The big heat vs the big cold... and the relative nature of misery

TAKE IT OR LEAVE IT
I left the United States again for Australia in November and about two weeks after my departure, as you all know better than I, Monticello was hit by a series of storms that kept everyone miserable for most of the winter.
But I missed most of this. While you were enduring a winter without end, I faced the opposite in weather extremes.
Across Australia, temperatures reached and remained at record highs. In Western Australia, the rain stopped falling in early November and it never so much as spit again, at least while I was there.
Because I was camping much of the time, I could not escape the heat, so I lay there in my tent for days at a time, suffering from the scorching sun and, when I could find internet access, I complained to my pals in the Northern hemisphere.
They were not especially sympathetic.
I believe one of them even called me an idiot. “You’re sweating and you’re unhappy?” wrote one. “I have been shoveling snow all day, I can’t feel my toes and I should worry about your suffering?”
I felt ashamed.
Then one afternoon, as the temperature hovered around 105 F, I was sitting in my old Datsun pickup, futilely trying to catch a breeze off the Bunbury Estuary. I noticed a tiny black speck on my bare sun-baked  leg. It was moving.
Concerned but not alarmed, I pinched the little creepy critter between my fingers and flicked it out the window. But a few moments later, I eyed another one. And another.
Then they began creeping up both legs. Soon I was doing nothing but studying my legs, waiting for the next intruder. They kept coming.
Wondering what these mini-invaders looked like, I retrieved a magnifying glass, put one of the  little buggers in the palm of my hand and had a gaze.
It looked hideous, like a miniature tick and still alive and I could see his legs trying to gain traction on my skin.  I thought that I had most likely walked through a swarm of sand fleas, but then I began to wonder if Australia had chiggers, as they do in Kentucky.
The Fear swept through me – I had been down that road once before and I knew I needed to get these creatures off my body as quickly as possible.
But I was camped out, in the middle of nowhere, with no running water, so I did the best I could with my solar shower. After I dried, I located  my can of insect repellant and sprayed my legs with enough poison to make the skin turn color.
I didn’t care anymore. Even after the soap and water, they kept coming, from where I couldn’t say. And despite my best efforts, I spotted more of them advancing farther up my leg.
Suddenly I was gripped by flashbacks. The thought sent shivers down my recently and increasingly violated body.
CHIGGERS.
I remembered the summer of my eleventh year. My first year at Boy Scout summer camp. We had camped in an open field the night before and planned a 15 mile canoe paddle for the following day.
But shortly after breakfast, I felt an uncomfortable itch down below. I sneaked a peak and it looked uncharacteristically red. It looked, in fact, to be on fire. But I said nothing, chose not to peek again and boarded my canoe for the five hour trip. By the time we reached our next stop, I was in agony.
I wandered away from my fellow Scouts and had a look.
It was horrible. It was grotesque. I was terrified.There had been significant swelling.
Mortified, but needing to share my predicament with someone, I sought out my friend Rusty and when nobody else was looking our way, I showed him my injured area.
“OH MY GOSH!” he exclaimed. “That’s horrible! Mr. Morey has to see this.” He dragged me to my scoutmaster, a wonderfully calm and reasonable man who could always soothe us when the fear of camping and being away from our mothers became too much. Mr. Morey would know what to do.
“OH MY GOSH!” he cried. “Jack! Jack!” Mr. Morey called to Mr. Steiner, the assistant scoutmaster. “You’ve got to see this!”
Soon a crowd began to form.
It was decided I needed medical treatment and so Mr. Steiner loaded me into his station wagon  and we made a mad dash for the Leitchfield, Kentucky Community Hospital. We were met at the ER entrance by a stern looking nurse who wanted to know the precise nature of my ailment. I showed her.
“OH MY GOSH!!!!” She summoned the doctors.
“OH MY GOSH!!!” 
By now it had become something of a theme.
Once the commotion died down, the issue of treatment was finally raised. No one knew what to do because none of them had ever seen anything quite like the spectacle I presented. Now, years later, I wish to heck I’d had a camera.
Finally one of the doctors suggested an anti-itch spray called Multi-derm. It was supposed to be effective but had never been applied to this part of the body.
What were the side effects? Could it make matters worse? I didn’t see how that was possible and pleaded with them to spray me. The doctors agreed. (Here, as before, a crowd had gathered. Nurses, doctors, technicians, other ER patiennts.)
But the plastic spray nozzle jammed. Nothing would come out of the can. Finally one of the doctors pulled the nozzle from the can, jammed a screwdriver into the tube and leveraged it back like one might raise a carjack.
An explosion of Multi-derm spewed from the can onto my affected area and knocked me against the wall. I remember it was also very cold and for the first time in 16 hours, it didn’t itch.
“Do it again!” I pleaded and they did.
“Again!” I cried. Now the doctors thought I was beginning to enjoy the Multi-derm more than was deemed appropriate and advised me I could only be sprayed every eight hours.
Finally, Mr. Steiner drove me back to our main camp, which was chigger-free. “I don’t think you need to camp in any more fields for a while,” he assured me. I spent the next two days alone, except for Mr. Steiner and my can of Multi-derm. By the end of the week I was healed.
Now in February, 2010, the fears of such a reoccurrence gripped me with dread. I finally drove to Bunbury and found my friends Steve and Gaynor who saw the Fear in me and offered the use of their wonderful shower.
But it was too late.  In fact, it was only after my hot shower and a hard scrubbing that the welts first appeared. From my knees to my waist, I was suddenly covered by more than one hundred ugly red pimples. And they itched with a familiarity that carried me back decades.
None of them had made their way to the scene of the original crime, but they were close enough. A month later and only now are the bites starting to fade. Later I learned that I had been consumed by an evil little beast called Trombicula (eutrombicula) hirsti Commonly called “the scrub-itch mite.”
MITES? Indeed. It turns out they’re the Aussie version of Kentucky chiggers.
So... I ask you, the North American reader who has endured the bitter cold winter and dreamed of nothing else but warm summer nights and a roll in the grass...would you trade your frostbite for my bites? Would you pass on the snow for “OH MY GOSH!?”
Mighty COLD vs MITEY hot. The choice is yours.
(Jim Stiles is publisher of the “Canyon Country Zephyr -- Planet Earth Edition” now exclusively online. He is also the author of “Brave New West.” Both can be found at www.canyoncountryzephyr.com. Stiles lives in San Juan County and can be reached at cczephyr@gmail.com.)