Botany
Georgia, September 2022
“I wouldn’t send anyone who doesn’t know their way around the woods down that trail. Half of it’s grown over. Once, I was pretty sure I was lost.”
I was talking to the campground host on a hot September day at the Lake Sinclair Recreational Area, a public beach and camping site on the edge of the Oconee National Forest in central Georgia. He flashed a mouthful of bad teeth and told me little had been done to maintain the two-mile trail I’d hiked — or anything south of the road, including a now-closed loop of campsites — since the Boy Scouts stopped coming to Lake Sinclair.
“You might be the only person’s even walked it all year,” he reckoned.
I decided against asking why he hadn’t mentioned this two hours earlier, when I sought him out to inquire where the trailhead was.
The hike was eventful, at least. I encountered no fewer than two dozen spiders, walking into the first few webs strung from tree to tree across the now-here-now-gone-again trail. Orb weavers, I surmised from their colorful markings. I batted their webs down with my walking stick. They probably weren’t venomous, but I saw no point in taking chances.
There was no sign of the picturesque backwoods pond the host had told me lay along the farthest end of the trail. Perhaps “pond” was a figment of my imagination and what he really said was “mud hole.” The white squares painted on trees to mark the trail grew faint, few, farther between. I crossed a bridge in such an advanced state of decay that I wondered whether it might collapse beneath me. Soon I came upon another mud hole, and then all trail-sign disappeared for some way.
I stood in the woods and looked around in all directions. I looked back towards the last sign I’d passed. There was no sign on this side of what I was pretty sure was the right tree. I turned again the way I’d been going.
I knew two things for sure: I’d walked mostly downhill so far, and if my sense of direction in flatlands was still good — it had been terrible up in the mountains — I now more or less faced the road. I only had to hike uphill to get back to it. So I made a guess about how the trail continued. As luck would have it, I was right. Not quite a quarter mile on, trail-sign reappeared to guide me through a bit of swamp. Soon I came to the road.
But I didn’t return from the woods alone. An old, hated acquaintance hitched a ride back to camp with me. Poison ivy.
If Thoreau ever contracted a serious case of poison ivy, he makes no mention of it in Walden. The closest he comes to it is a reference to “the seven-years’ itch” — scabies, which is not a botanical infection but caused by a mite. Even then, he appears only to be speaking metaphorically. Poison ivy would have distracted the readers of Walden from the point he’d set out to prove. So, if he ever got it, he didn’t bring it up.
Thoreau went to the woods, in his famous formulation, because he wanted to live deliberately — that is, he went there with an ax to grind, a point to prove.
Such people usually have a plan. Thoreau had a back-up plan, too. The town of Concord, less than two miles away, provided him the company of friends whenever he wanted it and an easy exit in the event of disaster. So he scrimped and saved, played the hermit for a couple of years, and wrote about what a life-changing experience it all was, what vistas of philosophy opened before him in his solitude.
But I went to the woods with no plan — indeed, you could say a lack of planning drove me there. So I have no smug pronouncements to make about what life is or how to suck the marrow out of it.
All I can say is that nothing makes you feel so alive, and that your life used to be a good one, as a case of poison ivy. It feels like an invisible swarm of fire-ants relentlessly engulfing you. Making mincemeat of your ankles. Crawling up your legs. Invading your crotch and backside. Spreading over your torso. Covering every bit of your body but your scalp. Eating you up.
After two days with a worsening case of poison ivy, I struck camp, desperate for a reprieve from the woods.
Just before leaving the campground, I texted my brother John, then a student at the University of Georgia in Athens, and asked if I could stay a night at his apartment and sleep on my air mattress in the living room. Driven to distraction by impossible-to-ignore itching, I didn’t think to mention I had poison ivy. I’d taken a shower in the campground facilities before leaving, and on the drive I took care not to touch myself, much less scratch any itches — that’s hell when you’re driving. When I arrived, at once I warned John not to touch me. So I thought I’d been duly considerate.
John thought otherwise. When I emerged from his bathroom, where I’d taken a second shower in an effort to prevent the poison ivy from spreading, and I asked if he had bleach I could wash out the bathtub with, he stared at me in exasperation and said, “You can get bleach at the CVS. And after you’ve cleaned the tub, you can leave. This is exactly what Dad and the rest of us have been telling you for years, Josh. You don’t think of people. What the hell were you thinking, coming here without getting rid of the poison ivy first?”
“Getting rid of it?! How on earth do you get rid of it?”
John whipped out his smartphone and googled the question. “Rubbing alcohol,” he informed me.
“I’ll get some at the CVS. But I’ve never heard of that, and you know I don’t have a smartphone. How was I supposed to know?”
John sat on the couch. I felt at a disadvantage in the argument, standing there in his apartment with only a towel wrapped around my waist.
“Then you should have stayed out there camping until you were over it,” John told me, “instead of bringing it here.”
“Have you ever had poison ivy?” I asked, and when John admitted he hadn’t, I went on: “If you had any idea what it’s like, you’d know I couldn’t just stay in the woods with it. It eats you up, and you can’t think of anything else. I’m sorry I didn’t give you a heads-up — that was thoughtless of me — but I had to get a break.”
“How do I know my furniture isn’t infected?”
“Believe me, nothing’s been more on my mind for the last two days than what I’m touching and not touching!”
“You touched my doorknobs,” John pointed out.
Indeed I had, and I hadn’t thought of it when telling him not to touch me.
