"What Hath God Wrought", an essay/memoir by Dennis Vannatta

(Late at Night while you’re sleepin’ . . .)

A question that has plagued philosophers, theologians, and ordinary folks like us, too, over the centuries is, Why is there evil?  Christians and like-minded believers add an element to the question and thereby make it even more difficult to answer:  Why does an all-powerful, loving God allow bad things to happen?  The formal term for such questioning is “theodicy” (from the Greek for God justified).  Over the centuries many brilliant men and women have tried their hand at a theodicy.  All eventually come up against an evil so intransigent, so apparently impervious to rationalization that they wind up breaking their quills and tearing up their scrolls and deep-sixing their laptops in despair.  I refer, of course, to poison ivy.

    

Yes, this is a memoir of my life with poison ivy.  Well, I say “life.”  I’m living at the moment.  However, if I have to go through one more night of lying paralyzed in bed for fear that any movement will bring poison ivy blisters descending my right arm in contact with the sheet, my side, anything at all, thereby sending maddening itches rippling across my flesh, I may reach for the .25 I’ve been saving for the onset of Alzheimer’s.  Right before I pull the trigger on my miserable self, though, I’ll do what Socrates, Plotinus, Augustine, and all those other deep thinkers at one time did—although few would admit it.  I’ll raise my eyes to the heavens, fire up a double middle-finger salute, and bellow a four-letter Anglo-Saxonism beginning with the letter F, followed by the second-person singular pronoun (capitalized, of course).

      

One poor sap had the opportunity to take his grievances to The Big Guy Himself:  Job.  After God stands by yawning and paring His fingernails while Satan destroys Job’s family, possessions, health, very nearly his sanity, Job says, in effect, I was a happy man, and a good, God-fearing man.  Why did you permit Satan to do this to me?  God’s reply?  Who are you to question me, dip shit?  I do what I do.

       

God doesn’t even attempt a justification, in other words, and I doubt Job was much comforted by His reply.  Still, I think I appreciate His honesty more than the unconvincing attempts of His acolytes to solve the theodicy problem.

          

Plotinus, for instance, averred that we’d be happy if we identified with the best of creation; then we wouldn’t be nitpicking the minor inconveniences that life occasionally throws our way.  Plotinus might have whistled a different tune if he’d been down in that ditch with me.

       

I refer to the ditch in front of our house in Appleton City (Edenic name!), Missouri, when I was, oh, probably four or five.  My best friend, Jerry, was with me.  We were playing cowboys and Indians or something like that.  With Jerry and me in the ditch was also a whole lot of poison ivy.

         

I doubt that it was the first time I got poison ivy, but it was the first dose awful enough that I still remember it three-score-and-ten years later.  I had poison ivy on and in my ears, around my eyes, at the corners of my mouth and invading my nostrils, on my arms, armpits, legs, feet, hands.  It itched hellishly.  If you’ve never had poison ivy, imagine the itch of a mosquito or chigger bite multiplied by three and ALL OVER YOU.  Nights, trying and failing to sleep, were a nightmare.  Days were a nightmare, too.  I was slathered with calamine lotion, the very name of which gives me heebie-jeebies because IT DOES NOT WORK.  At least not in the early stages, when the itching is at its worst.

         

I just wish Plotinus would have been rolling around in that ditch with me and suffered what I suffered.  It would have given me no little pleasure to shriek, “Where’s that ‘best’ you’re going to identify with now, Plotinus?  Huh?  Huh?  Stop scratching and tell me about that ‘best’!”

I’m reminded of one of Twain’s letters from the Sandwich Islands (April 19, 1866) in which Mr. Brown, looking over Twain’s shoulder as he writes waxing poetic over the beauties of paradisial Hawaii, insists that he not forget all the “santipedes,” cockroaches, fleas, and especially mosquitoes.  What Twain is demanding is a theodicy, a reason why there has to be bugs in Eden.    

