Pick your poison

It’s probably a little late in the summer for this, but I need to make a public service announcement about poison ivy. This usually bright green plant, vine, or shrub, identifiable by its three alternating leaf clusters, lives mostly at the edges of woods or creeks or meadows, places where people are likely to be walking. When human skin comes into contact with urushiol, the active ingredient in poison ivy, the result is a crazy-making, itchy, blistering red skin rash for the 85% of us allergic to it. No one outgrows this allergy. In fact, people who might not have been allergic as a child, may suddenly develop an allergy, and people who always been allergic often find their allergies becoming more intense as they age.

Poison ivy was the bane of my summer existence as a child, particularly during the weeks we spent in or near my maternal grandmother’s house. It grew prolifically on the woods edge of their yard and fields. Each summer, I walked blithely through it and then spent weeks scratching and doused in pink calamine lotion, waiting for the blisters to go away. Sometimes my mother or grandmother intercepted me after I’d been outside awhile and made me wash with an orange bar of Dial soap, which probably prevented my rashes from being worse than they were. In my early teens I got a case so bad it required oral steroids, and it definitely made our vacation to Nova Scotia less pleasant for me.

We were told as children not to scratch because the fluid in the blisters would make the rash spread, but I have learned this is not what happens. The fluid in the blisters is not the substance that makes you itch. A rash that seems to spread is likely the result of differential amounts of contact with the plant on different parts of the skin. A heavier “dose” will cause a quicker, more intense skin eruption, and the lighter doses will take a bit longer to show up as rashes. Also, there may be contact with urushiol from shoes or clothes contaminated with it after the person comes in the house, and later contact results in a delayed rash.

Poison ivy is not contagious across people, nor can scratching cause infection unless there are bacteria present, under dirty fingernails for example. Scratching just adds to the misery of the rash, intensifying the itch after the blissful but short-lived relief of it.

As a young adult paying closer attention to the plant life around me, I thought I perhaps had conquered this affliction. I wondered why my parents had not been more diligent in making me do this. Under my tutelage, my children could spot poison ivy from a mile away. Perhaps my parents tried, but I don’t remember it. I heard people say they were so allergic they got the rash from being close to it, so maybe they thought it was inevitable that I would get it. You do have to touch urushiol to get the rash, however. People just often don’t know that they have.

When I was maybe 30 years old, I also learned that poison ivy grows in vines up trees, and if you touch one of these vines, even when it is dormant, you will be exposed to urushiol. It is as toxic in the winter as in the summer. You can’t see the leaves, but if you see vines that look like they have hair growing on them, don’t touch them!

I learned about poison ivy vines the hard way one Thanksgiving-weekend walk in the forest, collecting vines to make Christmas wreaths. I had no idea what I was doing. This was 1985-ish, and there were no YouTube videos to teach me how to make wreaths. I just knew that people found vines in the woods, so I found some growing on trees. I pulled many vines down from the trees, including the hairy ones, with bare hands and then touched my face, probably over and over again. The next day my face blew up like a balloon, and I was on serious medication for at least a week. I have been vigilant about my proximity to this plant since then, in every season, and I have tried to prevent others from its potential misery as well.

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A great deal of effort goes into removing poison ivy from landscapes, and the primary commodity used to remove it is Roundup®, manufactured by Monsanto. Its main herbicidal ingredient, since its creation in 1974 until very recently, was glyphosate. Monsanto and its global parent company Bayer have been roundly vilified for their use of it, knowing it was potentially toxic to human beings but failing to warn consumers. According to Dr. Jenny Goodman, glyphosate was “originally a nerve gas, and it is implicated in neurological disease like dementia, like Parkinson’s disease, multiple sclerosis, but also in cancers like lymphoma and leukemia and many others. It disrupts the endocrine system particularly.”

It makes me cringe to see that Roundup® still takes up aisles and aisles of shelves space at the front of my local Lowe’s. Why would people buy a product from this company who knowingly used and still uses a product with this association with so much misery? Bayer has paid out billions of dollars in lawsuit damages, though never admitting wrongdoing, and is still in litigation over this chemical. It has replaced glyphosate in some of its Roundup® products with other herbicidal ingredients.

