For the past seven days I’d been walking the steeply pitched trails of Stewart Island, a jagged scrap of land off the southern tip of New Zealand, where the birds of Rakiura National Park thrived in isolation from the invasive predators of the main islands. It was a rugged spot, and the winter storms that raged across the Southern Ocean reminded its few residents that Antarctica was not so very far away.
It was February, though, and the sun lingered into long afternoons. When the track emerged from the trees, I stood alone on pale beaches, shedding sweaty clothes on my way to the water’s edge. I swam in the evenings, too, shivering and whooping from the cold, peeling mussels from the rocks to cook for my dinner, seasoning them with saltwater.
I had three more days of walking before I reached the island’s only settlement, where I would board a northbound ferry toward a series of buses, then a boat and train that would take me to Auckland, and finally, a flight to Spain to meet my boyfriend. Just three days left to spot a Kiwi bird, shy, flightless, nocturnal—and a beloved and endangered national icon.
I had made other nighttime forays like this one, creeping through trees, feeling foolish as I looked for … what? A roly-poly bird with a slender beak that would undoubtedly prefer I stay in my sleeping bag. A park naturalist had told me (without pausing as he sent the stiff, fuzzy body of an opossum sailing into the bush) that this remote spot would be my best chance to find the birds. I was determined to see one before my three-month trip ended.
It was my first big solo voyage. Although I had pored over travel books obsessively, discovering pre-war Dijon with M.F.K. Fisher and charting the South Pacific with James Cook, it seemed as if the maps were drawn and all the big adventures were collecting dust on library shelves. The frontiers had been conquered, and the casualties included the unassuming Kiwi bird, struggling to survive in a habitat transformed by introduced predators and development.
I felt that spotting a Kiwi would somehow prove that beyond the bungee jumps and backpacker hostels, undiscovered worlds were still shuffling through the earth’s dark forests, minding their own business.
Thinking of this, I ignored my timid urge to dash back to the safe, warm hut and continued through the trees, my ears twitching at every snapping twig and falling leaf. For what seemed like an hour I didn’t see a thing, and my walk down the trail began to feel like its own endeavor, as if I had come to this island for nighttime orienteering, not a quick glimpse of the local bird life. Then I heard a quiet shuffling in the trees, and I froze, staring hard.
The noises came closer, got louder. My heart was thumping against my ribs, and my surging adrenaline sharpened every sound. With sweating palms, I slipped the headlamp from my pocket and pointed it into the bushes, fumbling with the switch. When I turned it on, the round beam of light illuminated a patch of green pant leg that led to a muddy hiking boot.
I couldn’t have been more surprised if I’d seen a Kiwi bird. Standing in front of me was a young man a few years older than I, carrying a notebook and returning my look with a level gaze. He was slight, with dark blond hair that grew toward the wire rims of his glasses.
“Looking for Kiwis, then?” he asked.
“Yes,” I replied, aiming for nonchalance. “You?”
“That’s what I do most nights,” he said, with a smile. In fact, he was spending the summer in a small hut that belonged to the park, tracking the bird population. “I’ve just seen a whole family of Kiwi. Would you like me to show you where to find them?”
I couldn’t believe my ears—or my luck. Of course I wanted to see them. Of course.
Without much else to say, he turned in the direction that he’d come, and I followed his slim silhouette through the trees, away from the track and the little hut. Newspaper headlines flickered through my mind, but I stifled them. There are better places to look for kidnapping victims than empty forests in the Southern Ocean, I reasoned with myself. We walked on, ducking under fallen trees and brushing aside ferns.
After a few minutes he paused and put a hand out. Then he motioned me to his side and pointed to the ground in front of us. I squinted into the blackness, straining to make out shapes. Slowly, he took out his light and turned it on. In the sudden glow I saw three birds standing about six feet in front of us. Two adult Kiwi were the size of soccer balls, covered in long, slender feathers that swept back to rounded tails. An adolescent huddled between them, covered in fuzzy down. With beaks intent on unearthing bugs to eat, they scarcely seemed to notice us, and as we knelt down for a closer look, the notoriously timid birds didn’t budge.
