Immunity Lost

If you don't know what the above plant is, I envy you. No, no, actually I hate you, because anyone who doesn't know what this is has probably never had a serious run-in with it. And that's just not fair.

I know you, you who goes about your business in the woods without having to look carefully at every single plant beside the trail, or leap back in terror whenever a leaf happens to brush against your skin, or scrub furiously with mineral oil or Tecnu as soon as you return home. I know you and I hate you.

If you haven't already figured it out, the plant I'm talking about is poison ivy. SCIENCE ALERT: Poison ivy, oak and sumac contain an oil called urushiol, a wonderful little chemical that causes a severe contact dermatitis reaction for many people. It's an oil - that means you can't just remove it with soap and water. Typically you need mineral spirits or a miraculous substance called Tecnu to remove it, and you only have a few hours after exposure to do so before the oil begins to do its devilry to your skin. After that, it can take a couple of days for a full-blown reaction to appear.

The oil's everywhere in there, folks - the leaves, the stems, the roots. It lurks in the defoliated skeletons of ivy past so that just when you think it's safe to pull it from your garden, you're at the doctor two days later with a swollen face. It stays on your clothing for months - years, even - and laughs in the face of washing machines. Oh yes; you thought you got off scot-free when you scrubbed the crap out of your skin after your hike and instantly threw your clothes in the laundry, but no, all you needed to do was put that lovely shirt on again and you're a ticking rash-bomb.

Some people don't react to it. That's me, you may think to yourself, as you swim in the oily fields of green and laugh at your suffering friends. But poison ivy will have the last laugh, because perhaps its most fiendish quality of all is that you can lose your immunity. 
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This story starts in South Dakota, summer 2005. You may not think of the dry, mountainous Black Hills as favorable poison ivy habitat, but you'd be very wrong. When I was there working on woodpeckers between my junior and senior years of college, we had to wade through acres and acres of it nearly every day.

Poison ivy likes disturbed sites, so I'm told, and we were working in areas burned by wildfire. And the ivy loved it. If you've seen little bushes by the roadside or tendrils creeping along the base of an oak in your front yard, forget about those images and try to imagine this: a broad, endless, sparkling field of green, but except for grass, it's aaaaaaaaalll poison ivy.

At first, warned by my boss, I tried very carefully to avoid it. I had never been exposed and didn't know if I would react - and based on the stories I heard, I was not eager to experiment. However, one day, as I carried the equipment in the hot sun, trying my damnedest not to trip and fall on the half-hidden logs underneath the poison ivy, I lost my footing. I fell face-first into that crap.

And, joy of all joys, nothing happened.

I was immune. Glorious, glorious revelation.

Fast-forward to  summer 2010. I had now worked in the field of wildlife biology for 5 years, in northwestern Colorado, southern California, Yellowstone National Park, and central Missouri with untold exposure to poison ivy and nary a reaction to be had. (Granted, I got a little rash from poison OAK in California, but the stupid part of my brain chose to ignore the smart part that reminded me that, poison ivy or oak, urushiol is urushiol.) Now, I was back in Colorado, working on the lion project.

One hot day in July, my coworker Kevin and I decided to hit some points just west of Golden, in the scrubby hills right smack across from the Coors Brewery (remember, we were hiking in to data points uploaded from the lions' fancy collars). We didn't have far to hike, but the going was steep - through scrub oak and cactus, far from the shade of the trees, up a steep hillside cut in half by a deep, rocky little gulch. We were searching for a lion kill.

Most of the lion's GPS points appeared to drop right down into that little gulch. While Kevin balked at the unmistakable fronds of poison ivy trailing all over the sides and bottom, I puffed out my chest. "Never fear," I may or may not have said, "I am immune. I shall dive into the toxic depths." And did I ever.

It was everywhere. And there was no easy way to get into the gulch without touching it, so I threw all caution to the wind, sat down, and wormed my way through the stuff to slide down and land in the bottom.The scrub and the rocks twisted at my clothes and sent branches and pebbles down my pants, but I didn't care too much. Having reached my destination, I searched everywhere for sign of a lion kill, but alas, it was not to be. Just a random place the lion visited. It was difficult, but I pulled myself out of the ravine, and Kevin and I hiked back to the truck.

