Motive

My skin, it seems, is a lunatic beast.

The troubles started last summer with my journeys along the San Joaquin River near Fresno. I was trying to find a walking route from the location where the navigable waterway laws end and Millerton Lake. It was a distance of hardly more than twenty miles, but there was much private land and unkempt fields, so it was difficult.

I succeeded in finding many proper foot passages. There was no single good walking route along that river between that point about seven miles east of the 99 freeway and Millerton Lake, but there were many routes through many sweet places. It is a lovely river, and there are some tranquil shores. It is parklike in places. I was enchanted many times. The process of going out over and over over the course of a summer helped me refine my backpacking technique as well. I got my kit down to some truly minimal specs.

I did all that exploring in furnace heat of the central California desert

Many days had reports official reports of 115°, and I was out walking along blacktop on top of that. So I was likely experiencing actual temperatures approaching 140°. When it got that bad, I would take a break, finding shade, drinking water, but I was out in it, and that was what — I think — first started to make my feet form this heavy crust of yellow-white callus material.

They hqd never done that before. I had never seen my skin do that. I did not know how to treat the strange, new, unexpected condition. I would soak my feet and pumice off places where it hurt, like the pads behind my toes, but it was a losing battle. My feet started to dry out and crack occasionally too. Painful.

In addition, dressed so very lightly in running shorts, ultra-light shirts, and often wearing only sandals with no socks, I was occasionally wading through chest high fields of various local grasses and one particular invasive species — yellow star thistle, over and over. At night, really, all day, every day, I was rinsing off in the river, but I was not soaping off any plant waxes or oils deposited.

After my last outing, I was often itchy. “Often,” I said, but it was constant. For relief, I scratched. I did it so much, I started wearing rubber gloves to keep from breaking my fingernails and having them accumulate dead skin under them. My hands and feet in particular itched, just, just… I use words like “lunatic” and “insane” to describe it. It was a new kind of pain beyond all my previous experience.

I tried every over the counter anti-itch stuff I could find, but a vinegar rubdown worked actually better with the caveat that as it dried, the itch would crescendo, but if you could face that down, a calm would follow.

The other thing that worked great was a nice, hot shower.

I made them as hot as I could stand. Total relief! I’d go to sleep with my skin feeling stingy hot, but not itching much. I could at least get to sleep that way.

I started to learn the discipline of not scratching at all. I was making my skin bloody, and that would only itch worse, later. But so too did my hot water treatments! I was repeatedly burning my skin and making things worse the next day. One night I had a “brilliant” stupid idea — I used a blow drier on my skin to calm down the itch sensation. That totally worked! The itching vanished!

It worked so “well” that I was bright red and burned over my whole body. Finally, I sought medical help. I checked into Urgent Care at a local facility with full body First degree burns.

They got me on steroids at first and a strong anti-histamine to calm down the skin. I got a regular doctor who I like very much because he both bright and humble — a delightful personality combination. One will notice that it is pretty much impossible to get any MD to make definite pronouncements about any diagnosis, but they will commit to general observations, and all tests point to an immune system that has been way, way, way over active. These skin terrors are immune responses. My body senses itself under attack by various chemicals that are in local foliage, and, the humidity is extremely low, constantly drying my skin out.

My allergist — to whom I was sent — discovered through skin tests where they poke all kinds of stuff into you that I have allergic responses to almost every common tree and grass in this entire area!

Interestingly, I have almost no internal allergies; they are all topical. My skin seems to be much more delicate and sensitive than I ever knew; or, it has become that with age. “Parchment” was how I described the skins of my grandparents when I was a child, and now it seems I have grown into that myself.

Sigh.

It is much more fun to zoom than to go slow. I like to go fast. I like to simply push through. I do not like having to be wary of every single green thing that touches me!

But that is what I must be, like it or not.

I will pay in suffering consequences if I am not constantly conscious of any dermal contacts I make from now until any future I have. In the end, rather than regret this, I considered that I might convert this care into something Lao Tsu — the one considered to have founded Taoism — might observe as a “way of walking like water.”

Sixty-six years old, and I am still working on my strides and postures, so why not! Yes! Maybe I could turn this trouble into a flowing art of a walking style that passes through the world without resistance?

Catch me when I am a hundred, and I’ll tell you how learning that art went.

But my skin problems were not over. I learned these basic things, but I still kept hurting my skin from over-scratching and too-hot baths and showers. It seemed my pleasure and pain circuits were fried. Things that felt great were hurting my body, over and over.

Finally, after an obsidian gathering outing in the Eastern Sierras with a friend, I once again went through a steroid treatment regimen, and had it all fine again, but then one day my legs were just itching so much, I made what I thought was a tepid bath, and I scrubbed off all my peeling skin with a rough washcloth. It felt fine. The skin underneath was smooth and healthy. I thought I had done good, clean grooming…

But then, even as I was dressing, I saw a sheen of *ooze* coming from the skin of my legs, and it did not stop. I knew I had hurt my skin badly *again*!

Something broke in my soul. This was too much. It was not fair. I was hardly even scrubbing. The water was not that hot. Was my body breaking down? Was this the first sign of death coming?

I was truly shook up. I looked at my legs with horror.

I started peeling again! This time over my whole body, including my face. My skin started flaking off in quarter sized chunks. I looked like an old, dying tree. Hideous, I could not even go out in public. I felt miserable. My morale was in a wet trench. I thought that maybe I was seeing the thing that would kill me.

I did not know what to do.

I pondered, what did I know would help?

Steroids like Prednizone, sure, but you can’t suppress your immune system like that for long. I needed the real fixes.

I knew that if I could keep from messing with the injuries, they got better, sooner. So I wrapped the worst parts — my calves and feet — in gauze and sprayed it all down with Bactine. My anti-itch disciplines had taught me that if I could keep from activating an area, it would tend to stay calmer.

I remembered how fine it was to soak in cold water like I did when out looking for obsidian. That was genuinely healing. That was how to soak off dry skin. That was how to relieve itching without killing skin. Cold water! Water so cold it hurt when you first got in.

Yes! Cold water!

Now, you may wonder, why not just use my bathtub? Is not my house warm? And you would be right to wonder that. I could have done that. Yet, for some strange reason I think the pain was making me a bit goofy.
It was a cold lakes and river I wanted. I wanted to be outside. I wanted the things that comforted me.

I have had animals who when wounded would crawl off somewhere quiet and private to die.

The cool, moist air of the northern mountains was calling.. Getting away from an allergy hot zone in the zero humidity desert would have to help.

To do this cold water treatment, though, one needs a warm place to go after soaking. In summer, no problem. In winter? A problem. In Scandinavia, they love to build little heating cabins by cold water sources. They are not always saunas. A little wood fire works. One does not need anything elaborate.

Well, I knew of a place. I knew where I could go.