Enjoying Nature’s Thoughtful Gifts

Today I had fun cutting a tree that had collapsed on a fence. Afterward, I realized the area near the tree was carpeted with something which is probably poison ivy. Now I’m sitting around reading everything I can find, trying to figure out how to cope with this weed.

My farm has lots of poison ivy. I didn’t know what it was when I moved here, but at some point, I did some studying, and I found out the little three-leaved plants that occupied so much of my land were the famous toxic vine. Sometimes it appears as small, isolated plants. Sometimes it’s thick, woody vines 70 feet long. Today it was a big area of lush ground cover that actually looked pretty nice.

Most of my poison ivy has fat leaves with multiple points. The plants I saw today had long, oval leaves with pointed ends. They looked very little like the rest of the plants, but that doesn’t mean anything. Poison ivy has an annoying ability to look like different plants. If you see a shiny plant with three-leaf clusters, and the first two leaves in each cluster are directly opposite each other instead of being staggered, you may be looking at poison ivy.

Because the stuff I was wading in today didn’t look like normal poison ivy, I was happy to thrash around in it and put my saw down on it and walk on it for about an hour.

The Internet is full of mythology, but I think I’ve distilled a few facts out of the mess, so here I am to relate them to you.

The poisonous part of the plant is an oil called urushiol. It takes its name from urushi, a lacquer used by Asian woodworkers. There is a tree that secretes urushi. It’s called the kiurushi tree.

Japanese woodworkers coat their work with urushiol, and then they let it cure for months. Once it cures, it’s harmless. They wear gloves and long sleeves when they handle the uncured oil.

In poison ivy, urushiol is found inside the leaves and vines. You can’t get a rash just from touching a leaf. Maybe that’s not true for people with crazy sensitivity, but it’s generally true. To hurt you, a leaf has to be damaged.

Once the oil is out of the leaf and it gets on something, it can remain poisonous for 5 years. That means you can get it from sharpening a lawnmower blade or resting your hand on a tractor tire. That’s bad. How many people know exactly what their tractors have run over? I’m sure I’ve run over poison ivy. I wonder how tractor mechanics keep themselves safe.

If you get urushiol on yourself, it will only cause a rash on the areas it touches, and it has to stay in contact with your skin for a minimum amount of time in order to cause a reaction. If you remove the oil from your skin right after you get the oil on you, you will not get a rash. Unfortunately, you won’t know if you’re in the clear until days later, because poison ivy can take days to develop.

To get urushiol off of your skin, you have to use soap or detergent and friction. You can’t just run water over yourself.

Experts say people get less sensitive to urushiol with age. They also say you get more sensitive with successive exposures. They don’t seem troubled by the obvious contradiction.

Here’s a bummer for you: the mango tree is related to poison ivy. It does not produce urushiol. It produces a similar chemical called resorcinol. This chemical is found in the leaves, sap, and rind. If you’re allergic to poison ivy, you are probably allergic to mango sap, and vice-versa.

I have worked on this farm for almost a year, and while I have been burned, bruised, scratched, and bitten, I have never had a poison ivy rash. This is true even though I didn’t know what I was walking through (and on) until long after I got here. Now questions arise.

Am I immune, and if so, will it last, or will it go away? This is the question that interests me most. Some people never get a rash. On the other hand, some people start out insensitive and then break out in oozing blisters. I want to be in the first group. If I’m not, how can I protect myself? I have a mower and a tractor. God knows what’s on them, and they’re not that easy to clean.

If I’m immune, what about other people who visit the farm? Will I put them in the hospital by letting them use my tools? That would be awkward, wouldn’t it? And what if I take my tractors to the shop? Do I warn them, or will they think I’m nuts?

Doctors claim you can’t make yourself immune to poison ivy. They say you can only make yourself more sensitive. Okay, but I have seen claims that people who have been exposed to mangoes a lot can become insensitive to poison ivy. Supposedly, Hawaiians, who eat mangoes, are insensitive to mango oil, which would mean they were also insensitive to poison ivy.

I’ve been around mangoes for decades. Miami is buried in them every year. They’re a plague. I’ve handled tons of them. I’ve sliced them up. I’ve gotten the sap all over me. I’ve never had a reaction, which is good, because some people in Miami can’t go out in their yards without blowing up. Is it possible the mangoes got me ready for poison ivy?

Am I immune? If so, am I immune because of mangoes? If that’s not it, am I just temporarily immune because I haven’t been around poison ivy enough? Do I have to worry that one day I’ll swell up after touching my boots, which have definitely stomped on a fair amount of poison ivy?

What if I’m sensitive to poison ivy but I’ve been incredibly lucky all year? Maybe I just happened to avoid touching every contaminated surface, consistently.

I don’t know the answers.

I have considered taking a poison ivy leaf and applying it to a tiny area of my skin, in an area where a rash wouldn’t drive me crazy. This would be my DIY patch test, to see if I react. But what if it merely made me more sensitive? What if I’m immune now but my little experiment ruined it for me?

My prediction: nothing will happen to me after today’s exposure. I got in the shower when I got home, and I used my usual toxic castile soap to scrub myself, so if I got any oil on me, it’s gone, along with all of my skin’s natural oil. Also, I wore long pants and leather gloves today. I do feel a little regretful about using the finger of one glove to scratch my eyelid, but I think I’m in the clear. There has to be urushiol on my boots, but that’s always true, and nothing has ever happened to me.

After I realized I was probably in poison ivy, I drove back to the house and got the super-duper Roundup. Most people don’t realize Roundup comes in two varieties: the super-duper kind, and the kind that doesn’t work. The regular kind is useless except for accidentally killing your lawn. The super-duper kind actually kills weeds, and it even mentions poison ivy on the label. I blasted the daylights out of the area where I had been using the chainsaw earlier. I hope it works. I just need a few more dry hours to let it soak in.

It would be nice if being exposed to mango sap all my life left me with some protection from poison ivy. I would like to think I got one positive thing from my horrible relationship with Miami.