We stayed for several minutes without speaking or moving, until at last the three birds ducked out of the light and into a low shrub, disappearing from view. After our silent observation of the Kiwis, his voice startled me.
“I’ve been out here for hours,” he said, yawning, “and I’m famished. Would you like to come back to the hut for a cuppa and a bite to eat?”
I stood up, thinking of my mother and of newspaper headlines, then shrugged. “I’d love to.”
This time we walked with our lights on, and soon after rejoining the track, came across a tiny rustic shack built with unfinished timbers. It was as cold inside as out, and while I sat on the only chair, he knelt by the wood stove, adding kindling to the faintly glowing coals. When flames caught the dry wood, he turned to the table that dominated the room, swept off a pile of maps and papers, and unfolded an ancient two-burner propane cooker.
He filled a teakettle, set it on a burner, and pulled a box of pancake mix from a mouse-proof bin on a shelf. Clearly accustomed to living in a cramped space, he moved with the efficiency of a sailor. He had one teacup, a fork and spoon, one plate. He handed me a steeping cup of tea, made his in a small bowl, then set out powdered milk and a bottle of honey.
It was two in the morning, and my dinner of mussels and pasta had been hours ago. My mouth watered when the batter hit the oiled skillet. Expertly, he flipped a golden fried pancake onto my plate and poured another perfect circle on the hot pan. Reaching the highest plank shelf, he pushed aside tins of beans and dried pasta, then brought out a treasure as rare on that isolated coast as a Kiwi bird in Auckland: a fresh lemon.
We spoke a bit while we ate, I suppose. He asked me my name, and about the paths that had taken me to that remote spot. I must have asked the same, but the details, such as his name, have slipped my mind in the ensuing years. I was eighteen years old, in love with the man who waited for me in Spain, but also with the keenness of being alone, the long days and self-reliance. As I recall the months I spent in New Zealand and my walk around the tiny, rugged island, I often think of that night.
What I remember, along with the dark and the quiet and the dusty comfort of that little hut, is the taste of fried pancakes, soaked with honey and lemon juice. Never before had I seen someone eat pancakes that way, and never since. But I still do, and never without a thought of my great Kiwi hunt, the rustle of feathers in the night forest, and the young man with blond hair and a way with a skillet.
Jennifer Rose Smith lives in Vermont, where she lives a sweet double life. For half the year she writes, travels, taps maple trees for syrup, and plots adventures. During the summer she is up to her elbows in flour and butter, whipping up globally inspired pastries to sell at her farmers’ market stand, The Nomadic Oven. She chronicles her adventures on her website, www.thenomadicoven.com.
CAROL REICHERT
The Threadbare Rope
A woman discovers the truth about miracles.
I sat alone in my room at a hotel in Santo Domingo and observed what I wasn’t thinking about. I wasn’t thinking about which sun-soaked beach, what fruity rum drink, or whether to learn the merengue at the dance club we’d passed on the drive from the airport. Instead I stared out my window at thick, green blades of Caribbean grass and asked myself if I believed in miracles.
I’d come to Santo Domingo with my brother, Michael, to seek help from a doctor who used fetal stem cells to treat degenerative
diseases. Michael had suffered from Parkinson’s disease for eighteen years. He shook uncontrollably and walked in short, shuffling movements. He no longer blinked or smiled. His face had become a mask of blankness. My brother believed in the doctor’s miracle—and I wanted to believe. Dr. White claimed he could harness the power of creation itself with cells that were biologic chameleons, capable of differentiating into any type of cell the body needed. But I held no more stock in the case studies I read than I did in the eerie voodoo enchantments still practiced in the island’s rural villages.