That was a Thursday, the end of the 4-day, 10 hours-per-day work week for us. I went home to Fort Collins, showered, did my laundry, and went about my business. Friday was wonderful; cool and sunny like a typical mild Colorado summer. Saturday, my roommates and I decided to check out the O'Dell Brewery, which produces my favorite wheat beer of all time: Easy Street.

We sat on the porch drinking our beer samplers and enjoying the day. We took pictures of each other being brew connoisseurs, and flirted with the cute boys on their Fort Collins brewery tours (there are quite a few there...breweries, as well as boys). And somewhere in there, probably between the porter and the IPA, I scratched at my arm. It had suddenly started to itch.

An hour passed. I had tried the pale ale and the amber, perhaps ordered a pint of Easy Street, and now the itch had spread to my neck. And, strangely, my back. And my face. All over my face. Increasingly worried, I urged the girls to take me home. I had no illusions. I knew exactly what was going on.

I bought Tecnu and scrubbed and scrubbed, but it was too late.

Monday morning, I showed up to work with half of my face looking and feeling like a pumpkin. I tried to cover it with my hand, but Kevin took one look at me and started laughing. I had no choice but to accompany him to the field. I remember this day so vividly; we had to ask permission from a nice old lady in order to search for a den site in a boulder field behind her property. I begged Kevin to let me stay in the car while he went to the door, but he was merciless. I'm sure the nice old lady didn't want to be rude, but she stared at me like I was some kind of zombie. And just to add to the annoyances of the day, we didn't find any kittens in the den.

As soon as we got back to town I went straight to the Urgent Care Center. Catastrophic crappy high-deductible insurance be damned, I wanted some frickin' cortisone. I got a lovely shot and a packet full of steroids.

In the end, the poison ivy rash covered me nearly from head to toe. There's a myth out there that you can spread it by scratching the rash, but that's not strictly true. If you don't remove the oil from your clothes, of course it's going to hit you again and again. But the reaction appears over different parts of your body with different timing. At first it was my arms and face, but eventually it got all over. Remember how I said the rocks had tugged at my clothes when I slid down into the ravine? Yeah. It got all over my back, all over my belt line (which itched even worse than my face), and even eventually to my legs, despite the fact that I'd been wearing long pants. I imagine this was due to residual oil from my clothes.

And the rash took forever to go away; at least a month. It was absolutely miserable.

Ever since then, I've avoided the stuff like the plague it is. I have a search image for it - an ingrained mental picture, typically used to describe predators searching for prey, that allows someone to instantly key in on the shape of something familiar. I still have minimal encounters with it from time to time (mostly because my favorite jogging park in Texas is riddled with it), but I vowed never to underestimate it again, and so far I have been rewarded for my diligence.

Indeed, I returned to South Dakota in 2011, again to work with woodpeckers, and again I was faced with the fields of poison ivy. But this time, my treatment of it was quite different. Especially in one area called the Sheridan field site, it was everywhere, and the woodpeckers seemed to love it. Almost like they knew it was my kryptonite, and all they had to do to get away from me was veer toward it. It annoyed my boss to no end that I took such pains to avoid it, but damn it, he hadn't felt what I felt. He hadn't stayed up all night with that insatiable itch that begs you to scratch and then taunts you with only seconds of relief before renewing the misery. All that summer I was afraid to touch the bottoms of my pants or my bootlaces. It was pointless to soak them in Tecnu, because the next day I'd just be ankle-deep in it again.

Well, the moral of this story, kids, is not to mess with poison ivy. You may be immune now, but I am firmly convinced that there is no more eager teacher of wisdom when it comes to the sin of complacency.

The other (unintentional) moral of the story is that Colorado has good beer.

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SURPRISE.
If you've read to the end of this post, I shall reward you with a piece of information that may one day save your sanity.

Got an itch you just can't fix? Chiggers? Mosquito bite? Urushiol? Ditch the Calamine lotion, the hydrocortisone cream, the homeopathic remedies. Men, you may be SOL, but ladies, you probably have this most bestest of all itch cures already in your bathroom.