Idle Words

The Daintree Rain Forest

Tue, 12 Feb 2013 12:00:00 -0800

The cassowary is a two-meter high bird with a large horn on its head, cankles, a red wattle, and a bright blue neck. The fact that it is well-camouflaged in the Australian rain forest tells you something about this remarkable habitat.

Every so often a nature show tries to bill the cassowary as ‘the most dangerous bird in the world’, and even though this is technically true, it's a little disingenuous. Northern Queensland makes a lot of competing demands on your fear. From old classics like the paralysis tick, salt-water crocodile, and box jellyfish, to hungry young newcomers like the the flesh-eating Daintree ulcer, the Daintree rainforest has a deep bench. And even though the cassowary has giant slashing blades on its feet, and is powerful enough to disembowel a person with one kick, it's clear that the bird's heart is not in it. It just wants to eat fruit and be left alone. There are plants in Daintree (read on!) scarier than the cassowary.

Most mornings in Port Douglas I go down to the wildlife center to watch Cassie the cassowary eat her breakfast, a large bowl of fruit that has been laid out for her by the volunteer staff. She stands above it with quiet dignity, dipping her head occasionally to grab another piece. There are two cassowaries at the center, both left free to roam in the semi-open enclosure. Cassie prefers to stand by the door, while Ayerlie likes to hang out under the raised walkway, startling passers-by by poking her head out near their feet. The cassowary has an unnerving stare. Like its relative the emu, it fixes you with giant, unblinking eyes (framed by gorgeous lashes!) with an intensity that makes you wonder if it is having second thoughts about a fruit-only diet.

Cassie is less interested in passers-by, perhaps because of her high-profile station near the entrance. It's amusing to watch visitors react as they come out the screen door and see the enormous, blue-necked creature grooming its long black feathers just a few steps away. The cassowary's feathers are so long and fine they look almost like fur. Once in a long while, Cassie lets out a seismic, almost inaudibly low growl that sounds like a fair-sized motorcycle gang revving up just over the horizon. You feel it more in your chest than hear it. This is the bird's territorial call, and the casque on her head serves as an amplifier, making it easier for it to her to hear the same low frequencies at a distance ①. Infrasound penetrates the thick forest much more easily than sounds of a higher pitch. The growling completed, she settles down carefully, folding her legs under her, and rests for a while on the ground like a giant hen.

Being mobile and solitary, the cassowary has a hard time adjusting to the modern human presence in Australia. For the last three centuries, non-indigeneous Australians have been hypnotized by the idea that, with enough spadework, this fascinating continent could be made to look like Dorset. The result everywhere has been catastrophic, but it is especially pitiful here. One of the richest habitats in the world has been cleared to make way for vast fields of sugar cane ②. More recently the Queensland authorities have designated ‘cassowary corridors’, or links between remaining patches of rain forest, to allow the birds to wander. It takes quite a bit of territory to satisfy a cassowary, and even more territory to give it a chance at finding a suitable mate. To get from one patch of forest to another means crossing busy roads, and the biggest threat to the southern cassowary (which has no predators) is the automobile. Speed bumps and cassowary crossing signs don't deter visitors from barreling along rain forest roads at high speed.

To the cassowary, the Daintree rain forest is a big, year-round buffet. Like coffee hipsters who won’t touch beans that have not first passed through a civet cat, some plants in Daintree won't even germinate until their seeds have transited a cassowary. The bird's nitrogen-rich turds give seedlings a huge advantage in the race for the canopy, and like doting parents frantic to get their children into Harvard, plants will go to great trouble to get their fruit into a cassowary. The itinerant and hungry bird is happy to oblige, eating its fill under a variety of trees that have specialized in making it happy, then walking several kilometers until it's timefor another feast. It deposits new generations of fruit trees as it goes. The cassowary eats, the plants grow, and both sides of the arrangement are happy. ③

This struggle for canopy is a feature of any forest, but it is unusually murderous in the tropics, where water and sunshine are abundant and there is no winter break. The first task of any seedling is to break through into sunlight, and plants will resort to desperate measures, including climbing all over their rivals until one or the other collapses under the weight. The rain forest only looks peaceful because we see it at a human time scale, and fail to notice the slow-motion deathmatch.