I returned from the CVS to find John washing down the entire front door with hand sanitizer. He complained of a mild itch on his forearm. I thought it was most likely psychosomatic and not poison ivy, but I let him have the first turn with the rubbing alcohol. Then I retreated again to the bathroom, disrobed and gave myself a generous rubdown, and bleached the tub. When I reemerged, John said, “You can stay. I guess I overreacted. Just don’t sit on the couch.”
“That’s why I brought my camp chair,” I said, pointing at it.
We sat outside, smoked, and talked about our brother James, who had recently given up his lease in a rundown neighborhood a few blocks from the state penitentiary on the south side of Atlanta and moved to the countryside near Athens, thanks to a new job he worked remotely. We agreed Atlanta had been bad for James, especially for his character, and John assured me that James was growing more even-tempered, though he hadn’t been in Athens long. Our talk circled back to my selfishness.
“It’s not that I give no thought at all to anyone else,” I said, struggling as I often do to explain myself rightly. “I do care. I’m just a fool at times.”
“You’re a fool a lot.”
“Okay, then, I’m a fool a lot. Dad’s told me how selfish and inconsiderate I am since I was seven years old — ‘the age of accountability,’ he called it. Do you think I haven’t been listening for the last thirty-three years? Do you think I’m not trying?”
John didn’t answer.
After a while, as the sun was setting, we made our way on foot downtown to hear a band play at a bar John frequented, where we played pool for free on worn-out tables. The band was too loud, and their songs were Grateful Dead-inspired endless jams, so we soon left and went to another bar for Irish coffee. We sat at a table on the sidewalk and watched the never-ending parade of frat bros and girls in revealing outfits which typifies Athens on the night of a big football game.
Observing the parade with distaste, John said, “I hardly ever go downtown, and this is why.” He pointed across the street. “There’s that homeless guy I told you about.”
On the opposite sidewalk, a man lay wrapped in a sleeping bag in the doorway of a closed boutique, reading a paperback. He went unnoticed by the passing people, many of whom were stumbling-drunk. It was an ironic tableau: the studious homeless man surrounded by booze-soaked college students.
A gaggle of girls on our side of the street stopped as one of them vomited and then fainted on the pavement, shaking as if she was having an epileptic seizure. The other girls knelt beside her as she lay on her back, but they seemed to have no idea what to do. I rose and approached them.
“Turn her on her side,” I instructed, aware from experience — a few of my students at Georgia Southern had epilepsy — there was a risk she would choke on her vomit.
One of the girls tugged at her, turning her over.
“Catch her head!” I admonished, and the girl caught her friend’s head just as it was about to strike the asphalt.
Someone had emerged from the bar, no doubt an employee concerned about liability. He now took charge of the girls, making them pick up their still-shaking companion and move her to a nearby bench. John appeared at my side.
“Let’s go,” he said. As we wove through the loud throng of revelers, he raised his voice to remark, “I don’t get involved. You’re just opening yourself up to people’s problems. It never ends. And you don’t know who’s going to take advantage of you.”
“I realize that,” I said, “but I always feel compelled to try.”
“You’re not really helping anyone.”
Had no one intervened and the girl had asphyxiated, I reflected, the absence of any Good Samaritans on the scene might have meant her death — unlikely, it was true, but possibly.
My friend Cecilia, who works for the USDA, would later make a similar observation: “Everyone’s against big government in principle, but they don’t know what they’re opposing or arguing against. Sometimes I think we should shut down a few programs, just so people can see where we’d all be six months later. Most people have no idea how much work goes into making their food safe to eat.”
When help and care are ever-present, they become invisible to us. When they’re not, we notice, but only then.
I left Athens mid-morning the next day, sorry I’d put John out but unsure how to make amends. Over the next two weeks, I drove stage by stage up to the Berkshires, taking my time to stop and camp in North Carolina, Virginia, Pennsylvania, and New York. As poison ivy ravaged me, I learned what it was to be afflicted with no recourse for it, not a single person I had the audacity to impose upon in search of aid.
I went to the woods because it was cheap — or so I imagined. I was out of work, fast approaching broke, with prospect after prospect for a full-time job falling through during interviews. No one was getting back to me at all about my applications for part-time jobs. I saw nothing better to do with my time than see other parts of the country.
I went to the woods because I couldn’t live with either of my parents. At forty, I had to stop relying on my family to pull me out of scrapes and help me get back on my feet. I had to learn to face difficulty alone.
I went to the woods because I’d recently taken up woodworking and I thought I could use an arboreal education. I went to learn about trees.
I went to the woods because I just like being in the woods.
But mainly I went to the woods because I’m a damned fool.
Note
Just in case you run the risk of getting poison ivy, here’s some info from the FDA about avoidance, symptoms, and treatment. If the FDA’s info is to be trusted — I make no claims about that — poison ivy can spread through contact with infected clothes, but otherwise it can’t spread from person to person. When you come back to camp from a walk in the woods, take a shower and change your clothes! Wash the clothes you hiked in before you wear them again!
If used within four hours of your first exposure to poison ivy, rubbing alcohol will draw urushiol — the plant oil which causes the rash — out of your skin.1 However, if you already have the rash, as I did after two days, rubbing alcohol may only make it worse.2 Thanks for the casual googling, John.
Source: “How to Treat a Poison Ivy Rash at Home” (Amory Urgent Care).
Source: “How to Identify, Avoid and Treat Poison Ivy” (Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia).
Holy Cow! Wonderful from the first word to the last. Heartbreaking and inspiring. Thank you for writing this down Joshua. I’m a fan of your writing and your music and you too.