Me: gasp, pant, hello
Him: Hi, this is Bryan N. and I understand you do surveying.
Me: gasp, gasp, pant, yes, we do, pant, gasp
Him: You must be out in the field. You sound tired.
Me: gasp, well, pant, I'm, gasp, doing some volunteer, wheeze, pant, gasp work right now. gasp, I've, pant, wheeze, been dragging, gasp, tree, pant, limbs through a, wheeze, wheeze, cemetery for the last, snort, wheeze, hour or so.
Him: Catch your breath while I tell you what I hope you can do for me.
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Fortunately, that worked pretty well. By the time he told me as much as possible about what he needed I could actually talk fairly well. I gave him my e-mail address so he could send me all the info as I was a long way from anything to write with or on out in the middle of the cemetery.
What I was in the middle of involved the second day of cutting trees (weeds so far as the cemetery trustees are concerned) that had grown up in very inconvenient locations throughout a 10-acre cemetery about 10 miles from the nearest town. I've served on the Cemetery Board for ten years and this topic comes up every year at the annual meeting. We hired a fellow to cut trees, including quite a few that involved using a bucket truck and a crane to prevent damage to the headstones as the limbs were coming down. Then, three of the trustees (counting me) were dragging the limbs by hand, through and around the headstones over to the one driveway that runs down the center of the cemetery tract. There, we loaded most of them by hand onto a large farm truck with two-foot sides on each side for transport to a convenient spot on a nearby farm owned by one of the trustees. I made a point to be the one dragging any with poison ivy attached as I seem to be immune to it. I was the kid in the group. The other trustees are 75 and 72, while I'm a mere 59-soon to be 60. We will be back at it again tomorrow.
Bless you. I am also on a cemetery board. Somebody has to do it.
"I made a point to be the one dragging any with poison ivy attached as I seem to be immune to it."
Me too. For some odd reason poison Ivy, Oak or Sumac doesn't bother me at all.
Have a great weekend O Holy one! B-)
Many people have found that if you get a large enough exposure to it you will react, and be more sensitive in the future.
I've done everything but eat it. I was grabbing limbs yesterday that had just been sliced and cleared by chainsaw trying to get the vines detached. Some people would have inhaled the nasty juices and spent the next day in the hospital by being that close to where the juices were flying. I've driven a hundred thousand reference nails into power poles and corner posts completely covered in ivy. Measured to existing reference nails about that many times as well. On one job back in 1995, I was carrying all my gear and walking straight through dense patches forming a circle of at least 100 feet in diameter where it was at least head high. To attempt to go around all the poison ivy, like my helper did, was far to ineffecient, especially since we were wading through two to ten inches of water the entire time. Much of the 100 acres we had to wander through, across, back and forth multiple times consisted of those huge patches of poison ivy.
