Scavenger hunt # 55 & 23

Not much as fortunes go

The doorflap was dingy and oily from countless hands. I pushed inside and stood for a moment to let my eyes adjust to the dim candlelight. The tent's interior smelled of mold, sandalwood, and greasy shrimp.

Madame Osmerta was seated at the requisite round table, a purple scarf covering her hair. She peered up at me through cat-eye glasses. On the paisley tablecloth before her reposed a crystal globe, which appeared to be tinted a light pink. To her left was a double row of Tarot cards, some facing up, others face down. On her right was a TV tray, holding a Styrofoam food container and several napkins.

“Come in, come in,” she said, surreptitiously wiping her mouth. “Please. Take a seat. Did you want guidance on some specific life issue? Or do you want me to reveal your fortune?”

I pulled back the round wrought-iron chair and collapsed onto the threadbare cushion. “Uh, my fortune, I guess,” I said.

“And do you want me to read your palm, consult the crystal ball, or read the cards?” she asked, peering over her glasses.

From this close I could see greasy fingerprints on the crystal ball, which somehow seemed to bring into question its reliability as a source of knowledge. “Probably the cards,” I said. “How much is it?”

“A full reading is ten dollars,” she said. “I can combine it with a palm reading for fifteen.”

“Just the cards, then,” I said, pulling a bill from my wallet.

She folded the bill and concealed it somewhere in her voluminous dress. “All right. Please be still while I compose my spirit and open my inner eye.”

She raised her eyes to the ceiling, folded her hands and pointed them skyward, and hummed for a few seconds. Then she uttered a few syllables, spread her hands, closed her eyes, and slowly, with a series of flourishes, lowered her hands behind the table. I heard a crackling noise, followed by a pop. She bowed her head and rested it on the edge of the table.

I heard a “crunch,” and then she was sitting upright, gathering the Tarot cards together. She shuffled them several times, uttered a brief incantation, and turned over the first card. It showed a bright sun.

"There appear to be many clouds; but they quickly pass,” she said. “The card indicates that the sun will shine on your way.”

She flipped another card. “Ah,” she said, staring at the figure of an intertwined couple. I heard the odd crackling noise again. It sounded familiar, but I couldn’t tell what it was. "The Lovers appear. Your heart will always make itself known through your words," she said.

She dabbed at her lips with a lavender hanky, put it down in her lap, and flipped another card. “Oh, excellent. Strength,” she said inarticulately, as if her tongue were swollen. Her eyes flickered downward. "Adventure can be real happiness."

“Excuse me, but what does that mean?” I asked.

“Hmm?” she asked, looking up. “All will be revealed in due time, child, all in due time. The fates do not follow our schedules or whims.”

I heard more rustling as she stared at the three cards. She applied the hanky to her mouth again, closed her eyes, and hummed in a minor key. There was another “crunch,” followed by grinding noises. She turned up two more cards, and gasped, then coughed, pulling the hanky up to cover her face.

“The Devil and the Tower,” she wheezed. “Oh, this is portentous! This is significant! Many possibilities are open to you. Work a little harder.”

I scratched my head, wondering what a knight on a horse and a man falling from a burning tower had to do with working harder. “Could you clarify that?” I asked.

She stared at me through the thick lenses of her glasses, while the crackling sound was repeated. I heard a whispery rustle, and then she looked at the cards again, into the crystal ball, and into her lap.

"Every person is the architect of his good fortune," she said. “The numbers 22, 36, and 11 are lucky for you this week. Be on your guard for opportunities.”

I heard more crackling and rustling. She chanted some odd syllables over and over, swayed in a circle, rolled her eyes this way and that. “The fates are smiling on you, lad,” she said, turning over three more cards. “The Hermit. Very lucky to get the Hermit, especially in combination with the Hierophant and the World. Take advantage of your imagination. It will serve you well. You will have a special occurrence of the number 5. Seize the moment.”

I scratched my head with both hands now. “Madame… Osmerta,” I said, consulting the hand-painted sign behind her, “I haven’t heard anything that really tells me anything specific about my future. Nothing that shows me what’s going to happen or what I should do. Isn’t that normally what fortune-telling is about?”

