The Sacred and the Profane (Infested Part 2)

If you haven't read the previous entry "Infested" I suggest you do before reading this, it's sure to make what follows that much more cringe-inducing. Enjoy!

West End Road starts along highway 299 and veers down into a valley, dropping, somewhat abruptly into a swale of redwoods. When you’re on your bike, the green-toned shadow of the trees rises up to meet you as the road drops. Even though the ride is smooth, there is a toppling involved going down the hill. Moving under the heavy shade is like jumping into a sylvan lake. The heat of the day is overwhelmed by the layers of shadow which is dappled on the road in thick acrylic drips like a Pollock; some of them are so dark they look like pot holes. This effect is produced by the piling of the mixed coniferous and deciduous canopy. First there are the hefty ferns hanging palm-like in green bursts along the ground, there are the dappled oaks and their broad lobed leaves. Above those there are some tangled and mossy shore pines, knobby pine cones growing directly from the branches like sores, and above these, a few scattered redwoods. Each one of these trees throws its own shadow onto the street when the sun is overhead. In places where only the ferns or the oaks cover the sun, the shadow is lime or kelly green and it goes down the light spectrum with each overlap. Green becomes blue green and then blue gum and finally an inky midnight blue, each layer adding, also, a cooling effect. The deeper the shade, the cooler it feels. Imagine the opposite of a spotlight, a beam of cool dimness, now multiply it hundreds of times, but maintaining a fragility which is set to stirring even in the slightest breeze. On the street, while above ground, you simultaneously are at the bottom of an algal pond, drifting through kelp forests and under lily pads.

When you come out of the swale, the trees sweep out and reveal a golden valley of dry and sun-battered grasses. Grasshoppers can be seen flinging themselves up and catching the light of the sun like coins tossed into a summer afternoon fountain, flashing brightly before falling toward the water. There are frequently deer nosing through the grasses and no matter the time of day, there is always a just-before-evening quality to the light in the valley. Though the road passes a few homes, no one is ever out, if they are, they’re way back in the distant fields, so far you have to squint to see them. When you do, they seem to be waving. It’s hard to be sure, but, to be safe, you wave back anyway. A few farm animals nose the fences. Curious sheep and horses glance up from where they’re chewing, but seem too contended to bother about investigating you and your aimless waving arm.

Where the road comes to a fork, the Mad River sloshes through its gravely bed. In warm weather, whole families sit along its banks, children wading out into the stone-colored water and dogs swimming silently with their heads straining through the ripples and wavelets, dragging entire branches like beavers building a dam. There’s music playing, but it’s far enough away from the top of the bridge where you cross over this scene, the melody can barely be discerned, but the words have been worn away like the magnetic dust which eventually falls off videos and cassettes leaving only static and a watery beat.

At the end of the bridge the village of Blue Lake begins with it’s customary turn-of-the-century logging architecture, boxy, primary and half-covered in multi-paned windows of old, wobbly glass. There are no curtains up because in many of the buildings, there is nothing to see behind the windows but the afternoon darkness which, seen from the outside always reflects back as a sort of pewter. Downtown there’s a bar, a cafe which is permanently closed and gradually reverting to abandonment and a few large municipal-looking building that have been converted into community centers of various stripes with swollen doors and rusty locks which are shot back no more than once a week. The main street (I have no idea what’s it’s called), rises about a quarter block and levels out in a neighborhood so residential, it’s difficult to believe it could be anywhere near a bar or any place without a swing set in the backyard. There’s nothing to do in Blue Lake except look at the creaky Victorian houses and imagine living in them. Waking up with the perpetually evening sun shining in the windows, feeling the worn wood under your feet, listening to the gentle squeaks and pops of the stairs, coffee already brewing in a tiled kitchen that smells perpetually of drying dill and basil. The dull peaceful feeling of Saturday exuding from the place where the sun is shining on an old cat and an older rug.

But there’s no reason to keep going into Blue Lake and peering into people’s windows, cursing under my breath about the exorbitant housing market. Back by the river there’s a berm that sits slightly above a field, creating an embankment that looks out over the mountains to the north east, the field, wide and blank, acting like an earthen reflecting pool, a mantle spread out from the shoulders of the mountains. The bank is full with the spice of crushed and goldenrod grasses, deer urine and hay. A place to lean up against the afternoon and to study and memorize a moment of summer.

