No One Can Scratch My Itches

Ah, summertime, when our souls crave the blue mountain sky, our minds crave the liberating wilderness and our entire bodies crave a good, hard scratch.

This is the height of the Inland Northwest’s scratching season, or should I say, the itching hour. Right about now, if you’re not nursing about 14 varieties of bites, rashes and exotic skin irritations, you haven’t been getting out enough.

Or maybe I just have it worse than usual this year. At one point, I was convinced that I had all of the major varieties of summertime itch on my body, including one that doesn’t even exist this side of Kansas and another whose name includes the following two frightening words: “duck liver.”

I have been taking an inventory of my various bites and eruptions, and I think I can track most of them to the fact that I have been standing in the Spokane River fishing almost every night this week. What I’m trying to say is: I can barely get one rainbow trout to devour one artificial bug, but I can get three million genuine bugs to take turns devouring me.

I have mosquito bites on all of my major extremities and my one major nose. The total numbers less than 20, however, which makes this a relatively modest mosquito bite total compared to those of you who have spent a lot of time at high elevation or at high latitude. The mosquitoes down here in Spokane circle nervously, one a time, trying to work up the courage for an occasional foray onto your nose. High altitude mosquitoes, however, swarm around your head in gangs, forming their little mosquito plans to lift your nose clean off your face and take it behind a rock where they can use their proboscises to have their leisurely way with it.

As I continue the inventory, I also seem to be developing an incipient case of poison ivy on my calves. The stuff covers the ground like a carpet on the banks of the Spokane River, but it is usually not a problem unless you are such a monumental klutz that you stumble directly into a big shiny patch of it and then perform a massive crashing pratfall while wearing shorts.

Like I said, I think I might have a dose.

Listen, at least I have never been dumb enough to pick a poison ivy leaf, crush it between my fingers and sniff it rapturously in the mistaken belief that it is wild spearmint. No, I did that with a totally different toxic weed, stinging nettle. I suffered for three days from a red, hideously deformed nose, but that was no big deal, since it was just our honeymoon.

Finally, I was walking through the Bon Marche the other day, when I suddenly stopped dead in the aisle and used one foot to rub tormentedly on my ankle. Shoppers veered away in fear, apparently suffering from a blind prejudice against men standing on one foot scratching themselves urgently in the cosmetics aisle. But I was beyond caring. I was possessed by the itch.

When I got home, I discovered two odd-looking bites, or bumps, or carbuncles, on my ankle. I immediately thought they were chigger bites, despite the fact that I have no idea what a chigger bite actually looks like. We don’t have chiggers here, but they have them in the South and Midwest, and we had just returned from a family reunion in the Ozarks. My wife Carol was so freaked out about the prospect of chiggers that she took a bottle of chigger-proof Off! in our luggage.

She used it, despite the fact that she spent most of the weekend in my aunt’s well-groomed back yard. I did not use it, despite the fact that I spent most of the weekend flailing around in country weed patches looking for my golf ball.

So I showed my ankle to my neighbor, Chad, who grew up in chigger country.

“Nope,” he said. “That’s no chigger bite.”

“Thank goodness,” I said. “I’ve heard that chigger bites can be …”

“What you have there is a schistosome, also known as `duck liver fluke,”’ said Chad, a health professional.

A what? Oh, my. Did this mean some kind of mallard or wigeon will grow and grow and grow and then burst out of my ankle like an avian “Alien”? Or worse, did it mean I will soon notice a sickening lumpish movement beneath my skin and then suddenly out will pop a fully formed tin of duck liver pate?

Well, not exactly, said Chad, who simply enjoys saying phrases like “duck liver fluke.” Schistosome does indeed involve ducks and livers, but it is really just plain old swimmer’s itch, and it’ll go away all by itself long before Sigourney Weaver shows up at my house with either a shotgun or a box of Ritz crackers.

So that just about puts the crown on my summer itching season. I have swimmer’s itch, and I am delighted about it. Pass the Lanacane and duck liver pate, if you please.