Stories from the Road 2002
an ongoing travelogue

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I thought the leeches would look more like large, flat slugs. I thought they would be rather slow, like slugs in the way they moved. I thought that if I was lucky, I just might even see a few on our walk this morning through the Periyar Wildlife Sanctuary, here in the Western Ghats mountains of eastern Kerala State of Southern India. In all of the above assumptions, I was wrong, very wrong.

I was told that because the rainy season had already begun, there would be more leeches in the forest and that renting "leech socks" would be a good idea. And so upon inquiry at the park office, I found that these socks only came in one size - Indian size. This fact was enough to almost persuade me to just forgo the whole sock idea. "Nah, I can't wear these, they're way too tight. I wear 12-12 ½ and these are probably size 7", I remarked to the official.

But having seen some of the tribal people in the area just earlier that morning, wearing these knee-high, thin cotton socks, I decided I ought to just get them. I figured that if they were wearing them, then there must be some experience, some knowledge that I should not be ignorant of. So I handed over 15 rupees and squeezed my feet into these little foot-mittens. As you might be able to visualize, the socks didn't go to my knees as they were supposed to. For one, just to get my feet into them meant that my heels rested up along the tube of the sock, where the calf should have been. This and my rather long shins meant that when I tied the string at the top - that was supposed to keep them from slipping down - that they ended up only at mid-shin and when they fell, they dropped down to mid-ankle.

I eventually got my shoes on over them, walked a few steps and was close again to just forgoing them - I thought, this must surely be comparable to what a ballerina's feet feel like in point shoes. Little did I realize at that point that I would be walking more than 4 hours in them that day.

It was only a few minutes into the forest - better to describe it as a jungle - when our guide stooped over, and pointed his finger at the wet matt of duff we were walking on. "Leech," he said. No scientific name for this critter was needed. I thrust my head forward to get a good view, refocused my eyes and then looked face to face (or was that it's other end?) at the animal that could later be described as an all consuming, malicious son of a bitch.

Then I looked down at my own feet.

Whoa! Jeeze, they were all over me. Instantly, I was impressed by their acute sensitivity for finding prey (except that the prey was me), their dexterity, and their tenacity. At this same moment that I pondered these thoughts in awe, I reached into my hip pack for a flame producing lighter.

Before I could get it out, I realized that a small flame wouldn't be of much help in my current situation. Better, I'd have to pass my feet over a campfire to get all of these parasites off of me. I started flicking at them with the nail of my index finger - careful not to touch them with the skin of my finger. While I was able to get some of them off, most of them hung on and even continued their ascents up my legs or into my shoes. "Wow, they're quick little buggers." They moved end over end with an impressive and impatient certitude.

I had to pull a few off that were in areas I couldn't ignore. However, I didn't like to do this because they would stick like adhesive tape to the skin of my fingers and I would have to violently shake my hands to fling them off. And it was at these times that I was unsure whether I might fling them straight up so that they would come straight down - onto my head! Or down the back of my shirt. Or near my ear… (yeah, we don't need to go there.)

Soon, the three of us and our guide were using sticks to aggressively scrape them from our shoes, our socks, our pants. Many were so small that they would slip into our shoes along the sides of the tongue or in the lace holes. But their favorite spot was the heat sink around our ankles which was very difficult for us to remove them from because we couldn't flick or scrape without pushing them down even further. And the problem was that in the time it took us to remove two, three more would begin climbing up from the ground, beginning their slinky ascents.

I remember casting my gaze over the area on which I was standing, without fixing my eyes on any one spot, and was overcome by the startling sense that the ground was moving. It seemed that within a two meter radius, a hundred small black slinkies were propelling themselves forward to one common meeting place - me! "You guys, let's get out of here. They're coming out of nowhere. It's getting worse!", I commanded.

We continued on, looking at the flora, trying to stay alert and quiet enough to spot some other wildlife but our attention was clearly divided. We were invested in other matters. It was like this for the next three hours.

True, leeches can't technically eat through socks to get to one's skin (although this was not a confirmed fact to any of us), but it was the mental hurdle with being okay with thirty blood sucking animals, all obsessed with finding a way to your skin which we found to be distracting and unsettling. It's the psychological possibility that keeps one anxious and on guard, constantly swiveling one's torso around, craning one's neck, and shaking one's shirt, brushing their fingers through their hair to continually assess the situation.

However, at a certain point, I realized that I had to find some stillness in all of this so I could try to appreciate the wonderfully delicate smells of the tumeric roots, the bark of the sandalwood tree, the taste of fresh pepper from its fleshy fruits, the spicy zing on the tongue from the curry leaves, and the sweet smells of wet earth that were blowing up the grassy mountain side from which we stood i anwe, barely able to take in the magnificent vistas.

If we had become preoccupied with every single distracting biting fly, mosquito, or leech, we wouldn't have been able to see the silvery red beetle that crossed our path, the brilliantly blue butterflies, or the tracks and hovel of the sloth bear. One can't always be watching their feet because otherwise they would walk straight into the web of the giant spider that had grown magnificent horns from its abdomen to defend against predation. And who wants that web on their face?

Over the course of the day, we walked about 20 km. We stood amongst giant ferns and chest high clumps of elephant grass. We saw beautiful birds and butterflies, sambar deer and wild boar, bison, some fresh water otters, monkeys, and even three wild elephants off in the distance. But the animal that will have the most lasting impression on me from that day will undoubtedly be the leech.

If we had only seen a tiger...