Centipede

As she looked deeply into his eyes, he moved closer and a shiver ran down her spine. She decided to take a chance on the rogue Suede Harrington III ... "Finally," I thought to myself, "this lame book is going somewhere." I was just getting comfortable in our tent when my sis screamed "Ah!" beside me and launched herself out of the vestibule into the bright and hot Kauai sun.

Ok. Um. Why did she just bolt? I looked around. There in the very spot she was sitting in was a 10 inch rope-thick hairy creepy crawling centipede criss-crossing across the tent floor. Well, that would explain it. I took a few seconds to assess. I was in a very small confined space in shorts, shoeless, with backpacking paraphernalia strewn all over virtually begging to be the bug's newfound hiding place. I needed to act quickly. I started throwing things outside of the tent to clear the path to my enemy. Still, I needed to commandeer a weapon.

"Sis! I need something, anything to kill this thing!" She handed me a flip-flop. I gave her a look. "Oh, come on!" I was happy when she returned with a very large and pointy stick. Now we are getting somewhere.

The big nasty was still racing back and forth along the tent wall. I lunged at it and pinned it down. The stick wasn't quite sharp enough to pierce its hard cytoskeleton and it started to wiggle up the stick at me, fangs pinching, reaching out for my soft skin.

I realized I needed something definitely more substantial. "Mom! I need your knife!" It was a little scary how quickly my mom could whip out her REI limited edition extreme backpacking knife but in a second I was fully armed and went to town on that freak of nature on a stick. Unfortunately, it continued to slowly get loose and so I rammed the stick on the tent floor and started hacking at it while slowly praying that I was not rendering my beloved tent to be a holey mess. Hair and legs and bug bits were flying everywhere but this thing was still raring to go. It was hard to believe.

"MOM! IT.. JUST... WON"T... DIE!!!!!" I screamed, curiously like Captain Kirk. My epic battle was nearing a turning point. I needed to do something else. I skewered the remaining bug to the stick and thrust it through the open tent flap. My mom was waiting with another knife (I can not tell you how impressed I was at my mom's emergency preparedness) and she slit the thing from belly to head and I staked the body into the soft red Hawaiian earth.

It was still twitching as it sunk down into the gooey soil....insanity.

My experience on the Na Pali Coast's Kalalau Trail continued with bee swarms, overflowing human sewage, mud slides, a nude flasher, restless natives, raging torrents, and one nice psychologist from Cali that saved me from drowning. The night before we left Hawaii, I read about the centipede in a hotel guidebook. Can reach lengths up to a foot long. Normally found on the forest floor and are very rarely seen. If you get bitten by a centipede seek medical attention immediately or as the natives advise "get drunk for three days." Nice. I was glad I read that after my encounter.

You can imagine my annoyance on Christmas night when I heard "Centipede!" shrieked from my kids room after we had finally gotten them to sleep. By the time I got to the room, my hubby had already gotten bit but was able to kill the sucker. It had crawled up from the floor onto my little guy's bed! Oh, the horrors! Thankfully, it was smaller than the Hawaiian variety and with a little ice and Benadryl, my hubby was feeling fine.