Given the effort they expend to attract cassowaries, plants look dimly on any third parties that try to crash the fruit party, especially third parties who can't be trusted to pass the seeds whole. Unfortunately for us, they solve this free-rider problem with poison. Despite the enormous diversity in species, and the abundance of fruit, there is almost nothing safe in the forest for people to eat. Through what one imagines to have been a miserable series of experiments, the aborigines have worked out protocols for how to eat some of this stuff without dying. There is a nut, for example, that if you cut it into thin wafers, wrap them in a cloth, leave the bundle suspended in a stream for three days to leach out the poison, pound it into a mash, and take care not to eat more than a small fingerful at one sitting (so you don't go blind), is edible. These are the snack options available in Daintree.

The rain forest finds other ways to be unwelcoming. The first plants to grow after a space has been cleared tend to be particularly awful, which means footpaths and sunny clearings are some of the more hazardous places to walk in the forest. My favorite of these pioneers is the vegetable kingdom’s shout-out to the nearby box jellyfish, a plant the normally unflappable Australians have named the ‘stinging tree’. Nomen omen. The stinging tree is covered in a myriad of tiny glass spines that embed themselves in your skin at the slightest touch. And because we are talking about Australia, the glass is coated in neurotoxin. The wound will keep hurting for weeks, and then it will start to itch.

My Aussie friend describes leaning against such a tree trunk with his hand to catch his balance, realizing only too late that it was an oversize stinging tree. It was a week before he could touch anything, and two months before his hand finally felt normal. The first night he spent an interesting evening with tweezers and a bottle of whisky. The recommended treatment, he learned later, is a depilatory wax strip. Given the amount of pain involved, it's fortunate that he didn't have access to a machete.

The stinging tree is not without a sense of humor. Its bright red fruit, if you can think of a way to remove the neurotoxic peach fuzz, is one of the few edible fruits in the forest.

Another way to pass some time in the sunny parts of Daintree is by hooking yourself on the lawyer vine, or wait-a-while. These beautiful names give you a sense of just how many thorns cover this aggressive, creeping vine. It catches on absolutely everything and uses its powers of attachment to climb up other plants (a standard strategy in the rain forest) towards the canopy, eventually crushing them under its own weight. Up close it looks a lot like a burr, if you have ever seen a burr dozens of meters long and as thick as a banana.

The final joke the Daintree rain forest plays on people isn’t obvious to the casual visitor, but catches many hikers unaware. Despite the name, it can be difficult to find fresh water when it’s not actively raining. And when it does start to rain, it rains torrentially, and you are liable to find your legs covered in leeches. Daintree takes its rain seasonally, during the period from December to April known as the ‘Big Wet’, and at other times hikers struggling up the Mount Sorrow trail have found themselves stranded in the dark, miserable and dessicated, surrounded by poisonous fruit and loud, mocking birds.

Until recently, a cassowary named Elvis guarded the approach to Mount Sorrow like some kind of bridge troll, preventing many people from even attempting the hike. This uncompromising bird patrolled the beach at the trailhead, holding one couple hostage for forty minutes, and on another occasion surprising an Indian tourist with a kick from behind as he photographed a sunset. The Port Douglas gazette reports, with a straight face, that the poor man “ran into the safety of the water”. His further fate is not recorded.

Elvis was eventually trapped and deported to some more remote part of Daintree, exiled for the crime of taking the fight too aggressively to The Man. The forest has been further defanged in a couple of places where biologists have set up ground-level boardwalks and elevated walkways that take you through the canopy. The view from these is spectacular. Very little of what goes on in this forest is visible from ground level, and the catwalks give a sense of just how specialized every plant and animal becomes in such a rich habitat. The view from up high, along with explanatory placards, also tips you off to the Daintree's big secret.

It turns out that this is one of the oldest ecosystems on the planet. I remember marveling when I visited Poland's last stretch of primeval forest that the patch had existed uninterrupted since the glaciers retreated from Central Europe 12,000 years ago. But the Daintree rain forest has been around for 180 million years, about ten thousand times as long. Before there was an Australia, before there were flowering plants, or cassowaries to eat their fruit, this forest was already growing. Through a fluke of geology and climate it has persisted all the way into our era, along with a selection of giant ferns and other relic plants found in no other part of the world. It is humbling to be in a place that predates not only your species, but your genus, family, and order, and remembers your class when they were just a bunch of scurrying, trembling little dinosaur treats. Given its incredible antiquity, it doesn't seem fair that we should now have the power to decide this forest's fate, but here we are.

