworms) and no one in their right mind would really call them “bugs” outside a Calvin & Hobbes comic strip.  But for me, they tap into the same level of ohmygoditchygetitoff as something like venomous snakes and wasps, so I’m going to include them here.

POW!  Did that scare you?  Because that's how I feel about leeches!

Now, there is not much out there that genuinely scares the pants off me.  Snakes and sharks, to be sure, but after that I have the fear capacity of an Ikea desk.  Planes, traffic, spiders, pathogens, Sarah Palin, and needles are things I don’t adore but certainly don’t evoke visceral terror for me.  But leeches.  Oh God, leeches.  They really do writhe around like wormy zombies in my own private version of hell.

And so, if you ever need to break me during interrogation, my secret is out.

Something about things that are so wobbly and wiggly and drink blood.  Gahhh.  It makes me itch and squirm just thinking about them.

This is what a leech’s mouth looks like:

And when you recover from that, here are some leeches eating someone and getting exorbitantly fat:

Do you understand my position here?  There is not a single level on which my brain does not recoil at these creatures.  Once they bite you, they’ll ingest up to ten times their own body weight in blood, then drop off in an engorged state of obesity.   They are really really really fucking gross.

The worst leech experience I’ve had was in Australia, climbing Mt. Bartle Frere with my friend Terri.  

This is how I used to feel about hiking.  DESTROYED.

We set off into the jungly hillside, following a muddy trail up as the rainforest got darker and darker, until we stopped for a drink of water—at which point we realized something was... kind of tickly. 

By the time we noticed something weird, there were dozens of wormy things marching up our boots and legs, and more of them already latched up and curled up for a long feast.

In horror, I brushed them off my boots first and felt their little mucusy bodies mushing under my fingers.  Ewwww.  Then I tried to brush them off my legs AND THEY HUNG ON.  I had to actually grasp, pull, and stretch out their bodies before they’d let go of my skin, which would then be left with a bleeding hole.  And by the time I’d gotten them all off, more were marching up my boot.  I won’t lie, I was practically having a heart attack at this point.

And that’s when I discovered them INSIDE my boots.  See, I wear thin socks to fit my hiking boots, and they had crawled over the ankles of the boots and down into the hollows on either side of my Achilles tendon.

There they had curled up, bitten through my sock, and made themselves comfortable—in a pile of a dozen leeches per ankle.  That meant that as soon as I pulled at my sock, they were all dislodged—which was great!—and the skin on my ankle was demolished—which was not great.  It bled like hell and it itched like hell.  

At this point I was more or less having a complete psychological meltdown.

And now, my personal sanity scatters like birdshot.

Unfortunately, neither Terri nor I had thought to bring any kind of bug spray, so the only thing we could think to do was to smear sunscreen all over our boots to try to repel them.

Pictured: Not an effective leech repellent.

It didn’t work—a minute later there was an army of leeches marching up through our SPF 15.

They crawled out of every speck of dirt and leaf litter around—and remember that we were in a damn rainforest, so there was nowhere to hide.  I remember finding a 6 x 6 inch patch of bare rock to stand on with one foot to avoid being chewed while Terri tied a shoelace.

The only thing we could think to do to avoid them was run.  And run we did—we bolted up that mountain faster than I have ever hiked anywhere, until finally we reached an altitude where the rainforest was a bit drier and the leeches had vanished.  My onrushing schizophrenic hell receded into the background and we stopped to catch our breath and have lunch.  But we still had to get through the leech zone on the way back down.

We steeled ourselves—and then bolted down the hill like monkeys.  We must have taken all of half an hour from summit to trail head.  Inevitably for me at speeds like that, I tripped and fell—at which point all the lurking leeches jumped onto my body.  I got most of them off, but later discovered a couple hiding on my lower back and—not kidding, horror of horror shows, my groin.

My ankles itched for the next two months.  In trying to figure out how to speed up leech bite healing, I read that Australia’s not even the worst for leech attacks—in some tropical rainforests, they’ll also drop out of trees to get you.  Ew ew ew ew.

One final leech story:  I told my aunt about this experience and she related how she, during a trek in Nepal to Everest Base Camp, had been surprised to see a line of blood running down her inner leg at a completely nonsensical time of the month.  Upon investigation, she discovered a leech that had attached itself to her groin, then gorged itself so much that it had BURST.  Puke!