“You want specific? You’re asking for specific?” she said, raising her eyebrows and lowering her glasses down her nose. I heard more crackling, a loud snap, and rustling.

“Well, that’s what I was hoping for,” I said.

She looked down at her hands, then back up at me. “You may be hungry soon. Order a takeout now,” she said solemnly.

“Huh. I guess that’s specific,” I said, utterly bemused. "Not much as fortunes go, though."

She stared at the cards and then into her crystal ball. “The spirits do not reveal any more. It is up to you to find the meaning of this guidance,” she said. “Our session is done.”

I got to my feet. “Thanks, I guess,” I said. As I leaned over to offer my hand, I glanced down and saw that her lap was littered with shreds of clear plastic wrap, crumbled bits of pastry... and several tiny slips of paper.

“Hey, wait a minute!” I said.

A pig in a pipe

A pig in a poke pipe

A friend in my Wednesday night Bible study is a former oil company manager. As we were chatting last night, the topic of oil pipelines came up, and I learned some fascinating information.

I had always assumed oil pipelines worked like water pipes do: a pump or gravity pressure pushes fluid in at one end, there are valves at the other end and along the way, maybe some pumping stations to keep the fluid flowing, each pipe handles a particular type of fluid. It never occurred to me that this would be very inefficient, since there are so many different fuels and lubricants that all need to be transported enormous distances.

It turns out that the enormous pipelines that cross our country are shared by the various oil companies, and each company contracts to ship its various products through the same pipes, much as railroad companies use the same network of tracks or different freight companies use the same railroad company. The same pipeline can handle multiple grades of gasoline as well as jet fuel and other products, all at the same time.

A quantity of fluid is pumped into the pipeline, with a "pig" on each end. A pig is a sort of mobile stopper that serves to separate the loads from each other and moves along with the load. It looks like this:

Dispatchers at the various pumping stations have to keep track of the flow and schedule the loading and unloading of the various fluids, much like dispatchers at a trainyard. The pigs are inserted and removed through traps and launchers, as shown in this diagram:

The actual pig-trapping or launching equipment looks like this:

There are also pigs used for cleaning, examining, maintaining, and plugging pipes.

You can learn all about pigs at the Pigging Products & Services Association, from which I borrowed the illustrations.

Incidentally, this post fulfils Scavenger Hunt # 55, although not with any literary value.

Scavenger hunt # 7

We had seventeen years of better or worse

a lot of it worse.

It took ninety seconds for you to tell the court ‘I don’t.’

Afterwards we picked up the kids and drove to the lake

When you climbed a fence to photograph a field of wildflowers

I steadied you

and admired your pearl pumps

your warm wide hips under the India cotton skirt

your lovely face with its first age spots

and the softness of your flesh under my fingertips.

Chicken farm rescue - Scavenger hunt # 25

"Something using birds as a symbolic motif or centerpiece." This is an episode from my Nanowrimo, The Great Rogersville Flood. Mike has been dispatched on his raft to pick up a family stranded on the roof of a farm building.

I steered the raft in the direction of City Hall. When I could see the clock tower, I looked at my compass and took a bearing northwards, based on what Eddie had told me. There weren’t many landmarks, but I spotted a billboard in approximately the right direction, and steered toward it, plowing stolidly across the muddy water. When I reached it, I took another bearing and aimed for a dark spot on the horizon, which as I very slowly approached it, turned out to be the top of an oak tree. I looked back. How could I estimate distance across muddy water? Not many landmarks, and most that I could see were partly submerged, making it hard to guess how far I was from them. I had been going twenty minutes…

“Chicken farmers,” I muttered to myself. “I didn’t even know we had any around here.” I stared off across the muddy water, and my eyes focused on a row of cottonwoods sticking up out of the flood, roughly in the direction I needed to go. I burst into song: “There are chickens in the trees, there are chickens in the trees. Won’t you listen to me, please? There are chickens in the trees.”

