The Turk Who Loved Apples (12 page)

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.

“
Z
immer 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.

“A
re 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.