Dark Banquet - Bill Schutt [76]
But now, in the blast furnace of midafternoon, the forest was silent. Nothing moved.
Soon enough, I headed back to PAX, convinced that any creatures worth seeing were also smart enough not to be out and about in such wretched conditions.
After getting buzzed in past the front door, I was confronted by Gerard, the guesthouse manager. Gerard runs on the low side of the “Aunt Rose Height Scale,” but he is a force of nature. Wildly funny and incredibly bright, he and his wonderful Dutch wife Oda run the mountaintop landmark as if they were born for the job. Gerard’s only real personality flaw is that he hates bats (which is rather unfortunate for him since there are probably thirty species patrolling the rain forest right outside his back door).
“And where have you been, young man?” Gerard inquired, his voice rising to a pitch that threatened to crack my sunglasses. (Gerard refers to all males younger than the age of eighty-eight as “young man,” and on a recent return trip to PAX, my wife Janet and grad student Maria were disappointed to learn that Gerard had been calling them both “sugar plum.”)
“Just taking a walk,” I said, trying not to drip on the exquisitely polished wooden floor.
Gerard shot me a look as if I’d said I’d been out munching road kill. “Whatever,” he said, throwing me a good-natured but dismissive wave before hurrying past—presumably in search of more intelligent company.
The next day I awoke to find that not all of the forest creatures had been inactive during my ill-advised walk. Looking down, I could see a band of itchy, red dots circumnavigating my waist like Magellan’s diaper rash.
After taking a hot shower, I slathered on some calamine lotion, but strangely, the itching just got worse so that by that evening I had run through the entire bottle, exhibiting all the self-control of an addict on hot pink liquid crack.
Embarrassed, I decided to keep my new red belt a secret.
“I hear you picked up a few chigger bites,” my graduate adviser and mentor John Hermanson mentioned over breakfast the following day.
Great, I thought. It must have been my question about whether calamine lotion came in a five-gallon drum.
“Yeah, no problem,” I said, with as much nonchalance as I could muster. “I’m feeling a lot better.”
“That’s good,” he said, returning his attention to a plateful of eggs. “Because they’ll probably arrest you if you keep rubbing against the table like that.”
Over the next few days, the rash actually got worse, as did my desire to scratch the angry welts that had developed. I tried to get creative, imagining how I’d deal with this if I’d been stranded on an island somewhere. I found that by hooking my thumbs into my belt buckle and imitating some old twist meister, I could scratch all of my chigger bites simultaneously. Almost as important, I learned that I could avoid bites altogether by wearing lightweight long pants with the cuffs tucked into my boots. And as for protecting my upper body, I found that an ultralight, long-sleeved shirt added the finishing touch to a relatively chigger-resistant field outfit. The key bit of knowledge, though, was not to go wandering around the forest or scrub during the hottest, most humid part of the day.
Doing some investigative work, I determined that the itching and redness I’d been suffering through was a type of dermatitis called thrombidiosus and that I’d been lucky the problem hadn’t stuck around for ten days instead of five or six. I was also lucky that the chiggers in Trinidad weren’t transmitting some sort of nasty, trip-ending bacterial infection. Had I been trekking through the brush in Southeast Asia or the South Pacific, I would have run the risk of contracting “scrub typhus” from chiggers such as Leptothrombidium akamushi. The Japanese first described this tiny arthropod over two thousand years ago (akamushi is Japanese for something akin to “dangerous bug”) but although Leptothrombidium akamushi isn’t a bug, or even an insect