“And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be
fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have
dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every
living thing that moveth upon the earth.” Genesis 1:28
“Monks, we who look at the whole and not just the
part, know that we too are systems of interdependence, of feelings,
perceptions, thoughts, and consciousness all interconnected. Investigating in
this way, we come to realize that there is no me or mine in any one part, just
as a sound does not belong to any one part of the lute.” Samyutta Nikaya, from Buddha Speaks
This is a
moral tale about me and an infection: giardiasis, beaver fever. Giardia
lamblia trophozoites live in the small intestine of the host—in this case,
me on my third straight day of a hosting that was ruining a visit with my
sister in Hampton, Virginia.
A
trophozoite is a parasitic protozoan. Giardia lamblia is slightly elongated
with two nuclei, cartoon-faced, victim of caricature. When the Giardia
protozoa attach themselves in numbers to the small intestine, they promote what
any kind of intestinal irritation promotes—but on a scale that seems, at the
time, epic. I think I carried my
protozoa to Virginia from a spring pool in the Adirondack State Park.
Not to put
too fine a point on it, but giardiasis leaves a lot of time for sitting around
and contemplating, generally about giardiasis. Questions arise: what are humans
for anyway? The answers are humbling.
On that
third day of my sitting in, the air temperature had reached 100 degrees, with the
heat index over 115. The local paper
explained that the heat index measures apparent temperatures, the combined
effects of air temperature and humidity.
At 115 we were to watch out for likely sunstroke, heat cramps, and heat
exhaustion—and for possible heat stroke.
The same
paper sent a guy around to take the temperature of various points of human-sun
contact: a parking lot surface was 118,
beach sand 120, and leather car seats 131.
A Slurpee was 23 degrees.
This helped
a lot. We seem to enjoy trying to
express natural phenomena as they relate to humans in numbers—the Enhanced Fujita
Scale for tornadoes, the Saffir-Simpson Scale for hurricanes. But the newspaper story went even further, translating
numbers into observable truths as well. I itched to try it for myself, and a
day later when G. lamblia took a
break I did a dumb thing.
~
My sister
and her husband live in a stunning house with an even more stunning view. Looking east from their second floor balcony
you first see White Marsh, a wetland area whose edges are made up mostly of
groundsel trees, phragmites, miscellaneous scrub, and some young loblolly
pines. Only an occasional storm tide
washes this area. Through this high
marsh runs a tidal creek called Long Creek, with its accompanying mud flats and
spartina grass. Then farther east is
White Marsh Beach, a sparsely wooded barrier beach. Then the Chesapeake Bay. But from the first floor, the view of the
flats was being obscured. The vegetation
in the drier part of the marsh, normally about six feet high, was slowly
returning to woods. More and taller trees were growing in, especially one loblolly
pine that stood about 100 yards into the marsh: my goal. I got permission, gathered
loppers, pruning shears, and a buck saw. I bundled up in gloves, jeans, and an
old shirt. Having decided that alternating
between 100-degree natural air and air conditioning at half-hour intervals
would satisfy those in the media who said not to go outside no matter what, I
began to cut a trail. My work, it turned out, became a drama in three acts.
~
Act one was
mostly expository. I learned about smilax rotundifolia, commonly known as
greenbrier, a member of the lily family that made me rethink all those precious
lily images. My field guide mentioned
heart-shaped leaves, stout thorns, and putrid-smelling flowers. The flowers smell bad in order to attract
carrion flies, greenbrier’s chief pollinators.
Whether carrion flies or some other appalling flies, I learned of flies
too. Usually they land on you, begin to
bite, and you flick them away. But in a
marsh dominated by “stout thorns,” one more sting goes unnoticed—until it
intensifies to a point at which you look down and see a black, triangular fly
attached to a spreading blood stain. And
you’ll wonder what species of road kill your
fly laid her eggs on that morning.
I also
learned that shedding blood is not an exigency in White Marsh; it’s a way of
life. This is because the other dominant
plant beside greenbrier is from the rose family, genus rubus. These are brambles—no
need to get more specific. They, as
everyone knows, have stalks that hurt like hell if you touch them and that
eventually bend over to take root a second time, forming a grounded arch of
pain waiting to slash at your shins, arms, or face. In White Marsh, greenbrier
vines wind themselves around brambles and then tie the prickly bundles to groundsel
trees and phragmites. I had to cut my
path one tendril at a time.
So I did
that because I was too stubborn to quit and because it really wasn’t all that
bad. My clothes were soaked through with
sweat; blood was everywhere, bright red and fresh then drying black in the sun. But I knew I was safe from heat stroke; air
conditioning was only a few minutes away.
And then there were all those millions of parasitic protozoa depending
on me for their existence. The truth
here, as often happens, was relative.
Compared to giardiasis, this was downright festive.