Augustine had an answer.  It was Eden until man came along and screwed it up with his original sin.  We have only ourselves to blame, in other words.  If only Adam hadn’t given in to the evil bitch, Eve, and eaten that apple . . .

 

*

          

The second of my Three Calamitous Cases of Poison Ivy began in an apple orchard outside of Waverly, Missouri, not quite Eden, maybe, but it was pretty nice, a pleasantly cool day, apples plump and red on the trees, ready for picking.  That’s why we were there, my parents, sister and I, to buy apples cheap by picking our own.  I had a great time careering about under the trees, amongst the poison ivy.

           

I was maybe eight at the time and obviously still hadn’t learned to avoid the hideous stuff [1]since that First Calamitous Case a few years earlier.  And apparently my parents didn’t guard me against it, either.  Perhaps I should have blamed them, but I didn’t, not then or now.  I blame God.  He was the one who put it there, wasn’t He?

           

I could almost buy Augustine’s argument that it was man who corrupted Eden because we men do have a habit of screwing up a good thing.  But, hey, I was a little boy.  What had I screwed up?  Oh, right, Augustine covers that with “original sin.”  You lose me there, fat boy.  What kind of God condemns you to poison ivy before you’re even born and then blames you for itching?  Give me a freaking break.

But I didn’t get a freaking break.  I got poison ivy.  And if my parents deserve any blame for it, they got punished, too, as did my sister.  All three were stuck in the car with wretched me on the endless drive to El Paso, Texas, to visit my other sister.

           

We left a couple of days after the apple-picking expedition to Waverly.  By then my poison ivy was in full bloom.  Or maybe I should say full blister[2]. It ravaged me pretty much in the same manner as the poison-ivy-in-the-ditch episode, so I’ll mention only a couple of details that still remain vivid in my memory.  I remember being embarrassed to tears because the skin around the head of my penis swelled up so much from it that it looked like a homely woman with a bouffant hairdo, and I walked around straddle-legged like an old man with a rupture.  I also recall it crusting around the corners of my lips so that it hurt to open my mouth, and my parents had trouble getting me to eat anything. 

It was so bad that even my sister felt sorry for me, a rare occurrence, indeed.  My parents were worried enough that somewhere in Texas they took me to a doctor.  This was around 1954, decades before drop-in clinics.  I don’t know how they found a doctor and don’t recall the visit itself, but I do remember our driving around forever, it seemed like, trying to find a pharmacy to fill whatever prescription I was given.  No doubt I would gladly have settled for a cyanide capsule at that point.

        

So:  in three days I went from a happy little boy playing in an Eden of an apple orchard to Hell in Texas, and I don’t know what I did to deserve it.  As for Augustine, he can insert his original sin rationalization where the sun don’t shine.  To paraphrase Desi Arnaz on I Love Lucy, “God, you’ve got some ‘splainin’ to do.”

 

*

         

I would think that even the most fervent God-justifier would get a little uncomfortable applying his theories to suffering children.  My Third Calamitous Case of Poison Ivy, though, hit me when I was twenty-two, by which time I’d racked up plenty of sins.

         

Irenaeus, who lived a couple of centuries before Augustine, would be OK with my sinning.  That’s because, in his view, the all-loving God gives us free will and allows us to develop fully through our experience of the world, which includes the sometimes disastrous consequences of our choices.

          

These theodicy-hucksters are big on God’s “gift” to us of free will.  Generally, they use it to blame us for what’s wrong (Augustine), but Irenaeus says it’s all good, all just part of the process.

          

 Hm.  Let’s apply this to my third Calamitous Case of Poison Ivy.  It was during basic training in the Army.  We were on bivouac.  Bivouac is the Army version of a camping holiday.  You get to do some hiking, eat delicious boxed lunches and dinners, pitch tents and sleep under the stars a couple of nights.  We toasted marshmallows, sang songs around the campfire, told ghost stories.  (It’s possible I have a detail or two wrong here.)

