Snakes and snails and jellyfish tales

My son Nick and I went to Fort Clinch State Park on Tuesday, joining other home schoolers for a day at the beach. It rained most of the trip up there (Fort Clinch is an hour north of our house, just outside of Fernandina). Nick was driving, which gave him lots of opportunities to practice not hydroplaning and also gave me the chance to practice not putting my feet through the floorboards in a pointless effort to get him to slow down. We outran the storms and got to the beach in time to meet everyone in the group leaving the beach to go to the other side of the park. Apparently the winds were so strong that no one could swim and they were all getting sand blasted. 

When the thunder and lightning finally stopped, we all drove back to the beach and the kids jumped in the water again, until someone noticed that there were large fish jumping around just offshore. This could mean that the fish were very happy about the storm being over or that something bigger was chasing them so we called all the kids back out of the water again, just to be safe.

After an hour or so, all the big fish having swum away or been eaten, the kids ventured back into the water to play in the waves for a while. Then, just as we were about to pack everything up and head for the nearest pizza place, Nick was stung on the leg by a jellyfish. 

He flew out of the water, and was immediately inundated with advice, all of it strangely similar. "Pee on it!" "Pee on it!" "Pee on it!" While he limped off to the restroom, I gathered up our stuff and tried very hard not to think about the logistics of peeing on your own leg. I also tried to remember where the nearest grocery store was along our route. Did you know that vinegar will take away a lot of the sting? So will urine, which is handier, but of which there is generally a limited amount available.

We ended up stopping at Wal-mart. I had to go in wearing only my bathing suit and a straw hat, but personal embarrassment is not even on the same scale as a jellyfish sting. 

I bought some barbecue chips to cheer Nick up along with the vinegar and also a container of Accent, which is pure monosodium glutamate. Chris, who lived on a boat in the Caribbean for twenty years and so should know, told me to make a paste from it and smear it on the sting on Nick's leg, then wrap it and leave it alone for two hours. Then she said to take a credit card and scrape off the paste, going against the grain of the hair on his leg to remove any lingering stings. 

Nick talked about his injury all the way home (an hour, remember?). "This isn't at all like what you see in cartoons," he said. "In cartoons, they make it seem as though it's like being shocked. Remember in 'Finding Nemo' and they go through the jellyfish and every time a jellyfish touches them you hear a fizzing noise, like an electric shock? It's nothing at all like that. It's more like stinging nettles. It feels like someone hit me in the leg with stinging nettles."

It's one of the things that worried Nick when we first moved to Florida, being stung by jellyfish or eaten by sharks. Well, now he knows what a jellyfish sting feels like and he's proud of himself for living through it. I don't even want to think about the other.

Nick is hoping for scars. "I'll show it to some little kid and tell him, 'Yep, that's where I got stung by a jellyfish.'"

I'll be sporting scars of my own from this experience. Fortunately, they're all on the inside. I'm already making plans to pack vinegar and Accent in the beach bag, right next to the lightning rods and shark repellant.