My Annoyance Factor Ratings for leeches:

Swarming: 9/10 slaps for crawling out en masse to eat you when they smell you walking by

Itchiness: 10/10 slaps for bite longevity.  Those bites were bastards.

Ability to make you eat them by accident: 0/10, unless you’re seriously weird indeed.

You know you want to!

Ability to kill you if you’re unlucky: 1/10.  I imagine you could get overly leached by leeches—but I don’t think that’s happened to anyone outside of CSI Miami.  If you know of someone, please, tell me--it'll help me justify being so demented.

I Hate Bugs #2: Scottish Midges

The Scottish Highlands are stunning in myriad adjectives:

They are dramatic.

They are rugged and wild.

They are friendly and happy.

And they aren't so parchingly hot in the summer as most of North America.

What month is this?  JUNE.

In short, they are a challenge to every hiker, climber and outdoorsman, so you would think the Highlands would be overrun with goofy tourists and vacationers.  Here is why they are not.

I hate you.

This is Culicoides impunctatus, more commonly known as one of the biting Highland midge species, and most commonly addressed as “ya wee bastard”, “ow!  ya wee shite!”, and “och fuck off ya fuckin fucker.”

The problem with midges is not how itchy or disease-ridden or buzzy they are, like mosquitoes.  No, the problem with midges is that there are thousands of them per cubic inch of air space.  You never encounter just one midge, you encounter gazillions of them.  Since they are roughly the size of air molecules, you breath them in, you swallow them, they crawl into your eyeballs, they invade your hair and your ears, and if you were naked, I don’t even want to think about where they’d go.   If you are outdoors on a still afternoon, God help you, because even if they don’t bite you, the sight of 600,000,000 midges zipping about crazily a millimeter from your eyes and nose is enough to put you directly into the loony bin without collecting $200. 

Hence, this outfit is standard seasonal fashion for some days.  

Midges laugh in the face of DEET—in fact, they will happily lick it off before chewing into your arm.  It's more like an aphrodisiac smoothie to them than a repellent.  Some people swear by Avon Skin-So-Soft, but the only thing I’ve ever seen it accomplish is creating an oily layer on me that the bugs will stick to and die on—leaving me, once again, coated with bug parts and slime.

My view: useless greasy gunk.

There is only one thing that can defeat the mighty midge: wind.

Midges are small enough to be weak, slow fliers.  In breezes of over 6 mph, they’ll simply vanish as if they were never there, and the Highlands go back to being rugged and lovely.  But when the wind drops, there’s nothing left to do but run.  If you don’t think you could keep up a requisite 12 mph pace, try going to northern Scotland.  You will run like you’ve never run before, hysterically and uncontrollably.  On still evenings, Highland campsites look like Olympic training grounds with wild-eyed hysterical people sprinting back and forth.

Or whipping their hair back and forth, if they are so blessed. 

The Scottish Government once looked into midge eradication for the sanity and prosperity of its citizens, and eventually concluded that the nature of the midge life cycle made it impossible.  Adult midges zoom about on the wind, meaning they’d be hard to reach with a spray, and even if you did kill them all, you're too late--they've already laid a bunch of eggs in the soil just waiting to hatch.   If you wanted to kill the eggs and larval midges, you’d have to burn all the soil and drain all the bogs to reach them, which would basically leave the entire country stripped and barren.  I’m not saying this is a bad idea, but the Scottish Government seems to think it’s cost-prohibitive.

How bad is the Scottish midge?  My Annoyance Factor ratings:

Swarming: 10 out of god-awful 10!

Itchiness: 8/10 slaps merely because of the insane volume of bites you can incur

Ability to make you eat them by accident: 9/10 since the air is so saturated with them

Ability to kill you if you’re unlucky: 1/10.  And you would have to be pretty damned unlucky—drunk, naked, and doped full of blood thinners in order to let these guys drain you dry.  Then again, this may describe a significant number of Scotsmen on a Friday night.

Goner.

I Hate Bugs #1: New England Mosquitoes

Oh my God, it’s barely spring and already there is a swarm of bugs that has invaded my room.  They turned up while there was still snow on the ground.

Seriously, bugs, piss off.

Bugs suck.  I know they’re ecologically necessary—pollination, food web, blah blah blah—but whenever something bites me, flies into my eye, or stinks up my house, I feel like ecology can go fuck itself.  Use DDT.  Use lasers.  Nuclear weapons?  Fine with me!  

