Lyme disease—cases of which I had recently read had exploded since the 1990s as a result of climate change. Before traveling, I’d done some research about ticks and had watched a video that explained how they operated. They were pretty amazing animals, in a lot of ways. They sense the presence of humans and other large animals by the carbon dioxide we give off. Once they’ve alighted on our skin, they crawl around in search of a suitable location on which to break the surface and begin feeding. Unlike mosquitoes—whose custom it is to land, get stuck in, and get out of there within a matter of seconds—ticks take their time. It can take them an hour or two to pick the right spot, like tourists with too much time on their hands who can’t decide on where they want to eat. Most ticks, I learned, live about three years and eat only three times in their lives—one for each stage of development, from larvae, to nymph, to full adulthood—a fact that, it seemed to me, completely vindicated their seemingly excessive fastidiousness. Once it settles on the right spot, it gets out its elaborate eating gear, including two sets of hooked proboscis, with which it digs into the host’s skin, pushing the flesh out of the way and holding it aside to allow for the entry of the harpoon-like hypostome, anchoring the tick firmly in the flesh and allowing it to extract its feed of blood, which blood it prevents from clotting by excreting into the host its own home-brew anticoagulant. Provided the tick isn’t found, it will often stay there glutting itself, and swelling to comparatively gigantic proportions, for up to three days, at which point it simply rolls off and goes about its business.
Though I was by no means keen to play host to such a creature—and even less keen to accommodate Lyme disease, with its fevers and its facial paralysis and its debilitating agonies—I could not help but feel some sympathy and respect for its methods. It behooves us humans, I’ve always felt, to grant at least some grudging admiration to the humbler parasites, on the basic game-recognize-game principle. Their attitude toward us, after all, is strikingly similar to our own approach toward the world in general. Consider the mosquito, statistically the only animal more deadly to humans than we are to ourselves, causing almost twice as many deaths per year as are caused globally by homicide. Mosquitoes have no more against us than we do against the countless species whose extinctions we have caused through hunting or habitat destruction. We simply have something they need in order to live: blood. And the means by which they extract it from us is, it seems to me, uncanny in its similarity to the way in which we ourselves extract minerals from the Earth. To watch a close-up video of a mosquito biting a human—separating its proboscis out into a mechanism of serrated needles, some of which it uses to make deeper incisions into the flesh, others to hold the flesh back for ease of extraction—is to witness something weirdly reminiscent of a sophisticated mining operation. Mosquitoes and ticks and other bloodsucking insects, I thought, checking myself uneasily for any further creatures that might have designs on the precious nectar beneath my skin, are our dark doubles, our brothers in ingenuity and destruction.
What felt like at least an hour must have passed—although it may admittedly have been no more than fifteen or twenty minutes—wherein my sole occupation was the fondling of grass. I ran my fingers through it, plucked it and scattered it to the breeze, held up individual stalks to the light of the sun and inspected them at frankly absurd length. I was deriving a certain aesthetic pleasure from this activity, and had even begun to feel as though I might well have entered into a state of mindful receptivity. I seemed to myself suddenly like a character in a film by Terrence Malick, luxuriating at length in the unconsidered minutiae of nature, cultivating in a moment of complete stillness a kind of quiet aesthetic rapture that verged on the spiritual. But then, of course, it occurred to me that a character in a film by Terrence Malick would never entertain this kind of notion of himself, would never think of himself as a character in a film. What I was, I thought, was a character in a television advertisement whose director was shamelessly, and perhaps even