We pulled up our bright white socks, the old school mid-shin kind that in my dad’s day might have had two red or blue stripes at the top. We pulled them up high, over our jeans and then sat down to put our sneakers on. Well, not too high, but just enough that there was no cracks showing in between the two fabrics, creating a fortress against the elements.
I couldn’t remember the last time I had worn sneakers in the summertime; where I grew up wearing foot protection of any kind was a sign of weakness. A demonstrative claim that the soles were too soft because you hadn’t spent enough time in the woods or the beach running about barefoot. We might have worn a fancy pair of jellies to dinner, but we never wore shoes to run around in the woods and play.
Heck, we barely wore pants. Instead, we chose to run around in bathing suits and towels, traipsing through woods and streams hunting for crayfish in streams by feeling the rocks between our toes. It was easier and simpler, and what 8-year-old cares about anything when they can just go exploring in the forest.
But here we were now, with long pants, socks and sneakers. Our skin was covered from the waist down. Our parents gave up at trying to make us wear long sleeves in the height of the summer heat. But our beloved carefree lives were about to take a drastic turn.
Because the world had changed. I was 8 years old in 1986, when the first case of Lyme disease was reported in the Hudson Valley of New York. I don’t think we really knew what they were, except that posters and information was being sent out from the health department en masse. In fact, I think the first time I even saw a tick was on a poster hanging outside the candy commissary in our neighborhood.
It looked super cute, just a spidery looking thing that would be compared to the head of a pin. Unbeknownst to our parents, in the early years, we would pick them off our bodies and play with them. Watching them swim in a cup of water or seeing what would happen when we picked their legs off. We were unsupervised children, running through the woods and discovering things. Sometimes, we were nice and others times … not so much.
Over the next few years, one random tick turned into white socks covered with the little guys. A run through the tall grass used to be fun, but now … now we weren’t really sure what was happening. At first it was funny, being covered with bugs. But the posters kept coming and the nightly tick checks took longer and longer as the word Lyme entered our vocabularies.
Yes, even with long pants with socks over them, those little buggers still crawled through and got into our most private places. We went from not showering for days (the lake always seemed to suffice), to nightly hot showers. Flashlights, hydrogen peroxide, lighters (to burn the ticks) and tweezers became essentials. I remember the excitement when one of my mom’s friends found a tweezer with an attached magnifying glass. Every family quickly had at least one.
We were pros at tick checks, even the super embarrassing part. Because we didn’t have a choice. No one really knew what Lyme disease was, except that it was awful, your whole body would hurt and there was no cure. But man, we got good at removing those little buggers.
Pluck, pluck, pluck. As we counted how many ticks we picked off each other each night, our adventures started to change. The ballfield, where we had spent so much our our childhood, now stood empty most days. We stopped exploring in the tall grass and weed whacking became the favorite pastime of our dads. We stopped exploring areas where we saw deer walking through or anything that had vegetation taller than our ankles.
If you wanted a shorter tick check, you stayed out of the grass. Our world got smaller that summer — drastically smaller.
And then I moved to Vermont and never saw a tick again. I stopped wearing socks and started running barefoot in the woods and tall grass once again. I purposefully took trails with vegetation tickling my armpits. I stopped running my hands over my body at the slightest tickle of grass. It was a dream come true, to be free in the forest once again.
And now, now that dream seems to be coming to an end. Please, please everyone, make nightly tick checks part of your daily routine. You won’t regret it.
Merisa Sherman is a long-time Killington Resident, local realtor, bartender, and KMS Coach. Feel free to reach out at [email protected].
