Fungus
It was the summer of 2016. The last week of it, actually, when I began to notice that shaving my neck and right cheek had become seriously painful.
This was when I worked at Camp, up on Minnesota’s Iron Range, and being at Camp is being never fully put together. Not for the worst, to be sure. It’s definitely the best version of a half-assembled life. One that begins and ends with accepting that, every single day, when you walk out your cabin door you’re going to get dirty. A person gets all kinds of scrapes, bumps, blemishes, splotches, cuts, and bruises in the outdoors — but we understand this. I chalked the pain up to razor blades as old as time itself, and human error.
By the way: at the peak of this small mystery, also while I was shaving, someone came into my cabin looking for me. Without moving the razor, my attention tugged me parallel to its blades, providing my already wounded face with a gill-like series of clean slashes. I’m sure that the couple days my face had all this going on is the scariest I’ve ever looked to the world. All cut up and splotchy.
In any event, this was all something to deal with when I got home the coming weekend, when I reentered proper society. Something that would take care of itself when I had access to up-to-code showers, and not a revolving door of anonymous soaps and shampoos. It didn’t, and I booked a doctors appoint-ment, now under the impression this was the result of my lackluster sunscreen application constant throughout the summer. Maybe some prescription-strength aloe vera was in my future.
So I hopped in a suped-up DeLorean that brought be 88 to my old pediatrician’s office. A waiting room with immortal wooden toys, colorful beads on twisted rods, and an open-concept playhouse. For seating, a selection of vinyl chairs coming in Charlottean hues of purple and teal, upon a carpet that I admit escapes me; one I’m sure dated between 1990–2003 design-wise, however. And, two fish tanks with a steady stream of arrivals and departures for easy viewing.
“Connor?”
Then I was back in the examination room atop that big sheet of wax paper twiddling my thumbs.
For the life of me I can’t recall what the test they ran was. I assume something like scraping off a bit of the splotches to put under a microscope and go from there. But I’m not in the business of telling dermatologists how to do their job. It was a quick one, that’s all I remember.
Then I was back in the examination room atop that big sheet of wax paper twiddling my thumbs.
When the doctor returned, she was working hard to hold back the type of laughter which cannot coexist with speech. Surprising to neither of us, when she tried to deliver my diagnosis the dam burst. The giggles runneth over, and afterwards I returned to the car armed with an Rx for antibiotics and list of popular over-the-counter topicals.
• • •
Here’s where I went wrong: Because I did wear my deerstalker for a while after that to try and deduce what’d become of me.
The last week of July-first week of August I was on trail in the Boundary Waters for ten days. To mark the occasion, and to run an experiment safe from the public eye, the morning we left I shaved myself a Vladimir Lenin type anchor goatee, fancying I could pull off a more effortful kind of facial hair. During those ten days in the woods, as my stubble grew it trapped all sorts of nature against my bare skin. Nature which proceeded to fester into Tinea Pedis. Or, how that doctor so lovingly put it, muscling through her laughter:
“You know Athlete’s Foot?”