I get off my bike and I go to sit down, but I find myself hesitating. The last time I sat here, a few months ago, it couldn’t have been a day later when my back started itching and became red and swollen. The swelling quickly moved up and down my body in tracks, bloody red dribbling things. Tunnels, apparently. The doctor at the walk-in clinic confirmed my internet-produced fear: scabies. I had to slather myself in Permethrin. My wife and daughter did the same. We bagged up everything, left it on the porch for a week and then put the Permethrin on again which, by the way, is slightly toxic. My daughter was 5 months old. The whole thing was a nightmare. I never figured out where the scabies came from, I assumed the bus, but, this field. I had sat here just before...No. That didn’t make sense. Scabies are pestilential. They swarm in warm, wet and dark areas, in fetid areas, dirty jackets, the kind of beanies one finds on the playground and kicks out of spite for the vermin they are surely infested with. Scabies, like lice or crabs live on people, secreted away on their persons somewhere like an embarrassing secret. They feel karmic. You get them, it’s accidental, it’s personal; unless you live in squalor you can’t help but to feel you did something to deserve them. Whatever they are, however I got them, it was not from this sunny, robust and healthy field. This place was quite possibly the exact opposite of a scabies breeding ground.

I ignore the sense of caution that feels so out of sync with the beautiful afternoon, sit down in the long grass and read “The Horse Dealer’s Daughter” by DH Lawrence. In the story, a respectable middle class family of three brothers and a sister lose their means and must vacate the only home they’ve ever known. The brothers, somewhat assured a living, poor as it may be, are not much bothered by the imminent loss of their home. But the sister, Mabel—a name that must’ve translated better in England in 1922—is left to move in with a sister, forced into her employ. She is later seen from up on a hill by a friend of the family, a doctor, walking deliberately into a pond until she disappears under the water “in the dusk of the dead afternoon”. What a contrast to the gentle stirrings of the field, the unbroken cerulean sky, the summer warmth and the bright the trill of bugsong. I had been down to the bottom of the pond in the swale of trees on West End Road, but it had been a clean decent. There had been none of the muck, the “foul, earthy water” described in the story.

Mable is saved, or she saves the man who rescues her or they both fall prey to their baser instincts and deprive the heroic act of all validity or perhaps they both drowned after all. What else can happen to two people and a body of water? If it wasn’t one of these things, it was all of them.

After the story, I stay for a moment, comparing the view of the mountains to the stagnant English pond I’ve been reading about. Even on the warm, dry day, I feel like I’ve got a little murky water in my ears, a little of the rotten clay under my fingernails, some algae in my hair. The feeling makes me itch, but I ignore it, hop on my bike and take the cleansing ride back through the shade pools and sun baths along the road back home. It’s a classic summer afternoon, difficult to leave, but fading, very naturally, to quiet in the evening. That’s how all long summer days shake you off: When the sun finally sets, the warmth under your skin makes the sheets cool and sleep comes on so gently, it takes you by surprise, somewhat like finding yourself tossed up into the air and then, pop, you’re asleep, back under the cool weight of the evening.

I wake the next morning and I itch. I check in the mirror and the red patch on my lower back is there again, a large histaminic welt. I rake my fingernails over it and the sensory trill over the swollen patch is luxurious, but provides no relief. If anything, it only intensifies the desire to scratch. I curse myself for lying down in the same field, but, it doesn’t make sense, how could it happen again? Scabies can’t live in fields and last time, when I went to the walk-in clinic, I remember the doctor showing the intern the tracks on my body, the same as those coagulating under my skin again, and describing them as textbook scabies. Was I on to something? Had I discovered some new specie of scabie or were they another parasite that mimicked the action of scabies and, thus, had the same effect? Maybe it was chiggers? Or the mite that lives in hay? It had to be something like this because the Permethrin had effectively treated it. Therefore, it must’ve been something similar in body type and vulnerability to scabies, right?

