No, not that noxious weed. I'm talking about the near-ubiquitous iniquitous vine, the Strangler Most Foul, the chameleon-like climber that is the bane of summer camps across most of North America, Toxicodendron sp. - that is, Poison Ivy and its relatives.
At left you see a my hand circa Friday, May 29th. I remember it was pretty mild the day before, as I just slapped a glove on it and went to work at the shop (they make us wear latex gloves anyway); I don't know if all the sweat and coolant from the machines had anything to do with the worsening condition or if I was doomed from the start. At any rate, those blisters would continue to balloon to alarming proportions until the largest one sat 1/2 inch above the normal skin level. The blisters began appearing on and between my fingers and even on the touch surface of my ring finger. The largest blister kept popping and refilling with whatever that yellow fluid is (I think the scientific term is "Ichor from beyond time and space"). The result is that, by this morning, I begged off of work and am headed to seek medical advice (see image below). My left hand is not as badly affected, thank Christ, but there's still a couple of blisters and for some reason they're the itchiest of all. I think I had one tiny blister on my foot, but that's about it. No systemic reaction as of this moment. Knock on wood. Unless it's poison ivy wood.
Strangely enough, this isn't the worst dose I've ever caught. Way back in the murky days of 2013, I was working at the Howell Nature Center; for whatever insane reason I thought I'd be a lamb and help clear some brush. In shorts. It was a mixture of briar and autumn olive, with plenty of the aforementioned ivy lurking in the underbrush. I happened to get a good briar scratch on the inside of my right knee, no big deal, but soon it began to itch and swell and I knew I was in for it. Within a couple of days it had turned into one mealy hamburger patty. The reaction spread all over my body, especially around my midsection; my left eye began to swell, and in general I was in the shit. There's really no misery quite like it - never enough to put you in the emergency room, but just enough to make the dog days of summer unbearable. After it finally cleared up about a month later, I was left with a sizable numb patch of scar tissue on my leg, which somehow still itched even though I couldn't feel myself scratching it. Thankfully the nerves grew back eventually, but every so often it will itch vaguely, as though to remind me of its presence.
So what is poison ivy? Toxicodendron radicans (the poison ivy we have here in Michigan) is a woody plant whose leaves form distinctive groups of three. Its main trunk crawls across the ground, sending up stalks, until it reaches a tree or other upright structure and begins to climb and expand. If no structures are present, it can form a haphazard little shrub. In summer it produces clusters of greenish-white flowers, which then turn into white berries. All parts of the plant contain the oily compound, Urushiol, which causes an allergic dermatitis reaction in about 85% of humans. Together with poison oak and poison sumac, it belongs to the Toxicodendron genera of woody shrubs and vines in the Anacardiaceae family, which includes the sumacs (like the familiar roadside thickets of staghorn sumac), mangoes, cashews, shellac tree, and many others. Several of these genera produce Urushiol, which serves as an antimicrobial agent and helps the plant hold water in hot, dry conditions, and is used in China and Japan to make shiny black Urushi lacquer.
You'll notice I said "allergic reaction": urushiol is not, in and of itself, a toxic chemical; for whatever reason, the human immune system has decided it is a substance to be terminated with extreme prejudice, by which I mean calling in the B-17s for a carpet-bombing. Upon sensing urushiol, your white blood cells rush to the lymph nodes, recruit all of their buddies, and then return en masse as an avenging army. One of their favorite tactics is forcing your epidermal cells to destroy themselves. This explains the bubbling and fluid leakage that occur, essentially the same process as a second-degree burn.
This immune response also explains why not everyone has an immediate reaction to it, and some people never get it. Remember that one really annoying kid at camp who kept touching poison ivy and saying, "See? I'm immune to it"? Well, just tell him to keep it up - repeated exposure intensifies the immune response, in the same way you can acquire an allergy to bee stings if you get stung enough. It's also a roll of the dice as to how much urushiol you get from an encounter. Just walking through the woods in hiking boots and happening to step on poison ivy probably won't do much (although I'd wash my pants afterward); you either have to injure the plant somehow, or touch the vine when it's leaking sap in the Fall. Hot and sticky conditions open up your pores, allowing the urushiol to penetrate deeper into the skin than it would otherwise. In my case, I was digging out sod for a new garden, which involved cutting the grass roots and shaking the excess dirt from each chunk, a very hands-on process...I probably clipped the roots and stems of a small poison ivy vine and ended up getting urushiol-contaminated dirt all up in my pores. Add in the fact that it was unseasonably hot and muggy, and you have a perfect storm of conditions for a very strong localized reaction. My only blessing was that I didn't have a scratch on my right hand (they're all on my left), so at least it didn't get into my bloodstream.
