Chiggers

If you live in the South you know what a chigger is. When I moved to Arkansas I had no idea what a chigger was. I had heard the word "chigger" before, a card-carrying redneck friend of mine in Texas had a dog named Chigger and I thought it was a play on a racial slur. I learned different.

We move to Arkansas and I am brand new to patrol and my field training officer and I are asked to assist with an 18-wheeler that got lost and ran off a small county road just out of town. Cool, we get to leave the city, explore new frontiers and mock a dumb ass truck driver that left the highway and is stuck on a road he had no business on. Yeah, it was cool... the truck is off the road, stuck in a shallow ditch and I am taking it all in. I walked all around the truck, just looking at it, all in the ditch and in the nearby woods, just to look at it.

An hour or so later we finish up and it's back to business. No problems at that point; I get off, go home and get ready for bed. I get out of the shower and am itching my ass off!!! My legs are absolutely covered in little red dots, from the top of my boots to the bottom of my underwear line. They itched worse than anything I have ever experienced. "What the hell is that?", I ponder. I am ready to cut my legs off. Sleep is not even an option at that point, I just wonder what it is. What did I catch? And where?

The next morning I show up for work, keeping quiet about my condition, and see that my FTO is scratching like he had Lotto tickets in his pants. "What's the problem?", I asked. "Chiggers". "What are chiggers?". Everyone in the room looked at me like I was smoking crack.

Chiggers are little bitty insects, barely visible with the naked eye, and they love to bite you. I was informed about chiggers and drove straight to Wal Mart to buy every anti-chigger-itch product they had, which did little good.

I now know that chiggers are among the smallest biting insects in this part of the Country, and the most annoying. Other insect bites itch, like mosquito bites and tick bites, but there is no comparison to a chigger. Comparing a chigger bite to a mosquito bite is like comparing shampoo in your eyes to pepper spray. No comparison. Starting when the temperature reaches 75 degrees and throughout the summer and fall months I put on anti-insect spray as regular as I do deodorant.