HOLLY NADLER
508-274-2329
This is the week of the Imaginary Tick. It isn’t as if we don’t have actual ticks. We have ticks trekking up our shirts, hiding in our sleeves, lurking in our blankets and, of course, embedding in the pelts of our dogs. This happens even when we’ve Frontlined the pooches, because it takes a while for those intrepid little bugs to discover they’ve hopped a ride on a moving Love Canal.
But it’s once the ticks have reached a mid-spring critical mass that the Imaginary Tick grabs hold of our psychosomatic pathologies. For every actual tick, there are four or five phantom ticks climbing out of the tops of our socks, invading the backs of our necks where flesh meets hairline and — the worst of all the imaginaries — pitter-patting around inside the elastic bands of our underwear. I hate those ones! When you see a fellow Islander scratching incessantly, you know it’s the Imaginary Tick at work.
Meanwhile, on the final installment of Sam and Charlie’s Excellent South Asia Adventure (Sam Reece and Charlie Nadler), the boys have had to deal with an insect nuisance of a much more maddening order: In their trek through the Laotian rain forest, they found their feet and legs upholstered with leeches. You can’t help but think of Katherine Hepburn in The African Queen when, with constant yelps of revulsion, she pries leeches from the back and shoulders of Humphrey Bogart. Sam and Charlie were equally grossed out as they plucked those bloodsuckers from their shins and in between their toes.
The full horror of their monsoon night atop their zipline-platform treehouse stood revealed in Sam’s recent chatty e-mail to family and friends:
“We heard a whistling and turned to look at the storm. No rain yet, but the sound got louder and the wind hit us like a wall. Our candles blew out, the bug sheets were blowing sideways, and a few things at the railing, including one of my sandals, were lost to the forest floor forever. Now comes the rain, traveling completely horizontal through the house, soaking the beds, pillows, and anything else not safely stowed in dry bags. In this 60-second timeframe, we went from excited to huddled together on the floor at the trunk of the tree and closing our eyes as the tree swung 4 to 6 feet in either direction. This lasted maybe 10 to 15 minutes as we got cold, wet and scrambled to put on our harnesses. We discussed a multitude of options to either leave or stay.”
Leaving, by the way, would have meant ziplining through the storm from one treehouse to the next until they reached the main kitchen hut at the end of the line. As their guide, Thai Shon, blithely put it earlier in the day, if they zipped out, “When storm stop, you zip back to house and sleep.”
To continue with Sam’s tale: “As the wind calmed down, the rain and lightning moved closer and heavier, the sky exploding around us. My heart was racing and once again came a realization that we were 400 feet off the ground in a shelter built in a Third World country. We talked about evacuating, but in the end the wind never came back and we stayed up to watch the three-hour storm tear through the forest. . . We were closer to the other four people in the tree with us than I ever would have thought possible. We had survived and been given the go-ahead for life in the future.”
Their subsequent travels took them down the Mekong River in a slow boat, a couple of nights in the paradisiacal Luang Prabang (Charlie wrote, “Now one of my favorite cities in the world, a place I will definitely be stopping back at later in life for an extended time”), then on to a small Laotian village called Vang Vieng, where they spent a couple of dreamy days engaged in an activity called river-tubing.
River-bleeping-what? Were there deadly water snakes? Crocodiles? They hadn’t risked their hides enough with the zips and the (lightning) zaps that they had to, in Charlie’s Grandma Betty’s words, “Go looking for more trouble”?
Finally, Charlie’s passage home on Saturday, the 22nd, will involve flying out of Bangkok, currently undergoing a spot of rioting and fatal shootings. Couldn’t these protestors have waited an extra week before agitating for free elections? One thing I noticed on the CNN Web site is that, thanks to this mini-revolution and its paralyzing effect on tourism, Thai hotels are offering super discounts. I e-mailed Charlie to suggest that he and Sam treat themselves to a luxe night in a five-star lodging. On the other hand, this might spoil their record of three straight weeks of Xtreme sports, and instead for their last day together they’ll undoubtedly track down a scuba-dive-with-sharks-and-stingrays event.
Sam, by the way, has an additional eight days of fun ’n sun ’n monsoons, so if you run into Doug or Amy Reece in the coming week, be sure to give them a big hug of support.
Coming up soon, the annual 5K Hospice of MV Road Race, on Sunday, May 30, starting at 11 a.m. from the Wesley Hotel across from the Oak Bluffs Harbor. The walk and race will be preceded by a one-mile fun run at 10:30. Preregistration at the Wesley Hotel, May 29, from 3 to 6 p.m. costs $15 and includes a T-shirt. Registration on the day itself will cost $20 with no T-shirt, so you know where the good deal resides. To register go to hospiceofmv.org or call Roger Wey at 508-693-7887 or Lynda Costa, office administrator, at 508-693-0189.
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