Life With Ticks

Out at our winery we were looking at the old sorghum press when all of a sudden the woman screamed, “A tick!, I have a tick on my leg!”

First timer, I thought as she ran like a French Aristocrat with her head cut off, careening around the walnut tree and dousing her leg with water from the plastic water bottle that she had been suckling on all afternoon.

“Our red wine is good for ticks!” I called out with my hand at my mouth like a soooeeee pig caller, but she didn’t hear me or anything else, she just kept running for her car, telling her friend that she needed to go to the nearest emergency room to get treated for Rocky Mountain Spotted Tick Fever, Lyme’s Disease and a myriad other maladies with which she surely was already familiar.

Ticks most likely were around in the days when sorghum cane was brought to our place and made into molasses and I pictured those old timers looking down and flicking a tick off their arm without putting much thought into the fact that those bloodsuckers had probably been around for centuries before. Evolutionary science places them in the Cretaceous to Tertiary boundary at about 65 million years ago, long before the first human cried out, “EEK! A tick!”. I take them for granted like the old timers, too, but I always wondered how they got the name, tick. As it turns out, the origin of the name is fairly vague: Sanskrit for “to stay put” is plausible, as is the following progression: Armenian – tiz (bug)>Preshistoric W. German – tik or teke possibly derived from the Indo European base of deige – to prickle or itch. Who knows?

We live with ticks out on the farm. I always have to laugh a little when someone sees me pick one off and throw it back into the grass. “You should have killed it,” they might say, to which I reply, “Might as well empty the ocean with a teacup.” Then there are the popular sayings “full as a tick,” or “full as a tick in a dog’s ear,” or “bloated up like a stuffed tick,” all of which refer to eating or drinking too much which is what a tick seems to do as they engorge themselves with the host blood and swell to ten or fifteen times their original sveldt size. Unfed ticks are not that hard to look at but the full ones are ugly. Put a capital “U” on that one. After working in the yard or vineyard we periodically check ourselves and each other for ticks, much like monkeys or baboons picking off fleas. We even act like baboons as we do it and usually there is one or two to be found on the legs or arms or on the head. I heard the other day that there is a new country western song “I’d like to check you for ticks”. (Don’t know and don’t want to hear it.) At any rate, this is probably where the “mud room” on farms originated, mud being benign in the need to shuck one’s clothes at a more leisurely pace than if it were called what it really is, “the tick room,” where clothes seem to fly directly into the washer.

So if you encounter a tick on your body or on your clothes, remember a couple of things. There is no need to kill them, make them walk the equivalent of a hundred miles to find you again. And if they are crawling on you, this is a good thing, they haven’t bitten in yet.