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.
