by Matt Gross
“From this organism we collected, we purified the two hundred variants, and that is the formulation of our vaccine,” he said. “So this is the first time in which antigen variation had been disrupted in any organism, and if we can vaccinate with all the possible variants, you are protected then. You won’t need a treatment that has side effects.”
I wasn’t entirely sure how to react. For fifteen years I’d suffered the affections of this awful protozoan. I’d learned to recognize its symptoms and to handle the physical and psychological discomfort. Sometimes I merely persevered, other times I sought medication, usually Cipro (recommended by my physician in New York), but sometimes metronidazole or its cousin tinidazole. Four or five days of treatment, and I’d be better. In 2005, I’d even discovered a fast-track treatment: A 2,000-milligram megadose of Fasigyn, a brand-name version of tinidazole, would—I was assured by a Cambodia-based friend who’d been sicker than I ever had—eradicate giardiasis within twenty-four hours. He was not wrong: Ever since, at the first signs of giardiasis (some unusual gas, a proto-diarrhetic loosening), I’ve downed those pills, avoided alcohol, and woken up cured.
More important, giardia had taught me that the delight of eating came with risks, that no market taco or icy lemonade was entirely safe, but that the risks were worth the delight—always. A giardia vaccine, however, would mean a life of eating without consequences, and that felt far too easy. I liked the fact that I’d gotten sick and gotten better, that I’d survived my mistakes and emerged, if not more cautious, then at least humbler. I was a human being, and I had my weaknesses. And because I had weaknesses, I had a life worth living.
Besides, can you imagine a world of giardia-vaccinated travelers? How would they bond if they had no toilet tales to tell?
A giardia-free world is, however, a ways off. The vaccine is still only approved for veterinary use, and while Dr. Luján said a big pharmaceutical company wants to run human clinical trials, the deal was still in the works. Only the U.S. Navy, he said, had asked for his vaccine.
In thirty years of studying giardia, I asked, had Dr. Luján ever had giardiasis?
No, he said, adding that he’d take the vaccine now if he could.
So would I, I thought—without hesitation.
“Zimmer frei,” read the hand-painted sign in front of the tidy modern house at the edge of Altenbrak, in the Harz Mountains of central Germany. I’d just emerged from an overgrown trail, having hiked twelve miles from the town of Thale, and the sun was starting to set behind the wooded hills. I recalled the old legends about the Harz—that witches fly around the peak of the 3,747-foot Brocken, and that a creature called the Brocken Spectre roams the misty forests—and in the growing dark they seemed all too plausible. I needed a place to stay.
And right there was the zimmer frei, the institution I’d been counting on. Throughout touristed zones of rural Germany, I knew, homeowners with rooms to rent would put up such signs—“room available,” they say—to lure in wanderers such as myself, desperate for a bed but unwilling to pay the thirty euros or more for a pension or a proper hotel. And as the Frugal Traveler for the New York Times, saving money was my raison d’être.
I walked up to the front door, set down my backpack, and rang the doorbell. Nothing. Some lights were on inside, I could see, so I rang again. And again. Finally, a woman opened the door. She was older, large-ish, and thoroughly confused to see me.
“Zimmer . . . frei?” I asked.
Her expression changed to one of understanding. “Nein,” she said in a neutral tone, and closed the door.
Fine, fine. I hoisted my twenty-five-pound bag and walked deeper into town. After twelve miles that day, what was another five hundred meters? If I couldn’t keep my energy up at the end of a trek, I’d never get through the forty-odd miles I’d planned for the rest of the week, following in the footsteps of Goethe and Heine to the top of the Brocken. The walk so far had been perfect, starting out on well-trod paths, branching off on old logging roads, passing through tiny villages of dark-wood vacation homes. I loved the solitude, the jaunty pace of my feet on the ground, the slow accretion of mileage. Slowly but surely, I was making progress—and burning off enough calories that I could eat whatever I liked.
And that first night, once I’d checked into the Zum Harzer Jodlermeister pension and restaurant (I bargained them down from forty-five to thirty-five euros), I indulged indeed: schnitzel, noodles in mushroom cream sauce, apple strudel, vanilla ice cream, and a big pilsner. In bed by 10 p.m., I slept like the dead.