Toward the
end of act one, I began to notice bird sounds: crows and gulls over Long Creek
and purple martins feeding overhead. I
worked on, paying them little notice except to wonder if birds sweat. And then I remembered that, stretching the
term “sweat,” they do—in the sense that they cool themselves by increasing
their respiratory rate and, thereby, the amount of moisture evaporated from
their respiratory tracts. It’s called
thermal polypnea. I recalled seeing
robins sitting with their mouths open, panting, which is what I went inside and
did as well.
~
I changed
my shirt, drank a couple bottles of water, watched the Weather Channel briefly
(air temperature—90, heat index—119), then began the second act, which turned
out to be more introspective. I had
settled into my environment and my work.
I found that by moving slowly I could keep my panting to a minimum and
also reduce the number of the worst and deepest cuts. Two episodes penetrated my mindless haze and
brought me back to my true purpose.
First, I
came upon a deer trail. One minute I was
hacking through a green and brown tangle that limited my visibility to a couple
feet, and then I was looking down a clear path of easy, graceful curves that
led eastward at least thirty feet before it disappeared. My first thought was that my job had suddenly
become easier. Then I thought about the
poet Gary Snyder because I think of him whenever I see deer trails. In his poem “Long Hair,” he writes about a
world taken over by deer: deer trails
everywhere, deer everywhere. I said the
last line out loud: “Deer bound through
my hair,” and I enjoyed the image as I pruned away the few briers that the deer
had stooped under. But the feeling faded. Snyder’s peaceable kingdom of hair and
grasses and deer and men wasn’t working in the face of all that truth about
intestinal parasites and heat indexes and pricker-bushes. My presence was an intrusion, and a contrived
one at that. If I had come upon a deer
sleeping the day away under the cover of phragmites, it would have snorted and
crashed away to safety. I would have
yelped and tried not to fall over backward.
The truth was that the deer path was a poem, and when it veered suddenly
to the north, I had to leave it to cut my way into the brush again.
I had
penetrated five feet or so when I spotted something white another five feet
away. As I hacked closer, it became a
wonderful flower; then a single blossom, trumpet-shaped and the size of my fist;
then white petals with a hint of yellow, brilliant yellow stamens, and all set
against a background of stippled sunlight and leaves of the deepest green. I stood, covered with bugs and blood and
itches and laughed at such a beautiful thing.
And the purple martins called overhead, insects hummed, and deer
slept. It was time to go inside again.
I checked
the Weather Channel (holding at 98 and 119) and my field guide. The flower was jimsonweed, named for the
nearby, early-Virginia colony of Jamestown. It is a totally poisonous plant: touching the leaves and flowers can cause
dermatitis; cattle and sheep are killed when they graze on it; children have
died after eating the fruit.
~
Act three,
the reversal and denouement, were without incident. I came first upon a small grove of
loblollies: ten of them, ten feet high and about two inches in diameter. They were spindly things, bare trunk to about
five feet where the branches and long, graceful needles appeared. With the buck saw, I flattened the grove
easily and made a brush pile for winter storm tides to pull eventually into
Long Creek.
I reached
my target tree in another fifteen minutes.
It was fourteen feet tall and six inches in diameter. Sawing this one was harder work. Bending over made me woozy, and the
undergrowth made it almost impossible to keep the buck saw from binding. So I
decided to cut it at four feet then take the stump separately. Without remorse, I felled the pine and
counted the rings—twelve years. Bending
to finish the job, I felt the first chills of heat exhaustion. My stomach flipped around a bit like the
start of seasickness. I quickly turned
my back to the marsh. A/C, cold shower, curtain.
~
It had been
a good day. I had learned a little about
how I fit in—to White Marsh, Hampton, Virginia, North America, Earth. G. lamblia feasts off my gut; I’m compelled
to chop down whatever symbolic tree gets in my symbolic way: how are those two
different? Powerless to resist, I had naively
tried to re-establish my dominion. But my good day turned into a long
night. Those Giardia parasites, as they
tend to do, had called in reinforcements, and I was awake yet again. A hint of earliest light over the Atlantic
drew me first to the sliding doors, then to the dark outside. The sounds of cicadas and other night bugs
gnawed away at thick and sticky air. In
the marsh, clapper rails yapped at each other like neighborhood dogs. And far away the surf pulled at White Marsh
Beach. I was imagining the hiding places
of rails and thinking about deer making new paths through the marsh when the
itching started from the first no-see-um bite.
No-see-ums. Midges. Genus culicoides. Nearly invisible, the females break the skin
with small cutting teeth and, at the same time, inject a chemical from their
saliva that prevents clotting. Then,
without remorse, they suck up the tiny pools of blood.
********
The image of Giardia lamblia is from paleovegan.blogspot.com
Portions of this piece were published in Ascent
