Beware the perils of P.I. ~ July 11, 2002

David Heiller

“David, be careful with that poison ivy!” Mom scolded. “Use a hoe.” Mom had asked me to remove a patch of poison ivy from her backyard on July 4. So I donned a pair of rubber gloves and started pulling it up.

Fern's backyard was famously and beautifully WILD.
Poison Ivy was an issue.

“You don’t use a hoe on poison ivy,” I scoffed, ignoring her rare exclamation point.

Mom had reason to worry about P.I. She had battled a rash on her arms a couple months ago. It could have been used in a textbook on bad cases of poison ivy. She had a huge, boiling, oozing red rash.

I worked carefully, grabbing the plants by the roots, pulling them up, and piling them in the yard. Some of the branches had berries. The woody stalks were half an inch in diameter.

They reminded me of a camp-out I had made with some friends when I was a teenager. We were fishing for bullheads in the Reno Bottoms, seven miles south of Brownsville. We went out to gather wood, careful to avoid the poison ivy and its three glossy leaves. That’s hard to do at night in the Reno Bottoms, where P.I. rules.

One kid brought back a bunch of small sticks and threw them in the fire. The next day he was in the hospital with a severe case of P.I. We figured out later that the sticks he had gathered were poison ivy branches. Not only did he get a bad rash on his body, but sitting in the smoke had transferred it to his mouth and throat. He could barely breathe. It was scary.

I scooped up the pile of poison ivy in Mom’s backyard and carefully put it in a plastic bag. Then I took off my gloves and washed my hands and legs—I was wearing shorts. Mom made me throw the gloves away, and I had to put the towel and washcloth in the bath tub so that no one else would use them. I changed clothes too. I felt like I had just cleaned up a toxic spill and I teased Mom about her precautions.

Malika and Noah with Fern and her sunflower which 
resulted from a sunflower seed that the birds and 
squirrels missed in her back yard.

But she got the last laugh the next day, although she didn’t actually laugh, at least out loud. My hands and arms were fine, but my legs bubbled up with that familiar rash.

I hadn’t had a good case of P.I. since my childhood. I had forgotten the misery it brings.

It started out innocently. A few little pimples here. A cluster there. I put on some clear ointment that we had in the bathroom and thought it would be fine.

Then the main crop appeared whole fields of P.I. on my calves and thighs.

I went to the store and bought a bottle of calamine lotion. I took a small sponge paintbrush and painted the familiar pink lotion over my legs. It felt so good, because the itching disappeared. Once again I was transported back in time, when kids wore that pink lotion like war paint.

Calamine lotion stops the itching for a while. But soon it returns. There is nothing more maddening than having a poison ivy itch and not being able to scratch it. I think a very effective prisoner-of-war torture would be to rub poison ivy on a person and not let them itch it. I wouldn’t advocate using it, except for on Osama bin Laden.

I am refraining from scratching my P.I. itch, for the most part. It’s hard to totally abstain, because scratching a poison ivy itch is one of those sensations that really, really feels good. It’s a strange sensation. Scratching it feels good, then it starts to burn and hurt and itch, so you have to scratch it again to make that go away, and it feels good for about 10 glorious seconds, then it burns and starts to itch again, and so on.

And then it spreads, and the spirit of the P.I. plant is happy. It has done its duty.

So heed your mother’s advice. Use a hoe on that poison ivy patch. Or else go borrow a suit of protective clothing from your local nuclear power plant before you try to remove those rotten plants.