“The superior man thinks always of virtue; the common man thinks of comfort.” Confucius.

“ Comfort is the only thing our civilizationcan give us.”
Oscar Wilde.

When I came to this country, some 25 years ago, I spent my first year in Los Altos , playing governess for my sponsor, Paul. He owned several houses but, for some reason, preferred to live in a condominium. In retrospect, and although upscale, the condo was in one of many non-descript complexes one can find all over the US nowadays: a two-bedroom/two bathrooms apartment with double living-room and sliding windows, it had a fully equipped kitchen, washer/dryer, forced-air heat and AC and… beige wall-to-wall carpeting except in the kitchen and bathroom, lain with off-white linoleum. Having grown in an older house with tiles on the first floor and hardwood upstairs, wall-to-wall carpeting was, for me, the epitome of luxury. No need for slippers, warm and cozy all year round, comfortable enough to slouch on it with a good book, I was in heaven.

As I mentioned it earlier, Paul had two cats, both used to spending a great deal of time outdoors. He also owned a bar and a travel agency which, at the time, provided all travel arrangements for a very famous client: the San Francisco 49ers. As a member of the Stockton Booster Club, Paul, who was an avid fan, followed them everywhere they played and was gone several weeks every month, leaving me alone to care for the cats and handle the affairs of the bar. In addition, my job at the agency was to personally deliver the airline tickets to businesses and individuals all over the bay area, which allowed me to personally meet many of the football players, including Joe Montana, Jerry Rice and Dwight Clark (on whom I had developed a mad crush…)

During one of his numerous trips, in a late evening of September 82, when the temperature is still hot and the days shorter, I returned from one of my daily delivery errands to the empty apartment, happy to enjoy a quiet and solitary evening of TV, looking forward to the freedom of clicking on any program I wished to see. The living room of the condo didn’t have a ceiling light: as I entered, I had to walk several feet to a lamp sitting on top the monumental TV encased in a wooden cabinet. I clearly remember wearing sandals and white pants, as usual. I proceeded to turn on the light and directed my steps to the kitchen. One of the cats was crying for food and, as I bent over to pet him, my eye caught a glimpse of small black dots on the legs of my pants and the top of my feet. I shook them, thinking that it was dust for the outside or some kind of pollen, and the dots immediately disappeared. I fed the cats, started fixing dinner and returned to the living room with my plate, setting it up on the coffee table, my feet resting on its edge, the clicker in my hand. The light of the TV screen fell on my feet and legs and I saw those black dots again, dozens of them. And they were moving. I approached my hand and they disappeared. It suddenly downed on me: fleas! I put my foot on the floor: it was immediately covered. I literally freaked out. I jumped out of my seat, started running throughout the apartment, shaking my legs and probably screaming and soon realized that they were everywhere except in the bathroom and kitchen: they came from the carpeting!

I had to do something. I had no idea what, though: alone in the infested condo, my bear feet soon bitten, I put socks on, tucked my pants inside and climbed on the furniture, jumping from one piece to the other to reach the phone. In the States for less than six weeks, hardly able to speak English, I frantically called the only person with whom I could communicate: Ingrid, Paul’s former live-in, an Austrian woman whom I had replaced and who still worked at the agency and served as my interpreter in most of my dealings with him. In no time, Ingrid showed up to find me standing on the couch, my plate in the hands, finishing my dinner. She took one step in the condo, saw hundreds of fleas on her ankles and took one leap on the coffee table from where she called 411 (the phone book was unreachable, underneath the TV) to get the name of an exterminator. I will always remember standing there, bent over with laughter, waiting to see what would happen.

Eventually, she hung up and related to me her conversation with the exterminator: it was flea season, when the eggs hatch and, from the sound of it, it appeared that the entire condo would need to be fumigated, which meant grabbing the cats who would need to be brought immediately to a vet to be disinfested lest they would develop serious infections, and leaving the apartment for several days. The man came a few minutes later, confirmed the damages and gave us a brief course on fleas: a blood-sucking parasite that can jump up to 150 times its height, it lives for approximately four weeks on a host (cat or dog) during which time it lays up to 2000 eggs. The eggs fall off the host and onto the carpeting where they hatch into larvae. In turn, those jump back and forth from the animal, where they feed off its blood and back to the rug for several months, before reaching maturity. In other words, and even though we were completely oblivious to them, the fleas had spent months in the rug and, as the cats wandered from room to room, they unknowingly transported them onto every square inch of it.

According to the expert, it was one of the worst infestations he had ever seen. It could only be cured with extreme measures and remedying the problem required the use of potent chemicals which would need to impregnate and remain in the pile for several days in order to destroy all the eggs and larvae. Simply put, we had to move out for, at least, one week. Luckily for me, Ingrid had an extra room where I could stay. I would, however, need to wash every article of clothing I was to bring with me as eggs could be attached to them and could fall off on her carpeting, which could start the cycle all over again.

While I was quickly packing, the man got to work, starting with Paul’s room: wearing a mask, he assured that all windows were tightly closed and all closets open and he opened two canisters, which immediately released a smoky gas which shot up toward the ceiling before spreading into the entire room. He walked out and closed the door, working one room after the other. I remember watching him several feet away without mask, not even thinking that the gas had to be very toxic in order to be effective deep inside the rug and to stay active for a week.

