She said it was to avoid ticks.
Had she ever SEEN a tick, I wondered. I mean, if she, at maybe 5’3" and
120 lbs. Could get into her clothes, then why couldn’t someone who was
less than a sixteenth of an inch long? It’s a good thing that ticks don’t
have any sense of humor, because the laughter out in the woods would be
deafening when they see fully grown homo sapiens wandering around in July
wearing long sleeves and their pants tucked into their socks.
I told her that the best thing to wear for ticks was nothing.
She looked skeptical and suspicious of my motives. I just hate how
untrusting society has become.
MYTH No. 2: Ticks jump out of trees and land on you.
The same girl (I am NOT making her up) was wearing a sort of a sailor hat.
After I professed interest in her TAS (Tick Avoidance System) she
volunteered that the hat was to protect her from the shower of ticks
coming out of the trees
Think about this. The tick climbs up the tree (which has got to be the
approximate equivalent to a human climbing the Washington Monument) then
he sits patiently waiting for a victim. Suddenly, YOU come wandering out
of the underbrush fifty feet away. The tick hastily calculates your mean
velocity; your height in relation to his position in the tree; the speed
and direction of the prevailing wind. A hush falls over the forest. Then,
at precisely the correct moment, with a powerful spring of his spindly
1/32-inch legs, Thunder Tick launches himself, in a perfect triple-gainer,
out of the tree and into your hair.
I’m disappointed that the doctor got this one right, knowing that ticks
make their approach from below rather than above. Phooey.
MYTH No. 3: Ticks must be removed very carefully.
Luckily for my purposes of ridicule, the doc goes on to tell us that we
should never, never, ever remove ticks with our fingers. Unfortunately, he
doesn’t say why, but he does recommend using fine tweezers.
He goes on to say, "Don’t use alcohol, nail polish or petroleum jelly to
remove ticks – it just makes them mad. A provoked tick will attach itself
more firmly to it’s host..."
"A provoked tick" - I marvel at the mere suggestion, as ticks in my
experience have seemed rather passionless. Perhaps this is where the term
"ticked off" originates. The Doc recommends you go home and shower after
your tick exposure. Again, he doesn’t exactly say why. Certainly you’re
not going to just WASH OFF any self-respecting tick. They do this for a
living, and they’re damned good at it. It makes sense though, that if
you're not going to be removing your ticks (maybe you want to show them to
your friends when you get home) you’ll want to make certain that they’re
as clean as you are.
The article said the doctor was from New Jersey, but is suspect he is
originally from A Large Western State.
The other day, I got into a tick discussion on a Usenet group. Some poor
babe was trying to find out how to AVOID ticks, and all the local experts
seemed fixated on how to advise her to properly remove them once she’d
been "tick-timized".
My client seemed to favor trying to discourage the attached tick (she got
dozens, of course) by burning them with a cigarette lighter. This appeared
to be a very painful solution and a very ineffectual one. Maybe if you
pulled the tick off with your fingers and THEN burned it.
Let’s get to the point here. How do you spend a great deal of time in the
Great Outdoors without being driven to distraction by ticks?