I feel uniquely qualified to comment on bug swarms, by the way.  Okay, maybe not that unique or very qualified at all, but I’ve lived long-term in three different bug-specific regions, and each has its own unique brand of irritation and itching to appreciate.  I appreciate that some bugs need to be around, but others?  Can’t we just put our morals aside and eliminate some species on purpose?  When are these bugs going to fall victim to the sixth great extinction?

I know, ecologically this is a stupid question.  Biting insects are using my blood to survive, they’ll probably thrive next to human populations, there are lots of us, these bugs are already fairly well adapted to our presence, blah blah blah, bottom line is they’ve got it made in terms of long-term survival.  But this is a blog where I get to be annoyed and irrational, not where I get graded on my scientific accuracy.  So the next few posts are about bugs I wish to destroy.

1: The mosquito

Growing up in New England was when I started hating bugs, and it was the mosquito that did it.  At first it was just the occasional mosquito—irritating, but survivable.  Then my family moved into a house next to a swamp and one mosquito became thousands.  Outdoor barbecues at twilight would lead to this sexy sexy look:

They would find every bit of exposed skin and happily dive in.  They would lodge themselves in my hair and bite my scalp.  If I were wearing a skirt, they would try to . . . well, you can guess.  I swear they would even try to bite my eyeballs.  Every tiny pinprick and itch would make you leap and jump and slap spasmodically at the spot.  Even when they weren't biting me, I could here them buzzing softly in that tiny tiny horrible squeal only mosquitoes and small children can make.  The dreaded memory of mosquito attacks meant that just one single mosquito trapped in my bedroom at night would inevitably wake me up and freak me out.

I would bolt out of bed and hunt for it in my sleepy semi-hallucinatory haze.  For a few moments, all would be well, and I would drift off again.  Unfortunately, it would always return.

The reality:

But this is how my brain saw the situation.

Needless to say, they could suck out my sanity right along with my blood.

Eventually I would spin out of control into an insomniac rage of thrashing and slapping and hurling myself around my bedroom.

Then mosquitoes started carrying West Nile virus, which didn’t bother me so much because I’m not an alarmist and WNV wasn’t going to bother a young healthy person and really who cares about a few dead birds and it’s rarely even a serious disease etc., etc. . . . but all the hypochondriac moms who hysterically kept their fat six-year-olds indoors to play more video games and get fatter DID annoy me, because I'm neurotic like that.

The farther north in New England I went, the worse the mosquitoes got.  Sometimes I’d sit on a beach at sunset in Maine and look down to find two dozen mosquitoes devouring my arm.  But at least there was a solution—the middle of the day was generally mosquito-free.  And mosquitoes are reasonably responsive to bug-spray, sort of.  If you absolutely plastered yourself with DEET you could avoid bites.  This didn’t mean they wouldn’t swarm you and land on you, however, so DEET only worked insofar as you didn’t mind coming home coated with a mixed layer of chemicals and mushed bug parts, and having 1,000 mosquitos buzzing around your eyes at any given moment. 

Spray to instantly acquire your very own bug-part facial masque!

How bad are New England mosquitoes?   My Annoyance Factor ratings:

Swarming: 5 / 10 slaps

Itchiness: 6/10 slaps

Ability to make you eat them by accident: 1/10

Ability to kill you if you’re unlucky: 7/10 – if you’re old, diabetic and have had an organ transplant, well, here’s some more bad luck.

Fun mosquito fact: The very first Russian prison camps were in the far northern Solovetsky Islands during the 1920’s, where one punishment was to be stripped naked and tied to a stake for the mosquitoes overnight.  People tended to die from blood loss, but if they survived, they often went insane.

To summarize: fuck mosquitoes.

Cyclones

When I lived in Queensland, I saw a share of cyclones and cyclone-like storms.  (If you are my friend from the North Atlantic, read: ridiculous tropical hurricanes that more or less go backward.)  I wasn’t there when Larry, a Category 5, mowed down the Innisfail south of where I lived. 

 

I also missed Yasi, the Category 5 Monster Super Ridiculous Continent-Sized cyclone which mowed down Innisfail again.

But I WAS there for an unnamed storm during which I entered into a notorious cluster fuck. 

