The Tick

Matt heated up the corkscrew in the gas flame and then stuck it into my back. He was going to get the tick out that way. He’d done it a few times in Texas, “It’s sort of like a rite of passage there,” he said. I held on to the heating pipe that runs up the wall of the kitchen.

The tick must have crawled under my t-shirt the day before when I was in a forest on the Teatown Lake Reserve in Westchester county. I was carrying things around on a film shoot for a documentary about Mary Pickford.

We were making a reconstruction of the moment when Mary met and fell in love with Douglas Fairbanks in 1917, while they were traveling and making appearances to encourage people to buy war bonds. The two silent film stars went walking on an autumn afternoon. We were focusing on the moment that Douglas picked up Mary and carried her across a rushing stream in his strong Hollywood arms.

I think the tick got under my clothes at lunchtime. I was quietly sitting on a stone wall next to the stream across which Douglas had lifted and re-lifted Mary many times during the morning. I was trying to draw some of the leaves on the ground.

The stream ran down from a Teatown lake which sat under a slanting sun, pasted with summer’s lilies like old ladies’ faces. The water on the lake was so still it looked heavy – you could see the shallow banks, the mulchy slide into the greenness and brownness. Tiny creatures with smaller brains yippered and skitted on the surface, making triangles and leaping half-miles in their minds.

On the far side of the lake, powerlines hung from their grey towers, quite the most purposeful-looking things in the forest because everything else was drunk: drunk on autumn and the end of it all. The good honest strong green leaves of summer had turned wasted yellow and pink, decadent and drifting. And now they wafted in clusters in the light gusts of wind, dancing for the last time before hitting the floor and fading to brown.

After lunch (I assume with the tick on board, crawling like a marine across my back), I had to go up to the top of the stream and control its flow with a wooden plank that served as a sluice. Douglas was having trouble when the water got too high and I lay on one side of the sluice with Gene, the voluble park manager, on the other, slowing the flow of the water to a picturesque little rush.

I never felt the eight legs marching across my innocent skin nor sensed the moment of decision which inspired the tick to chose a little mole on the lower right half of my back and start digging: craftily out of sight and away from the more obvious and eagerly inspected horror patches.

At the lake, only an occasional goose called out – the big birds from the forest had migrated and the ospreys and herons from further north were only here for a couple of weeks to feed before they too carried on south. Only the turkeys would stay on, barging around with the smaller birds like the bluejays.

The lands of the Teatown Lake Reserve used to be owned by the Gerard Swope, the President of General Electric. He started buying patches of forest around Teatown in 1922, two years after Mary married Douglas, for his wife to ride her horses on. Swope’s wife, Mary Dayton Hill, rode on them for forty years. Mary and Douglas were married for ten.

Ticks can live for three years. They live all across the world. There are about 850 species in two families, the soft and hard ticks. Their lives are strung out in three stages, from the larva to the nymph to the adult. Their lives have a pleasing sense of progress, an onward momentum because they transform from meal to meal. They emerge from the egg, tiny and naïve, and seek a meal of blood. Infused and charged with power, they become nymphs and eat once again. As worldly adults, ticks might wait for months, comatose – in “diapause” – wafting on the top of a long stalk of grass, looking out for their last supper. Three square meals, a laying of eggs for the females, and then death.

I like to think the one that got me was on its last meal. Not out of any sense of pity but because of the solemnity with which it must have taken the decision to attack me. In each meal, soft ticks consume blood between 5 and 10 times their bodyweight. Hard ticks can expand to take on 400 to 600 times their bodyweight. A tick’s last meal is quite a thing.

So imagine the destiny and abandon that filled its tickbrain as it buried its body in mine. Head first, mouth whirring, jaws called palps moving from side to side, steadying frames called chelicerae like some Greek princess and the plunging rod, the jagged hypostome, wrecking its way in and sucking out my blood. Behind the head came the pummeling legs, clawing for grip and the wildly growing body, filling with blood, bursting like a planet.

I found the tick in me in the shower the next morning. A night’s gobbling had only taken it so far, its last legs stuck out feebly with its sack of stolen blood. I dabbed at it with tweezers but the mirror made the angle confusing. I woke Matt and he reached without ceremony for the corkscrew and turned on the stove. I made some toast.

And then I took hold of the pipe. As my room-mate nudged and frazzled around in my back I caught a glimpse of my ghastly reflection in the mirror, mouth hurled open like a gargoyle. My only consolation in those reddening moments of pain was how much worse it was for the tick. Meeting the burning corkscrew must have been quite a surprise.