Rich Landers: Steamy tales of ticks and romance

Roll over in your grave, Elvis.

Get a better grip, Justin Timberlake.

Look for a new hairstyle, Jess Walter.

It’s me, the lowly newspaper outdoors writer, who’s feeling the hormone-charged power of a rock star and the word-shock of a novelist this week.

I swear this is the truth: In the past six days, three women have told me they were moved to strip naked after reading my prose.

Revise your celebrity guest list, David Letterman. You need to meet some of the writhing babes on the Inland Northwest hiking trails.

I realize I’ve written some steamy passages during my career, including graphic accounts of field-testing Gore-Tex fishing waders, huddling in duck blinds with wet Labs and paddling the San Juan Islands in a drysuit with a zipper that wouldn’t unzip.

I’m sure my readers puckered up before they finished the sweaty story about turning into a prune while stranded overnight in a backcountry hot spring. No telling how many readers were aroused by the moist details of drying wool socks in my armpits during a storm high on the glaciers of Mount McKinley.

So I shouldn’t have been so surprised this week to have hikers telling me that reading a few Rich Landers paragraphs has moved them to giggle, wiggle and peel it off like girls gone wild.

One woman said she did it in her car. Another said it was on her back porch.

Showing the most restraint, Lea Jones of Coeur d’Alene said she waited until she drove into her garage and shut the door.

“Then I just stripped and shook out my clothes and sure enough, there were ticks,” she said. “I’d been feeling them all the way home.”

There’s no surer way to break down inhibitions among my adventurous readers than to recommend spring hiking on scenic trails at Fishtrap Lake, Palouse Falls or the Odessa-Pacific Lake Trail.

“I was absolutely infested,” said another woman, who threatened to stake me out over sagebrush to a certain death by blood-sucking arachnids if I used her name.

I told her the infestation from a rock star would be a lot worse.

Indeed, tick season is considered a bonding experience at the Landers home.

In April and May, when frantic individual schedules seem to rip our family apart, ticks give my wife, Meredith, and me a reason to focus on each other.

She easily strayed my attention from reading Field & Stream magazine in bed Tuesday night when she nuzzled up and whispered, “There’s a tick on your pillow.”

“I love it when you talk dirty,” I said.

Discouraging ticks from latching onto your outdoor experience is fairly simple while hiking, fishing, turkey hunting and enjoying other outdoor activities this time of year:

“Wear light-colored clothing to make the dark-colored ticks more visible so they’re easier to detect and brush off.

“Tuck pants legs into socks, and shirts into pants.

“Use permethrin to treat light-colored hat, socks, collars and cuffs of shirts and pants legs. Permethrin is an insecticide recommended for use only on clothing by the U.S. Center for Disease Control. Never apply it directly to the skin and don’t spray it on clothing while it’s being worn. Sawyer makes an aerosol permethrin treatment that does not harm fabrics and is odorless when dried. It helps.

“Take short breaks with your partner in the field to check clothing and necklines for ticks.

“Wear pants with legs that zip off to convert into shorts. In tick season, you would leave the legs on. But the flap that covers the zipper acts as a “tick trap” as the buggers latch onto your pants and crawl up your leg. After fishing Crab Creek one day, my partner’s “tick traps” had collected a dozen ticks that otherwise would have been working their way up toward the first exposed skin.

Of course, I don’t really recommend any of these preventative measures.

Much better to let the ticks crawl, and the good times roll.

This is the season that brings my wife and me together. I don’t need to buy expensive flowers or jewelry to set the mood. I just take one of the dogs out for a walk in the woods behind our house. Exercising the dogs during tick season inevitably pays off in a wonderful evening of togetherness as Meredith and I search the pet from head to toe for ticks.

We need nothing more than a candle, a rug, a couple of glasses of wine and a jar of water lubed with a drop of liquid soap. The wine is for us, the jar is for the ticks.

Dickens, our English setter, virtually purrs as Meredith runs her fingers through his fur and whispers sweet nothings in his ear while I move in, searching, probing and plucking.

This mixture of work, play and companionship works wonders for everyone involved.

After an evening in such intimate proximity to ticks, Meredith and I have no choice but to give each other the same treatment.