Hiking and Ticks

Just back from a hike at the Konza Prairie with my wonderful girlfriend. Katie was very patient with me today as I forced us to stop many times to take pictures of the scenery. You know, for Kansas, this is a very nice hike. Lots of trees, big spaces, the Flint Hills to roam around in; just what my Pacific NW upbringing needs after four months on the prairie.

Something I never dealt with back where I grew up, though, were ticks. I was in the Boy Scouts during my middle and high school years and we talked of ticks often. In fact, one of the hottest Boy Scout debates (at least in our troop) was the best way to deal with ticks. The common cures ranged from the much maligned gentle tweezer pull (But if their heads break off, it'll get infected!) to the hot burnt-out match to using vegetable oil at the bite location to suffocate them. Though the debates were fierce at times the vegetable oil trick seemed to usually win out in the end as it seemed the least invasive. The funny part about all of this is the fact that NONE of us had EVER seen a tick in person. It may have been the weather forcing us into long-pants for most of our camping trips or maybe there just aren't as many ticks up there; it doesn't matter, we were all blithely ignorant.

As of today, I have now passed this adolescent stage and have begun my adult life when it comes to ticks.

Being male and not having the social pressure to shave my legs, I tend to let the hair on my legs grow out. From what I've noticed, this is common among most men (exceptions that come to mind are hard-core bicycle racers and swimmers). Well, today that came back to bite me, literally, thanks to wearing shorts on this approximately twelve mile hike through the prairie.

On our way back to Wichita, I noticed a small insect that looked like a proportionally-challenged spider crawling around on my legs. I let it crawl onto my finger and then tried to kill it by squishing it against the dashboard of my car. Well, things didn't work out so well and the little guy ended up in Katie's seat. Note to self: Katie is not a big fan of insects. She ID-ed the guy as a tick when it landed in her lap but wasn't able to finish what I started due to her somewhat excited state. He escaped somewhere on her side of the car and I volunteered to take the next exit so we could hunt him down.

We never found him but decided it would be a good idea to look ourselves over to make sure we were clean. (This was probably the first time in my life I was verbally encouraged to intently study a woman's legs.) Katie was tick free but, I, on the other hand was not. We found two of those guys buried in my legs. TWO.

The Boy Scout training evaporated from my brain; I wanted those little buggers out now! Let me tell you, if you've ever tried pulling a tick off a non-smooth surface, you know how hard it can be. It took me a few minutes to finally wrest one of them from my thigh; Katie got the other one in just a few seconds. As I found out, though, the only thing harder than getting the tick out is killing it. Without any of my blood in them, ticks are very thin and flat and even trying to crush this one between my thumb and index finger did not succeed in killing it. I tried this on a fourth tick I found while driving home; he made the same mistake the first one did and just crawled onto my finger looking for blood. I didn't look back and simply mashed him against my thumb for fifteen seconds before flicking him onto the dash (and not onto Katie's lap). He was still moving around, trying to get off his back! How do they do that? Again, Katie came to the rescue by picking him up with a tissue and throwing him out the window.

I'm about to go take a shower and give my whole body one more check but before I go, let me say this: probably the most unique experience in all of this adventure is looking down at my leg and seeing those guys with their (very) small heads buried in my skin. Its a very, uhmm, unusual sight. Just sitting there, legs spread out for balance, (empty) flat abdomen laying flush against me. With just a glance you could see that this thing was very foreign to my body, not a part of me. It made me want to yell and say "Hey, who said you could help yourself to that? That's my blood!"

POST-SHOWER UPDATE:
No embedded parasites ID-ed, one free-loader on the elastic leg-band of my underwear. (just a wee too bit close for comfort.) Attempted to neutralize with tweezers. Crippled but was not able to easily terminate (How do they do that?!) Total tick count for the day: five, all mine. Next time, I'm shaving my legs are wearing pants.