Pass the Butterworms

by Tim Cahill

  I asked Chris, who had had a very bad go of it for a few weeks, if he had actually written the letter in his allotted hour. He said he had. He couldn’t remember it exactly—he wasn’t feeling so hot and was a bit distracted at the time—but it read something like “Dear Mom and Dad, I was doing what I wanted to do. I love you both. Please take care of my dog.”

  This compares, not unfavorably, I think, with John Keats’s last letter, written to Charles Armitage Brown, on November 30, 1820: “I can scarcely bid you good-bye, even in a letter. I always made an awkward bow.” Keats was dying of tuberculosis and had a lot more time than Chris Rainier. He was also one of the greatest poets in the English language, and didn’t, apparently, have a dog.

  When my shivering started on that bright summer afternoon, I didn’t know what variety of malaria I’d contracted and thought about writing the final letter.

  What does a person say? How do you explain your life in a couple of pages? If that’s all you have.

  For a while, I occupied myself with the question of who should get copies of the letter. The list should be fairly inclusive, like, say, wedding invitations. You don’t want to leave anyone out. Parents, lover, best friends—sure. Ex-wives, yeah. Business associates—okay. I had worked back through my life to a beloved high school swimming coach when the febrile stage hit and I fell completely and irredeemably asleep.

  The fever dream was a bad one, full of anxiety. I was, for reasons that seemed perfectly obvious at the time, forced to occupy someone else’s body. Who was this guy? He seemed to be crouched in a tower, looking down at the lawns and walkways of a busy college campus. He was holding a rifle. People were running in panic, and faint screams drifted up to the tower. Had this yo-yo shot anyone yet? I could see a few broken windows in a building across the way, but there were no bodies down. A SWAT team was making its way across the lawn, toward the tower.

  My problem, as I saw it, was to explain to the police that I was not really this wacko with the rifle. I was a nice normal guy who happened, through no fault of his own, to be temporarily inhabiting the body of a deranged sniper. “Sure,” I imagined the SWAT team leader saying just before they opened up the shotguns, “that’s what all you deranged snipers say.”

  The dream insisted that I come up with some more satisfactory explanation for my presence in that particular body. What? My mind skidded off in several different directions at once. I could hear heavy footsteps pounding up the stairs. There seemed to be no way in which I could adequately account for the person I truly was.

  The dream, I think, mirrored my anxiety about the last letter. If I could just explain myself properly, maybe I wouldn’t have to die.

  Since then, I’ve often wondered if, in some larger sense, that’s what we all think. We produce art or music or literature or philosophy or children; we make laws or medicine or history; we become saints or outlaws in our lifelong scramble to create some living context. This, we need to say, is who I truly am. It’s our one shot at immortality.

  The blood tests came back positive. “It’s malaria,” my doctor said.

  “What kind?”

  “Vivax.”

  Common malaria. Not something fairly exotic, like P. ovale or P. malariae. Not the deadly P. falciparum, either. People I know who’ve survived a falciparum infection have suffered badly. During lucid periods, several thought they were going to die. By contrast, my vivax is pretty mild: a walk in the park.

  But unlike my falciparum-suffering friends—who tend to go through a single frightening incident—the vivax I have recurs at more or less regular intervals. The parasite, like many microorganisms, clings stubbornly to life. Vivax malaria is the prevalent form of the disease precisely because it withstands therapy and can become chronic.

  My doctor, who doesn’t have much occasion to treat malaria in Montana, consulted with a tropical-medicine expert, and together they worked out a treatment program. There was no way to know for sure if the various pills would, in fact, kill all those morozoites and sporozoites and gametocytes smooching around in my blood. And they didn’t.