Before we decide to go on a rampage of eradication, I want to point out that none of this is poison ivy's fault - and I don't just mean that in a "poisonous plants are part of nature too" kind of way. In fact, humans are one of only two mammals known to have a reaction to the plant. Deer and goats go out of their way to eat the stuff; bees relish the blossoms (and make damn good honey from it, too); and birds eat the berries to bulk up for the winter. Poison ivy and its relatives are simply a natural part of the North American ecosystem. We humans, newcomers in terms of nature, just so happen to have a bad reaction to it.
I have a few personal observations that make me somewhat fascinated by this so-maligned plant. It's the kind of organism that we regard as a hateful nuisance, but not so much that we observe it closely. It's a bit like the common cold, in that we (at least up until recently) simply shrugged and regarded as a part of life, and there was nothing we could do about it.
One thing I've noticed about poison ivy, once you get past the whole "miserable disgusting dermatitis" thing, is that it can be strangely beautiful. The leaves are variable, not only in shape but in coating: from the small, jagged, waxy leaves of a young stalk, to the enormous, trailing leaves of an old vine. The vines themselves can get as big around as your arm, and are covered in millions of clinging fibers that anchor the plant. The green-white flower clusters and resulting white berries are kind of pretty, and provide copious amounts of nectar and food for bees and birds. There's a part of me that wonders what the world would be like if poison ivy weren't toxic (or relatively less toxic) to humans: what kind of showy cultivars would be grown? What kind of food plants could be developed from it? Such a versatile plant could be an enormous benefit, providing an array of different food options - much in the same way the Cabbage family (Brassica) has been cultivated into broccoli, Brussels sprouts, cabbage varieties, kholrabi, kale, and many others. Maybe the leaves could be a kind of salad green, the berries a fruit, the shoots a kind of asparagus, the roots a potato; there could be a shrub variety for hedges, a climbing showy flower-vine, a strong upright variety for its fibrous, flexible wood. I'm just spitballing here, but I think there's a lot of research to be done in this field.
Another thing I've noticed is that - and I'm definitely anthropomorphizing here - but poison ivy appears to be clever. It mimics the foliage around it. When next to a waxy, climbing ivy, it seems to grow in almost the same manner, even spacing out its waxy, jagged leaves in the same way. When clambering up a tree, it sticks out branches full of waving leaves, looking for all the world like a hickory. It's not that it's trying to be sneaky, like a snake in the grass, but simply trying to blend in with its environment, to escape notice and not be eaten.
But that's all just conjecture. Hopefully there's a vaccine on the horizon that will help us humans come to terms with a plant whose only crime was producing a chemical we happen to be allergic to. Until then, I'll get me away to the doctor, and hopefully get a cream for this godawful rash.
Rick Out.
Strangely enough, this isn't the worst dose I've ever caught. Way back in the murky days of 2013, I was working at the Howell Nature Center; for whatever insane reason I thought I'd be a lamb and help clear some brush. In shorts. It was a mixture of briar and autumn olive, with plenty of the aforementioned ivy lurking in the underbrush. I happened to get a good briar scratch on the inside of my right knee, no big deal, but soon it began to itch and swell and I knew I was in for it. Within a couple of days it had turned into one mealy hamburger patty. The reaction spread all over my body, especially around my midsection; my left eye began to swell, and in general I was in the shit. There's really no misery quite like it - never enough to put you in the emergency room, but just enough to make the dog days of summer unbearable. After it finally cleared up about a month later, I was left with a sizable numb patch of scar tissue on my leg, which somehow still itched even though I couldn't feel myself scratching it. Thankfully the nerves grew back eventually, but every so often it will itch vaguely, as though to remind me of its presence. |
| "Leaves of Three, Let it Be..." Note the short stems of the side leaves and the longer stem of the central leaf; the leaf surface; veins are prominent. The leaf edge can be toothed, or smooth in larger leaves. Just-emerging foliage is reddish, while Fall foliage is blazing red, orange, or purple. |
You'll notice I said "allergic reaction": urushiol is not, in and of itself, a toxic chemical; for whatever reason, the human immune system has decided it is a substance to be terminated with extreme prejudice, by which I mean calling in the B-17s for a carpet-bombing. Upon sensing urushiol, your white blood cells rush to the lymph nodes, recruit all of their buddies, and then return en masse as an avenging army. One of their favorite tactics is forcing your epidermal cells to destroy themselves. This explains the bubbling and fluid leakage that occur, essentially the same process as a second-degree burn.
