At the onset of summer in 2007, The Wire issued a stern warning to readers about the various perils of the great outdoors. We warned of ticks carrying Lyme disease, mosquitoes transmitting EEE, timber rattle snakes, black bears, mako sharks and even brown recluse spiders.

We did not run a guide to summer dangers last year, but watched in horror as a menacing giant red ant conquered Market Square in Portsmouth. A local hero’s efforts to decapitate the ant were foiled when it simply grew a new one, also sprouting spikes on its back to discourage future acts of bravado.

There have been no giant insect sightings so far this year. But there have been numerous incidents of other terrible bad summer dangers, a few of which are outlined here. We generally try to avoid pontificating at The Wire or telling anyone how to live their lives, but trust us on this one: Don’t go outside. It’s dangerous out there.

LIGHTNING!

They say lightning never strikes the same place twice. Horseshit. Lightning is totally indiscriminate about when and where it strikes. According to AccuWeather reports, an average of 62 people die each year from lightning strikes. That’s about the same as the death rate from tornadoes (watch out for those, too).

The lightning threat leapt into the red over Memorial Day Weekend, when hail and thunderstorms pummeled the Northeast. Cloud-to-ground lightning tore through the coast from Connecticut to New Hampshire, striking a man in Quincy, Mass, and injuring four hikers on the Appalacian Trail in northern New Jersey.

The havoc was serious enough to spur AccuWeather to send out a press release warning people about lightning danger. Around 25 million flashes of lightning occur each year across the United States, the report warned, with the current of each bolt measuring between 10,000 and 200,000 amps. By way of comparison, wiring in an average household carries about 120 amps.

Forty-five people were killed by lightning in 2007. Of those, 24 died outside in open areas, and eight were under trees. Forty of the victims were male, while only five were female. But don’t let the stats fool you, ladies. “Be advised, lightning does not discriminate based on sex or other category,” the release states.

If you are foolhardy enough to venture outside and a storm hits, AccuWeather offers the following tips: “(M)ake yourself the smallest target possible. Crouch down with your knees together and your weight on the balls of your feet. Put your head down and cover your ears. Do not lie flat. The goal is to minimize your height and your body’s contact with the ground.”

Also, stay away from trees. At The Wire, we’ve always been leery of trees. They are tall, stoic and brooding. On top of that, they are magnets for lightning, and when a charge strikes a tree, it can cause fatalities up to 100 feet away. Water is also an enemy, as it conducts electricity. If you value your safety, steer clear of lakes, streams and pools.

But even if you heed all these suggestions, you still might not be safe. Lighting can easily strike people 10 miles away from where it’s raining. And although it is wisest to stay inside a building or car, about 5 percent of people struck by lightning in ’07 were talking on corded telephones. It is not at all unreasonable to live in a constant state of severe paranoia, even when you’re inside. 

CLAM  WORMS!

The common clam worm goes by many names. Some call it the ragworm or sandworm. Others prefer the playful and lovely alias of bloodworm. Whatever you call it, it’s squirmy and wormy and centipedey and absolutely goddamn disgusting.

I recently encountered a clam worm while walking my dogs with my girlfriend at Fort Foster in Kittery, Maine. I was peacefully skipping rocks along the beach at low tide when I saw something lying in the sand that at first looked like a snake. Upon closer inspection, I noticed the creature had a segmented body with spiny little points up and down its sides. It was motionless at first, but started writhing laboriously when I poked it with a stone. I’d say it was about nine inches long and had a head like an alien species.

I later described the freaky little critter to a couple of birders who said it must have been a clam worm. They’re quite common in tidal waters along the East Coast, I was informed, and make good fishing bait. That is, if you don’t mind handling them and shoving hooks into their prickly bodies.

Here’s a little info about the clam worm from our ever-reliable friends at Wikipedia: “It has an identifiable head with four eyes, two sensory feelers or palps, and eight tentacles.” There’s more: “To feed, it uses a proboscis, which has two hooks at the end, to grasp prey and draw it into its mouth.” We’re not done. Read on: “They can protect themselves by secreting a mucus substance that hardens to form a sheath around them.”

Tentacles. Proboscis. Mucus. Ick. I haven’t been able to dig up any reports of clam worms actually doing harm to a human being, but that might be because they drag their victims deep into the mudflats without leaving a trace. I imagine these things grow up to be something like those killer creatures in “Tremors.” No, make that “Tremors 4.”

