Nature Noir (27 page)

But the ticks are really just intermediaries, carrying the disease to a new victim after acquiring it from an animal that acts as the bacteria's perennial host. As Lyme research began in California, the perennial host animal—epidemiologists call it the "disease reservoir"—was generally found to be either a dusky-footed woodrat, a kangaroo rat, or one of a couple of species of deer mice. Woodrats are common in the oak forests of the American River. They are far prettier than you might imagine when you hear the word "rat": soft and furry, with delicately colored feet. Their nests, some quite large, are piles of sticks, often stacked against a tree or a rock on sloping ground. These serve generations of rats and their smaller cohabitants, the deer mice.

But at Eight Mile Curve, what the biologists found surprised them. While the ticks they collected on the site tested positive, only one of the many rats and pinyon mice they trapped did. So what was the disease reservoir—the mystery animal that passed the infection to the ticks? At Eight Mile Curve the biologists were seeing a good many songbirds feeding on the ground, and studies elsewhere—Europe, Asia, and the eastern United States—had found Lyme disease in avian hosts. So they turned their attention to birds.

What they then found was published two years later in the
Journal of Medical Entomology:
On the Foresthill Divide, within the lands the Bureau of Reclamation had condemned to build the Auburn Dam, birds were discovered with ticks embedded in them. Many of the ticks carried Lyme disease. Of ninety-two blood samples taken from birds there—towhees, warblers, sparrows, flycatchers, thrushes, finches, jays, and a single hawk—over half tested positive for Lyme; in some species the number was 100 percent. Many of these birds were neotropicals that traveled as widely as flight attendants, appearing in wintering grounds as far away as Central and South America.

Disease on the wing was an idea to get used to in California. Less than three years after the study went to print, the slow wave of West Nile virus, which was by then making its way across the United States at the speed of bird and mosquito flight, reached Southern California. There the virus's arrival was announced, as it had been everywhere else during its cross-country journey, by crows—which, among the avian victims of West Nile, seem to suffer greater mortality, literally falling like sparse black rain from the sky. But even before that, on the spring mornings when those men in moon suits lumbered through the oak forests of the Foresthill Divide carrying containers of little animals, although the air was still full of the familiar, if unseasonable, damp scent of spring, it was a new world.

By 1998 it had been twelve years since I had arrived to work as a ranger on the American River, twenty-three since construction of the Auburn Dam had come to a halt. During an informal meeting with officials from the Bureau of Reclamation in the late nineties, one of our rangers was told, "The Bureau has never deauthorized a dam, and we're not about to start at Auburn." And so our lives in the dam site continued to be a long improvisation. Without a unifying plan for the place—other than its eventual flooding—our effect on it was an aggregate of our individual whims and interests, all expressed in the makeshift way of things that happen under the shadow of a limited budget and a limited future. More often than not the right hand didn't know what the left hand was doing, and although one of my coworkers had made arrangements for the biologists to get into our locked gate at Eight Mile Curve, I never heard about the study until much later. As early as April 1997 the Placer County Health Department was warning citizens in radio ads to be careful about Lyme disease. California State Parks' response to this was not to respond; no cautionary memo was issued to rangers or their seasonal assistants working in the areas where infected ticks had been found. And while biologists who spent only a few hours in our park had taken elaborate precautions against infection, we who were there every day continued to go around in shorts in the summer, our guns no protection against a threat too small to shoot.

Among environmentalists there is a popular fable: If you drop a frog into a shallow dish of boiling water, the frog will fight for its life to jump out; drop the same frog in cool water and then very slowly heat the water to boiling, and the frog will perish with no apparent distress until the last moments, and by then it will be too late. The story refers of course to people's capacity to adjust to increments of strangeness and danger in their environment without taking action to stop it. That may be true of us, but I doubt very much that frogs are that stupid.