  About six months after my first episode, I was giving a series of readings at the University of Montana, about 250 miles from my home. The malaria started shaking me at about four o’clock the first afternoon. There followed the required five hours of misery, but the next day, precisely at four, I gave my reading and felt just fine. Hey, no recurrence! A day later I was driving home, over icy roads and through a minor blizzard, when my hands began shaking on the steering wheel. It seemed I was on a forty-eight-hour cycle this time. My friend Linnea drove, and I sat twitching in the passenger seat. My pills were at home, and they would knock out the infection within twenty-four hours. Why did I leave the pills at home? Apparently, I was moaning with each exhalation of breath.

  “Music bother you?” Linnea asked.

  “No.”

  “Because, I’m sorry, the moaning’s driving me nuts.”

  And so we listened to music at top volume, and I never did pass out during the febrile stage, but was able, in a half-waking state, to harness the fever dreams, which I played across the windshield as the wipers swept the snow away. I was in a deep green forest. Sunlight fell in shafts through alien flowers that grew everywhere on strange, unworldly trees. I may not have been precisely human, in this dream. I could fly, for one thing, and I seemed to be some sort of combination of butterfly and bird. It was strange to see this peculiar world in three dimensions and I wondered about that until I realized that I was soaring through a jungle as painted by Henri Rousseau, the jungle of The Sleeping Gypsy.

  It was an hour and a half of exhilarating delirium.

  • • •

  A friend of mine, photographer Nick Nichols, once suffered a relapse of malaria in New York. He was staying at an upscale hotel, editing pictures he’d taken in Africa for a national magazine, when his teeth started chattering. By the time the house doctor arrived, Nick had sweat through the sheets on his bed. He had wrung them out and hung them over the shower curtain. So there he was, lying on a bare mattress, sweating profusely, and looking like a junkie in need of a fix.

  “What seems to be the trouble?” the doctor asked.

  “I have malaria,” Nick said.

  The doctor began asking him a series of irritating questions. Were Nick’s stools black and tarry? Were people following him? Did he hear voices when there was no one there?

  “I’m not crazy, you asshole,” Nick screamed, “I have malaria.”

  Health professionals in America often have little experience treating the disease, which is always in a dynamic state of change. Generally, when traveling to malarial areas, it’s wise to begin taking preventive drugs about two weeks before departure and to continue the regimen for six more weeks upon return. I can testify to the fact that this is not always 100 percent effective. Plasmodia are persistent, and quickly become immune to last year’s preventive or therapeutic drug of choice.

  One useful source of up-to-date information is the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, which maintains a malaria hotline with information about malarial areas and current treatments.

  I’ve been told that anopheles mosquitoes sit at a slant on a flat surface. This may be so, but I’ve never been able to arrange the necessary flat surface in conjunction with a stationary mosquito. Identifying mosquitoes in this way is like trying to sprinkle salt on the tail of bird. I do know that anopheles mosquitoes are never found at altitude. One source tells me they do not occur at altitudes above three thousand feet. Bunk. I’ve seen people suffering what was clearly malaria at five thousand feet, while their neighbors who lived at six thousand feet seemed perfectly healthy.

  That bit of anopheles esoterica was of use to me when I was searching for the ruins of a pre-Inca society in the eastern foothills of the Peruvian Andes. No use looking in the fertile river valleys: The stone huts and the great forts of the Chachapoyas people were perched on cloud-shrouded peaks, at ten thousand feet. There were sto
ne catchments for rain, the people’s only source of water. The Chachapoyas laboriously terraced the steep mountain slopes in order to grow crops. They lived this hard high-altitude life because the river bottoms were rife with malaria.

  The disease might have arrived in the Americas with Columbus. A few hundred years later, Indians in the Amazon were successfully treating malaria with the bark of the cinchona tree. This is an interesting and persuasive argument for biological diversity: As we decimate forests worldwide, do we also lose the potential cure for various diseases, both those that are killing people today and those, perhaps presently unknown, that will kill in the future?