           

For sleeping we were paired off two to a tent.  Each carried half a tent (hence its name:  shelter half), and part of the fun was learning to pitch the tent.

          

  “Vannatta.  You two pitch your tent over there.”

          

  “But Sergeant, that’s in the middle of a patch of poison ivy.”

         

 “Vannatta, you smart-ass college boy!  Are you questioning my order?  Pitch your goddamn tent right goddamn there!”

          

We pitched our goddamn tent right goddamn there.

          

Two days later, after a ten-mile forced march[3] in the heat of a Missouri July, we were back in our barracks (unairconditioned, need I say), and I was sick.

          

We don’t usually hear the term “sick” applied to poison ivy, but if you have it bad enough, it affects you like an illness, not just the hideous itching but the feeling of something foul in your entire system, as if you’ve been poisoned.  It was bad enough that when my mother saw me a few days later for a parents’ weekend or some such thing, she thought I’d gained a lot of weight.  That’s how swollen my face was.  My legs swelled up, too, and I had such huge blisters between my fingers that I couldn’t make a fist.  That led to the only benefit I ever derived from poison ivy:  the head cook saw my hands and rejected me for KP duty.  (I would have traded my poison ivy for doing KP ten times; if you knew how awful KP was in basic training, that would give you some idea how I suffered from poison ivy).

          

I won’t go so far as to say that my platoon sergeant felt sorry for me, but he did tell me to go on sick call.  The doctor gave me a shot—a steroid, I suppose.  The itching stopped almost immediately.  Powerful stuff.  You don’t want to overdo steroid use, of course, but I would gladly have taken a steroid shot once an hour for a week, popped steroid tablets by the handful, grown two heads from taking so much, as long as the two heads didn’t have poison ivy.

          

 Where was Irenaeus’ and his followers’ God in all this?  Allowing you to make choices, supposedly, and through your experience of the effects of even the bad choices (suffering) eventually becoming “all you can be,” as the Army recruiting slogan of the day proclaimed.

Well, here’s a news flash for you, Irenaeus baby.  The United States Army isn’t known for giving you a lot of choices.  What choice did I, a draftee, have about being in the Army in the first place?  What choice did I have about going on bivouac?  What choice did I have about where to pitch my tent?   I think the sergeant’s word choice was appropriate: “Pitch your goddamn tent right goddamn there!”  Yes, I felt damned, and through no fault and no choice of my own. God and the US Army did it, and only the Army was merciful enough to give me a steroid shot.

 

*

          

That was a half a century ago, and I haven’t had a truly calamitous case of poison ivy since.  Which isn’t to say I haven’t had it at all.[4] I’ve had periodic smaller doses, and even those are enough to summon up old psychic demons.

           

If I don’t get it as bad anymore, it’s not because I’ve developed a greater tolerance for it.  I’ve just gotten smarter.  I don’t go anywhere poison ivy might be lurking.  Notice I said “might” be lurking.  I don’t actually have to see it.  All I have to do is see a place where it might be, and I’m outta there!  That means I stay out of the woods anytime but the winter when poison ivy would be dormant.  I love being out in nature, love hiking trails, but for the most part I’ve denied myself that pleasure.  I’ve done my best to be a good father, but I never took my children camping and took them fishing only a couple of times.  They missed out on an experience that might have been wonderful for them because in this one regard I put my own self-interest above their happiness.  If I had it all to do over again, I’d do the same damn thing.

          

  I’ve lost a lot of golf balls, too, refusing to venture into the deep rough looking for wayward shots—and wayward shots are a specialty of mine.  Hardly a tragedy, of course, but it does show how poison ivy gets you here, gets you there, gets you big and small, gets into the creases in your nose and the edges of your mouth and the dark corners of your mind where paranoia lurks, and there is no balm in Gilead.

