JUNE 9, 2024 – Back in the day up at the lake, when we went to the grocery store we’d grab the free “Buyer’s Guide” of real estate listings published by the Hayward Area Board of Realtors. We read the listings mostly for their entertainment value. In a vintage edition, for example, I found a “newly remodeled” home on Lac Courte Oreille promoted as having “exceptional value.” What was most “exceptional,” apparently, was the back deck. “Step out the back of the home,” read the ad, “and you’ll find yourself standing on a large wooded deck complete with its own free-standing enclosure containing both heat and A/C for the days the weather doesn’t cooperate with your plans.”
As with everything else, real estate marketing is now almost entirely online. Prices have skyrocketed too. On Round Lake a property is listed for 50 grand shy of a cool three million. The online advertising copy, however, is just as entertaining as the old “Buyer’s Guide” used to be: At the $3 million cabin (so-called), “Enjoy beautiful dual sliding patio doors along the entire lake side of the house.”
What none of the ads—old or new—mentions, however, are the bugs that go with Northwoods real estate, or that for some folks, the whole point of owning a “cabin” in the Northwoods is to swat flies, smack mosquitoes and flush ticks down the toilet.
Ticks are the “despicables” in our neck of the woods. I hate ’em. Everyone does. They spread disease and their bites last forever. This weekend I removed a dozen ticks from my person. The first 10 were totally passive. The 11th was uncharacteristically active, dancing around my right ear to the point I initially mistook its jig for my gray locks dropping down across my ear. But the little bugger overplayed its steps. I reached up, pulled it out of my hair, then flicked it out the back doorway.
I then repaired to the upstairs bathroom to conduct a full body tick check with the aid of mirrors. Nothing like a couple of mirrors to remind yourself you’re no longer a candidate for the Olympics, even if you do happen to clear the tick check. I then checked my clothes, and sure enough, a sock yielded my 12th tick. Too lazy to run back downstairs and flick it out the back doorway, or rather, so as not to shock my wife or a possible intruder, given that I’d just completed a fully body tick check, I flushed the poor bugger down the toilet, then stopped being naked by putting my tick-checked clothes back on.
Not to offer a sliver of praise to ticks, but one thing I “like” about them is that they’re slow and dumb. As a human, you have a fighting chance against ticks. They don’t flit about like a biting fly, equipped with 1,000 eyes so it can see you coming and going 100 times faster than you can blink, and ticks don’t bite you with a sharp proboscis the second they find a patch of exposed skin. No, they crawl at a snail’s pace—make that a tick’s pace—and don’t really get down to business until they’ve given you a very long time to conduct . . . a full body tick check. Plus, when they do decide to bite, it’s not a quick injection and they’re done. No, they take their time, giving you yet another bite at the apple, as it were, to save yourself from a really bad tick bite.
June is big for ticks at the cabin. The good thing about June is that it’s followed by July, when the ticks trail off or rather, go off the main trail and wind up less often in bed with you when you’ve forgotten to conduct a full body tick check beforehand.
This past weekend, however, my main problem was with the main offenders of the local insect world: the state bird of both Minnesota and Wisconsin.
Friday evening just ahead of dusk I made the mistake of venturing deep into the tree garden to check on my white pine seedlings and saplings. Given the time of day and all the recent rain, I knew that mosquitoes would be in full attack mode. I covered up from head to toe, leaving only a portion of forehead, part of my temples, my eyelids and my nose exposed. I naively thought I should take my hand clippers to do some very light pruning on the fly as I hiked along the trail. The mosquitoes had other plans. If I slowed my gait, they buzzed onto my face.
I escaped, but barely—so to speak. Never had I experienced such a reaction to mosquito bites. From the woods I emerged with a welt on my forehead and another on my temple. Worse, my left eye lid was so puffed up it interfered with my sight—even when I willed it into the full open position.
I hastened back to the cabin, which stood in the protective zone of a light breeze.
To fool the critters completely, Beth and I jumped on the pontoon and at 5,000 rpms, made good for the middle of the lake.
Beth later surmised, however, that perhaps I was blaming the wrong members of Arthropoda. “Maybe those are spider bites,” she said. Spider bites are always big like that.” Oh great, I thought. Spiders biting my face when I didn’t even realize it! “I noticed while sitting on the dock, tiny spiders would drop right down from the tree branches.”
Why can’t all insects (and spiders) be non-biting, non-disease-transmitting, and beautiful—like . . . butterflies? Take for instance the yellow tiger swallowtails that we see along the lakeshore trail. They’re beautiful and bring us such delight, especially when they bring such joy to our granddaughter, who chases them into the woods. Except . . .
Last summer, our joyful granddaughter informed me very matter-of-factly that these colorful creatures of fairyland origin . . . eat poop. “No!” I protested. “Where in the world did you learn that these beautiful butterflies exist on poop?”
“Grandma told me,” she said authoritatively.
This weekend I tried to put insects and spiders and poop-eating butterflies into reasonable perspective. As I walked the paths, admiring the burst of new life in our lacustrine woods, I heard beautiful birdsong, and I knew that without insects, the avian chamber orchestra hidden among the trees would be silent, and we humans would be inestimably poorer. Yesterday, I caught sight of dew drops on the threads of an intricate spiderweb, glistening in the fresh rays of the rising sun. It was a fleeting work of wonder spun by a hungry spider but for me to treasure as a member of the realm. Today I saw the final emergence of a full-fledged dragonfly from the skin of its earlier self. It was an extraordinary event to behold—especially when I considered that dragonflies feed on . . . mosquitoes.
Nature is an infinite complex of interaction and interdependency among organisms. What strikes us as beautiful and desirable in sight and sound requires competition and coexistence among the species, all in conjunction with astronomical, geophysical and meteorological forces. We often see ourselves as apart from nature, treating it as a painting to be viewed or sound recording to be heard on our own time and terms, not grasping that we are no more apart from nature than we are from creation.
Uh oh. What’s that crawling across the back of my neck? A tick, by gosh, but surely not from the northwoods. No way, no how, given the above-described full body tick check. No, this tick had been lying in wait, slow and dumb, for our return to our house and porch back in . . . the city.
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© 2024 by Eric Nilsson
