O’Neill Regional Park 2

Posted on May 26, 2003 in Biomes Photos

That’s the stuff on the left there. What I was talking about yesterday. The scourge of the Lynn’s family. The bane of myself. The strange thing is that the local native Americans were immune to it. They used it as an astringent, a soap. Take a brutal jump into one of the shallow warmed over pools that remain in the summer and lather up with the leaves three was the order of the day in pre-contact times. I’m sure it didn’t help relations when some well-intentioned medicine man suggested it as a regimen to a white man.

It’s related to Poison Ivy, that stuff you Easterners find crawling all over your beloved state parks and woodlands. Please don’t be insulted: you have the ivy and we have the oak.

I caught a case of poison ivy once at Gettysburg. “Don’t scratch!” my mother barked at me. I couldn’t keep my hands off the patches and it was all over my body — wherever I touched my fingers — in a matter of hours. I remember flying home, from Baltimore to Los Angeles, wearing a suit and having the oil from the weed rubbing against my sleeves and the joints of my suit. My mother never let me fly anywhere without wearing a suit. So for four hours, I sat in my Robert Hall-tailored special, trying to keep my hands in my lap and my finger nails off the rosy patches of torment. I didn’t succeed. That’s how I got to know pink calomine lotion and how I learned to stay away from thickets.

Lynn’s family suffers badly from the stuff. Her brother, Paul, is the most sensitive. He has picked it up from petting cats and once, when he broke his arm while living in Boston, got it under the cast. He likes to hang glide. Once he came back from Big Sur to tell us that he’d crashed and broken a few bones. It didn’t help that he’d landed in a grand patch of poison oak.

My poor sister-in-law Carey had a more embarassing experience. We were all gathered at a family reunion in Santa Cruz. She went for an early morning run in the redwoods. Nature called and she ducked into the bushes. When she was finished, she grabbed a handful of the most beautiful red leaves she’d ever seen. It was a pity, she thought, that she had to put them to such a use. We pitied her more when the rash broke out two hours later and we had to bring her to an emergency room for treatment. My brother-in-law Lenny and I were fighting hard to keep from laughing. The doctor and the nurse asked her permission to break down. (She gave it.) Carey spent the rest of the weekend high on benadryl while we played.

Then there was the time my friend Boris Horvat from Slovenia saw the leaves and was taken by them. He leaned down to pick them. “No!” Lynn and I cried. He looked at us strangely. What could possibly be wrong with that? Lynn and I just described the symptoms of contact. He decided rein in his desire.

So, for those who don’t know: that’s what poison oak looks like. Up there on the left. In the autumn, it turns scarlet. It’s easy to avoid the patches because they stand out from the brown. They’re a splendor to behold.

Be safe when you walk in our woods and stay out of the thick stuff beneath the trees.

Click on the picture to visit the rest of the gallery, which includes Chinese houses and other beauties of the Orange County near-wilderness.