Lowcountry of South Carolina. Two-thirds of my county is underwater at high tide. If it bites, it lives here.
Deer flies, horse flies, dog flies, chiggers, sand-gnats, three flavors of ticks, assassin beetles, 56 separate species of mosquitoes, any number of venomous spiders, including the black widow, which can kill you outright, and the brown recluse that may only make you wish you were dead.
Throw in sundry species of sharks, alligators, coral snakes, copperheads, moccasins, diamondback and cane-brake rattlers.
But forget the sharks and reptiles, if you can. Worldwide, mosquitoes kill more men than sharks, snakes, crocs, gators, hippos, lions, tigers, leopards, rhinos, elephants, Cape Buffalo combined, maybe more than women but maybe not. Ask Mr. Google if you disbelieve. He might fart, scratch his ass, walk around in circles and mumble, but he will bear me out.
Slide up a stump, y’all, set a spell. Swat a skeeter and listen.
Our deer season here is the nation’s longest: One hour before sunrise on August 15 to one hour after sunset on New Year’s Day. No need to hunt during hurricanes or earthquakes, no need to skip weddings or funerals, not even your own.
A deer license is 40 dollars. Three bucks per hunter and two does a day on certain eagerly anticipated Saturdays. Play the numbers, you’ll put up ten deer each year. Smallish whitetails but bone ’em close and throw in some bacon ends and Legg’s #10 Old Plantation spice mix and you’ll get sausage to feed a precinct of Savannah Democrats.
How come the deer ain’t all shot out?
Bugs.
Einstein said E=mc2. Pinckney says “There ain’t no free rides in the universe.”
First Africans in these parts were a group of 20-odd slaves aboard a Dutch ship into Jamestown, Virginia, in 1619. A quarter-million followed, mostly through Charleston, Savannah, New Orleans. They brought malaria in their blood. First local mosquito that bit the first slave picked up the parasite. If it wanted desert and bit a white man, holler up the undertaker.
It took a couple of hundred years before anybody learned anything about Africans with sickle cell anemia and decades more before researchers discovered sickle cells in the blood provide a resistance to malaria. White folks blamed it on swamp air, rather than the squadrons of skeeters upon it. And they named it malaria, Spanish for “bad air.”
John David Mungin pegged it perfectly. “I would rather be shot at by a good rifleman than spend a single summer night on my plantation.”
Mungin and his peers maintained palatial summer homes in Savannah, Bluffton, Beaufort and Charleston with broad piazzas facing the prevailing wind, which kept the bad air off them. Those houses still stand in National Historic Districts. Slaves remained on various plantations with “to-do” lists, “see y’all first frost.”
Africans got their work done and more. They hunted and they fished, they brewed their stump-hole whiskey, they bartered amongst themselves, they kept to their gurgling Creole, their perlows, bogs and gumbos and their hoodoo. Gullah in South Carolina and Geechee in Georgia and they are still here, the Big Bang beginnings of the entire African-American culture, 30 million and counting.
Because of bugs.
I got a deer lease, 1,000 acres, sometimes I think it’s got me, sometimes I know it does. A most vexing tangle of maritime forest, cut over and grown back, pine, scrub oak, magnolia, sweet gum and maple, an understory of wax myrtle, ti-ti brush and snag-you, trip-you-up-and-throw-you-down devil vine, cat’s claw and wild muscadine. Hard to see your own feet; hard to see a snake; hard to see a deer. We got a collection of derelict machinery, none of it quite designed to do what we ask. We got chainsaws and brush-cutters that run most of the time, but there is no way we could ever hope to keep up, these woods growing ten months a year the way they do.
But we got a friend in fire.
A fire can clear more woods in a day than a tractor and whatever you can hook to it in a year. You’ll need fire-techs, fire-breaks, a permit, a gentle breeze and rain in the forecast. Do it right and you’ll get a four-foot wall of flame moving through the woods about as fast as a man can walk. Results, are immediate, long-lasting and entirely gratifying.
A “cold” spring fire eats up the deadfalls, the understory and leaf litter, mitigates the chances of wildfires in the fall. Ashes neutralize acidic woodland soil, sunlight hits the ground, and the earth explodes in wildflowers and a profusion of grasses and sedges for wildlife. But most importantly, a spring fire kills ticks by the tens of millions.