① There is controversy over the cassowary's casque. The leading theories are that it is a simple case of sexual selection (like the peacock's tail) with no practical function, that it is a kind of crash helmet to protect the bird as it runs head-down through the forest, that it protects the bird's head from falling fruit, or that the cassowary uses the casque to dig through leaf litter. With great tact, the biologist Andrew Mack has pointed out that cassowaries do not run with their heads down, and that they invariably use their feet, rather than their heads, to rake through leaf litter. He implies but does not say outright that some of his fellow theorists might benefit by spending, say, ten minutes watching an actual cassowary rather than Road Runner cartoons. Mack does not exclude the possibility that the casque is just a sexual ornament, but he finds the fact that it is ideally structured to amplify sound at low frequencies, and connected to the bird's inner ears, provocative.

② Farmers and fishermen in Australia test the limits of human empathy. While I was in Cairns, for example, controversy ranged around the recent extension of the Great Barrier Reef marine park, opponents arguing that the expanded ban on fishing would harm the Cairns fishing industry, and proponents arguing that that was the whole goddamn point. If it were up to Australian farmers and fishermen, the Great Barrier Reef would be processed into bags of fish meal, the fish meal spread as fertilizer on land obtained by clearing the remaining rainforest, the fertilized land used to grow sugar, and the sugar used as raw material for some of the least appetizing desserts in the world. The fundamental question is this: do we prefer our biomass in the form of gorgeous reef and rain forest ecosystems, or Australians? Unfortunately, the only country that has any say in the matter is also the only one that finds the question hard to answer.

③ This approach to spreading seeds by making tasty fruit for large animals to swallow whole is very common (the technical name for it is megafaunal dispersal syndrome). It worked wonderfully until human beings began to spread out of Africa, hunting large animals on every other continent into extinction. And so we live in a world full of fruits—avocado, mango, papaya, honey locust, osage orange, gingko—whose seeds are designed to be pooped out by large animals, but who have been left without their animal partner. In this respect, the trees of northern Queensland are lucky to still have the cassowary. See The Ghosts of Evolution for the full, fascinating story.

Cape Tribulation

Sat, 15 Dec 2012 03:00:00 -0800

Because Captain Cook discovered the Great Barrier Reef the hard way, by running his ship onto it, the place names near his landfall tend a bit towards the emo. South of eponymous Cooktown are Mount Sorrow, Weary Bay, and a little east-facing bump called Cape Tribulation, so called because, as Cook wrote in his report of the 1777 voyage, ‘here began all our Troubles’.

For modern travelers, Cape Tribulation is likely to be the place all troubles end. The place is a postcard. As the northern terminus of the paved coastal road from Brisbane, the place has an air of romantic remoteness. Here the rain forest comes down nearly all the way to the water's edge, and only a crescent of beach, narrow or broad depending on the tide, separates the trees from the water. The coral sand is bright white, with only the occasional seafaring coconut from Polynesia as punctuation. The coconuts can't grow in this climate, but they're needed for atmosphere, and so central casting keeps sending them in across the Coral Sea.

The whole tableau is so lush and so over the top that you would roll your eyes at it if you saw it in a postcard rack. But Mother Nature is shameless, and in her hands the effect is magical. After a long drive through rain forest, the road ends at this magic stretch of beach, and the only thing you can think of is how fast you will be able to kick off your shoes and go dancing into the gentle waves.

But to go swimming here in November is unwise. If Cook had arrived at this time of year, his crew, in addition to being the first Europeans to see a kangaroo, might have discovered the box jellyfish. And then the place names would be things like 'Pain Cay', and the 'Bay of Screams'.