The cats caged in, my bag packed, Ingrid and I waited for the man to finish his work and to give us additional instructions: upon our return, we were to dust all the furniture, vacuum thoroughly every inch of rug to removed all the dead larvae and eggs and regularly treat the pets. The problem would then be resolved. Needless to say, Paul wasn’t too happy to move in with his mother for a few days but we went through it and quickly put the incident behind us, although I got into the habit of checking my feet while walking in the apartment, just in case of fleas. Eventually, I forgot all about it and returned to slouching on the floor without ever considering that, whatever chemical had been spayed, it had to have been incredibly potent to penetrate the hard shell of eggs and kill the larvae and it had never been washed out of the carpeting: anytime I walked bare foot on it, it had to, somehow, enter my body through my skin. For the next nine months, day in, day out, I lived in that chemical and rolled on the rug without giving it a second thought.

Only after the birth of my daughter did I ever realize how filthy and unsanitary wall-to-wall carpeting has to be, regardless how spotless it appears. By then, I had moved into another non-descript condominium with similar high-pile wall-to-wall beige carpeting and linoleum on which we walked bare foot or fully shoed, dragging dirt from outside. Once or twice, I had the rug cleaned because of stains but I felt uncomfortable with the idea that some soapy solution was being sprayed onto it and that it would simply dry on it without ever being rinsed out. It didn’t feel right. I started thinking that others before me had lived there, walked on it and, who knows, maybe they had athlete’s foot or some kind of skin disease. How effective was the soap? How toxic was it in the long run? I started to view carpeting more and more as a Petri dish and whatever level of comfort it brought paled in comparison with what I perceived as its dangers. At the time, however, those rugs were everywhere: most houses were twenty or thirty years old and built in the same cheap fashion: the floor was often made of plywood. Carpeting simply hid it.

After moving to the East Coast, I found an apartment in a very old two-family house. It had a rug that was stained and had long served its purpose: I immediately removed it (without asking the landlord), lifting heavy clouds of dust in the process, and refinished the oak and fir floor. Hard work but I had the satisfaction of knowing that I could now wash it with mild detergent. The apartment became draftier but I viewed it as a small drawback and somehow thought that cold air was healthier than dust trapped in an airtight place. The fact that my kid was never sick tends to prove me right.

Interestingly, asthma never overtook her as it has so many children her age and I have to wonder if there is a correlation between wall-to-wall and respiratory illness. Common sense leads me to believe that, indeed, there is one even though the documentation of specific research seems to lack.

Lately, I have started to think about it quite a bit: our offices have wall-to-wall, all our cars do too and, in many houses, people wouldn’t think of doing away with it. Rug manufacturers and installers flourish and one can now find designer rugs in any color and pattern. Anytime one shampoos a rug, it remains damp for several days and I noticed when removing mine that it had large, grey moldy stains on the bottom of it, which, in certain areas, had stained the hardwood floors as well. So, not only do rugs trap the dust but, in addition, they promote the growth of mold and mildew, both connected with the increase in respiratory diseases we are now seeing in children and elderly, and allergies have reached proportions never seen before: 1 in 30 persons suffered from them a century ago. By 2000, 1 in 3 was subject to one or more allergies.

When the term was coined, in 1910, it was considered to be an ailment primarily striking the upper middle class who spent little time outdoors and whose houses embodied “refinement”: heavy drapes hanging from all the windows and doors, large rugs covering most wooden floors, cigar smoke filling libraries and parlors, all of it contributing to a dusty and unhealthy air quality. As people’s standard of living improved during the following 50 years, they duplicated what was considered to be a wealthy and chic lifestyle. One must wonder if the trade off was worth it. The past 50 years also saw the advent of air conditioning now common place in all new buildings and which, personally, I never got used to: as air cools, it condensates and deposits moisture on the floor. The moisture becomes trapped in the rugs where it creates mold. Many kitchens and bathrooms no longer have windows: a hood or a fan aspirates a portion of the vapor caused by boiling pots and hot showers. A large amount of it, however, remains on the walls and tiles where they promote the growth of mildew.

What I find remarkable is that, in the recent years, we have seen a serious boom in the sale of air purifiers, most of which function electrically by releasing unhealthy quantities of ozone into the ambient air of the home. Those purifiers do not come cheap: a good model costs anywhere between $700 and $1,500. They work but at what cost in the long run? It is a relatively recent phenomenon and the same way that it took a century to understand that wall-to-wall triggers allergies, we may come to realize one day that purifiers hurt us much more than they helped.

It seems to me that we are going about solving the problem the wrong way: rather than add some expensive electric appliance which increases our consumption of energy and our exposure to electric current in our homes, we might be better off simply removing what we know to be the culprit for our allergies, embarking on a complete detoxification with DrNatura programs and returning to a simpler way of life. I know it worked for me, And the way I see it, being very comfortable now may, in fact, costs years in the quality of our life in the future. I don’t advocate turning our backs on progress. I simply believe that we need to pick and choose what progress is worth embracing. And so far, a lot of what we have called “progress” has turned out to be seriously detrimental to our health.

So, would you like a hand with removing your old, dusty, moldy carpeting?

Just kidding…

Christine
CBrightlife@aol.com