When I was a child, I was highly susceptible to poison oak, ivy or sumac. Didn't matter which. My parents used to say that I only had to look at it to catch it. They revised that when the wildfire smoke gave it to me, without even going near the woods. My family thought it was hilarious, saying that when I refused to go into the woods, the poison oak came searching for me.
Sick family, with a weird sense of humor.
Once, I started getting rashes on my arms and torso without ever being exposed to any plants. There'd been no fires, no smoke to carry the poison to me. I suspected my brothers until the third time I realized I'd been eating cashews before the breakouts. My parents had stocked up on cheap tinned cashews which apparently hadn't been processed correctly and those nuts were causing my breakouts. Strange but true. Cashews are related to those other poisonous plants, from the family Anacardiaceae. That's why you never see unshelled cashews. It's illegal to import them. The nuts are coated in a corrosive liquid used to make paint removers and other things. That anacardic acid must be removed before the nuts can be processed.
My family loved the outdoors. My family had a cabin outside of Wawona in the Yosemite Valley. It had been handed down over the years from my mother's 49er ancestors. The family loved it, and we spent summers and a lot of weekends there. It was our vacation home.
My family loved it; I hated it. It was the site of constant torment and agony for me.
My two older brothers, and older sister and two younger sisters were all outdoorsy. They loved hiking, rock climbing, and anything that got them out in nature. They got that from my parents, who were even crazier about all those things, and insisted their children experience it and learn all about it. Orientation, white water rafting, rock climbing, snowboarding and cross-country skiing were all our family sports. And my siblings excelled at them all, even my youngest sister.
Me, not so much. From my earliest memory, the woods and all the outdoors have been associated with constant itching, dripping plasma, and swollen features. I'd have a rash within a day of going to the cabin and would have some form of rash for at least two weeks after returning home. I've been painted with calamine, soaked in ice baths, and pumped with steroids when the doctors feared my health might be compromised. I constantly smelled like Fels-naptha soap, a laundry soap and stain remover, that my parents believed was effective against poison oak. Did it help? Who knows. I always had a horrible itch whether or not I used that rough soap.
As an example of my family's twisted humor, my brothers loved to bring a dog along with them to the cabin and have it run wild in the woods. They'd then sneak bacon onto my person or dab me with some interesting (read disgusting) smell, knowing the dog would be attracted to me and brush me all over with its fur. Of course, after running through the woods the mutt would be coated with the residue of my nemesis. So even if I stubbornly stayed out of the forest, I was soon itching.
They'd also rub leaves on my sheets and clothes, throw bits into the fire while arranging seats so I was bathed in the smoke. My eyes and face would swell up and my ears would look cauliflowered. While everyone in the family slept soundly, enjoying the peace of the woods and the sounds of the crickets, I would toss and turn all night with a constant, unending itch that had me in frustrated tears nightly. During the day, at least I could move around and hopefully bake in the sun, which seemed to help ease the torment, if only by distracting me.
If I wasn't suffering enough when we left to go home, they'd rub leaves on the car seat. I'd have a worse case at home than I did in Wawona.
Somehow, my parents and siblings were immune to the whole spectrum of Anacardiaceae, and my parents believed, or at least claimed to believe, to their dying day that I would develop immunity eventually. They didn't understand how I kept getting it. I had the idea that they thought it was my own fault.
So, despite all the evidence that they were the natural descendants of Torquemada, they claimed to love me and only want the best for me. My parents would paint me with calamine, which provided some cooling relief. The relief only lasted a few minutes, then the calamine would dry and crack as plasma would slowly drip out in amber drops.
Next were the ice baths, tubs filled with ice cubes and sprinkled with some powder provided by the doctors. I'd be forced to sit in it for what seemed like forever, my parents forcibly holding me in when I tried to scramble out. The irony, which only stuck me in adulthood, was my parents would take turns holding me down, switching every minute or so because "the cold makes my hands hurt," my father would whine. Yeah, imagine how it made my whole freaking body feel.
Do you know what's far more painful than the constant torment of poison oak? You guessed it: ice baths.
One silver lining was I really believe those baths brought my puberty forward. The cold made my testicles climb back up into my body while they were trying to drop in puberty. They'd descend a little further each time I warmed back up, therefore dropping faster than they normally would have. Maybe not, but I like to think something good came from my torture sessions. By seventh grade my voice was deeper than that of most of my fellow students' fathers. Even my brothers insisted I play the prank phone calls, because I sounded like an adult.
It was later in life that I found that hot showers were my salvation. Showers as hot as I could stand, seemed to bring out the histamines in my system and the itching would turn into a mild buzz, almost a pleasant buzz, which would allow me to fall asleep. It was odd, because as a child it was dogma that you had to take cold showers because warm showers would open your pores and allow the poison oak to spread. I later learned that poison oak is an acid, anacardic acid, that once you wash it off, the rash won't spread further. It seems to spread because where the exposure is heaviest, you break out almost immediately, where it might take a day or two for the lighter infected areas to erupt.
In any case, as soon as I was old enough, I refused to return to the woods, ever. No matter what my parents threatened me with, I didn't go. I'd run away and hide when they were leaving, not returning home until I knew that they had left. One time, they stayed home and when I returned, my parents punished me for ruining their vacation, and my brothers showed their displeasure for the next week by hitting me whenever I was foolish enough to get near them. Even my sisters made my life miserable, hiding the towels and toilet paper when I needed them, or shutting off the hot water whenever I was in the shower.
But eventually, my family gave up and left me at home with a babysitter (usually a grandparent) or later, alone when I was old enough. I vowed never to get within sight of any dangerous plant.
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Rafting down the Gore River on a vacation, my parents died when their raft flipped, and they were drowned. I was just twenty-two at the time, and my youngest sister had just turned 18.
In a stunning revelation that my siblings had inherited their sick sense of humor, my parents left me....
That fucking cabin. I hadn't been there in almost 8 years, had no desire for it, and resented it being left to me, with the stipulation that I couldn't sell it or give it away without forfeiting all my inheritance. Even from the grave, my parents were determined that I should be exposed to the outdoors.
With what I thought of as a flash of brilliance, I kept the cabin but refused entry to any of my siblings. I arranged to have it become a rental and had all the locks changed and an alarm system added, with cameras. I warned my siblings that were I to discover that they had come on to my property, I'd have them arrested for trespassing.
I didn't see any of my brothers or sisters for over four years, and never missed them. And was never bothered by Anacardiaceae, either. Never went into the woods.
Until Olivia. Beautiful Olivia. Wonderful Olivia. Olivia who reminded me so much of my beautiful mother. Yeah. Woodsy Olivia.
I didn't meet my future bride in the woods, but instead in an art gallery. I was there with my interior designer, who felt that my offices should have outdoor scenes, and Robert Edward Benton was the preeminent Western artist of the moment. I had to admit, he had a way of capturing the woods that made me start itching. There was no way I'd ever have these pictures in my office. They made me cringe. I could feel the poison oak coming off them.
But I did stop in front of one. It wasn't of the woods. It was an accurate rendering of the one place I did love about the cabin. "That's Chilnulana Falls. It's not far from my cabin in Wawona. I loved that place." I told my decorator.