And I got a grudge to settle with the ticks, a grudge to settle big time. Malaria is mostly gone now, but we got West Nile, Zika and encephalitis worse than ever. A county plane and truck to spray the skeeters, but there’s only our fires for the ticks. Lyme disease finally worked its way down here from Yankeeland, and if you don’t get it from a tick, you can get it from sex with somebody who did. Canadians figured that out, way up north where the preferred wintertime indoor sport is fornication.
And then there is Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever and a half-dozen of its variations from the Lone Star tick, not from Texas, but from a white dot behind their heads. It’s asymptomatic. Some people break out in spots, some don’t. Others get vertigo and crushing migraines, yet others lose motor function in their legs. And in some people, it attacks the heart. If left untreated, the death rate is around 30 percent. Only a blood test can tell.
When I woke up one morning in May and could not breathe, I judged it pneumonia. EMTs strapped me to a gurney, loaded me into an ambulance and then onto a boat. Once across the water, another ambulance took me to the ER. Doctors ordered up a chest X-ray; my lungs were clear. They hauled out a flow chart, traced boxes to boxes via arrows running this way and that.
Congestive heart failure.
“Hold on, Doc. Last week I could have run around this room with you on my shoulder. Now I can’t hardly walk at all. Can it come on so quick?”
“Maybe,” he said.
“Maybe it’s insect borne?”
“You think you have a bug problem, call Carolina Pest Control.”
Good thing I was so puny, or I might have slapped the snot out of him, then and there.
Blood test for Lyme, negative. But Lyme is a virus. They sent me home but three weeks later, I was back, fixing to croak.
“I am on Medicare, and I know you sons-of-bitches are losing money on me every single day. I’m gonna lay right here and cost you money till you fix me.”
Money talks. Dr. Amanda Parks, infectious disease specialist, blonde and beautiful. She drew a dram of blood, not easy on a dying man.
Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever, bacteria not a virus.
Doxycycline, massive doses.
I called it gorilla-cillin.
And then I dedicated one of my books to her: “Thanks Doc, for keeping me on the right side of the dirt.”
I grew back best I could, gimping along now with about half a heart. I can still sit up and take nourishment and can do most everything else I need to do, so long as I can think about it first. Have bugs scared me out of the deer woods? Hell no!
I took a ten-point buck the day after Christmas on my 71st year.
But I take my cautions along with my chances.
DEET does not repel bugs at all, despite the label; it just blocks your scent and makes you invisible, sorta. And these gnats use it for gravy. But take heart ye forlorn and bitten, ye swatters and scratchers. Skeeters and gnats hate tobacco smoke. If you smoke, then smoke ye. Deer might see the motion. If they smell the smoke, they will smell you and you’re already busted. Fifty-odd years into it, 70 bucks and counting, I never lost a single deer to tobacco.
But if you don’t smoke, Thermo-cells work well in enclosed stands. About the size of a flip-phone, they have an igniter battery, a little butane bottle like a CO2 cartridge and a shelf for a little pad saturated with insect repellent. Fire it up and put it on the floor between your feet. But a Thermo-cell is worthless in the wind. Ditto while walking. But there is hope—clothing with permethrin woven right into the fabric. Per what?
Permethrin, invented in the 1970s.
I am a notorious Luddite, the last man in this almost civilized world who will not carry a cell phone. I shoot paper shells in antique shotguns over cedar decoys I carved myself. I run my boats by the compass, not GPS. My deer gun dates from 1908. I made babies on a bedspread from a buffalo I shot myself with a black-powder rifle and then raised those babies upon it.
But I will forsake my cantankerous ways when it comes to bugs. I’d nuke ’em, if I could, call down a space death-ray. And I am here to testify: permethrin-infused fabric works. And permethrin doesn’t just make you invisible, doesn’t just repel bugs, it kills them dead as hell. There is no known risk to humans, even pregnant ladies, but it makes cats psychotic, or even more than normal. There are men’s and women’s shirts, pants, hats, socks, even skivvies available from Cabela’s, Orvis, Bean, Ex-Officio, Duluth Trading, under such trade names as No-Fly Zone, Buzz-Off, Insect Shield. The bug dope is guaranteed effective through 70 washings—effectively the life of the garment.
Something new that actually works? Well, I’ll be jiggered. Yes, they will cost a few bucks more, but well worth the comfort.
And the peace of mind is priceless.