Singing by myself out in the middle of nowhere struck me as comical, and I cackled to the gloomy skies. “Oh chicken farm, oh chicken farm, how lovely be thy eggses,” I bellowed. “Oh chicken farm, oh chicken farm, how lovely be thy eggses. With omelets sweet, and chicken feet, with gizzards, livers and white meat. Oh chicken farm…”

As the trees grew larger, I changed to opera, Nessun Dorma: “A chicken with its head cut off will never catch the whooping cough…”

My inspiration was waning. “There are chickens in the trees, there are chickens in the trees…”

Then I heard a shout. “Hey!”

I looked around, then saw movement in the trees. An arm waving. “Hey, Mike!” the voice shouted. It was Tony, perched on a branch just above the filthy water.

I coasted up to the trees and let the motor idle. “Hey, Tony, what are you doing here?” I said, wishing I had something cooler to say.

He dropped onto the raft and rubbed his arms. “Lost my Jet Ski,” he mumbled. He was wearing a life vest and swim trunks.

“What happened? Did you run into a tree?” I said.

He flushed and rubbed his face. “Fencepost,” he said. “I slammed my face into the water, really hard. Made me dizzy. Then when I got my head clear, I couldn’t find the stupid Jet Ski. I don’t know if the motor kept running or what. I swam around for a while, but finally got so tired and cold I climbed into a tree to rest and wait.”

I put the motor into reverse and backed away. “Been here long?” I asked.

He looked at his expensive waterproof watch. “Not too long. A while,” he said vaguely.

I steered around the trees and continued on my bearing.

“Where are we going? Town’s back that way,” Tony said.

“Chicken farm,” I said.

“A chicken farm? What for?”

“Eggses,” I said, not able to think of anything brilliant. “The farmer and his family are stranded. I’m supposed to take them to the shelter.”

“Shoot. I need to let my folks know where I am,” Tony said. “Dad’s going to kill me.”

I clicked on my radio. “Florence, this is Mike. I just picked up Tony. Can you let his folks know he’s okay? What? A phone number?” I looked at Tony.

Tony said, “Don’t say anything about the Jet Ski, okay?” He gave me the number.

I relayed it to Florence. “I’ll take him to the shelter with the chicken people,” I said.

Florence laughed, and then I heard Nora’s voice. “Sounds like a cheap horror flick,” she said.

“It is,” I said. “Real cheap. Cheep cheep cheep. Get it?”

Nora groaned. “Unfortunately, yes.”

It took another fifteen or twenty minutes to find the poultry farm. “There are people over there, standing on something,” Tony said, pointing to a couple of long, low roofs on the horizon. There were indeed people, perched on one of the roofs.

“What are all those things around them?” Tony asked, staring at the odd sight.
“Looks like they’re moving.”

“Chickens,” I said. “Several hundred of them, I’ll bet.”

“Sheesh, how many kids in that family?” Tony exclaimed.

“Fourteen,” I sighed. “Ages six months to 17 years.”

Tony looked around the raft. “Do you think they’ll fit?”

“If not, you can stay and look after half of them,” I said. “They’ve been waiting here since dawn. Probably three of them in diapers. Do you have much babysitting experience?”

The expression on Tony’s face was delightful to see. “I hate kids,” he muttered.

It looked like even more than sixteen people sitting and standing on the roof. There was a broad range of expressions, from glum to glee. The mom was holding the youngest baby in her arms, with two toddlers clutching at her long skirt. The smaller toddler was wailing. The other regarded us with bright interest.

I bumped the raft up against the edge of the roof. “Hi,” I said. “They told me you all needed a ride to town.”

The dad rubbed his head. “We’re glad to see you,” he said. “Been here since before daylight. How many can you take?” He patted the back of the toddler on his shoulder.

I surveyed the crowd. “No idea,” I said. “We’ve got a dozen steel drums under us. Probably everybody, weight-wise, but we’re going to be really low in the water, and we’ll move slowly. I don’t have life vests.”

“Well, if you can float us, we’ll be okay. All right, everyone over ten get on first, and make a big circle. Mama, you’ll be in the middle with the babies, and then the others around you. Oh, I forgot, the eggs!” He turned and pointed to a huge stack of cartons.

“Uh, there’s no way we can fit those,” I said. “Not with this many people.”