For four days, I ate big German breakfasts—rolls and cold cuts and cheeses and butter and jam, hard-boiled eggs, maybe some yogurt, buckets of weak coffee—and set off early in the general direction of the Brocken. I’d tramp for hours, sometimes through small, populated towns, more often through places that were no longer quite as wild as they’d once been. The logging routes led into patches of regrown forest, and more than once I found myself backtracking around lakes and over streams. The way forward was never obvious, and I covered more ground than I should have.
Though I never knew exactly where I was going to be, at lunchtime I always managed to pass through a town or village, where I’d pick up a hearty, rustic lunch of bread, cheese, ham, and maybe an apple. Once, at a traditional charcoal-making plant, I got a bottle of schwarzbier, a kind of black lager, and another day, just east of the former East Germany–West Germany border, I happened on Kukki’s Erbsensuppe, a roadside stand selling bowls of thick split-pea soup with bacon that had opened just after reunification. Eating like this was perfect; when food was fuel I didn’t have to think long or hard about what I was devouring, as I would for a story in, say, Paris or San Francisco, but it didn’t hurt that it was all delicious.
Of everything I ate in the mountains, nothing was as gratifying as the wild raspberries and blueberries that grew alongside the paths. Whenever I’d spot the bright red or pale blue fruits, I’d hurry over and quickly strip them from their bushes, shoving great handfuls into my mouth. Each one was like a sharp pinprick of sweet flavor, intense and pure, and as far as I could tell this great buffet stretched across the region. As I popped berry after berry, I remembered childhood summers in Amherst, where my brother, my sister, and I would pluck blackberries from the backyard and sit on the porch consuming them, our fingers and lips stained dark with juice. Free fruit, unplanted by human hands, had always seemed to me one of nature’s greatest gifts, and by my efforts I hoped to become worthy of her generosity.
A few days later, however, when my Harz Mountains story appeared on the New York Times Web site, I found a disturbing notice in the comments section. “I know all those raspberry and blueberry bushes throughout the forest look tempting, but most Germans wouldn’t dare to eat them,” wrote someone named Robyn. “The reason being the fuchsbandwurm a type of parasite that the foxes leave in the forest, contaminating all those lovely, free berries.”
Fuchsbandwurm? I turned to Google and Wikipedia: The “fox tapeworm” (Echinococcus multilocularis) is a parasite carried in the intestines of foxes, and often dogs, in China, Siberia, Alaska, and central and southwestern Germany. The foxes, which eat berries, can contaminate the plants they touch, and when humans contract the disease, it attacks the liver like a cancer. It is, says Wikipedia, “highly lethal.” Treatment is surgery followed by various forms of chemotherapy, but complete cures appear to be rare. Worse, the parasite has a long incubation period—ten or even twenty years—and is difficult to diagnose.
Even now, years after that hike across the Harz, my heart beats faster and my stomach turns as I contemplate what may befall me in another six to sixteen years. Worms may dissolve my liver, and there may be no hope. Of course, Louis Morledge, my travel doctor in New York, tells me not to worry; my liver tests have been fine so far. And I did generally—but not exclusively—eat berries from at least waist height, where foxes’ fur wouldn’t brush. And Klaus Brehm, a fuchsbandwurm specialist at the University of Würzburg, has reportedly said
the idea “that one could get the fox tapeworm from berries belongs in the realm of legends.” And my friend Christoph Geissler, another German doctor I met randomly on a shared taxi in Israel, giddily confessed to eating wild berries all the time, everywhere, regardless of the fuchsbandwurm risk. And, and, and . . .
And yet I feel terror. At least with giardia, I came to know my tormentor, to understand its causes and symptoms and cures, and to make a kind of peace with it. With the fox tapeworm, there can be no such rapprochement. If I have it, I will kill it—or it will kill me. And if the latter comes to pass, I will have no hand to blame but my own. But I hope, in those fucking miserable final moments a couple of decades from now (maybe), the berries—and everything else—will have been worth it.
