When Ticks Fly
by Harlan Booth
Copyright© 2026 by Harlan Booth
You hear it on the radio while you are driving to the diner, or while you are standing at the kitchen counter pouring coffee into a travel mug that says something you no longer find funny. The voice is calm, official, and already halfway through its list of recommendations before you register it as anything other than background.
“As we enter the spring season, the New Hampshire Division of Public Health Services reminds residents that tick populations in the region remain high. Black-legged ticks, commonly known as deer ticks, are active as soon as temperatures rise above freezing. Residents should check themselves, their children, and their pets after any time outdoors. Wear long sleeves, tuck pants into socks, and use an EPA-registered repellent.”
You turn it down. You have heard this every April since you can remember. You tuck your pants into your socks approximately never. You continue driving.
At the diner, the counter stools are occupied in the usual order. Joe is two in from the end, working on eggs. Carl is next to him with coffee and a newspaper he is not reading. Earl is at the far end with a mug that has been refilled twice and a posture that suggests he has been there since before the building opened. The radio advisory has already made its way in ahead of you, the way news does in a small place, arriving through the door in pieces before the door even opens.
“They say it’s a bad year,” Joe says, not to anyone in particular.
“They say that every year,” Carl says.
“They do say that every year,” Joe agrees.
Earl sets down his mug. This is a known signal.
“I’m not talking about regular ticks,” Earl says. “I’m talking about what I saw on the back pasture fence post, three years ago now, maybe four. Little thing reared up on its back legs and came off that post like it was diving. Like a dive bomber. Straight at my forearm.”
The counter does not go silent. It does the thing it does, which is continue at a slightly lower volume while everyone listens without appearing to.
“Earl,” Carl says.
“I’m telling you what I saw.”
“You’re telling us what you saw every April.”
“Because every April I remember seeing it.”
Joe refills his own coffee from the carafe on the counter, which is something you are technically not supposed to do but which the diner has given up enforcing. “How far did it travel?” he asks. He is asking in the way you ask a child how far the dragon flew.
“Three feet, maybe. Fast. Deliberate.”
“Deliberate,” Carl repeats.
“Aimed.”
There is a pause, and then Carl says, with the satisfaction of a man delivering a line he has been saving: “Earl’s Air Force is back.”
The counter laughs. Earl does not quite laugh. He picks up his mug and looks at it, and you notice that, but you file it under old man being dramatic and you let it go.
Joe is shaking his head in the fond way. “When ticks fly,” he says, and the laughter comes again, easier this time, and somebody at the back table says it too, quieter, just to finish the joke for themselves.
Earl says, “That’s what I’m saying they do.”
Nobody hears this, or nobody chooses to.
By afternoon the advisory has traveled the full circuit. It goes through the transfer station, where two men standing near the cardboard bin agree it is going to be a rough season and then talk about something else. It goes through the hardware store, where the tick spray and the permethrin clothing treatment are already on a dedicated end-cap display that went up a week ago, which is earlier than last year, though you would have to be paying attention to notice. You are not especially paying attention. You buy what you usually buy and you go home.
That evening, a post appears from Helen in the town Facebook group.
“OK so I need to say something and I know people are going to think I’m overreacting but I was standing in my DRIVEWAY today. Not the woods, not the field, my DRIVEWAY, and I felt something on my neck and it was a tick. Already attached. I have been doing tick checks every spring for 20 years and I know what I’m doing and there is no way this tick walked to me from anywhere. I was nowhere near anything. Has anyone else had this happen?? Please share because I don’t think this is normal.”
The comments arrive in the usual sequence. Donna says to be careful this year. Mike says cedar oil, his wife swears by it. A woman named Patty found three on her golden retriever just this week, probably just the grass. A man named Kevin posts a 2019 article that manages to feel dismissive. Carl posts a cartoon of a tiny tick in a fighter pilot helmet. It gets eleven reactions.
Then Rick Talbot weighs in.
“Look I don’t want to be that guy but Earl has half this town worked up over his dive-bomber story and now people are finding ticks in their driveways and acting like it’s the apocalypse. It’s tick season, people. It happens every year. Check yourself, use bug spray, move on. Helen I’m sure your tick was real but ticks hitch rides on birds, on deer, on your own pants leg, on the dog. They get places. That’s what they do. Relax.”
Helen replies that she knows what she saw and she is not hysterical and she has been living here her whole life.
Rick replies that nobody said hysterical.
Someone else says actually he kind of did.
The thread runs to forty-seven comments before it buries itself under a post about a pothole on Route 9. You close the app. You go to bed. You do the tick check you have been doing since you were a kid. You find nothing. This is normal. This is every spring.
But you do it a second time, which you do not usually do.
You know how it is with a bad season starting. First week of May, everybody’s talking about it at the counter. By the third week you’re tired of talking about it. That’s how it usually works. You check yourself, you find one, you get it off, you move on.
This year the moving on part is taking longer than usual.
The reports had changed enough that even people who weren’t paying close attention were paying a little closer. Joe mentioned at the diner that he’d found one on the dashboard of his truck, inside the cab, windows up, and he couldn’t explain how it got there. He wasn’t alarmed about it (Joe is not an alarmed kind of man), but he mentioned it twice, which with Joe means it was bothering him.
Somebody’s kid found three of them on the second-floor deck railing on Birch Street, and the deck didn’t have a tree anywhere near it, and the mother posted about it in a what-is-going-on way, and that post got shared twelve times, which for this town is essentially going viral.
Then there were the motorcycle visor reports. Two of them, from different people, neither of whom knew each other, both saying they’d pulled over after feeling something hit the face shield and found ticks. Not one tick. More than one. Dave, who everybody knows but who is not really a central figure in anything, said he’d been doing forty on Route 9 and he couldn’t figure out how a tick ends up traveling at forty miles an hour unless it started from somewhere above road level. He posted a photo. The photo was blurry and inconclusive, the way photos of things like this always are, but people looked at it anyway.
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