I’d flown from my home near Boston to Milwaukee where Michael lived, and in the airport terminal, my childhood life assaulted me. First the smells: bratwurst, knockwurst, and sauerkraut. Then the sounds: “Paging Craig Wyznewski, paging Craig Wyznewski.” A name I never heard in Boston. Then a friendliness that startled me: the woman at the rental car counter who gave me explicit directions to the counter of a competitor, the rental car van driver who treated me like a drinking buddy: “I really thought the Patriots were going to win last weekend. Boy, the Celtics are doing great.” I remembered that you were a loser in Wisconsin if you didn’t follow your teams, and I knew enough to play along.
Outside it was 18 degrees. I picked Michael up at his apartment.
“I’m sorry I’m late,” I told him. “I took a wrong turn.”
“I don’t understand. Who are you?” he asked, staring at me.
“I’m Carol, your sister.”
He was embarrassed and I was embarrassed for him. I told him I had changed my hairstyle and that it made me look different.
“That must be it,” he said.
I helped Michael pack, and we returned to the airport, where the security guard checked our boarding passes and IDs and told us to have a peaceful day. As we waited for the boarding call, Michael studied my face.
“The circles under your eyes are darker than they used to be,” he said.
I pretended to be merely surprised, then excused myself and ran to the bathroom to cover them with makeup. We’d never been close, my brother and I. He was six years older, single, no friends. He suffered from certain social deficits—the worst of which was an inability to empathize. But when he said, “I can’t do this trip alone. Will you come with me?” it didn’t even occur to me to say no. I left my family in Boston to pick him up in Milwaukee.
“Take lots of pictures,” my little girl said.
On the airplane, I walked down the aisle to the bathroom. When I returned, Michael told me that my hips had widened since I’d had children. He said this with no affect—no derision or concern. It was simply his clinical observation about how his younger sister had changed. I wondered how I’d survive the next two days under his scrutiny.
Traveling with Michael, I observed the world through the eyes of someone who seemed to have thawed after a lengthy freeze—emerging severely out of touch. He asked me why the passengers burst into applause when we landed smoothly. “Perfect landing,” I told him. He asked me to tell the waiter that he wanted Spaghetti Bolognese because he didn’t know how to pronounce it. He was surprised when I tipped the man who pushed his wheelchair from the ticket counter to our gate in Newark. “I never would have thought of doing that,” he said.
We landed in Santo Domingo at midnight, and the flight attendant hurried to get Michael a wheelchair. “Good luck,” she said from the jetway. It was January, but the night air was tropical and fragrant, and the clinic van was waiting for us.
At the hotel, I fell asleep quickly, exhausted from the journey and the effort of pushing my 200-pound brother through airports and up wheelchair ramps. In the morning, I found a flyer slipped under my door advertising a snorkeling excursion and a sunset amble to the marble burial site of Christopher Columbus. The usual sensations I felt when I traveled—excitement, curiosity, a craving for the exotic—were replaced by anxiety. I worried whether the injection was safe, if my brother was wasting the little money he had on an untested procedure. I feared his disappointment. When I knocked on Michael’s door, I heard him shuffle, then he appeared wearing nothing but white briefs.
“Don’t worry. I won’t look,” I said as I entered, shading my eyes.
“Why? I’m not naked. If I were, I wouldn’t have opened the door,” he said, as if astounded that I might have such a thought.
Why did my brother have to be so strange? I was annoyed by his oddness. It was hard to help someone who made me squirm.
At breakfast, I filled Michael’s glass with orange juice and cut his pancakes. I couldn’t escape the traveler inside me—always itching to leave home, shed my skin for a while and slip on someone else’s. So I ate a Dominican breakfast—fried eggs served on top of boiled and mashed plantains, soft cheese fried in peanut oil, slices of papaya and pineapple, and café colado, water poured over a cloth bag stuffed with ground coffee and served with steamed milk.
I looked around the hotel and saw tourists in flip-flops and wide-brimmed hats examining maps and planning itineraries—and also people in wheelchairs, a little boy with muscular dystrophy, a woman with Lou Gehrig’s disease who stared into space with her mouth frozen open. Dr. White’s patients.
I wondered how the tourists felt—the ones who came here to escape and ended up vacationing among people who were broken.
