In reality, swimmer’s itch symptoms aren’t quite so dramatic. “They got swimmer’s itch after cannonballing off of their family cabin dock.”Īt the time I had no personal swimmer’s itch experiences to fall back on, so these tales often left me no choice but to imagine poor so-and-so in a hospital bed, pockmarked and malformed by their terrifying encounter with the infamous itch of the swimmer. “Did you hear about so-and-so,” a fellow fifth-grader might say, in a tone reserved only for the scariest of ghost stories. Prepare yourselves, Leader readers, because this column is bound to get under your skin.Īs someone who grew up in Montana, my childhood summers were peppered with mysterious swimmer’s itch tales.
From peeling sunburns to mosquito bites, many of the inflamed epidermal threats we experience are widely known and well understood by local residents and out-of-state visitors alike.īut there’s another cutaneous offender that exists more in the realm of local folklore than the rest - one that resides in the shoreline waters of Flathead Lake and other freshwater bodies, and starts to emerge when summer temperatures approach their peak. Here in Montana, itchy skin has always been an unavoidable consequence when enjoying the great outdoors.