Poison ivy comes a-creepin' around

Last summer, I developed an inexplicable, very localized, highly uncomfortable, and long-lasting itchy rash on my left arm, right leg, and other random locations. When I eventually visited my doctor, I was pretty surprised to hear that it was poison ivy, because I drew a blank on how I could have gotten it. (Those of you who know me are probably aware that I don't spend much time outdoors in close contact with nature of the sort that might contain poison ivy.) Nevertheless, I started poking around the yard, and lo, next to my garage door was this small vine with leaves of three, and a bit of Googling produced a plethora of poisonous pictures verifying that this is, indeed, a fine specimen of Toxicodendron radicans (aka Rhus toxicodendron).

Well, that still didn't explain how I got my rash, because I certainly had not been messing with this vine, so I pressed on to the back yard, where I found the smoking gun, as it were – a larger stand of the weed under one end of my hammock stand – and suddenly it all became clear.


A few weeks before, I had hung up my hammock, on the stand which had been sitting out since the previous year. Now, hanging this hammock is really a two-person job, because it has to be strung tight as a drum to start with – it's cotton rope and it stretches a lot when you put weight in it, and then you have to take the slack up in the chains or else your butt drags on the ground. However, not having a second person handy at the time, I laid the hammock out on the ground across the base of the stand, hooked the chain onto the hook at one end (the end where the poison ivy is, as it turns out), then picked up the other end and hauled it as tight as I could before hooking it on that end of the stand.

So undoubtedly, I laid that end of the hammock right in the poison ivy, contaminating parts of the rope, which handily transferred a dose of urushiol to bare arms and legs when I lay down in the hammock. This explained the nature of the welts, which looked kinda like a rope burn. Duh.

Well, I got me some high-octane brush killer and tried it out on the vines next to the garage, and it worked, but somehow I never got around to spraying the hammock patch (actually, I think I can legitimately blame this particular piece of procrastination on the fact that I suddenly found a job and no longer had all the time in the world to do yard work). As a result, I never did get my hammock up this year, and the poison ivy has flourished mightily:


Would that my landscaping plants would do that well! Anyway, two weekends ago I was weed-whacking the hayfield back there and must have inadvertently clipped a few vines that have cropped up here and there away from the main mass, because I developed a few random blisters on my hands and arms that I'm pretty sure are poison ivy. So this past weekend I finally dug the brush killer out of the garage and went out and sprayed all I could find. The label says it's rain-proof after four hours, which is a good thing since it rained almost the whole next day. With any luck, the stuff should be dying by next weekend.

Of course, that's not the end of it, because dead poison ivy vines still contain plenty of active urushiol. Once the stuff has croaked, I'm still gonna have to pull up all the dead plants, seal'em in double trash bags for disposal, and then put my clothes through the laundry (twice, just to be on the safe side). Or maybe I should see if Home Depot carries Tyvek coveralls? Gaahh! I thought I was done with the hazmat business when I left chemistry behind.