Random Stop...

Thursday, 8/28/08 @ 9:13pm
Interstate 70, East of Hays, Kansas:

I was jolted awake when Ike hit the brakes-HARD. The van lurched to the right, crossing the rumble strip, and stopped roughly on the shoulder. Semi-trucks, lugging their heavy loads roared by as I sat up with a "hrumph." I had drifted off into sleep long enough for the sun to have gone down without my awareness. I had no idea where we were.

Ike was already out of the van by the time I raised the blinds. I looked out the window and spotted him-up to his chest in grass, climbing up a small hill toward a ridge of trees. Towering above him, about 100 feet beyond, was a solitary wind turbine turning fast in the Kansas wind.

Betse yelled out, "oh no, I bet there are chiggers."
"You can brush them off!" he yelled back as he disappeared through the tree line.

Nate turned around from the seat in front of me, laughing, and said, "Hey Phil, did you think we would be stopping for THIS?". I grumbled a non-answer, and looked back outside at the turbine, scanning the trees for Ike.

"Wow, you can hear it," Betse said, "LISTEN..." I slid my window open, but for several moments, all I could hear was the traffic whooshing past. Then I heard it, the steady, "whump, whump, whump" of the turbine.

Spurred on by this new auditory impulse, Betse too was now off into the grass, She moved with greater care than Ike- perhaps hoping to limit her parasite exposure. Nate turned to me again and said, "He was just talking about wanting to climb something." Chuckling, he added, "He's going to be on top of that thing in a few minutes."

I collapsed back into my seat with a grumble-feigning disinterest. The part of me that knew this was going to make us late, had taken momentary control of my vocal chords. But there was another part of me that secretly wanted to see Ike's shadowy silhouette moving up the side of the tower- no matter how late it made us.

I sat back up and said, "Do they even HAVE chiggers in central Kansas?"
"I don't know," Nate replied as he stepped outside to water the roadside flowers, "but I'm not feeling adventurous enough tonight to find out." Then he said, "Hey, they're coming back, there must have been a fence"

Ike an Betse returned to their respective front seats, obsessively brushing and rubbing their wrists and ankles. They spoke to each other emphatically-not about wind turbines, but about feeding habits and human defense strategies against Trombiculidae, the common chigger. It was obvious that they now imagined their bodies teeming with microscopic mites. Innumerable chiggers were slipping into a sock here, a waistband there, or worse yet, crawling under a warm, moist fold of skin where there would be protection from the incessant brushing and rubbing- the sort of place a chigger can relax, a safe place where he can linger long enough to begin to feed...



For those who don't believe in the existence of the much-reviled midwestern chigger, please visit:

http://mdc.mo.gov/nathis/arthopo/chiggers/

Or, for you adventurous disbelievers, I invite you to visit any picturesque backyard, pasture, or meadow of Missouri grass between June and August. Go ahead, have a seat, relax and see for yourself if chiggers are real.

By the way, you can't see them, they are invisible...