When we decide to walk the trails to the salt marsh, the only bugs on my mind are ticks that might fall out of the trees or cling to us as we pass vegetation. I have completely forgotten about the aggressive woodsy bugs that might attack, so I am unprepared and without bug spray for our trek.
Within forty minutes, I have been bitten/stung/attacked by no less than a dozen deer flies. Let me say this about deer flies: they suck. I mean, seriously, the females make a two-way incision into the skin with their jaws (or whatever the technical term is) and suck blood out like a mosquito on steroids.
The resulting welt is slightly painful, markedly swollen, and unconscionably itchy. Calamine lotion just turns the humongous red marks into some bizarro collection of pink mountains on my skin. My upper arms and shoulders look like a life-sized game of Human Connect-the-Dots.
The weird part about all of this is not that I'm complaining. After all, I fully expected to get bug bites in the woods. That's what happens. It has happened all my life, especially for the half-dozen years that I actually lived IN the woods. When I was a kid, my summer was one giant and perpetual bug bite, and it never really bothered me.
The screwed up part is how long it takes me to recover from bug bites now. Simple mosquito bite? About two weeks to stop itching. I had to beg the seventh grade to stop the yearly field trip to a farm in Newbury because the sand fleas in the floor of the barn would attack my legs, and the resulting reaction caused six weeks of misery.
By the way, I killed as many of those little bastards as bit me, so I guess we're even. Well, I probably came out ahead: I might itch for a few days, but those suckers are dead on the ground. I'd say this round goes to me.