          

This latest dose has been especially troubling because 1) I hadn’t gotten the stuff in years and foolishly thought I was done with it; 2) I don’t know where I got it, hence don’t know where/what to avoid; and 3) while this one doesn’t qualify as a Calamitous Case, it’s bad enough.

           

It runs for approximately eight inches from the inside of my right arm near the wrist to above my elbow.  Nearer the wrist there are only a few dots here and there (but tiny dots can itch just as badly as big blisters if not more so), but the dots proliferate into a rash about the size of a tennis ball above my elbow.  At first I tried treating it with cortisone cream, but it didn’t provide much relief.  Next, I used a calamine spray, which I hate because it looks ugly and dries and flakes and gets on your clothes and sheets at night.  It’s more effective than cortisone cream, but you have to reapply it every few hours, and the chalky layers build up, get messier, yuck.  When the poison ivy is at its worst, nothing will stop the itching totally.  In bed, I try to lie with my arm bent in such a way that the poison ivy won’t touch the sheets or any part of my body because even the slightest contact will send a shiver of itching up and down my arm.  A couple of mornings ago, after the crap had gotten to the blister stage, I got up and there on the gray sheet was a yellow pus-smeer peppered with pinkish flakes of dried calamine spray.  Disgusting.

          

 It’s disgusting what the body does to itself, what the world does to the body, what God allows in the world.  I cannot be reconciled to it, and Plotinus, Augustine, Irenaeus, and all those other theodicy peddlers haven’t convinced me there’s a good reason to be reconciled.

         

Gottfried Leibniz comes closer than the others, in my opinion.  Voltaire’s, “This is the best of all possible worlds” in Candide was intended as a parody of Leibniz, but actually it’s not a bad précis of his argument.  That is, we may not understand the why of it, but if God is indeed all-powerful and all-loving, it’s illogical to assume that the world could be any better.

          

 Reminds me of a joke.  A man drives down the street, sees a sign on a seafood restaurant advertising all the shrimp you can eat for ten dollars.  He goes in and orders the shrimp special.  The waitress brings him two popcorn shrimp.  He promptly dispatches them, calls the waitress back over and asks for more shrimp.  No seconds, she says.  But I ordered the shrimp special, all you can eat for ten dollars, he says.  That is all the shrimp you can eat for ten dollars, she says.

          

There’s a certain Leibnizian logic in that.  Popcorn shrimp can be pretty tasty, and if you can convince yourself to be content with what you get, even if it wasn’t as much as you’d expected, life can be worth living.  It does help to have something to take your mind off the bad stuff, as Candide found at the end of his travels.  “Cultivate your garden,” he keeps telling the pesky philosopher Pangloss.  He could have added, while you’re weeding your garden, keep an eye out for poison ivy.

 

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[1] In contrast, my three grandsons could recognize poison ivy by the time they could walk. That’s because every time they got near it their grandpa would begin hollering, “Poison ivy!  Poison ivy!  See those three leaves?  See?  Stay away from that stuff.  Don’t go near it.  And if you do go near it, stay the hell away from me!” «--

[2] Poison ivy begins to itch before it presents itself visibly.  You’ll scratch it—you can’t help it, it’s instinctive—which only irritates it.  Tiny dots will appear, become redder, then proliferate and coalesce into a fiery rash.  If you have it bad enough (i. e., me), the rash will form festering blisters that can and do break, pus running, dripping, sticking to clothes, sheets, whatever.  Even after the blisters dry up, it will still itch.  This can easily go on for two weeks.  Fun stuff. «--

[3] One of the marching songs taught us by our sergeants was a Vietnam-era version of the old Coasters’ hit, “Poison Ivy”:  “Vietnam, Vietnam. / Late at night while you’re sleepin’ / Charlie Cong comes a creepin’ / around, around.”  At that moment, I was more concerned with poison ivy than with Mr. Charles. «--

[4] I was teaching a World Lit class not too many years ago when I threw my hand up making some point, and pus flew out of a broken blister and landed on the desk in front of me. «--