Chapter 3
Wandering Stars
In Which I Deal with the Inevitability of Loneliness and the Complicated Joys of Making Friends
“Are these edible?” I asked, pointing at one of the clusters of pink-purple berries I’d spotted along the trails leading through the woods of South Pender Island.
“Sure!” said Cassady Buchanan, a Pender native I’d known for approximately one hour. He plucked a few berries and ate them, and I did likewise. They were a little sweet, a little tart. Not bad. No match, of course, for the blackberries that grew in florid bushes along sunny roads here in the Gulf Islands, a sparsely settled archipelago just west of Vancouver, British Columbia. But I was happy to have discovered a new fruit, and even happier to have a new and knowledgeable friend.
I’d found Cassady by chance at Beaumont Marine Park, a secluded waterfront campground reachable only by boat or by two-mile hike through forested hills. There he was sitting at a picnic table, smoking a hand-rolled cigarette while his dog, a German shepherd mix named Haze, ate from a dish. I was carrying a camera on a tripod, and it caught his notice. We started talking and struck up a quick friendship.
Thirty-five years old, Cassady wore faded jeans, a black Wicked T-shirt, a floppy jungle hat, and wraparound shades. His goatee was bushy, his thick eyebrows deviously arched. After nine years of working on the mainland, he and Haze had just returned by Zodiac boat to Pender, where his family had lived for generations.
“My family, they’re selling the place down at the end of the road there,” he said, “so I’m just camping around and having fun. It’s nice here. Well, you live in the city for so long and you see so much, it’s really, really bad.”
I could see what he meant, I guess. Pender and the other Gulf Islands were stunning, wild outposts of trees and rocks and water and light, with a touch of sophistication. On Galiano Island, I’d gone skinny-dipping with locals, scooped fresh oysters from the intertidal shallows, and slept in a cozy French-run bed-and-breakfast. Here on Pender, with the late-afternoon sun rippling golden across the water, I could imagine staying in just this hard-to-reach spot forever. Or at least never returning to the city.
“I’m gonna have a whiskey and a Coke,” Cassady said. “It’s Saturday.” As he spoke more about the island—“You gotta go back about twenty years, and then it really was remote. But now it’s a tourist trap. People saw it and went, Wo-ow!”—he came off as sharp and experienced. He spoke of finding fossils (“a piece of sandstone with a whole clam in it”) and donating them to the University of Victoria, and he told me the woods were dotted with Indian caves.
Cassady also seemed a touch paranoid and a braggart—he called himself a horticulturalist, a Hungarian prince, a descendant of President James Buchanan (a lifelong bachelor, it should be noted). He claimed never to have been photographed, and he seethed at the Pender authorities, who were transforming the place into a yuppie (or as he put it, “yippie”) shithole, with no regard for locals like himself. This was his island. He’d built its roads. It belonged to him in some intangible way. “Ha!” he’d add at the end of every sentence.
I listened to him intently—it didn’t matter to me what was true or false, or that he’d nearly emptied his bottle of whiskey. Cassady was a local, a quirky character with inside intelligence and stories to tell, and he seemed to reflect my interest in him. I didn’t look like a New Yorker, he said, and he kept asking about what I was doing hitchhiking around the islands. Finally, I felt comfortable enough to admit I was writing for the New York Times. Usually, I kept such things secret, so that people wouldn’t act different around me, but Cassady had been so open already that it didn’t seem right to hide it from him. He was a civilian, not an hotelier. In any case, he didn’t react strongly to the news—he took it in stride. He felt like a friend.
On the ferry over from Galiano, I’d heard about a house party that night, and invited Cassady to join me. He tied up Haze and gave him some water, and off we marched back through the woods, stopping to sample those berries and explore one of the nearby caves. We returned to the more developed part of Pender early, and took a rest in my campground—a boring place I would’ve avoided if I’d known about Beaumont Marine Park—while I cooked a quick dinner of rice with sausage and dried mushrooms on my portable stove.