When I’d told my friends what we were doing, everyone discouraged me. Have you researched this? What are the doctor’s credentials? Have any clinical studies been published? I had nothing scientific to offer them. There were no clinical studies, and the doctor was a psychiatrist, not a neurologist. He specialized in treating eating disorders, not Parkinson’s disease. I lived in Boston, home of Harvard Medical School, Mass General. So an unknown clinic in Santo Domingo did not give me a sense of institutional worth. I tried to talk Michael out of it. It sounded too good to be true, too mysterious and too expensive. A friend told me she had just watched an exposé on 60 Minutes about offshore clinics that preyed on people desperate for cures. I pictured Dr. White as a flimflam man operating out of the back of his caravan at Carnaval. “Step right up and get your fetal cells!” And behind him, a row of gray fetuses floated in watery jelly jars.
“It’s easy to be rational when you don’t have Parkinson’s disease,” Michael said when I told him my concerns, and I was staggered by the truth of it.
That was it, wasn’t it? I didn’t have Parkinson’s disease. It was easy for me to stand in judgment, to question the validity of a doctor who could be a savior or a quack, bamboozling an easy $30,000 from people who still had hope, the threadbare rope they clutched before letting go. As Shakespeare said, “The miserable have no other medicine.” Only hope.
The van arrived early to pick us up. Michael sat silently in the back seat while I asked the driver questions in Spanish as he maneuvered through Santo Domingo’s busy streets. He said many people were coming to the clinic this weekend—babies, old people. We drove through a poor neighborhood, past women washing clothes on the street in red plastic tubs. In heavy traffic we slowed down, and I saw the open-air market. Normally I would have hopped off here to inspect what the locals ate, to put a frame around the life of the people. Instead we drove on, shuttling past bins of sweet potatoes, yucca, yams, and spices.
I imagined the clinic as a shabby building with cracks in the walls, bad smells, bare light bulbs, used syringes stashed in the trash. But the driver stopped in front of a thick mahogany gate that swung open to reveal a Spanish Colonial villa with a swimming pool and a fountain surrounded by palm trees. The walls were painted a creamy gold.
“It looks like the home of a conquistador,” said Michael. I saw the driver’s eyes in the mirror and wondered if he appreciated this comparison to the explorers who pillaged his country for God, gold, and glory. I wheeled Michael inside, and the interior looked like a movie set: heavy Spanish-style furniture on terracotta floors, gleaming chandeliers, ornate masks, and Mayan musical instruments hanging on thick white walls.
In the living room, a m
an with a heavy German accent cuddled his two young daughters. Each had cerebral palsy, their legs as thin and shapeless as pipes. A boy with severe autism turned away from his parents and rocked with his eyes closed, occasionally yelling.
“I sure hope it works,” my brother said.
I squeezed his shoulder. “Me, too.”
An assistant wheeled Michael to a bedroom where we met the anesthesiologist, a Dominican woman in her thirties. She took Michael’s blood pressure and inserted an IV needle into the top of his hand. He lay on his back, and his hand shook up and down, involuntarily slapping his abdomen. As the IV dripped into his vein, I felt the rush of hope.
Dr. White entered the room, dressed in a white jacket. He was slender, of medium height with thick, silvery hair swept back over his head. He managed to be both elegant and slightly nerdy. He hugged me and held Michael’s hand.
“We’ll put a local in your back, Michael, and then you won’t feel anything.”
Dr. White answered all my questions. He didn’t hide anything. I asked him about the fetuses, where they came from.
“In eastern Europe today the number one choice for birth control is abortion,” he said, “which doesn’t make sense to us, emotionally or financially. Healthy young women come in for abortions. They know nothing about this—they’re just asked if they want the material to be thrown away as medical waste or used to help someone. If they say they want to help someone, then we test the cells at one of the best laboratories in the world. They put them into liquid nitrogen at 196 degrees below zero centigrade. I select them, and they’re reconstituted. They’re alive when Michael gets them.”
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