This immune response also explains why not everyone has an immediate reaction to it, and some people never get it. Remember that one really annoying kid at camp who kept touching poison ivy and saying, "See? I'm immune to it"? Well, just tell him to keep it up - repeated exposure intensifies the immune response, in the same way you can acquire an allergy to bee stings if you get stung enough. It's also a roll of the dice as to how much urushiol you get from an encounter. Just walking through the woods in hiking boots and happening to step on poison ivy probably won't do much (although I'd wash my pants afterward); you either have to injure the plant somehow, or touch the vine when it's leaking sap in the Fall. Hot and sticky conditions open up your pores, allowing the urushiol to penetrate deeper into the skin than it would otherwise. In my case, I was digging out sod for a new garden, which involved cutting the grass roots and shaking the excess dirt from each chunk, a very hands-on process...I probably clipped the roots and stems of a small poison ivy vine and ended up getting urushiol-contaminated dirt all up in my pores. Add in the fact that it was unseasonably hot and muggy, and you have a perfect storm of conditions for a very strong localized reaction. My only blessing was that I didn't have a scratch on my right hand (they're all on my left), so at least it didn't get into my bloodstream.
Before we decide to go on a rampage of eradication, I want to point out that none of this is poison ivy's fault - and I don't just mean that in a "poisonous plants are part of nature too" kind of way. In fact, humans are one of only two mammals known to have a reaction to the plant. Deer and goats go out of their way to eat the stuff; bees relish the blossoms (and make damn good honey from it, too); and birds eat the berries to bulk up for the winter. Poison ivy and its relatives are simply a natural part of the North American ecosystem. We humans, newcomers in terms of nature, just so happen to have a bad reaction to it.
I have a few personal observations that make me somewhat fascinated by this so-maligned plant. It's the kind of organism that we regard as a hateful nuisance, but not so much that we observe it closely. It's a bit like the common cold, in that we (at least up until recently) simply shrugged and regarded as a part of life, and there was nothing we could do about it.
One thing I've noticed about poison ivy, once you get past the whole "miserable disgusting dermatitis" thing, is that it can be strangely beautiful. The leaves are variable, not only in shape but in coating: from the small, jagged, waxy leaves of a young stalk, to the enormous, trailing leaves of an old vine. The vines themselves can get as big around as your arm, and are covered in millions of clinging fibers that anchor the plant. The green-white flower clusters and resulting white berries are kind of pretty, and provide copious amounts of nectar and food for bees and birds. There's a part of me that wonders what the world would be like if poison ivy weren't toxic (or relatively less toxic) to humans: what kind of showy cultivars would be grown? What kind of food plants could be developed from it? Such a versatile plant could be an enormous benefit, providing an array of different food options - much in the same way the Cabbage family (Brassica) has been cultivated into broccoli, Brussels sprouts, cabbage varieties, kholrabi, kale, and many others. Maybe the leaves could be a kind of salad green, the berries a fruit, the shoots a kind of asparagus, the roots a potato; there could be a shrub variety for hedges, a climbing showy flower-vine, a strong upright variety for its fibrous, flexible wood. I'm just spitballing here, but I think there's a lot of research to be done in this field.
Another thing I've noticed is that - and I'm definitely anthropomorphizing here - but poison ivy appears to be clever. It mimics the foliage around it. When next to a waxy, climbing ivy, it seems to grow in almost the same manner, even spacing out its waxy, jagged leaves in the same way. When clambering up a tree, it sticks out branches full of waving leaves, looking for all the world like a hickory. It's not that it's trying to be sneaky, like a snake in the grass, but simply trying to blend in with its environment, to escape notice and not be eaten.
But that's all just conjecture. Hopefully there's a vaccine on the horizon that will help us humans come to terms with a plant whose only crime was producing a chemical we happen to be allergic to. Until then, I'll get me away to the doctor, and hopefully get a cream for this godawful rash.
Rick Out.
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