“They’ll go bad if we leave them behind,” the man said. “Might as well feed them to people who are flooded out.”

I sighed. “Tell you what. Let’s get everyone on and see how it’s floating,” I said.

What followed surprised me no end. The older kids cheerfully leaped onto the raft and spread out. They grabbed each other’s hands and made a big ring. Then the lady climbed onto the raft, while the middle kids took the toddlers from her. The teens closest to the barn roof reached out and seized the toddlers and swung them aboard, while the toddlers giggled. They handed the mom a couple of diaper bags. After that, they helped the other children aboard, and carefully closed the circle around them.

“How’s the buoyancy?” asked the farmer, looking down at the edge of the raft. “Looks like you’ve still got a few inches.”

He picked up a box and handed it down to the nearest kid, who set it down near the edge and reached for another load. Pretty soon there was a row of cartons along the side of the raft, six feet high. “Nobody bump those,” the dad warned. “How are we floating?”

“Same as before,” reported one of the kids.

“Excellent,” boomed the farmer. He looked around and said, “Do you think we could take a few hens? Some of these are brand-new layers.”

“No,” I said, and was surprised at how loud my voice was. “We have too big a load already. It’s going to take hours to get back. I don’t know if I even have enough gas.”

Tony, who like me was crowded up against the motor, had been gaping at the spectacle. Now he hefted my gas can. “Feels just over half full,” he reported. “How much gas did it take to get here?”

“I don’t know, but we weren’t having to plow through the water as much,” I said.

A little blond girl with pigtails was just inside the circle in front of me. She began to weep quietly.

“What’s the matter, Gwen?” asked her mother, looking at her sharply.

“Velvet,” sobbed the girl. “She doesn’t know anything about water. She’s going to drown. And she’s my birthday present.”

“Velvet?” I muttered.

“Velvet,” Tony repeated. “Is it a safe guess that Velvet is a chicken?”

“Yes,” sobbed Gwen. “She’s my Silky. She was going to be a mommy soon, but her eggs got flooded.”

I looked around. Most of the family were looking at Gwen with expressions of sympathy, except a couple of boys who looked about thirteen. “She’s just a chicken,” muttered one of them.

“Uh, remember Klinky, Rodney?” said their mother softly. “And Pertelote, Rupert?”

Rodney flushed, and Rupert grinned. “Yeah,” he said. “Sorry, Gwen.”

I looked at one of the kids closest to the roof. “Can you get her the chicken, please?” I said.

“And Grizelda,” called out another small child.

“And Pansy,” said a tall skinny beanpole of a girl.

“And Trisquit,” said a fat boy.

I sighed as the three kids on the roof edge of the raft scrambled back on and began gathering up hens, which ran squawking across the roof. Tony groaned.

“You okay, mister?” asked a boy near us, looking at Tony.

Tony swelled up and stood straight. “I’m fine,” he said.

We finally set off. All the kids inside the circle who could were holding chickens. Some of them were talking excitedly about being on the boat. “I’m hungry,” said the fat boy.

“Suck an egg,” said his father. “That’ll tide you over.”

The boy sighed and didn’t say anything more.

The kids on the outside of the circle kept hold of each other’s hands faithfully on the trip to town. The parents talked with us, even though they were obviously exhausted. “I’m Bud Hamilton, and this is my wife Holly,” the man said. He named all the kids, too, but I couldn’t remember most of the names.

There was some excitement when one of the hens flew overboard. Some of the kids lunged after it, but at Bud’s stern warning, the circle of hands held. The hen flew about twenty feet, then dipped toward the water, while the younger kids screamed. She fluttered and flew back up into the air and turned back to the boat, then flopped into the water a short distance from us.

I stopped the engine and stared at the chicken, which was fluttering and squawking in the water. “Can chickens swim?” I asked.

“Not very well,” said Mr. Hamilton.

“I’ll swim over to her,” volunteered the oldest boy.

“No!” said his mother. “That water is filthy. You could get sick.”

I sighed and started the boat up again. I turned it toward the chicken. It took some maneuvering, but we were able to move up close enough that the closest kid could grab her.

