Sept. 7, 2001

Dear Ken,

Sitting in our favorite Chinese restaurant, my wife offers her right leg for my inspection. "Hmm," I say in a tone meant to imply insignificance.

I pull up my left pants leg and roll the sock down below the ankle. "Oh!" she exclaims.

We are comparing chigger bites. Mine are more numerous and horrible looking by far.

The wounded have returned from Labor Day at the cabin on the Castor River.

"Chiggers: The Movie" could do for the woods what "Jaws" did for beaches.

People who have spied on chiggers report that three pairs of legs are attached to their bright red hairy bodies during the larval stage. That's when they attack humans. At other times in their lives the monsters have more legs and consume other living things.

Really horrifying is what happens when a chigger bites. It finds a pore or hair follicle and injects a powerful salivary secretion that liquefies your skin cells so it can suck them up.

Eeeuuuu, the audience screams.

This same chigger bile hardens the skin around the bite, conveniently forming a straw through which the chigger sucks more skin cells.

After four days of gorging on liquefied skin, the chigger abandons the host to become an eight-legged nymph and finally an adult.

In spite of their nutritional habits, chiggers have always seemed a minor irritation. This time they mean pain.

Since returning to civilization, I have been investigating chiggers hoping to discover their weakness, an Achilles heel at the end of one of those six legs. Mine don't appear to have any.

I have tried a soap laced with pine tar. I have tried cortisone creams. The itching subsides awhile and then returns. I have been invaded.

It's every horror movie's money shot: the horror of being eaten alive.

While I scratched, DC read a Sidney Sheldon book because that's the kind of book you're supposed to read in the summer and because she'd never read a Sidney Sheldon book.

"This is so bad," she occasionally reported from the depths of Sidney Sheldon's world.

"She basked in the summer of his arms" bad.

As always, the river brought many treasures. We retrieved a perfect chopping block from a gravel bar and a small log we didn't know what to do with. DC's father caught three tiny water snakes in his minnow trap. You don't always know what to make of everything the river brings.

DC has decided the cabin needs an amphitheater. An area just downhill from the cabin, formerly the fire pit, is now the performing arts center.

A campfire will make fine footlights, DC says. Her brother Paul's old Ford pickup's headlights will do if a spotlight is needed. A ring of gracefully arching small trees defines the stage.

The benches for the audience will go only 10 yards up the hill from the stage between two large trees that shelter the amphitheater. The goal is intimacy, not attendance records. The largest congregation at the cabin usually numbers no more than 10.

A rock stairway that will lead to the seating area already has taken shape. The log we didn't have a use for will become seating.

You are invited to the summer 2002 grand opening. Bring insect repellent.

Love, Sam

sblackwell@semissourian.com

335-6611, extension 182