RIVER CITY JOURNAL: MRS. NATURE SHOULD GET HER OWN WHITE COAT

Sometimes when you get too close to Mother Nature, she snaps at you. Have you ever noticed?

Take sunburns, for example. You go outside and try to absorb a big dose of Vitamin D or whatever it is you get from sunshine, and the next thing you know you are dunking yourself in a bathtub full of vinegary water trying to soothe the heartbreak and pain of red skin.

One time, many years ago, you had a sunburn so bad you wound up in the emergency room of the hospital in Branson. This was before Branson had millions of visitors a year, and the hospital emergency room catered mostly to local folks who stepped on nails and an occasional fisherman who got his lure caught in his ear lobe.

The doctor in the emergency room was very young, but he quickly identified your sunburn the instant he touched your red and swollen shoulder. "That looks pretty nasty," he said with the full authority of a medical degree.

Do something, Doc. It's killing me.

"Well, let me check." Honest to goodness, the young doctor in the starched white coat with a stethoscope around his neck reached for a copy of a medical book and started thumbing through it murmuring, "Sunburn. Sunburn. Q, R, S -- ah, here it is."

He looked like Dr. Leakey must have looked when he found that 3-million-year-old skeleton in Africa. "Says here you should use a mild vinegar-and-water solution on your sunburn."

Doc, my mother could have told me that. Don't you have something else?

Finally, the good doctor prescribed an ointment to soothe the pain and itching.

Speaking of your mother, just the other day you went to your favorite hometown for a visit and to do some chores around the house. Outside, you noticed the flower beds at the driveway entrance, the ones with the gravel mulch, had some sprouts in them that needed to be pulled up. There are maple trees nearby, and the sprouts looked like tiny maples. So you pulled them up.

Later, during dinner, you mentioned that you had pulled the sprouts out of the flower beds.

"Oh," your mother said, "has the stuff I put on the poison ivy killed it yet?"

Without a word you headed for the bathroom and washed every exposed part of your body. Too late, of course. Mother Nature wasn't about to give up that easily. A few days later the itchy bumps appeared. You remembered having poison ivy when you were young and going to the doctor. He was wearing a starched white coat and looked at the ugly rash. "That looks pretty nasty," he said in his doctor tone of voice.

Yeah. Yeah. Been there. Heard that.

One day this week you were outside enjoying the splendid autumn weather. Great breeze, you said, just as Mother Nature threw some dirt, carried on a gust of wind, into your eye.

Once, in a big city, you got something in your eye while walking to work. The irritation got so bad your boss sent you to an ophthalmologist several blocks away. You stumbled along the street to the doctor's office and pleaded with the nurse for immediate attention. The good doctor, wearing -- that's right -- a starched white coat, looked into your eye and said, "That looks pretty nasty."

There is a pattern here, in case you've missed it somehow. Mother Nature, it turns out, is a shill for highly trained professionals who wear starched white coats and go to school for years and years to learn how to say, "That looks pretty nasty."

~R. Joe Sullivan is the editor of the Southeast Missourian.