  As for me, well, I still search for ancient ruins up high. I take my prescribed pills at the proper time. On my own, I’ve begun eating huge bloody steaks, because I think they replenish my red blood cells. I also drink the distilled essence of cinchona bark, which can be found in tonic or quinine water. Massive doses of quinine, however, may cause cinchonism, a series of symptoms including blindness and deafness. It is safer and healthier to flavor a few ounces of quinine with a shot or so of gin. The wise malaria sufferer wakes up in the morning, lying on the couch, with the overhead light blazing away. He has a headache, the events of the previous evening may not be in satisfactory focus, but he can see. He can hear. “Thank God,” he says to himself, “that I thought to mix my quinine with gin.”

  It’s not a bad life, really. I’m the only person I know who’s on the steak-and-gin-and-tonic diet for his health.

  The day after that strange breakfast on the terrace near Sante Fe, malaria knocked me down again. I had the pills with me, and since I was going to have to go through this episode anyway, I found that I was actually looking forward to the fever dreams. So there I was in a cheap motel, shivering in front of the television while some twitching dysfunctional tried to explain his deplorable existence to America through Oprah. “This is who I am,” he meant to say, his one and only shot at immortality.

  It could have been me, I suppose, telling America why I loved my job. That particular day, I would have been acceptably pathetic and just right for daytime TV: a thoroughly broken looking man, shifting in pain on his chair, shaking badly, soaked through with sweat, and babbling incomprehensibly about nifty perks—high-altitude ruins and gin and tonic and great slabs of bloody red meat.

  “You got malaria on the job,” the host might ask, “and you still love your work?” And in my waking fever dream, projected transparently across a sea of concerned faces, I would see a body dragged out of a stinking sewer somewhere in New Mexico, and I expect I’d say, “There are worse jobs than mine. Lots worse.”

  On the River of Cold Fires

  The writer considered the weather and felt somehow obliged to issue a challenge to God. He was, apparently, a man who had never read the book of Job. There were several of us standing waist-deep in the icy river, cursing our leaky rubber waders, and unloading lunch gear from one of the three rafts. It was one in the afternoon, the warmest part of a cold day, and the rain, which had started earlier that morning, was falling in sheets from a glacial gray sky. It seemed biblical in proportion, this rain, ridiculously cold, and it drummed down on our heads without surcease, making us both snappy and stupid. The temperature fluttered just above the freezing mark and the downpour was so constant, so unrelenting, that my fingers weren’t working well in the cold. I could see them there, fumbling redly at the end of my arms.

  Funny fingers, I thought, stupidly. Aren’t much good.

  And then, at that point, the writer said this thing and everyone backed away from him.

  I’m not being coy here. I didn’t say it. There was another writer along for the trip. Aside from us—two writers—there were a couple of restaurateurs, a musician, a couple of professional fishing guides, and a real estate salesman.

  All of us were slowly freezing to death, and no one was mentioning this fact. There were two women on the trip, and none of the men was going to say anything at all about the possibility of our impending icy demise until at least one of the women complained. The women, for their part, had equal and opposite concerns regarding the men. Thanks to the issue of sex, there would be no complaining on this trip.

  The writer—this other writer, understand—looked up into the low gray clouds for a moment. A small stream of ice water formed and poured off his nose.

  “You know,” he said brightly and full of false good cheer, “God’s a wimp if this is the worst He can throw at us.”

  And all of us sort of backed away from the blasphemer. People who had never been to church in their lives made for the bank. It was April in Montana: There are lots of things that can happen to you in this, the cruelest month, and it doesn’t do to tempt fate. I had a sudden vision of Ice Age corpses frozen throughout time in the shimmering belly of some renegade glacier. Shriveled limbs. Open mouths; silent screams. An eternity of ice.

  Give you an idea of how miserable it was:

  We built a fire at lunch. It took a very long time to catch, longer to flame up in any satisfactory way. It took longer than the hour we had for lunch. I know that because no one got warm at lunch. The Crow Indians say that an Indian builds a small fire and stands close; a white man will build a large fire and stand far away. We were, for the most part, white men and we had built a large fire. But the ground was wet, the wood was wet, and rain kept falling from the sky. We stood very close to the large fire, breathing smoke and waiting for some warmth to develop. “This,” one restaurant owner said, “is a cold fire.”

