A Parasite to Behold

Giardia is sort of a bogeyman of outdoor trips. Park rangers, vendors of water treatment paraphernalia and their countless minions are constantly threatening, “if you don’t boil or filter your water, the giardia will get you!” Potentially lurking invisible in even the purest of streams, giardia lamblia colonizes in the lower intestine and, among other things, limits absorption of food.

There is a general consensus that water from anything other than a bottle or faucet is dangerous. A greenhorn hiker I shared a camp with once called me an idiot to my face when I said I didn’t treat my water, which I don’t and haven’t for literally hundreds of streams, springs and ponds. Imagine my surprise when a week after returning home from the Big Bend I took ill. At first I thought my sickness stemmed from a dollop of questionable sour cream that I’d put on a burrito. But then two days later, swift and nasty, it settled into my gut like an eagle getting fried on a power line. I’ll leave out the specifics, but it was moving experience. Powerful. Wow. A healthy 130 pound organism waylaid by a microscopic one. I lived on the couch off of pudding and ginger ale for several days (time during which I watched every episode of The Office, 30 Rock and two seasons of Law and Order SUV on Netflix) though after two rounds and ten days of a drug called Metronidazole I was back to form.

I don’t know where the bogeyman caught me. It could have been a desert spring tainted by the shit of burros and mountain lion, or it could have been a cup of coffee I had in Mexico. When soon the spring time comes and I put on my backpack again, this time, perhaps, I’ll be carrying a pump or chemical treatment, but probably not. Full Post»

Mark's Little Cabin

For years my friend Mark has been telling me about a cabin he built on a plot of family woodland in northern Wisconsin. Call it a lack of faith, but I had pictured it a pile of plywood and sticks--building a cabin from scratch seemed too ambitious to do well in one’s free time. A couple weeks ago while he and I spoke over the phone, he answered my plans of doing a winter camp in the Apostle Islands by suggesting that instead of sleeping in a snow cave and shivering in a double bag for 12 hours a night, I visit his nearby cabin.
Last week I spent 3 nights in that 8 by 10 hut, a short walk from the road and sitting under a forest of birch, pine and maple. Inside is a small woodstove, the log walls behind it are protected by a layer of glazed, smooth stones. The floor is pieced from caramel boards and a bunk runs the room’s length.
I spent an afternoon on the Apostle lakeshore where there is a stretch of craggy shore pocketed with ice covered caves. The lake was frozen and I skied to the caves. The next day I drove along the Bois Brule River and walked among the ice mounds at its mouth, then strapped on skis and watched the sunset from Brule Point.

The last full day flakes began to fall and I didn’t leave the cabin. I cut logs, watched the snow pile up and wrote and read in front of a glowing stove. I woke at three to add wood; the wind howled icy from the north and eked through chinks that weren’t filled with moss or shims. I filled the stove high and went back to bed. But the wood didn’t catch and by first light my hard boiled eggs had exploded and my bananas were brown and hard as hammers. No matter, a new fire finally lit to warm those final hours. Full Post»

Rio Grande Hot Springs

It was about 100 years ago when J.O. Langford and his family arrived at the big hot springs on the Rio Grande. His first impression of them were from “a hole some six inches in diameter and almost perfectly round, [that] spurted the sparkling water with a force that lifted the column almost a foot above the ledge before it tumbled back in a wreath of white foam.” They built a health spa for folks to come and get healed. Langford himself was long ill, though in time regained the health he’d lost as a malaria-ridden child. A full healing course of baths, a prescription passed down from Indians, was 21 days. Supposedly it worked quite well. Langford wrote that he saw numerous complete cures of gonorrhea, eczema, malaria, stomach illnesses and kidney ailments. I asked my wife the doc if his claims have any medical credence. She said aside from sulfur helping eczema and the desert air killing bacteria, hot spring cures are a myth. I struggle to explain Langford’s eye witness curative accounts in ways not involving personal pride. Then again, 21 days relaxing in a river canyon oasis is a pretty good way to feel better. I spent about three weeks in Big Bend, and though I did not visit the springs every day, I managed half a dozen trips. The foundation of Langford’s bath house still stands (it was built by a German national who shot his family and then himself when the Kaiser called him back to the motherland to fight in World War I) and is a pocket of clear, 105 degree water jutting into the muddy green Rio Grande under the open desert sky. The river and Mexico are on one side and yellow limestone cliffs on the other. People from all over still come there to soak in the water that, even if it does little to combat disease, does wonders for the soul. Full Post»