She was returned to the arms of a weeping and grateful girl, who clutched her and kissed her on her comb.

As we were passing by the trees, I nudged Tony. “Want me to drop you off and come back for you later?” I asked.

“Just about,” he said. “Little kids give me the willies.”

“These aren’t bad,” I said. “They’re pretty well-behaved.”

Tony shivered. “They’re bad enough.”

It took nearly two hours to get back to town. The family spent one of those hours singing. Even Tony was impressed: they sang hymns, all four or five verses, in four-part harmony, from memory. They sang folk songs. They sang songs the children had made up. Each of them recited a poem.

I looked at one of the teens who was about my age. “I don’t remember ever seeing you in school,” I said. “Did you just move to town recently?”

He shook his head and grinned. “Homeschooled,” he said. “All of us were born at the farm and educated at home.”

Bud and Holly sang a series of lullabies, and the toddlers nodded off in the laps of older children and on Bud’s shoulder. They asked us about our families. I told them about my older sisters and my parents.

Tony squirmed uncomfortably when it was his turn. “It’s just me and my parents,” he said.

“Isn’t that lonely?” asked one of the girls.

Tony looked at her, surprised. “No. Why?”

“Well, there’s no one to play with or sing with or anything,” she said. “Is there? Or do you do everything with your parents?”

Tony squirmed again. “No,” he said. “My folks both keep pretty busy. I have plenty to do, though. I have a pool and a pool table and pinball games and a BMX bike and stuff, and I have friends. And I’m an honors student. I’m on the debate team.”

The girl gave him a pitying look. “It must be sad to come home after school and be the only one there,” she said. “I’d go crazy.”

Tony shrugged. “It’s not that bad,” he said. “I’m used to it.”

The kids played I Spy and several other games. I could see the edge of town ahead. As we reached the first houses, the kids began looking around and commenting about them. “They don’t get to town very often,” said Mrs. Hamilton, noting my attention to their conversation.

“We went to Clark for the fair,” said Gwen. “We won four ribbons for our chickens. And we got to ride on the Ferris wheel for free.”

“Oh, yeah?” I said. “How’d you work that out?”

“There was this old man who couldn’t believe it when I told him how many of us there were. He kept laughing and saying, ‘A baker’s dozen.’ And he told the man at the Ferris wheel that he’d pay for all of us to ride. So we did.”

“I thought there were fourteen of you,” I said.

“Well, last year there were thirteen,” said Gwen.

We bumped to a stop as close to the Episcopal church as I could go. The teenagers kept the circle closed around the back and sides of the raft until all the younger ones and their parents were off the raft. Then they formed a bucket brigade and handed egg boxes to their dad, who stacked them rapidly on the road.

When they handed him the last boxes, he looked at me and Tony. “Your families eat eggs, don’t they?” he said.

“Uh, yeah,” I said.

“Some,” Tony said.

Mr. Hamilton set two of the boxes back on the raft. “Here you go,” he said. “Two gross of eggs is too little to show you how grateful we are for you rescuing us, but it’s all we have right now. Someday when we have the farm going again, stop by and we’ll give you a couple of chickens.”

The kids all said goodbye to us, and Mrs. Hamilton smiled wearily and waved, and Mr. Hamilton hopped back on the raft to give us bone-crushing handshakes.

“Aren’t you getting off?” I asked Tony.

“What?” he said, looking over at me. “Oh, yeah.” He reluctantly stepped ashore, watching the family walk up the road toward the church.

I realized that he didn’t want to let the family know that he hadn’t actually been involved in the rescue. “Where are you going to go?” I asked.

“Need to find my folks,” he said unenthusiastically. “I can walk from here.” He turned and began ambling away. Then he stopped and walked back. “Hey,” he said, “if anyone asks about my Jet Ski, just… tell them you don’t know anything. Okay?”

“Why?” I said.

“I’m hoping to find it,” he said. “So I might use some… creative explanations with my dad. And once I find it, everything will be okay.”

I didn’t know what to say to that. He turned to leave again. “Oh,” he said, stopping. “Thanks for the ride, by the way. It sure beat sitting in a tree for hours.”