I like to mix my own intravenous drugs, making sure that the white powder of the antibiotic is entirely dispersed into the fluid in the clear bag. Once mixed, the plastic bag of fluid is clear and pale yellow, almost exactly the color of urine. I unroll the clear tubing of the infusion set, close the valve, pull the seals on the IV bag and the tubing, and stab the bag with the spike on the end of the tubing. I hang the bag over me from a chrome IV pole on wheels next to the bed. I pinch the clear drip chamber to fill it and then open the valve on the line to purge the air in it. You don't want to get large air bubbles in your brain or lungs. I assemble the other things: syringes, vials of heparin and saline, alcohol swabs, a needle for taking my blood samples. I clean the valve on the end of the tube that goes into my chest and from there to the portal of my heart. I clean it really well, and then I push ten milliliters of normal saline into myself with a syringe. Then I connect the line and open the valve to start the drip. I set the drip at about one per second. I like infusing myself because it reminds me of the satisfactions of competency, of the roaring propwash of a helicopter, of a well-packaged, desperately injured patient on his way into it with me holding the clear bag over him. But now it's more nebulous. I'm not really dying, and I'm not sure day to day if I'm saving myself.

But the feeling in my hands has returned, and I wonderingly run my hands along my nakedness, my chest around the tube that goes right through it into the big veins returning to my heart, my upper arms, the tops of my thigh, which had been numb, too. I imagine the branches of my nervous system, from the trunk of my spine to the tiny rootlets that define the limits of my skin. The sensation of my skin has supplied me with an illusion of a distinct edge, a definable limit between myself and the world. But it's a false autonomy. I know a woman in these mountains who startled and dropped a dish at the exact moment her husband died in a motorcycle crash, miles away. I know a man who carries the canyons of the American River inside himself, in his blood, in his brain.

So many of the things that happened to me as a ranger in the American River canyon I remember well, as my brain gets better. But this one is obscure to me. It was a nothing call that amounted to nothing.

Early June of 1998 was wet. The Douglas firs on the north slopes were festooned with bright beads of water at the time when the crimson Indian pinks were already blooming. Ticks are very sensitive to dryness. Their bodies desiccate easily, and in dry weather they hide deep in mossy crevices on the bark of trees, or in the leaf litter, or in woodrat nests. Damp weather, however, makes them more active, and they come out and stand around on the tips of branches and blades of grass by trails, like hitchhikers at a freeway on-ramp.

June 14, 1998. The dispatch log says that at 1606 hours—six minutes after four—that Sunday afternoon I was on a traffic stop on Lake Clementine Road. What I remember next was hearing a sheriff's deputy radio to his dispatcher that he was pursuing someone on foot down by the river at the Confluence. Someone had done something, but what? Exposed himself to a woman? Threatened someone in a drunken argument? The dispatch log doesn't say, just that it took me seven minutes to get there.

When I arrived at the Confluence, we spent some time chasing this guy through the weeds grown tall in the late rains until we lost him. Then we picked the burrs off our uniforms and left. No one cut any paper. I stayed late at the ranger station catching up on reports and got home around midnight.

The following morning, the first of my days off, I slept late. When I got up I found myself absentmindedly scratching an itch just below my beltline. There was something—a pimple, a little bump. When I finally looked at it, I found a tick—brick red and small, the kind I now recognize as
Ixodes pacificus,
embedded in my skin. I knew enough to pull it out with a pair of tweezers and save it in my refrigerator. I made arrangements to see a doctor, without really thinking anything would happen.

Old Doctor Parsons had an appointment available on Thursday. Like me, he wanted to be a writer, but at the time he was further along in this delusion than I was. His office was a small pale-green building in a stand of ponderosa pine a couple of miles north of Placerville, across the highway from a house with several washing machines and a logging truck in the yard, and about half a mile south of a Scotch and steak roadhouse called the Hanging Tree—one of those places with the chandeliers made of wagon wheels suspended from the smoke-darkened pine ceiling and Freddy Fender and George Jones on the jukebox in the bar. Over the time I knew him, his waiting room became increasingly empty, with a fish tank bubbling in the silence. Eventually he let his secretary go. He was a portly, bald man in his late sixties, and by the time I came in with my tick bite he was spending most of his time hunched over his computer in his back room, cranking out unpublished polemical short stories and libertarian novels in the tradition of Ayn Rand. His writing schedule gave him little time to keep up on developments in medicine.

