He came here, the old man, to escape his past and the adventures that he once thought as fine and good, like war and seducing tall European women who belonged to lesser men than he. He had faced death like the great white hunter Francis Macomber in the face of charging white rhinos and the bad water and poisoned arrows of the Orinoco.

Those were all good things for the young, when pain could be washed away with two or three fine, salty, cold margaritas.

But when climate change made summer in Cuba unbearable, he and his first all-night woman, whom he had loved for more years than he could remember, decided to go north to Maine, where the air smelled of the sea and pines, to a simple life of writing pure and honest. He would write clean and perfect sentences. It was a good idea, he thought, and so they did.

Here, in the land of famous writers like Hawthorne, Thoreau, Smith, Nemitz and Boyle, they would be safe.

Yes, he found that the winters were dangerous. Many times he had to gird up his ancient loins and do battle with the Great White Bull that was the snow.

And then the spring with its damp breath and muddy feet stayed too long. Some liked it — farmers, mostly.

But the two short seasons, autumn with its splendid bursts of color, and best of all, summer, that season that comes like a young woman with moist lips and with hair of grass greener than he had known in the fields of Connemara, in those two short months, he and his all-night woman would walk the sandy beaches, run in the fields, and lie in the tall grass in the evening, naming the stars.

“This is good,” he said.

“Yes,” she replied. “This is a good, pure and clean place.”

But the old man should have known that the good times, especially the best of times, don’t last. The warnings came slowly at first, along with the weather reports. They spoke feverishly of the dreaded Ixodes scapularis, known to most as the deer tick.

The scapularis carry baggage with them, he learned: “Lyme disease bacteria, Babesia protozoa, Anaplasma, Ehrlichia, and other Rickettsia, even encephalitis-causing viruses, and possibly the dreaded Bartonella bacteria.”

So the old man and his all-night woman withdrew from grassy delights and took to the deck and sat on new chairs away from the dark forest homes of Ixodes scapularis.

They drank their good wine and enjoyed the tapas by flickering candlelight as they once did in the gypsy caves of Jerez de la Frontera in Spain. They missed those days, but he reminded her that it is better to be safe than sorry.”

“Is that in the Bible? ” the old woman asked.

“Yes,” he answered.

She did not believe him but knew it was not wise to ask questions when he was drinking his wine.

Soon the news came of a new mosquito and that it would be called “Aedes aegypti,” and even more horrifying, the Aedes albopictus, better known to all of us as the “Zika,” a malevolent breed that somehow, perhaps in the middle of the night, slipped in on a tanker out of Mozambique after a long buzzing flight out of the Zika Forest of Uganda.

The old man knew Uganda well, as he did the horrors that came from there: dengue virus, chikungunya and yellow fever.

Now, exiled from the wondrous fields, grassy domes, twilight forests and evening parks, the old man and his adoring all-night woman took refuge in the humid darkness of their home, where in the twilight hours, they sat in the flickering colored light of MSNBC to follow the progress of the dreaded Aedes aegypti and Ixodes scapularis as they ravaged the world outside. Now, as summer began to fade, all the houses around them were dark and silent, and the neighbors and their pets had vanished.

So this, the old man thought, was how it would all end, in a world owned by giant mosquitos and ticks.

That night they held each other in the dark, listening to the buzzing outside of mosquitos and a strange scratching on the screens.

“Don’t be afraid,” he told her. “Soon the Great White Bull that is the snow will come again, and not even Adidas aegypti and Ixodes scapularis can stand against it.”

“Is that in the Bible?” she asked.

“Yes,” he said.

He is wonderful, she thought, this old man.

J.P. Devine is a Waterville writer.

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