AMATEUR NATURALIST Woods harbor great beauty – and some nasty ticks

Years ago when I taught at Unity College, the outdoor recreation professors drilled a sentence into every generation of students: “The woods don’t care.”

It meant that along with being remarkably beautiful, the forest is remarkably dangerous. The oaks and cathedral-like firs do no more than stand there when you’re lost and running out of daylight. They stand there all night, too, unmoved, and on into the next morning.

It’s hard to think of a tree as a threat. It just doesn’t care. But its inhabitants, like ticks, are a clue about the warning’s depth. They can scare the pants off you.

They’re tiny. Some are a quarter-inch wide, but a lot of them, like the deer tick, are just lumbering specks. If one finds you, it burrows into your skin and drinks your blood. It can inject bacteria into you. If you don’t carefully tweezer it off your scalp or ankle, the body tears away and the maw gets stuck. The whole head stays in your skin, digging deeper. Bad infections can follow.

One of the bad infections is Lyme disease, caused by a bacteria the ticks get from biting deer and mice. It usually starts with a rash, fever, headache, and muscle or joint pain. After weeks the pain can get worse, and after months mental instabilities can set in.

But the ticks don’t care, and neither do the deer – who are feeding more ticks this year because more of them survived the mild winter – and neither does their habitat.

Years ago some friends and I went camping on Little Chebeague Island in Casco Bay. We walked around the beach from the ferry stop on Big Chebeague and at low tide crossed the sandbar to Little Chebeague, which at that time was overgrown and wild. We found a huge, gorgeous oak tree in a grassy clearing and set up our tents under it.

While my friends took a campers nap, I got restless and walked down to a rocky beach to ruminate on the beauty of Maine and its seascapes – the wild rose thickets yellowing in the September sunlight, the glistening blue water. Signs of the divine.

Standing on the silent beach, I took off my hat and ran my fingers through my hair. (It was a long time ago.) I felt a scab. Odd. It came loose. Then I felt another one. It came loose, too.

On my neck was another one, and wondering what the hell was going on I brushed it away. I took off my shirt and saw motion in the collar and seams. Ticks. Multilegged. Crawling. Ravenous.

I shook out the shirt and looked in my hat – the inside band was teeming. I took my pants off, and in the seams and zipper were ticks, ticks. I brushed, flapped and picked until they seemed gone, and then I stripped and dove into the cold salt water and stayed under to soak off whatever monsters remained.

I don’t know, it must have worked. I got dressed and walked back to tell my friends. We had a collective vision of ticks dropping like paratroopers out of the oak tree to feast on us and leave us for dead.

The woods do not care.