- I'm covered with bites today and, as Elvis put it so
well, "itchin' like a man on a fuzzy tree." Which means I'm ready
to rant about one of the most maddening aspects of living in Paradise.
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- Ticks!
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- Wherever you find beautiful greenery you also are sure
to find Earth's most obnoxious little bloodsuckers. Step outside on a beautiful
summerday, and the odds are good you'll step back in with a tick somewhere
on- or in-your clothes.
-
- Over the years I've learned how to deal with chiggers.
Stay out of the woods. Wear boots and long pants and tuck your pants inside
your boots. Keep moving. Deet up.
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- Ticks, however, are another story. Pick up a rake and
presto! There's a tick crawling up your arm.
-
- Walk past a shed and wham! That's a tick fastening itself
to your neck.
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- Trim a tree branch and pow! That ain't no aphid clinging
to your leg.
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- I can Deet myself to death and still find a little bump
in an inappropriate place, scratch at it and splatter myself with my own
blood, courtesy of one fat, well-fed tick mom.
-
- I remember as a child plucking off a tick and continuing
on my merry way.What I don't remember is the welt the size of my mountaintop
and the Big Itch afterward that I feel now. Have ticks mutated into something
farmore powerful than before?
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- In Paradise, common wisdom says there are two ways to
beat the ticks.
-
- The first way is to move to the city and spend your life
on concrete and asphalt, insulated from nature's miserable little sucks.
Since my neighbors and I are all about living where we can touch and smell
and listen to the land, that's not an option.
-
- The second way is to spray all around with the strongest
possible poison. But that's got a downside too. Everyone's livestock would
pay a high price for grazing on chemical-soaked grass.
-
- Yesterday, as I pondered and scratched, Brannigan the
Contractor came by to ratchet up our sagging back deck. After a couple
of sweaty hours he came inside to take Gwen the Beautiful up on her offer
of sweet tea.
-
- After pulling up a chair, he noticed a two foot long
feather on my desk. Brannigan eyed it curiously. "What're you doing
with this?"
-
- "Admiring it," I said. You don't see an eagle
feather every day."
-
- Brannigan snorted. "Eagle feather?! No way! It's
from a turkey vulture. Eagles are noble. They hunt just like real men.
But vultures? They're the lowest form of bird life there is. Good for nothing
but stripping roadkill!"
-
- After Brannigan left I picked up the feather. When I'd
thought it was an eagle feather I'd seen it as beautiful. A prize. But
now? Now I felt likea jerk.
-
- Which got me to wondering. Why value eagles over vultures?
Is killingfood automatically a "better" thing to do than eating
what's already dead? Wouldn't it be easy to argue exactly the reverse?
-
- I called Johnny Lee, Deputy Game Warden at Paradise County
Fish and Game.Asked him what he knew about vultures. "Vultures are
awesome," he said. "I'd want to be one if I was abird."
-
- This was a surprise. I asked Johnny Lee one question.
"Why?"
-
- "They're the ultimate team players. They know how
to make everything around them work for them. They're not made for hunting
so they depend on others to kill. When the hunters are finished, the vultures
eat what otherwise would rot and be wasted.
-
- "And they share it with other animals. Everything
in the woods knows where to go for supper when they see vultures circling
around.
-
- "They're great flyers too. Most efficient gliders
of any bird, and they're just about the healthiest. They've got special
bacteria that knock out most disease."
-
- Which, believe it or not, brings me back to ticks and
the itch I'm stillscratching. Vultures are in tune with the world, and
they're big on sharing, right?
-
- Well then, here's what I'm going to do. I'm taking that
big feather outside and waving it at the next turkey vulture I see overhead.
And I'm asking it the Question of the Hour: "How can I get along with
ticks? How can I get something good out of them? What should I do?"
-
- And I promise that when that vulture tells me, you'all
- and Brannigan - will be the first to know.
-
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- Copyright C 2006 by Larry Brody. Forpermission to reprint
this column, please write toLarryBrody@cloudcreek.org.
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- Author Larry Brody's weekly column,LIVE! FROM PARADISE!
appears on his website,www.larrybrody.com. He has written thousands of
hours of networktelevision, and is the author of "Television Writing
from the InsideOut" and "Turning Points in Television."
Brody is Creative Director of The Cloud Creek Institute for the Arts, the
world's firstin-residence media colony. More about his activities can be
seen on www.tvwriter.comandwww.cloudcreek.org. He welcomes your comments
and feedback at LarryBrody@cloudcreek.org. Brody, his wife and their dogs,
cats, horses and chickens live in Marion County, Arkansas. The other residents
of the mythical town of Paradise reside in his imagination.
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- Larry Brody TV Writer.Com http://www.tvwriter.com Better
writing makes better TV!
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