Ticks

Not a fan, but I like their neighborhood.

Ticks

“The ticks are bad this year.” Along with an existential threat to snow sports of all kinds, climate change has brought many more ticks to Vermont. For the last decade or more, I have been hearing that the ticks are bad this year every year.

When we say, “the ticks are bad,” we mean “there are a lot of ticks this year.” If I talk to Chris, my neighbor who makes cider, and say “the apples are bad this year,” I mean that it does not look like there will be many apples to harvest this year. So, apples good, ticks bad. No real news there.

The ticks are bad this year, because from our perspective, ticks are bad all the time. They can spread Lyme disease, which is no joke. Disease or no, being a host for a parasite is unpleasant, especially when ridding oneself of that parasite involves removing a small insect from your own skin engorged with your own blood with a pair of tweezers if you can the tweezers in the midst of the panic that can ensue from being a bloodfeast.

That said, my least favorite thing about ticks is what they can do to the brains of human beings just by existing. Justifiably, people are afraid of ticks. Sadly this fear can translate into a much broader fear of existing on any spaces that are not mowed or paved for a good chunk of the year. We have our lawns and our grills; the ticks have the tall grass and the woods. This weekend, I was repeatedly reminded to watch out for ticks while walking our dog while visiting in-laws on Long Island. When my nieces were young, their mother would repeatedly mention ticks if they strayed near the perimeter where the tall grass began. An acquaintance turned down an invitation to hunt for morels because the ticks were bad.

I am coming to the question of ticks as someone who is currently thinking about lives of early Puritan settlers in New England. I do not know if the ticks were bad back then, but I do know that their worlds were bifurcated by fear, much as our own worlds are. Their concerns were with wolves, bears, and Indians, often treated more or less as interchangeable threats. The idea “over here = safe, over there = danger” is one that is selected for, but there are any number of situations where we exaggerate both the safety of over here, and the danger of over there. Even in the free range 70s and 80s, many of us grew up with a parental geofence of where we could go on our bikes. Important, but imperfect, guidance.

A more extreme form of this mindset comes in the form of the map I got when I visited the University of Chicago before enrolling in 1992. There was a campus map, with buildings and such, and the South Side environs were rendered as blank space, similar to early modern maps showing whole continents as terra incognita. The neighborhoods around the University of Chicago have changed, in part because good old U of C has worked hard to gentrify them. But even 35 years ago, “here be monsters” was an ungenerous way do describe the South Side. Conversely, I know for a fact that people have come to harm on the U of C campus, from other members of that community, so the map is not so helpful, after all.

It would be less sexy if Fleetwood Mac sang “Lay me down in the tall grass (on a blanket that has been treated with pyrethrin) and let me do my stuff,” but I do understand the concern. If nothing else, COVID taught us that it is hard to get people to come to a consensus on risk. In June 2025, I generally find myself in the spot of “other people can do what they want, as long their choices to not significantly amplify my own risk.” Ceding the all of the outdoors for a stretch of months for me, is not a worthwhile risk/reward equation.