This storm didn’t even rate as a genuine cyclone by the numbers.  It was within a few millibar or windspeed mph or whatever meteorological criteria you use to classify a cyclone, but it hadn’t quite crossed the threshold.  That didn’t stop it from chucking a tree onto our shed and turning Barron Falls, which is normally this:

into this:

This same river cut off whole towns for days.  Most of greater Cairns was flooded, albeit less seriously than the Great Queensland Underwater Event of 2010 (click here to donate).  I’d seen some distant wisps of hurricanes and watched them go muscling around the Gulf of Mexico when I worked in Florida, but this was the first time I’d ever been in the middle of anything like this.  However, I am from New England, so I took the attitude that as long as I wasn’t dying of hypothermia, everything would be A-okay.  And how could you die of hypothermia in tropical Queensland?  This was going to be a total walk in the park.  Cyclone, schmyclone.  Bring it.

Unless things get so serious that you actually need to run for your life, Queenslanders seem to react to natural disasters—or actually, any event, disastrous or otherwise—in one way: they lay in a stash of booze and barbecue materials.

How to arrange your emergency management kit

Being vegetarian, I was mostly exempted from the latter, but on the day this storm was moving in I was told repeatedly and sternly not to come home from class without copious alcohol.

First I went for a drive to gawk at the overflowing rivers.  If you’ve never seen a coastal area in monsoon rain, it’s amazing.  The whole place goes underwater on either side of the elevated roads until you appear to be driving across an enormous lake with a wet highway in the middle.  Periodically the asphalt in the road subsides under you as the ground becomes so soaked it just flows away.  Streams turn chocolate brown and rush by the bridges at roughly a million miles an hour, then eventually overflow the bridge altogether.  People crossing them in SUVs often run over fish.

If this is the biggest drama you see, monsoon storms are kind of pleasant—you get a good violent show of nature while everything manmade stops and waits peacefully for the waters to subside.  It’s a nice reality check to be at the tender mercy of the environment, especially when you’ve been living in People World and your biggest concerns are powered by petrol or electricity and computers rule your life.  I stood at a bridge, getting soaked by bucketing rain, contemplating this for awhile.  Then, having had my blissy hippie the-earth-is-all-connected moment out staring at a bunch of water, I went to the liquor shop and picked up a bottle of wine and a couple of Archer’s Peach.  (Naturally, when I went home I was told that this was woefully inadequate by Australian standards.)

I found my housemates Sam and Cathy sitting on the back porch smoking and drinking and laughing, where I joined them with my Archer’s.  We had a good laugh comparing storm stories and watching the dogs run around and get soaked (at this point we still had two Jack Russells!) while I slowly drank my two Archer’s, congratulating myself on my restraint and feeling smug that my meager alcohol ration would TOTALLY last out this storm—up yours, Aussie lushes!  Then Sam pulled out my wine and looked at me questioningly.

Okay, I thought, just one.

This was my downfall, as it has been for so many before me.  Sam filled my glass just as the Corrs came on the stereo, complete with fiddle fills.  Sam and Cathy got up to dance, and I, being happily tipsy and a total prick about the fiddle, yelled something like “I CAN PLAY THESE TUNES!”

Sam looked at me challengingly and said, “Well, why DON’T you then!”  So I whipped out my violin and started playing along, at which point Sam refilled what I’d drunk out of my glass when I wasn’t looking.  If her goal that night was to make me steaming drunk, this strategy succeeded excellently.   I would take a few sips and put the glass down, then play another jig or reel while Cathy jumped around like a maniac.  Meanwhile, Sam would sneakily put in what I’d just taken out.   With my usual powers of genius and observation, I did not notice this.

Fiddling while Rome pours

Then the boys next door came over.  They were three single guys living there with us three single girls at our place, so this was clearly, in their minds, THE BIG NIGHT.  At that point, Sam finished pouring my wine bottle and went to welcome the guys, and I put my fiddle down to chat, continuing to sip from my glass and congratulating myself on my slow pace of alcohol rationing.  Then I looked over at the bottle.
 

Empty.

I have never been able to hold my liquor.  Never ever.  At that time, I was probably at my worst, since I was running and swimming twice a day, plus I was only 21 and extremely square.   I looked in horror at the empty bottle, knowing that I wasn’t drunk yet but ALL OF THAT was inside me waiting to be metabolized into blood-alcohol ridiculousness—and yet there was nothing I could do about it.   

Sam, Cathy, and the boys, meanwhile, had decided it would be a good idea to take a taxi into town before the bridges washed out.   Based on my wine backlog, I was hesitant—which led to Sam marching me into the bathroom and telling me to shower and get the hell ready.