The box jellyfish is one of those Australian animals that are venomous beyond reason. It is a transparent creature about as big and as clever as a handbag, and although it subsists entirely on small fish and crustaceans, its three-meter long tentacles contain enough venom to kill an orchestra.①

The box jellyfish hunts by floating just off the beach and letting its tentacles drift in to the water's edge. The things that make northern Queensland beaches ideal for swimming—sandy beaches, constant sunshine, and the enormous breakwater of the Great Barrier Reef—also make it a paraside for the box jellyfish. Given that it is the most venomous creature in the sea, the total body count in Australia has been mercifully low, with sixty-four confirmed fatalities since 1883. Most victims in recent years have been children, whose smaller size means they need less tentacle contact to absorb a lethal dose. But even the slightest contact with the jellyfish produces a lifelong scar and a vicious sting (a common local name for it is the sea wasp). Despite the fierce summer sun, and the hundreds of miles of inviting beach, in three weeks in Queensland I will never see an unprotected person enter the water.

If you are being stung by a box jellyfish, and are of a philosophical bent, you can take comfort in knowing that the behavior is mindless. A jellyfish is a pretty decentralized thing, and its stinging tentacles are fully automated booby traps. Each one is covered with millions of microscopic structures called nematocysts, which are tiny poison harpoons rigged to fire when they brush against something that tastes like protein.② When triggered, the nematocysts fire with incredible speed, each little harpoon flipping inside out and leaving its casing with an acceleration of over five million G. Yet the structures are so rugged that you can reactivate a jellyfish tentacle that has dried in the sun just by getting it wet again.

People who get stung call the feeling memorable. Locals are careful to avoid the actual jellyfish; many of the stories you hear from them involve accidentally touching a fragment of tentacle that has broken off and drifted through a stinger net, or adhered to an anchor chain. It takes about two meters of tentacle contact for the sting to become life-threatening to an adult. At that point the pain must be indescribable, but it is at least brief. Jellyfish venom is the fastest-acting poison found in nature.

A friendly bus driver tells me the story of a local priest who dove headfirst into one of the things on a Port Douglas beach. “He was literally dead before his feet hit the water.” At most, the story exaggerates by two minutes, the scientifically attested time between initial sting and cardiac arrest. There is an antivenom available, but the only way it has been demonstrated to work is by pre-mixing it with the venom as it is administered. Until science perfects the anti-jellyfish, this antivenom will remain an expensive placebo.

Australians, being a hardy people, deal with the presence of the world's most dangerous marine animal with warning signs and vinegar. The vinegar helps deactivate any tentacles clinging to your skin so you can remove them without doing yourself more damage. The warning sign shows a picture of a swimmer in briefs being attacked by something out of H.P. Lovecraft, and cautions that ‘marine stingers are present in these waters during the summer months’. The committee in charge of creating the signs presumably considered adding words like "danger" or "no swimming", but found them over the top. They try not to coddle you in Australia.③

'Marine stingers' is the local blanket term for several species of these awful things, which biologists call the cubozoa. The box jellyfish proper (chironex fleckeri) has a family of little peanut-sized relatives called irukandji. Despite their tiny size, these tiny jellyfish can still unfurl about a meter of spider-web-like tentacles. Unlike the box jelly, irukandji have a mild sting, so you may not even notice one has touched you until the delayed side effects set in about half an hour later. At that point, however, you will most certainly notice, as will anyone close enough to hear the screaming. The jellyfish scientist Lisa Gershwin describes irukandji syndrome like this:

It gives you incredible lower back pain that you would think of as similar to an electric drill drilling into your back. It gives you relentless nausea and vomiting. How does vomiting every minute to two minutes for up to 12 hours sound? Incredible. It gives waves of full body cramps, profuse sweating...the nurses have to wring out the bed sheets every 15 minutes. It gives you very great difficulty in breathing where you just feel like you can't catch your breath. It gives you this weird muscular restlessness so you can't stop moving but every time you move it hurts. It gives you a feeling of impending doom. Incredible. Patients believe they're going to die and they're so certain of it that they'll actually beg their doctors to kill them just to get it over with. And all of this from this little tiny jellyfish.

The irukandji poses a special problem for scuba divers, because the symptoms of irukandji syndrome are hard to distinguish from acute decompression sickness. Failing to notice the sting can add an incredibly expensive visit to a hyperbaric chamber to your already dismal day.

What is truly scary about the marine stingers is how little we still know about them. In 2007 an American tourist, Robert King, wrapped up his Australian vacation by discovering a completely new species of irukandji jellyfish, which the Australians graciously (and posthumously) named malo kingi in his honor. In the process, he disproved the conventional wisdom that irukandji syndrome is not life-threatening to healthy people.