“Don’t forget your eggs,” I said.

He flapped a hand. “Keep them,” he said.

My life in parasites: Scavenger hunt # 6

My life in parasites

or

More than you ever wanted to know

In our jungle town of Puerto Asís, where my first memories took place, many of the local kids had swollen bellies and raggedy brown hair unnaturally streaked with blond. My parents forbade us to go barefoot outside because of the danger of hookworm, which caused the problems our neighbor children experienced.

We moved to Medellín, a mile high in the mountains, in 1967. The first week, a friend took us on a long walk to visit the house my dad had arranged to rent. My legs got to hurting so bad during that hike that I had to be carried.

It turned out to be hookworm. I don’t know if it was the worms themselves or the anemia they caused that made my legs hurt. At the time, treatment involved a couple of weeks of evil syrup that turned your poop purple and made you feel awful. But the pain in my legs went away.

During our 1970 furlough, we had checkups at a hospital in Chicago. I was diagnosed with whipworm. Not worth treating, they said. The treatment was more stressful than the problem.

Ringworm became a problem for a couple of us in 1971, for some reason. I had one on my upper arm. I think my sister had it on her leg or elbow. We used some kind of ointment, and it went away.

I awoke one morning in high school with such bad diarrhea that it had seeped into my pajamas. The doctor prescribed something, probably Metronidazole in capsules. I took it for a few days, and the problem went away, so I didn’t finish taking all the treatment. In retrospect, that was a big mistake.

Those years, it was normal for me to experience an upset stomach and diarrhea after eating red meat. I didn’t think much of it. My senior year of high school, I would wake up in a bad mood every morning. Our dorm parents’ twelve-year-old son had a raspy changing voice, and sometimes would tap on his plate with his fork, and I would want to tear his head off. It was like having a daily hangover. I discovered that once I downed a glass of milk, I felt better. Skipping a meal was something I never did; hunger caused physical pain.

The summer of 1979 was when I made my fabled South American journey with my buddy Scott. At Limoncocha, the jungle missionary base in Ecuador where his dad was a pilot, we were encouraged to submit a stool specimen to the clinic lab. It was extremely embarrassing, since the nurses that summer were only a couple of years older than we were and hung out with us. I was diagnosed with whipworm (which the doctor in Chicago had told us about), giardia, and amoebas.

They dosed us up with Pantelmin (a four-day worm treatment), and ten days of Flagyl, one of the nastiest medicines in the world. Flagyl tastes about as good as earwax, and over the course of the ten days, seems to build up in your mouth, so that the taste gets worse and worse. It also causes mild nausea. I took to smoking my pipe (I was cool back then) after I took the pills, to ease my taste buds.

We returned to the US, and I settled back into school. Over the next few months, I made a few discoveries: I could eat red meat without adverse effects. Hunger was mild discomfort, not piercing pain. Skipping a meal was no problem. It was not normal to wake up feeling crappy.

Life without parasites was good.

I picked up amoebas again on a Christmas visit to Colombia, but now I knew what to do: I had someone bring me a box of Flagyl from South America. (It was easy to buy drugs without a prescription down there.) Later I rediscovered Metronidazole in capsules, which was the same drug as Flagyl but it didn’t make your mouth taste of earwax, it only made you nauseous.

In 1984, I went to Honduras as a volunteer with World Relief to work with refugees on the Mosquito Coast. I had to travel through the port of La Ceiba, where I waited three days for a small freighter to load up. During my free time, I wandered the streets and ate at interesting restaurants.

The day the freighter was sailing, I woke up with an evil liquid spewing uncontrollably from both ends. I had to alternate sitting on and hugging the toilet. Once it was a little bit under control, I went to the drugstore and asked for something, and they gave me a pill that did no good.

I bought a six-pack of Pepsi and a dozen bananas to eat on my trip down the coast, which would be a couple of days. The first day at sea I ate hardly anything. I did drink a Pepsi or two; it settled my stomach. I threw up once or twice, but the diarrhea wasn’t too bad. The second day I ate some of the bananas and kept them down.

