A tick plays a sick trick

The bug bites are starting to form constellations on my legs. I’ve got the Big Dipper just above my knee, Cassiopeia angling down my shin, an obnoxiously itchy North Star on my big toe.

Perhaps most frustrating is the invisibility of the culprits: the little creatures do not give me the chance to defend myself. Like the pepper tick. The size of a pinhead, it undetectably crawled its way up my leg and plagued me with headaches and fever and swollen lymph nodes in a textbook case of African tick bite fever. But don’t worry, this is not another long-winded, overdramatic chronicle of my relatively unimportant health problems (see Defeating the microbe, summiting Kilimanjaro for that sort of woe-is-me-themed recount). I’d like to think of this as a contented reflection on the natural world, and perhaps a bit of gratitude for the tick that forced me to slow down and write about life lately.

After a few days in Johannesburg, I wrapped my way around the coast, winding up in the easternmost corner of South Africa in a little backpacker’s lodge that shares a fence with iSimangaliso Wetland Park. For the price of identifying plants for a local conservation project, I could stay in an army green trailer with a foam mattress and dubiously secure screens that the geckos seemed to be intent on testing. Having been on the move every day for nearly a month, the thought of staying put and really getting to know one place was appealing. So I returned to the world of stamen counts and leaf venation patterns and perianth whorls in the couplets of a dichotomous key, relying on my rusty arsenal of obscure flower facts that I learned during a single botany class in college.

The army green trailer that I stayed in for two weeks

My foam mattress bed and the window screens where geckos would congregate every evening

The fence separating the backpacker's lodge property and iSimangaliso Wetland Park

Having a routine in the decidedly not routine Bonderman Fellowship was a nice change. Each morning, I pulled on my overalls (which were, evidently, not defense enough against the ticks), grabbed Elsa Pooley’s field guide to South African wildflowers, and marched out into the nature preserve just beyond the fence.

I angled towards the vegetated dunes in the distance, the divider between Lake Sibaya and the Indian Ocean. Though the ocean was hidden from view, it always announced the arrival of high tide, when the reef stirred up the ocean's momentum into a whitewash of waves that roared like an unseen airplane somewhere in the distance.

Sometimes, I followed cattle tracks, which often led into densely packed forests of small trees and hanging vines and tangles of sweet jasmine that perfumed the air. And sometimes, I saw cow-like dung caught in hip-height bushes, but the territory mark was not the work of a cow. It was from the hippo. I learned that it was best to give the pile a slight kick, to see whether it was fresh or if the sun had enough time to dry it out. The level of moisture, I was told, was directly correlated to how afraid you should be of running into a hippo.

Wherever I walked, I was sure to step carefully, especially after they found a cobra in the storage shed at the lodge. But usually, the surprises were pleasant: a dung beetle diligently rolling a perfectly spherical ball of cow poo to its hiding hole, an elegant grasshopper with fuchsia wings buzzing in a downwind flurry, a swallowtail butterfly flitting about a cluster of white blotting paper flowers, a monkey orange that had been pecked open and drained by some persistent creature.

A skunk longhorn resting on a snow white sedge

The shell of a monkey orange, scratched open and drained of its sweet and sour contents

Eventually, I would pick a spot in the grass and nestle down to observe the life around me, the life that we step over. There were the sedges, tall and rubbery, towering over fuzzy Fabaceae pea pods and other Cyperacae grasses that looked like jewel-toned fireworks, a weedy Ranunculaceae identical to the yellow buttercups at home. And I sat there in the sun, keying out flowers, fixating on the details that separate one species from another: this one has a branched inflorescence, that one has slightly waxy petals, those ones secrete a milky latex. The details that we don’t normally pay any mind to.

The first bloom of a brown bonnet (Eriosema salignum), a plant in the pea family, Fabaceae

Two specimens of Pycreus macranthus, a perennial sedge

I would take the especially tricky specimens back to the lodge for closer examination, in the communal living area that was not separated by windows or doors from the outside world. It was so open that the pretty Eastern golden weavers would occasionally find their way inside, along with the chickens who were less pretty and more prone to defecating on the floor. The latter were promptly chased out in a dramatic show of feathers and clucks.

The afternoons were spent in indolent debate of trivial issues, like in which combination of prepositions and nouns we should place ourselves for sunset. On a dune? Next to the lake? By the pond where the Bubbling Kasina frogs croak so loudly that the entire stretch of lily pads sounds like a cartoon boiling cauldron? In any case, we all squeezed into the bed of a 1970s Land Rover that looked as though it had been stolen right off the tracks of the Indiana Jones ride at Disneyland.

We bounced over white sand tracks laced with reeds and rushes, through open fields towards Lake Sibaya. It seemed to always be windy there, the water whipped up in dark blue swirls and gold-tinged white caps in the sun’s slow, dramatic exit from the day. There was the urge to walk to the edge of the bank and peer into the shallows, but it was subdued by the reminder that crocodiles can jump up to six feet and run 20 miles per hour. So from the Land Cruiser, we watched the world around us: the hippos, gathered like stepping stones by the reeds; the kingfisher, scouting for fish in a hover as stable as a drone; all the other birds – fish eagles and goliath herons and black-winged kites, participating in an unfilmed episode of Planet Earth.

Life went on like this for nearly two weeks. Most days, I did not know what day it was. Time was punctuated only by semi-remarkable activities, like attempting to make homemade lemon popsicles, hand-pressing 40 tortillas as part of a Taco Tuesday deficient in nearly all other essential taco ingredients, going on a safari here and there.

And of course, there was the day that I found the tick.