Here & there: Getting buggy with it in Belize

Insect on leaf, location unknown, August 4, 2020 | Photo courtesy of Sudha Surendran via Scopio, St. George News

FEATURE — Sitting in the discomfort. That’s what I’m doing right now. But what I really want to do is claw at the itch-filled tingles that dance around both of my ankles. Forty-four lumps the size of Q-tips speckle the flesh left exposed by my three-quarter length leggings. At their center, small blood blisters have formed making each appear like a mini jelly donut.

I don’t even have the worst of it. One of my boys has one hundred and fifty-nine bites on his legs front and back. We counted this afternoon. My friend’s sixteen-year-old girl has so many we cannot count them – the multitude of bites having morphed into one contiguous landscape of angry red welts from her ankles to her buttock.

We’re not sure if the welts are a result of her inadvertent itching or an allergic reaction to the Belizean biting fly. But we are sure the sheer number of bites has something to do with the fact she was wearing a bikini in the jungle.

She had clothes. Pants even. But at some point in the 1.8 mile hike through the sloppy jungle trails, over the sprawling buttresses of tree roots, and up the boulder laden steps with coarse rope assists anchored between grand trees, she took them off.

We were climbing through the jungle to the Antelope Waterfall with the intention of repelling down it with our guides, which we did, and which explains the bathing suit as a relevant piece of attire. It just shouldn’t have been the only piece of attire in her case. Hindsight being what it is and all.

But even still, the rest of us who were clothed in various forms of proper attire were still under heavy attack. And we are all royally suffering now.

Black and white textile art , undated | Courtesy of Mariia Ion via Scopio, St. George News

The culprit’s common name is the botless fly. Its scientific name is Simuliidae. But whatever you call it, it’s a pesky little blood sucker whose small stature does nothing to prepare you for the pain it inflicts.

We met hundreds of these botless flies in the jungles of Belize yesterday in a place called Bocawina. The name, half Spanish and half Mayan, which means twisting mouth, also did nothing to prepare us for the bugs that awaited.

Always buggy in the rainy season, the Mayflower Bocawina National Park is especially so right now in the wake of the potent hurricanes that have been making their way through the Caribbean. Even weeks later, the waterfalls within the park’s boundaries are cascading torrents, the jungle trees and paths are gurgling with wetness, and the botless flies are in a truly exquisite period of Renaissance.

Or at least they were for our party of eight yesterday afternoon.

In her book Rising Strong, Brené Brown says, “our instinct is to run from pain. In fact, most of us were never taught how to hold discomfort, sit with it, or communicate it, only how to discharge or dump it, or to pretend that it’s not happening.”

Yes, that. Exactly.

I know Brené meant emotional pain, but this is what I want to do with the physical pain currently screaming at me from my ankles: I want to dump it, discharge it and pretend it’s not happening. But mostly I want to itch. I want to scratch and dig and claw until the nagging itch subsides.

The thing with the botless fly bite itch, however, is that when you attempt to discharge it, it only gets worse. It oozes and reddens and swells. And I swear it multiplies, too.

My dear friend and I, she about as bitten as me from the previous day’s adventures, don’t know this yet as we try to sit with the discomfort across from each other on the couch in the early morning hours, but the bites will get worse.

They will redden and harden and swell so our ankles, well mostly mine, will disappear by nightfall. They will ache and fit and demand to be scratched all day long. As we clean up breakfast. As we make the seven hungry kids lunch. As we clean up lunch. As we drive the weak golf cart into town for some cash. As we help with a myriad of school assignments over Canvas. As we ride horses all together later at sunset.

The bites will remain. The discomfort will remain. But eventually, it will pass.

And so, we continue to sit in the discomfort, resolved not to scratch, resolved to learn a little better how to hold ourselves in it, and resolved to never again let her daughter wear a red bikini in the jungles of Belize.

Kat Dayton is a columnist for St. George News. Any opinions given are her own and not representative of St. George News staff or management.

Copyright St. George News, SaintGeorgeUtah.com LLC, 2022, all rights reserved.

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