When we got to Puerto Lempira, I was feeling better. I was directed to the house of an absent missionary, where I waited for my ride to Mocorón and ate a can of Campbell’s soup from the pantry. That night I made the three-hour trip from Lempira to Mocorón standing in the back of a Toyota Land Cruiser pickup, along with a group of fellow volunteers and a couple of locals. I was stunned at the spectacular view of the Milky Way, which I hadn’t seen since my childhood.

Mocorón was a cool place. I shared a cabin on the riverbank with Dwight, the program coordinator. We used an outhouse just across the path, and carried our own toilet paper with us. The river was our bathtub. My plastic jug could be filled with tepid potable water from the dining hall. For light, we had a Coleman lantern and candles.

A couple of months after I arrived in Mocorón, I again contracted diarrhea, so I submitted a stool sample for testing at the clinic. The verdict: giardia and ascarids (roundworm). I took a treatment of Metronidazole and of Mebendazole (same as Pantelmin) and the problem went away.

Over the next few months in Mocorón, I went through a laundry list of tropical parasites and ailments: nasty little worms under my toenails, called niguas in Spanish, which are actually arachnid grubs; a persistent ulcer on my ankle; tinea versicolor, a skin fungus that causes discolored splotches; an ear infection; and absolutely the worst, scabies.

The niguas were dug out with a needle by Blanca, our experienced jungle nurse, and the wound treated with a topical antibiotic. I think I used a topical antibiotic on the ulcer, too. For the ear infection, an ear-nose-throat doctor in Tegucigalpa prescribed a five-day antibiotic treatment, but when it appeared that the infection was still there, I was given a ten-day run of penicillin in Mocorón.

The skin ailments were tough to get rid of. A doctor prescribed an oral antifungal, Griseofulvin, for the tinea versicolor, but I couldn’t see any results. I bought a paint-on treatment at a drugstore that more or less burned it away. It was a mild acid like the aspirin-based stuff you can get at Walmart for warts and bunions, and it knocked the tinea back considerably. Later on I learned that using a good strong dandruff shampoo as a lotion or body wash was as effective and much less hassle.

I discovered the scabies when I kept waking up with itchy bites all over my body. I sprayed my bed for fleas, scattered flea powder… and the bites kept occurring. My girlfriend looked at the red lines connecting the bites and said, “You have scabies.”

Being my girlfriend, she also contracted it, so we each had to anoint ourselves with benzyl benzoate twice a day. The lotion smelled like dirt, and to this day the thought of the aroma stirs very itchy and romantic memories of courtship.

We got engaged April of 1985, and left Honduras at the end of July. As we traveled, we took a final treatment of Metronidazole and Mebendazole. I weighed about 160 lbs. at that point, due to recent bouts with intestinal parasites.

After we got married, we settled in Miami. The tinea flared up again, so I took to bathing with the strongest dandruff shampoo I could find. During 1986, I seemed to develop symptoms of intestinal parasites, so I took a worm treatment just in case. We moved to Dallas in 1988, and in 1991, to Costa Rica.

I don’t remember having any trouble in Central America in the 1990s. I do know that new two-day treatments for amoebas were released, and one-day worm treatments, but I didn’t use either.

We moved back to Dallas in 1995. In 2001, we separated, and in 2002, divorced. I moved into a little house in Duncanville by myself with a fat orange tabby named Pumpkin. In 2004 and 2005, I had several bad infestations of fleas, which I treated by using shoulder drops on Pumpkin (the kind that are supposed to treat heartworm as well) and by flea-bombing the crawl space and the house. I quit letting Pumpkin go outside. (He hasn’t been out in the past four and a half years.) The fleas were persistent buggers; I probably bombed my house three times in a month before I got rid of them for good. Poor Pumpkin had to spend those days locked in the bathroom, which didn’t completely protect him from the fumes.

My most recent ailments have been athlete’s foot and a toenail fungus, which the dermatologist tells me are actually the same organism. I took a three-month oral treatment last spring that was supposed to kill it off, but I don’t know if it was effective because the toenail still looks pretty much the same. No athlete’s foot in a long time, though. The doc tells me to use medicated foot powder to keep the problem away.