Dr. Goodman asks why we should trust that this new ingredient is any safer than glyphosate and other experts suggest that the unnamed ingredients in Roundup® may pose an equal or greater health threat than glyphosate? I don’t trust Bayer to do the right thing, nor do I want the people who make a profit from this product to keep making money indifferent to its threats to consumer health.

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There is a ton of poison ivy growing in and around the woods, creek, and meadow of my mountain habitat. As I began noticing it, it came back to me that this is the very ground where I encountered it as a child. I have in the past tried to eradicate poison ivy in other yards, yes using Roundup®, before I became aware of its toxicity to humans (and no doubt other living beings). I am aware of this now, and am thinking differently about my relationship with the other than human world. I am not using Roundup® to remove it from the meadow here or along the creek where I walk every day.

Instead, I am figuring out how to live with it. To be an ally with it so it can be an ally to everything else. Why? Because poison ivy plays a robust role in the web of life.

We are the only species for whom poison ivy is a problem. White-tailed deer, racoons, and muskrats eat the leaves and stems; its berries are eaten by wild turkey, robins, crows, and bluebirds. Some bees use poison ivy pollen in their honey. Virginia pine, silver maple, willow oak, and sycamore are some of the trees who provide support for their vines. They are perennial plants with robust root systems that prevent erosion along the moist places they gravitate towards.

Poison ivy appears most often in disturbed areas and along the edges of the woods or meadows, needing part shade, part sun to thrive. These edges include the paths where humans walk, likely to protect these places from human invasion.

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I can live with it unharmed if I take certain precautions: wear long sleeves and long pants with socks and shoes and gloves if I’m going to be touching other plants with my hands; observe the plants around me and stay away from it as much as possible; take a shower after being in the woods and wash my clothes, wipe off my shoes.

I also learned about and now have used a homeopathic prevention/remedy. It is call Rhus Tox and I was told to take three pills after I notice I’ve been around it. I have taken it and not gotten a rash after finding myself in a field of it. I can’t tell you it was absolutely the reason I didn’t get a rash because I also did all the other things I mentioned, but I didn’t feel any side effects from the Rhus Tox pills either. I am not advising you to use this; I’m just telling you about my experience in case you are interested to finding out more.

I have read that jewelweed in the form of a mash can be used topically to treat a poison ivy rash. I have not tried this but there is a ton of jewelweed growing along the creek and in the meadow, which seems like poetry somehow.

This past winter as I was removing invasive multiflora rose, I did develop a rash that I believe was poison ivy. I assume that I inadvertently touched some dormant plant near the rose vines. Once I noticed a rash I began washing down after every foray into the woods. At my local food co-op, I found a product called Poison Ivy/Oak Soap. It creates a soothing lather for one’s irritated skin, and now I use it almost all the time. Its makers also sell an all-natural bug repellent that I have not yet tried.

In the yard-like area close to my little blue house, I have small poison ivy plants growing one or two at a time. I do not want to encourage their spread into these areas to be used primarily for humans, so I have dug them up (carefully) and put them in plastic bags and put them into the garbage.

In full disclosure, I have in the distant past tried to use a vinegar solution to kill poison ivy in my yard. It didn’t seem to work, so I did not mention it initially in this piece. I have heard from others that it does work, and in investigating this further on the internet, I realize I was not using the industrial strength vinegar needed to kill it. Vinegar is much preferable to the Monsanto product if you have a patch in your yard you want to remove. I recommend doing more research on the internet to determine if it would work in your situation. Care should be taken in removing the dead plants so that there is no contact between skin and still-active urushiol.

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The good of poison ivy for all of the other than human life around me (which also benefits humans) seems like a good reason to make an extra effort to avoid it myself and to make sure others do as well. So much healthier than putting nerve gas and the poison of corporate greed into the ground.

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This is the essay #4 in my blog series woods*creek*meadow, exploring connections between myself and a particular place in the natural world.