My wife, Sonya, and I were in Mexico for the month of November, most of that time on the Yucatan Peninsula, visiting Mayan ruins we had not seen before, cenotes, Merida, Campeche, etc. and doing some birdwatching. Our southernmost destination was the largest forest reserve in Mexico, the Calakmul Biosphere Reserve (723,185 ha. or 1,786,990 acres) on the Guatemalan border. We spent several days visiting several ruins in the area besides the giant Calakmul city buried within the reserve, returning each night to the disgusting little town of Xpujil.
One day, we hired a birding guide, Ezekial, to take us inside the reserve to the birding hotspots. It was a fantastic day in which we saw countless species we had never seen before. We started at 4:30 a.m. and ended, exhausted around 3 p.m. Meanwhile, unbeknownst to us, while we were dancing around in excitement at what was going on in the trees, some very, very tiny beasts of evil were silently working their way up our unprotected pant legs to their target: the groin, bunolas (Spanish), and waist. In our dawn sluggishness, our guide failed to suggest that we duct tape our cuffs to our boots.
That night, as we prepared for bed, Sonya screamed when she dropped trou, her entire midsection, without going into graphic detail, was covered with hundreds of red pimples, or bites, or whatever you want to call them. She swore. For several minutes. At least. Maybe more than that. “I can’t believe it,” she said. She swore again.
“What is it?” I asked, in my pathetic ignorance as a lifetime biologist.
“CHIGGERS, DANGNABBIT, YOU BIOLOGICAL BUFFOON!!”
“Now, now, calm down,” I said, a little offended at the reference to my mental state.
“CALM DOWN, MY ASS!” I did notice that she was scratching it. “Don’t you remember Belize when I got into these little bastards years ago and they attacked me, and I STILL have the scars to prove it. That was only a few, now I have hundreds!” I vaguely remember only because they mysteriously left me alone. I did eat a lot of garlic in those days.
“Grrrrrrr…….” She growled. “You can’t scratch them, or it makes it worse, and we have no calamine lotion, which helps a little, but not when there are this many.” More nasty language. When I dropped trou, I had some faint red dots but around the waist, but no itching, nada.
“Just like in Belize, you must have a chigger-specific autoimmune defense system. Are you eating garlic again?”
We combed the little cesspool of a town, Xpujil, hitting the several “pharmacies” in town, all who had never heard of calamine lotion. Finally, we found some in a half-pharmacy, half-something else but I’m not sure what. I do know it wasn’t a Pemex station. We lathered her up and went to bed. Several days and a lot of lathering and 24-hour round-the-clock growling later, we were back in Merida and the itching was beginning to subside and the spots slowly, ever so slowly, fading. I kept very, quiet but very, very silently gloated to myself that I had been blessed that the Force had been with me, when I woke up in the middle of the night scratching like a hound: waist, groin, bunolas. “OH, SHIT. JHC!” I said and leaped out of bed in into the bathroom and dropped my PJ trou. My chigger autoimmune system had given up and succumbed to the microscopic beasts from Hell. Weeks later, back in Boise, life has pretty much returned to normal. But the scars are still there and will probably be there for years. I’m a little leery about going into the YMCA shower without my bathing suit on because by the time I got around to explaining what had happened and that I don’t have leprosy, the shower room would have emptied.