Marine biologists will try to tell you that clam worms actually play a vital role in the ecosystem, consuming algae and small invertebrates while serving as food for bottom-feeding fish and crustaceans. Whatever. Have you seen these things? I find it difficult to believe that any living thing would want to put a bloodworm in its mouth, even a bottom-feeder. I just barfed a little bit thinking about it. 

FLASHERS!

At about 8 p.m. on Tuesday, April 28, police in North Hampton received a call from a distressed woman. According to a police log, the woman said she was at North Hampton State Beach when a man in his 50s exposed himself to her and her children. The offender, who was not caught, constitutes the first reported flasher of the season.

This is nothing new. Every spring, it’s a race to determine what will happen first—the blossoming of the year’s first crocus or the indecent exposure of the year’s first flasher. Alternatively referred to as “streakers,” these perverts generally strike near beaches in Rye or the Hamptons.

In recent years, a number of women have reported being flashed in the area of Odiorne Point State Park by a man described as “a white male, about 55, with a chubby belly and gray chest hair.” There have also been sporadic reports of a flasher, perhaps the same man, who disguises his identity by wearing his underwear over his face. This is not a joke.

Almost exactly a year ago, at about 6:30 a.m. on June 3, 2008, a woman called Rye police to report that an apparently unrelated flasher exposed himself to her while she was jogging at Odiorne Point. Portsmouth police drew up a composite sketch of the suspect, revealing a stubbly-faced, wavy-haired man in his late 30s wearing dark sunglasses. He kinda looks like Corey Hart, although it’s unknown if police consider him a suspect.
Area flashers are surprisingly elusive, consistently stymieing the finest of our local law enforcement agents. In a way, witnessing a flasher is kind of like seeing a yeti or Sasquatch—there are dozens of reports, yet authorities usually fail to turn up any hard evidence. Could it be that these reclusive flashers have in fact reverted to a primitive lifestyle, living naked in the woods? Or did they inadvertently wander away from the nudist park in Lee? We’re not ruling out either possibility.

In any case, flasher season tends to heat up in the summer, and the most recent report in North Hampton is unlikely to be the last. We recommend steering clear of both woods and beaches, lest you should come face to face with a stranger’s penis.

PIRATES!

There are two areas of concern here. The first and most obvious are the Somali pirates who have been hijacking ships in the Indian Ocean. The threat jumped to a new level when pirates seized a U.S.-flagged freighter in April and kidnapped its 53-year-old captain. That incident ended several days later with Navy SEAL snipers gunning down three of the pirates and rescuing the captain.

Although the drama unfolded in a distant region of the globe, the kidnapped Capt. Richard Phillips is a Vermont native, giving the sensational story a New England twist. First mate Shane Murphy, who took command of the ship after Phillips was abducted, is a Massachusetts native and graduate of Mass Maritime Academy.

The Somali pirates are indiscriminate in their lawless attacks, capturing hostages from France, Germany, Greece and elsewhere, but they have become especially antagonistic toward the United States, and they have vowed revenge for the loss of their comrades.

“In the future, America will be the one mourning and crying,” a pirate told The Denver Post following Phillips’ rescue. “We will retaliate for the killings of our men.”

The Seacoast has a rich and still vibrant maritime culture. With the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard repairing submarines and housing their crews in Kittery, who knows who will become the next piracy victim with local ties?

But there could be an even greater pirate danger in the immediate area—Capt. Jack Sparrow. A blog posted on Seacoast Online on May 15 reignited rumors that actor Johnny Depp has been lurking around Portsmouth. This time, he supposedly rented several rooms at a local hotel during the same weekend that author Dan Brown rented out The Music Hall for his “Angels & Demons” film bash.

Rumors of Depp surfacing in the area have been circulating for years, most of them perpetuated by the Seacoast Media Group. The “Pirates of the Caribbean” star was supposedly spotted exiting Breaking New Grounds with a cup of coffee in December 2005, although many think it was just a Depp look-alike. Other sources have claimed inside knowledge that Depp is looking to buy a home in New Hampshire. 

Are the rumors true? We don’t even pretend to know. Seems like a screwy pirate with a braided double-goatee and heavy eye shadow would stand out, though. I can tell you for certain that I once saw comedic actor Kevin Nealon at the Gas Light in Portsmouth, but he seems pretty harmless.

