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06/22/2017 12:01 AM“Just wait until winter.”
“You are all going to freeeeeeze.”
“You only think you like snow. Ha ha ha.”
When packing to leave Los Angeles for our new home on the Connecticut shoreline, there was no shortage of friends telling us how deeply we would regret decamping from the Golden State as soon as winter’s first winds howled through our new home. Even when we got here and eagerly stocked up on North Face gear, many laid bets that sometime after the third crushing blizzard, we would load up our minivan, dig our flip flops out of storage and flee west.
Having now endured, and delighted in, our first Connecticut winter, I have only two words: Snow schmow.
It’s the ticks that are going to drive me to a mental breakdown.
Our two prevalent family “issues” are a tendency towards OCD (mine) and a fear of zombies (the kids’). You could say, in current parlance, that ticks are the uniquely perfect “trigger” for both terrors. First, they don’t die. Or rather, they seem to have an eerie ability to reanimate. At a recent lacrosse game, while one child ran around on the field, my other daughter and I sat on the bleachers, where I picked a tick off of her. We dropped it to the bleacher and I stomped on it. It froze, and then ...it started to move again. Clearly what we had on our hands was no ordinary insect.
It Was a Zombie
I stomped harder and ground it into the metal of the bleacher. It reanimated.
I drove the side of my shoe into it, almost splitting it in half. It reanimated.
I lit it on fire. It cooled, collected its ashes back together, and reanimated.
Okay, that didn’t happen, but only because I didn’t have a match. Still, I am convinced they are truly zombies.
And for people with even a slight tendency toward OCD, let me assure you that “Did I check my child thoroughly enough for that potentially harmful bug about the size of a coffee ground?” and “Is it my imagination or is something crawling on me?” are about two of the most annoying thoughts you can be riddled by on a day-to-day basis. I wasn’t always worried about ticks. In fact, last summer, I was downright cavalier.
I had heard about Lyme disease, but I wasn’t too worried. I knew that all ticks aren’t carriers—only deer ticks, and only a small percentage of deer ticks are carriers. I wasn’t worried because, with Lyme disease, you have time on your side: Transmission of the bacteria can take from 24 to 48 hours, more than enough time to locate that zombie and yank him out. If I missed a tick check one night, or failed to find the tick, there was always a hefty round of antibiotics to turn to. It seemed there were lines of defense between me and disaster. I also still had a bit of Big City swagger about me still: I was used to scanning the sidewalk that led up to my children’s school for, among other things, syringes, condoms, and streams of urine.
Bug schmug.
But, by all accounts, this season is different.
A Real Wake Up Call
If you haven’t read about it in the news or seen it on television, maybe you’ve experienced it firsthand like we have: Summer isn’t even officially here and already I have already pulled four ticks off of kids, and found one crawling in our house. While Lyme disease might be curable, if it’s not caught in time, it can cause lasting problems. But my real wake up call was reading about something called Powassan virus.
One of my mottos in life is “If You’re Going To Panic, Panic Big,” and so maybe I needed something like Powassan virus to kick me into gear. First, I will assure you that the good thing about this possibly emerging tick-born virus is that it is extremely rare. Experts suspect that only one to two percent of ticks are actually carriers (other statistics put those numbers more in the range of 7 to 10 percent). Those are pretty good odds in Vegas, so the likelihood of contracting it seems small, but if you get it, it can be nasty. Powassan is a neuroinvasive virus that can cause encephalitis or meningitis. It is carried by the deer tick, the same tick that carries Lyme. There have already been cases reported in the Northeast this year, and there is no cure.
There. Now we can all be insomniacs.
While the risk of contracting this new virus (honestly, are ticks good for anything other than super-charging epidemics?) is very low, this what just the tick-kick in the head I needed to get more proactive about battling ticks this summer.
Field Tests
I was never entirely comfortable with daily use of DEET, so the first thing I did was field-test some natural alternatives. First on my list and highly recommended by a naturopathic practitioner was Doterra’s Terrashield. It’s a mixture of ylang-ylang, juniper, cedar wood, lemon eucalyptus, and vanilla in a coconut oil base. It smells so amazing, I was highly skeptical that it would actually work—in fact, if I were a tick, I would be attracted to it, but after several weeks of hiking in the woods using Terrashield, I didn’t find a single tick on me. That’s the good news. The bad news is it’s pricey—and the bottle is small. In other words, it’s not the most practical daily tick repellent for a family.
A less expensive but still all-natural tick repellent is Nantucket Spider Extra Strength Tick Formula. Like Terrashield, it relies on essential oils, in this case clove, geranium, peppermint, rosemary, cedar wood, spearmint, and cinnamon, in a base of water, glycerin, and vanillin. In other words, you will smell like the best piece of gum you’ve ever had in your life. It also comes in a large 8 oz. bottle. I have only tested it on long hikes a few times, but again always came home tick free. It comes in a big bottle, and claims to be the brand used by park rangers.
If you want to concoct your own blend, some essential oils that repel bugs naturally (and ticks specifically) are peppermint, cedarwood, lemongrass, eucalyptus, and tea tree. Add a few drops of your chosen oil or a combination of oils to a carrier oil like jojoba or avocado oil, shake it up, and schmear it on.
So there are natural repellents that I will use on a daily basis, but for long days in the woods and camping, I am going to get more comfortable with DEET. In fact, considering the explosion in the tick population that is expected this summer, I am considering the nuclear option for when camping: permethrin.
Years ago, before going on a prolonged trek through Southeast Asia (absurdly planned for the tail end of rainy season), my travel partner and I soaked all of our belongings in permethrin before leaving on our trip. During five weeks of hiking through tropical landscapes and sleeping in rain forests, neither one of us got a single bug bite. This stuff is hard-core. It also does what frost, fire, evisceration, crushing, stomping, and drowning apparently can’t—it can kill ticks. Permethrin is safe for most fabrics, and it stays effective through five or six washings: in others words, soak your camping gear and clothes once, and you will be good to go all summer. You don’t want to get it on your skin, so be sure to wear gloves when handling it and follow the directions on the bottle.
Many local New Englanders warned me about the misery of winter: The short days, the gray skies, the cabin fever, the agony of shoveling, the long, seasonal gloom that settles in after the glittery joy of the holidays. I don’t know.
A few more blizzards for a tick-free summer? I’d take it.
Claudia Grazioso is a columnist who lives in Guilford.