Lyme disease is rare in California, he said. We think only about one percent of the ticks in the state might carry it.

I handed him the plastic bag with the tick inside.

If we test it and it comes up positive, he said, it'll just make you nervous. Even if the tick's positive, it's unlikely that you'll get the disease. Let's just forget it, shall we?

Okay, I said.

You're likely to get some local irritation and redness, he said. Ticks are dirty animals. Don't worry about it.

And so I didn't. Within a couple of weeks, a round patch of rash circled the bite. Within a month I began to feel very tired. More tired than I had ever been in my life. Then came diarrhea. My hands began to go numb, then my arms, my lips, my tongue, the roof of my mouth. Then my feet. I began to get shooting pains, like hot needles, in my feet.

One day I went to the pistol range to qualify. The police holsters we used had three different safeties to make it hard for someone to take your gun from you in a wrestling match. I couldn't feel any of the releases with my numb fingertips, so I couldn't get my gun out. I stopped going to work. After several months my sick leave ran out.

I was seeing more doctors. A neurologist performed nerveconductance tests and a spinal tap. Your nerves are damaged and there's protein in your spinal fluid, but I don't know what's wrong, he said. I went home. I fell down a couple of times. My eyes were getting blurry; my ears were ringing. The joints in my fingers and toes were sore and sometimes swollen. I couldn't twist the lid off a jar. I began to go deaf in my left ear. The sound of my young children's laughter cut through me like a knife, rattled my brain. My own speech seemed to reverberate in my face and forehead, each vowel causing excruciating discomfort. My brain felt swollen. I couldn't think. Everything seemed difficult to figure out. I was tired, but I couldn't sleep at night.

I began to lose my memory. I made an appointment with the new chief investigator at headquarters for an interview for a position I had always wanted on the department's investigations team. I never showed up, and it was another week before I knew I hadn't. I missed an appointment with my dentist, and then another. I rescheduled and missed it again. The dentist's secretary told me it might be time to find another dentist. I called up the dentist, a friend, and found myself weeping on the phone. I didn't know myself anymore.

I was tested again. I saw a fifth doctor, a sixth, and then a seventh. I was told I had Lyme disease. I tested positive. One day two years after the bite I drove down to the ranger station, a route I had taken for thirteen years. I was now feeling drugged or drunk most of the time; my brain was full of spirochetes, a doctor told me later, and the inflammatory nature of the body's reaction to them causes swelling in the walls of small arteries, resulting in decreased blood flow to the brain. When I finished my errand at the ranger station, I started home again. But I wasn't sure anymore exactly how to get there. I pulled over to the side of the road and called my wife on my cell phone, then sat there waiting for her to come and get me. I waited for months for things to get better. Eventually I was forced to retire from State Parks, and for two years I wasn't much good for anything. The trail back from that bad place was so long and circuitous that, like many Lyme patients, I cannot say exactly when it began to look like I was going to get better. As I write this, it isn't over yet.

However, as I healed, I made two very pleasant discoveries. One was that my memories of what had happened during all those years in the American River were intact. It was as if they and so many other things I was missing—the names of friends, phone numbers, parts of my vocabulary, and the contents of books I had read—had been locked in a cabinet during my illness, and now I had the key again. The other surprise was that as I was healing, the American River's situation had gotten better, too.

In the final analysis, neither of my present doctors can promise me that the Lyme spirochetes or their cyst form—like a seed—will ever be completely absent from my body. But then, when you think about it, who ever thought that a ranger could spend fourteen years on a piece of land and the two would remain entirely separate? Environmentalists have been saying for years that as the land goes, so will we go. It should be no surprise to learn that rangers may be the first to know how true that really is.