  “Sounds like a book title,” one of the writers said. “On the River of Cold Fires.”

  “I mean it,” the first man said. “You could freeze to death in front of this fire.”

  That’s how cold it was.

  The river was peculiar. Once you began, you were committed to a three-day run at the very least. It was all canyon walls and wilderness until the first feasible take-out point, sixty miles downstream. When someone in your party challenges God to make you as miserable as possible and there are a couple of days left on the trip and your fingers don’t work very well, it takes an act of will to enjoy corrugated canyon walls soaring five hundred, eight hundred, a thousand feet overhead.

  There was no one else on the river, because anyone who knows it well enough to float knows that late April can be unpleasant. So there were no other human beings in sight. Not for three days. It could have been Alaska. It could have been America before the white man.

  The river, in fact, had been named by Lewis and Clark in 1804. They named it for the secretary of the navy in that year. It wasn’t a big, important presidential river, a Jefferson or a Madison. Just a small secretary of the navy-size river, a little bit of a secret, actually, and if I were to mention its name, my companions would discuss the matter with me using baseball bats and two-by-fours. No matter that the fishing was grotesque and the weather hideous: These folks, Montanans all, believe in the Conservation of Misery.

  So, for the purposes of obfuscation, I’ll call it the River of Cold Fires.

  We had been invited on the trip by a river guide named Jim Kent, who works out of Livingston, Montana. His first clients would hit the water toward the end of May and probably avoid any blizzards. Before that, Kent had to check his gear. Were the rafts leaking?; were the tents in good repair?; were the grill and griddle working well? It was chancy setting out on the third week of April. But, what the hell, we’d be lucky. The weather, which had been inching up into 80-degree temperatures the week before, would surely hold.

  • • •

  There was a black Lab along on the rafting trip, the kind of dog that joyously plunges into freezing river water to retrieve fallen ducks on a late fall day. The black Lab had the same name as the river, and he lay atop one of the softer mounds of gear strapped into the raft and cried piteously as the cold rain fell. That should suggest the measure of our discomfort. It’s cold when you have to find a blanket for a black Lab.

  We had about six more hour
s to float after the day’s cold lunch, and a strong upriver wind drove pellet-hard drops of near frozen rain into our faces. The rain seeped into our clothes.

  It was the worst, the coldest, and most miserable kind of weather. The temperature hovered near freezing, so the rain wanted to be snow. Soon enough, it started to fall: snow-flakes the size of quarters that splashed against the exposed skin of my face.

  The fish, after twenty-four hours of cold rain, were hunkering at the bottom of the river, not feeding much, not rising to the occasional hatch of mayflies. To catch trout on a fly rod in these conditions you have to throw weighted nymphs at them. These are big fat heavy flies, difficult to cast, and they go bouncing along the rocks at the bottom of the stream, where they supposedly look like the larvae stage of various insects. These insect entrées form 90 percent of a trout’s diet.

  Nymphing is a frustrating method of fishing, especially from a moving boat, because the fly is floated deep and the only way to tell a strike is by a sudden movement of the line on the surface. And since the fly sometimes snags on rocks, you often strike at nonexistent fish.

  Every twentieth cast or so, your fly catches something on the bottom and stays there. You try to shake it loose a couple of times, but nothing happens, so you point the tip of your rod along the bad destiny of your line and just let the $2.95 fly snap off. A gift to the river. Then, in the icy rain, you get to tie another big fat woolly worm to your tippet. With numb, shaking fingers.

  Because the water was dark with rain, I was using flies with white rubber legs and bits of silvery tin foil on their underside. Such flies do not imitate any known insect. Their advantage, in high, dark water, is that the fish can see them.

  People who fly-fish—I’ve said this before, but it bears repeating—are rather like people who have some strange sexual fetish. “If I can’t do it with whips and chains, I’d rather not do it at all.” The fly fisherman says, “If I can’t catch them on a fly, I’d rather not catch them at all.”