I went off to work, found a routine in the summer again, rode around some more on my bike, but the rash was worsening, surpassing the point it had reached at its most extravagant the last time I’d had it. My ankles, thighs, the back of my knees, lower back, upper back, arms and chest were inflamed. In some places, like my lower back, the rash was total, a whole raised area of skin, like a red histaminic raft on a pale, sunless sea. In other places, like my arms, the rash was particulate, looking like dense clusters of chicken pox and along my wrists and in between my fingers it was swelling into clear, separate cysts. That seemed filled with the very fluid of itch. I had to avoid touching any part of my body for fear of setting off the itch which was of the maddening variety that made one want to rub against a loose nail or take a piece of sand paper and just burnish the maddeningly ticklish swelling away. If I began scratching, I couldn’t stop. I’d scratch until little pores would tear open and drops of blood would form on the skin. Even then, there was no relief. I wanted to savage the rash, raking my fingers over it until I’d removed most of the offensive feeling, leaving myself with a ripped and bleeding back, arm or leg.

Last time the rash had the civility to stop below my neck, this time, when I took a shower—which really brought out the itch—I could feel it in patches on my neck, nose and even on my eye. I stood under the hot water with the rash glowing like an anemone flush with sea water at high tide, feeling itch everywhere. This comparison made me think back to the story and Mable walking into the cold and sepulchral horse pond. The kind of place you imagine full of goose shit and the gassy stink of decaying willow leaves. It felt as if in reading of it, I’d been down to the bottom of the pond, too and had come up covered in the scabrous muck that caused the itch. It was like there was something psychosomatic to it.

Surely this wasn’t scabies again. I couldn’t have gotten it from a field (or even an imaginary pond). It wasn’t chiggers. It wasn’t mites. Dammit. It had to be some kind of plant. Poison oak, maybe? It would make sense. After all, there had been plenty of plants on the berm that I’d lain in. We didn’t have poison oak where I grew up, so I wasn’t really accustomed to looking for it. Had I really lain down in a patch of it? Was it possible I had been so stupid?

Yes. Emphatically yes. The next day, I took Gina who was better at identifying rash-inducing plants to Blue Lake. She hadn’t even gotten out of the car when she declared, “Oh my GOD that’s a whole patch of poison oak! I can see it from here! Some me where you laid down.” and I pointed to the middle, the dead center of the patch. Gina repeated what was by now becoming her mantra “OH MY GOD!”

By this point, I could only think this funny, really hilarious. Twice now, I had come and pretty much rolled around in a largish patch of poison oak. When I went to the walk-in clinic last time, they’d told me I had scabies. They told me I needed to coat not only myself but my wife and daughter in Permethrin. We had to put everything in bags. We had to vacuum, rub everything down in bleach. We had to induce compulsive-level cleaning and rabidly rub mildly toxic medicine all over ourselves. I drove myself crazy thinking about the little bugs burrowing under my skin. I was manic trying to figure out where I’d gotten them (scabies, after all, is not an ‘it’ but a ‘them’) from and too paranoid to touch my baby daughter for weeks for fear I should infect her (if she wasn’t already). For nothing. All for nothing. I’d never had scabies. The first time, like this time, I’d had poison oak. I tried to muster some kind of anger toward the walk-in clinic, but it hadn’t been their fault. If I’d gone in declaring that I thought I had poison oak, I’m sure the harassed doctor would’ve just as easily agreed with that prognosis as she had with the scabies I’d suggested. Too bad about that intern, though. She was going to be calling poison oak rashes scabies for the foreseeable future. I could only hope that others would be more savvy and avoid the doctor altogether, opting for th traditional at-home treatment.

I went and bought a bottle of calamine and antihistamine pills, but the rash was spread so thick, neither really did anything and I spent another week or so waking up periodically in the night to itch, rub more lotion into the rash and press burning cold ice packs against my skin, but this time, it went away without the Permethrin and now at least, I have some idea what poison oak looks like, but I’m not going to take any chances. From now on, I’ll stay on my bike, drifting up and down West End Road, sinking through its shade-flooded valleys and rolling along its susurrating golden afternoon fields without exposing myself to the “foul, earthy water”. The rash may have not been produced by a neurotic reaction to the DH Lawrence story, but I still felt Mabel’s story embodied the poisonous side of nature. When I thought of myself, laying in a path of poison oak and reading about the horrors of drowning in a cold, stagnant pond, it seems as if there’s some connection to what nature can do and what it was doing as I lay there oblivious to its ravaging. Even the brightest, most innocuous landscape has the potential to become a gray English pond of rotting leaves and cold rain and even July sunbathing can come to feel like drowning, provided there are enough poisonous plants around.

At least I can say I never really had scabies now, but I don’t know that’s it much better to say that I got poison oak twice from the same place.