Dac Crossley's Western Blog

Red Bugs

In south Texas we called them “redbugs.” Our Yankee brethren called them “chiggers.”

In the summertime, if you played outdoors in the grass, you were apt to get these little itchy places. Around your ankles, your waist, on your privates. My mother’s treatment was salt and butter, rubbed on the bites. Where did that come from? Western or Southern remedy?

There are a number of myths about chiggers. Here are two:

Chiggers burrow into your skin. No, they don’t. Sorry, Mom. They just stick their spears into you. Those little red spots are what’s left after you scratch them off.

Spanish Moss is full of chiggers. No, it isn’t. It’s an article of faith in Florida, and denying it can get you threatened with a thrashing, but really, chiggers don’t live in Spanish Moss. Oh, if it’s blown down and draped across a log, you might get chiggers if you sit on it. But it’s the log, not the Spanish Moss.

There are hundreds of different species of chiggers, about forty of them here in Georgia. Most don’t bite people, or don’t cause a rash if they do. Our pest chiggers are actually reptile parasites; they don’t bother their snake hosts a bit.

Pest chiggers are distributed across the US, but people living in the Great Plains (west of the 100th meridian) don’t get bitten. Why not? Is it a different kind of chigger? Looks the same …

(I took my bride, from Amarillo, to south Texas on our Honeymoon. Her first exposure to chiggers. She blamed me …).

Chiggers, and their mysterious ways, got me a degree in Entomology from the University of Kansas. Nevertheless, they make me itch.

Cold Night in Georgia

I lost heat last night – the fan motor on the furnace went out – and I thought about how my house has been heated, down through the years. How things have changed!

As a little boy, living out on West Kennedy in Kingsville, Texas, we heated with mesquite “logs,” cut from our four-acre farm. We had an old iron “Box” stove, with a grate on the front and two cooking lids on the top. Every fall meant a trip to Cypher’s 5&10 to buy new, black tin stovepipe. (Our house was a four-room shack held together by a brick chimney down the middle. We had indoor-outdoor plumbing, a bathroom attached to the back of the house. We were ahead of the neighbors.).

Dad finally had propane installed, a tank buried outside and a gas heater in the “front room.” (The installer, a big old boy, taught me how to play harmonica – a fringe benefit to gas heat). When we moved into beautiful downtown Kingsville, near A&I College, we heated with natural gas. Much of Kingsville did. And my first apartment in Lawrence, Kansas, also had natural gas, this time with a thermostat (which didn’t keep the furnace running on cold nights).

In East Tennessee, we had electric heat. Newly constructed homes were “all electric.” This is TVA country. Older, poorer homes were heated with coal, abundant in the Cumberlands. (Come to think of it – coal generated much of our electricity, too).

Our first house in Knoxville had electric “Ceil Heat.” Heating elements were embedded in the overhead sheetrock. A really bad idea; heat rises, of course, and producing it at the ceiling – well, you get the picture. Ceil Heat didn’t last. (It really didn’t. The wires soon burned out).

Our house on Hancock Lane here in Athens, Georgia, was heated with a heat pump. A strip heater furnace came on when it got too cold for the heat pump to work. I liked the heat pump.

Here on Buttonwood, I have a gas furnace. Installed before natural gas was deregulated, it was supposed to be a money saver. It’s not. I think I prefer electric heat.

And today, the gas furnace isn’t working. Thankfully, I have -- a fireplace!

-- And I’m back to burning wood again! Back where I started.

The circle is complete.

Horned Toads

Growing up in south Texas, we had plenty of little critters to entertain us. Such as the fierce-looking horned toads. Or horny toads, we called them. Or horned frogs. They are lizards, really.

Where I live now, in Georgia, we have some nice little lizards, too. Little blue-tailed skinks slithering among the ivy. A few fence lizards and racerunners. And, those cute little green anoles (Chameleons) running across the deck – favorites of my cats, who bring them indoors.

Ah, but in Texas we others. The bigger Sonoran skink. Those six-lined fence lizards – nobody could catch those except Mrs. Roadrunner, who took them home to her offspring. And those marvelous horned toads. Easy to catch; they didn’t run far or fast. Fierce looking, all those stickers, but they never hurt you. Pick one up by the horns. Turn it over, rub its stomach. Watch it go to sleep.

(Horned toads actually can squirt blood from an eye. Didn’t believe it until I saw it happen).

