It took about 20 minutes after leaving Ely's Peak before I noticed the first tick. Luckily, it wasn't on me, but on Christa, and even more luckily, it wasn't on her skin, but on her sweatshirt. We had just pulled into the driveway and were getting out of my car when I saw the little demon. I picked it off and dispatched it, but it was then that I knew (flashing back to all the bushwhacking we'd done while leaving one trail and searching for another) that the tickiness had only just begun.

Like good, clean citizens who would rather not contract Lyme disease or walk around with something resembling a white jelly bean attached to their foreheads, we inspected ourselves as soon as we got in the door. Nope. Nothing. Not a tick on board. Still, I was skeptical.

Crawling through the ticky woods of Northern Minnesota in springtime is not always a delight. I remember one time several years ago, when a friend of mine found something like 23 ticks after we returned from an afternoon hike. I got luck again that time -- I only had six. That was probably the most I've ever had, even though I've done quite a bit of hiking, backpacking and camping in my time. The only thing I can possibly attribute it to is that I eat a lot of garlic.

Anyway, you want the horror story and that's what I'm here to write so here it is. After inspecting for ticks, I took a shower and we went out to dinner. Then we came home and watched a movie and went to bed. About two hours later I woke up, scratched my belly, and bam -- there was a tick.

I don't know if you've ever removed a tick .64 seconds after you woke up from a dead sleep, but let me tell you, it usually doesn't involve tweezers and a careful inspection of where the head meets the abdomen, like all the pamphlets tell you. I grabbed that little fucker and yanked it like I was free-falling 50,000 feet in the air and pulling the ripcord. I leaped up, stumbled into the kitchen and burned his eight-legged ass. Then I crawled back into bed and slept the sleep of the just.

But in the days since all of this happened, here's what I've come to find out. When you grab a tick and yank it out of your body, inevitably some of his body, namely his head, stays where he buried it. Also, when you grab a tick by the abdomen really hard, he, like any rational being, spits the contents of his abdomen into whatever it is he's chewing on. All of this leads to a big, itchy, red skin-volcano that oozes goo until the goddamn bug head is expelled down onto the villagers below. And when you wake up in the middle of the night and find that, you have to leap out of bed once again and look up Lyme disease on WebMD until you're satisfied by their claims that you won't get it if you remove the damn thing within 36 hours. Plus you knew it was a woodtick anyway, not a deer tick, but that doesn't matter when you're looking at Mt. Vesuvius on your own abdomen at 4:39am.

I should have just delicately removed it, flicked it onto the old lady, and went back to sleep. That would have saved me a lot of trouble and worry.