RABIES!

You think the swine flu is bad? Imagine if a rabies epidemic broke out on the Seacoast. Ever seen “28 Days Later” or “I Am Legend”? It would probably be something like that. Masses of uncannily pale people frothing at the mouth and gnawing each other’s eyes out. Stuff like that.
But unlike the zombie-esque infections that plague the movies, rabies is real. And it’s fatal. Almost any mammal can carry rabies, but it is most commonly transmitted by small carnivores like raccoons, skunks and foxes, as well as bats.

A local rabies scare arose in the summer of 2007 when a Newmarket man reported that a rabid fisher pounced on him from a tree branch while he was operating a riding lawnmower. The man claimed he had to punch the animal three times before it released his shoulder from its jaws. (Authorities, responding to a firestorm of panic, later refuted the man’s account. Either it’s some kind of conspiratorial rabies cover-up, or the guy’s a little loony.) 

Regardless, that same year, authorities verified reports of area residents and domestic animals being attacked by foxes, raccoons and even a woodchuck. Even scarier, according to the Centers for Disease Control, 90 percent of all human exposures to rabies and 99 percent of human deaths result from rabid dogs.

Symptoms of the rabies virus include difficulty breathing, hydrophobia, coma and muscle paralysis so severe that patients cannot swallow their own saliva. These symptoms often take weeks to manifest themselves, but once they appear, chances of survival are exceptionally slim.

If bitten by a wild animal, patients should wash the wound and consult a doctor to determine if a rabies vaccine is necessary. The vaccination process entails a series of painful injections, traditionally administered in the stomach, which can temporarily cause flu-like symptoms. It’s an all around unpleasant experience, although new medical innovations have supposedly made it more tolerable.

The Centers for Disease Control reports that rabies is mostly under control in the United States, with only one or two deaths attributed to the disease each year. Whereas most rabies cases once occurred in domestic animals, more than 90 percent of cases now occur in wildlife. With those kinds of numbers, it’s easy to dismiss the threat—until a rabid fisher leaps out of tree and sinks its fangs into your shoulder. Watch out.  

TOURISTS!

The most dreaded summer danger of all. They cause smoggy, bumper-to-bumper traffic on the Spaulding Turnpike. They leave heaps of litter on Hampton Beach. They clog sidewalks in Market Square and create long lines at coffee shops. They are tourists, and they’ll be invading your community soon—if they haven’t already.

The tourist threat exists pretty much throughout the year in New Hampshire. There’s skiing in the winter, leaf peeping in the fall and maple sugaring in the spring. But summer is worst of all. We’ve got beaches, lakes and mountains within an hour radius, and there’s no sales tax. Our neighbors in Taxachusetts love it.

According to the N.H. Division of Travel and Tourism, the state hosted about 13 million visitor trips last summer, down 2 percent from the summer of 2007. Each tourist spent an average of $76.60 per day, amounting to $1.6 billion for the season, up 1 percent from the previous summer. The total included $624 million in retail sales (not including meals, beverages or liquor) and $585 million in rooms and meals taxes.

The total number of visitor trips for the entire year in 2008 was about 33 million, and their total spending added up to $4.4 billion. Summer, not surprisingly, was by far the busiest tourist season (there were 6.3 million visits in spring, 7.5 million in fall and 6.3 million in winter).

So, alright, I’ll concede that summer tourism might be good for local businesses and state revenue. But it’s not at all good for finding a comfortable spot on the Harpoon Willy’s deck, or getting a table at The Friendly Toast on a Saturday morning. Plus, tourists are like mobile hazards for cyclists and skateboarders. You never know what they’re going to do. And it’s even worse when they’re behind the wheel of a car.
Luckily, it’s fairly easy to identify tourists and tell them apart from regular citizens so that you can avoid them. They look like they’re perpetually lost but very much enjoy the condition. They gaze around at storefronts and buildings with grins pasted to their faces, in a state of blissful hypnosis, as if seeing things for the first time.

Occasionally, a tourist might even ask you for directions. The safest thing to do in this situation is run. But sometimes it’s fun to give them completely inaccurate directions. Or help them mispronounce Piscataqua, with heavy emphasis on the first syllable.

Whatever you do, stay safe out there. And remember, in just a few short months, this will all be over.