You could find horned toads hanging around the Red Ant beds, basking in the sun, picking off an occasional ant. Red Ants were fun, too. We spent many hours studying them, following their trails, watching them touch muzzles as they made their way along. Set a peppermint Life Saver in their trail and see them go crazy. Even better, offer them a piece of a Frito and see them pass it around. But watch yourself; their sting was legendary.

Not many horned toads any more, they tell me. Or red ants either. Invasive fire ants are hard on both creatures. Overuse of insecticides didn’t help, either.

What critters can youngsters watch today, in south Texas?

Grass burs and other wonders

Bright sunshine brings the hope for an early Spring, and thoughts of south Texas. When the scissortail birds returned, we kids were allowed to go outdoors barefooted. And that’s when the trouble started.

South Texas is a sea of thorns. Cactus in all its forms. Consider the mesquite and the huisache, and the other vicious shrubs of the brush country. Long thorns, sometimes festooned with grasshoppers or lizards impaled there by shrikes – the ‘nine-killers’ of the West.

But even more insidious were the little grass burs and their kin, thorns that make their impressions on young bare feet. Eventually your mother would sit you down and pry out little thorns with her sewing needle.

We kids recognized two kinds of burs. Grass burs (from un-mowed Bermuda grass), small but pervasive, were minor irritants. Except in your socks. If your socks blew off the clothesline, grass burs would find them and you’d soon find the burs. I hated that.

The other kind, sand burs, were worse. In sandy areas, little prostrate branches of these weeds produced vicious little thorny capsules. They punctured bare feet. Heck, they could puncture bicycle tires! Pay attention! Walk along day-dreaming, and you might find yourself in the middle of a patch of sand burs. Try to pick your way out, carefully.

So enjoy the sight and song of the birds, the feel of warm sand on bare feet, but watch where you step!

Spring is coming.

A'Hunting the deer

My heart's in the Highlands,
A’Hunting the Deer

I am not a hunter, in spite of my Texas background. I make no apology. My father was not either; his firearm was his camera. I followed in his footsteps. My uncles and my grandparents grew up rural and were hunters. I have a picture of my grandmother Crossley, in a split skirt and astride her Arabian pacer, shooting quail near Alpine, Texas.

But for my doctorate research at KU I had to become a hunter, collecting all kinds of animals for their parasitic mites. After my daughter was born, I rid my home of all firearms.

Texas was – still is – home to an abundance of wildlife. Hunting game is becoming a major industry for small landholders. Many of my friends enjoy the sport of hunting.

I’m reading the journal of an Englishman, William Bollaert, who traveled through East Texas in 1843. In the Guadalupe and Brazos river valleys, he found an abundance of game to supply his party. Here are his comments on hunting deer:

First – by merely shooting them down in daylight with the rifle; this is deer stalking and hunters generally get up to the game from 80 to 100 yards – others fire when they can discover plainly the eye of the animal. When game is scarce, then dogs are employed to scent them.

Second – by fire hunting. This is performed by one person carrying an iron pan basket filled with burning pitch-pine with which they shine the eyes of the deer, and thus are enabled to shoot the deer in the darkest nights.

And you spot-lighters thought you’d invented it!

Always Kill a Rattlesnake

That’s part of the code of the west – always kill a rattlesnake. When I was a boy, you went out of your way to kill one. Growing up outside just of Kingsville, Texas, I was warned about them. Our German-immigrant neighbors, the Rohnfeldts, had a black dog named Joe that hunted rattlers. He’d been bitten so often he was almost immune. Still, snake bite made him sick; he’d lie in the ditch for a few days.

At the University of Kansas, we hunted rattlers and copperheads in the Springtime and sold them in Topeka, to a man who made antivenom. (I was the one who held the sack). I could make twenty-five dollars on a good afternoon.

Today, I’m sure the Code of the West still applies. Mary says it’s the Code of the East, too. I asked if rattlesnakes are protected species, not to be harmed. Bud says they aren’t federally listed. Some States may protect rattlers, on State property at least.

Texans may abhor rattlesnakes, but they are more frightened of tarantulas. The sight of one of those hairy spiders was cause for alarm. Crepuscular creatures, they were thought to be able to jump about twenty feet. The good news – those tarantulas are completely harmless. We didn’t know ...

The fear of snakes is pervasive among us. I think it’s matrilineal – perhaps inherited directly from our mothers. Inherited or taught?

Does this take us back to the Garden of Eden. Fear of the serpent?

Perhaps – but most of us aren’t afraid of apples.