By the time I got out of the shower I was deteriorating fast.  I’m pretty sure Cathy dressed me, but I have very little memory of clothing that night other than that I wound up wearing her trousers, which had no pockets--somehow making me think that not carrying a wallet or phone would be a better idea than changing.  Outside, everyone else was waiting for the taxi.  I was laughing my head off and falling over just as much as you expect a 21-year-old completely pissed girl to do.  Eventually it entered the ever-darkening fog of my brain that—shit—no phone? no money? no ID? not even house keys?  I told this to Sam with a plaintive little look, which led to her walking me back to the house and putting me inside.  Sadly, she did not collar and chain me in the yard, which may have been a better approach.   

As their taxi pulled away, I realized it was nearly 9 p.m. and I was absolutely rat-arsed and hadn’t had anything to eat yet—maybe food would save me from the roaring hangover I knew would arrive along with the cyclone.  Sam had made an enormous pot of stew earlier in the afternoon.  God knows why, since it was about a million degrees outside, but she must have had an urge.  So I scooped it into a bowl and stuck the bowl in the microwave.  When I took it out, the bowl had reached roughly the temperature of molten iron, which my drunk hands did not register until I was halfway across the room.   

What do you do in this situation?  You drop the bowl.  And the bowl shatters into ceramic shards, and the stew goes everywhere.

Now, any normal person in this scenario would have cursed, mopped up the stew, and swept up the broken pieces.  Not me.  At this point my inner thrifty Yankee came bursting out in all her drunken glory.

Obviously a bowlful of homemade stew is irreplaceable, especially when you have a whole cauldron of it to hand.  Inner Yankee enthusiastically began gathering up the ceramic shards to throw in the trash, leaving the stew in its piles on the floor.  Then, being ever so careful to conserve as much stew as possible, I scooped it into a mug to eat it.

(Do bear in mind that this was the same floor I had repeatedly cleaned of dog shit.  My only defense is the alcohol.)

I flopped down happily onto the sofa, congratulating myself on my food conservation strategy, when I realized my hands were wet. 

Why?  Because I’d slashed them to shreds picking up ceramic shards.  I’d managed to clean up the floor and then thoroughly mess it up again by bleeding all over the place.  So I went through the motions again of finding a sponge and the disinfectant, and cleaned up the floor, and then realized that in doing so, I’d just bled more.  At this point, in the absence of smarter ideas like band-aids, I took a roll of toilet paper and wrapped it around my hands.

But this still didn't deter me from eating the damn stew.  This also went badly.   I didn’t understand for a long time why there were hard crunchy bits throughout the stew.  Isn’t stew supposed to be sort of gooey?  Like squishy comfort food?  I was a little bit concerned, but not enough to stop eating.  As I neared the bottom of the mug, I discovered the cause.

There were dozens of little ceramic shards in my stew.  And I had happily eaten bite upon bite of them.

I remember thinking to myself, that’s hilarious!  I ate a bowl!  Not a bowl of stew—THE ACTUAL BOWL!  And then I passed out facedown on my bed.

Around 1 a.m. I woke up, feeling far less drunk but still fairly confused and tipsy.  I could hear someone outside the door.  Normally, when I hear strange noises at night, I get freaked out.  I don’t recall being frightened this time.  I remember being kind of excited, like oh yay, someone’s going to come play with me!  (I wonder if I were channeling those damn Jack Russells.)  So I frisked over to the front door, knocking over someone’s glass of red wine onto my (fortunately purple) shirt, threw open the door and yelled, “CATHY! IS THAT YOU?”  In reply, I heard a “Shhhh!”  So I stopped yelling and instead turned on all the lights, opened the door, and stuck my head out, and said, “Hi!” as Cathy and one of the boys next door nuzzled each other against the wall.  Classy.

Fortunately, the next day most of this was forgiven.  The storm had passed, Cathy still got to have her good times with the guy, despite my enthusiastic interjection, and except for having to clear up myriad fallen trees in the yard, all was well..  Cathy found humour in the mess of broken bowls and wine glasses and strewn toilet paper and specks of stew I’d left in my wake, which by that time looked like we'd had our own private cyclone indoors.  I suppose I’m lucky we didn't have any fine art to ruin.  Sam missed most of the saga, having picked up a guy in town and spent the night there.  So of the three of us, my night was by far the most useless.

It was the next day that when I explained this to my friend Vanessa that I received the best summation possible:  “You mean you could have gotten laid but instead you got drunk and ate ceramics?”