Summer so soft
SUNDAY'S FULL-MOON tide was expected to mark the end of greenhead season: a month of yelping, swatting, and scratching as the voracious Tabanus nigrovittatus does its worst. From the top of Cape Ann to the tip of Cape Cod, anyone visiting a Massachusetts beach between the full moons of July and August can pretty much bet on suffering the bite of the female greenhead fly. The breed is resistant to insecticides and so plentiful that entomologists at Rutgers University have trapped them at a rate of 1,000 per hour.
Although some summer residents take a perverse pride in vacationing during peak greenhead season, hosting dinner parties on the open deck and inventing green-tinged cocktails, the monthlong blood feast is mostly a bane to summer business. Realtors have trouble renting salt marsh cottages in July. Audubon sanctuaries have been known to add a warning asterisk to their scheduled bird walks and kayaking trips. Crane Beach in Ipswich posts a prominent sign at its entrance gate. "No refunds!" it reads.
And yet the arrival of the first greenhead also marks the advent of high summer, when raspberries fruit most heavily and local corn comes in. It is the time of nodding daylilies and monarch butterflies, of fireflies at night and grassy heat rising from the fields by day. The shoreline teems with the charming little dowitchers and plovers. The water is gin-clear and warm enough for a real swim, and the spartina grass glows a green so intense it could be lit from within. A few welts on the calves seem a small price to pay.
Besides, savvy locals know there is an effective repellent to greenhead flies: Skin So Soft, the cloyingly sweet bath oil manufactured by Avon and available for years only through door-to-door sales. Theories abound as to why this product succeeds in keeping the greenheads away where traditional insect sprays and ointments fail; the Avon company itself doesn't promote the product as anything other than a cosmetic. Maybe it makes the skin surface so slippery that the greenheads can't get a grip long enough to have their snack. Probably the insects just abhor the smell as much as humans do.
Whatever the reason, as Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone when he was aiming to make a better hearing aid, so too the happy accident of this bath oil's off-label use as a nontoxic bug repellent is something to cheer about.
Five months from now, when the world is a monochromal gray and we reach the still depth of the natural year, it will be worth rummaging around for that box of summer gear stored in the basement. There, amid the flip-flops and sunglasses, will be a half-empty bottle of Skin So Soft, still covered in a thin film of sand. Just a whiff will bring rushing back all the joys and horrors of greenhead season. A sickening aroma, maybe, but a balm in January.