Not quite realizing what I was getting us into, I also uncorked a bottle of local red wine I’d bought in town. And as we ate and drank, I could now see that Cassady was really blitzed. When I added salt to my rice, he sneered, saying it was terrible for you. I wanted to explain about the relationship between salt and flavor, but I kept my mouth shut, opening it only to drink my own wine as fast as possible, so Cassady wouldn’t get worse.
Finally, we left the campground and, in the dark, started walking up the island’s smoothly paved main road toward the party, whose hosts Cassady said he knew. I was dreading our arrival: Was he really friends with them? Or would we find ourselves in an even more awkward situation?
The awkward situation found us. Halfway to the party, bright lights appeared behind us—bright lights that turned suddenly blue and red. A police cruiser. The cop, tall, blond, and clean-cut, got out and asked us for identification. Cassady had none.
“Where are you from?” the officer asked him.
“Right here,” he said proudly. “I built that road! Where are you from, ha?”
He ignored Cassady’s question and said, “You were weaving all over the road.” It was true. Cassady couldn’t walk straight, and it was partly my fault. “Have you two been drinking?”
“No!” Cassady said, sounding insulted. He turned to me, his eyes pleading for backup. He looked scared—his swaggering confidence drained.
I couldn’t lie, but I couldn’t indict Cassady, either. “I drank some wine with dinner,” I said.
“Who are you?” the officer asked me. “What are you doing here?”
I gave him the short version: on vacation, island-hopping, camping. No mention of the Times. Easier that way.
“Okay, you can go on,” he said to me, handing back my driver’s license. I wasn’t drunk. “Stick to the side of the road.”
“I’m not leaving without him,” I said, although all I really wanted was to leave without him. Cassady was beginning to be a burden, but I couldn’t treat him like one, even if it meant getting arrested alongside him. “I’m not leaving without my friend.”
“Fine,” said the cop. “You stand there.” He placed me in front of his car, with its high beams directly in my face, then led Cassady behind the vehicle. I couldn’t see or hear a damn thing.
I stood there, imagining the worst: Cassady locked up, Cassady beaten up, his triumphant return home to Pender wrecked because he’d happened to run into me, a charming enabler with a video camera. And I wished, for a moment, that none of it had happened, that I could have just gone on my way, a lone traveler neither seeking nor needing companionship. But that, I knew, was a fantasy.
Ever since I can remember, I’ve been good at making friends, usually without consciously trying to. As a little kid, of course, I was willing to be friends with anyone who liked Star Wars figures or Legos; that was enough for me. But at the same time, my family was also moving about, from Amherst to Brig
hton, England, back to Amherst, down to Williamsburg. And so I was, perhaps slightly more often than most children, the new kid, always introducing myself in a fresh environment and trying to find other people who played Ultima on the Apple II or wanted to stay up all night watching horror movies and eating Domino’s pizza. Lots of people, I bet, look back on their childhoods and see themselves at the center of multiple, ostensibly antagonistic groups—jocks and nerds, rebels and preps, blacks and whites, and Latinos and Asians. This, too, was me, though not because I specifically positioned myself between them but because I didn’t care all that much who my friends were. As long as there was a single point of commonality, we could get along. I didn’t ask much: Be available to hang out. Laugh at stuff. Don’t beat me up. (I was short, nerdy, and accustomed to harassment.) Yup, that was about it.
The unforeseen consequence of this is that while I made friends easily, I also had a lot of crappy friends—kids who might have shared my nominal interests, like skateboarding, but who too often took advantage of my craving for companionship (and my access to the family car). Some of those high school friendships ended in acrimonious breakups, and one of them in an actual fistfight (if you can call my getting punched once in the jaw a “fight”). Meanwhile, I spent less time with certain friends who were kinder people but less enthused about skateboarding, more into playing guitar.
Over the years, I’ve come to realize that these sorts of friendships are normal for kids. Stuck in the same classroom, the same high school, the same small town, your choices are limited, superficial, not really choices at all. Circumstances force you into friendships that, given the options of a wide world, you might otherwise never have forged. If you’re lucky, the friendships can last, maturing as the friends themselves mature. But they don’t have to, and that’s okay.