The idea that, in 2007, a man could go to a popular vacation resort and be killed by a jellyfish unknown to science is not one that sends you skipping into the Coral Sea. But although these animals are ubiquitous, we know almost nothing about them. The life cycle of the irukandji jellyfish in particular is a total mystery. They occur worldwide, but no one knows where they spawn, what they look like in their juvenile form, or what role they play in the ecosystem. And no one has any idea how the venom works.

The box jellyfish, despite being much larger, poses similar problems. The sessile form of the box jellyfish—its alter ego for half the year—has been found in nature only once, back in 1985. Even such elementary questions like how well it can see (it has twenty-four eyes) or what provokes it to move from feeding site to feeding site remain unanswered. Just last year, researchers discovered that one species of the cursed things can actually navigate, using an upward-pointing eye to detect when it has strayed too far from its feeding grounds under mangrove trees. How an animal with no brain coordinates such sophisticated behavior is—wait for it—a mystery.

The most pressing question about these weaponized jellyfish is what effect sea warming will have on their distribution. Northern Queenslanders have learned to live with their beaches shut down for half the year, but you can imagine the effect a vigorous population of irukandji (which are found worldwide) would have on tourism in Florida.

One of the few things we do know is that mangrove swamps like the one at Cape Tribulation are where the box jelly spends its childhood. Here it lives as a tiny polyp on the underside of rocks, zapping brine shrimp and other tiny animals, until some unknown stimulus makes it assume its adult medusa form. When it grows big enough to start catching fish, its venom changes composition to better attack vertebrates, and (from our point of view) becomes much more potent. Sometime in October or November, the summer rains wash the jellyfish out of the swamps (or do they migrate? No one knows), and so ends another year's swimming season.

Flooding right out with them is another excellent reason to stay out of the water, the saltwater crocodile. Crocodiles are numerous in northern Queensland and all through northern Australia and New Guinea. They prefer a quiet life in estuaries and rivers, but as their name implies they can do a limited amount of swimming out in the ocean, usually to commute home after a particularly vigorous monsoon. They have also been found to drift surprising distances on ocean currents, using them like sailors to move hundreds of kilometers with minimal effort.

It's not common to spot a crocodile during the daytime, but you can sometimes see their landing places on the river banks. They are scary in direct proportion to how much you learn about them; I calibrate my fear by the fact that the same Australian authorities who found no need to add "no swimming" to marine stinger signs have written WARNING in large red capital letters on the crocodile signs by the river.

The salt-water croc is furtive but not shy, and right where the water becomes too fresh for the jellyfish is where you need to worry most about the crocodiles. There are big billboards warning about them at the entrance to the Daintree river ferry, but to me the best preventative is a visit to the crocodile enclosure at the Port Douglas wildlife park. The giant animals lie motionless in the sun, but very rarely one will move, and when it does it goes like lightning.

Visitors' guides stress the importance of “crocodile safety” in the same gentle language they use to warn against sunstroke. The universal theme in crocodile attack stories is that of complete surprise, the victim usually disappearing under the water before they can get out one good yell. The crocodile prefers to store its supper to age a little bit before eating, so the aftermath of many crocodile attacks is a grisly hunt for both the reptile and the cached body.

In a better world, box jellyfish and crocodile would be mortal enemies, battling each other out in the shallows like the kraken and the whale, but as best I can tell the creatures coexist in the tidal zone in perfect friendship and harmony, possibly buying each other beers after a hard day's work of making it impossible for a hot and weary traveler to put so much as a toe in the water.

① Since orchestras and box jellyfish both vary considerably in size, it's hard to make the claim unequivocal. Attention to tentacle placement, and the appropriate selection of larger cnidrians, would presumably play a key role. The universally cited figure is that one box jellyfish has enough venom to kill sixty people, but I suspect this is an estimate based on the jellyfish having sixty tentacles. At the limit, big orchestras like the Cleveland Symphony (100 members) might require two individuals, and it could take as many as six to dispatch the Mormon Tabernacle Choir (360). But in this era of budget cuts and shrinking audiences, you can be confident that one chironex fleckeri will have a powerful effect on the evening's programme almost anywhere.

② Many lifeguards in Australia pull nylon stockings over their limbs and torso as a cheap form of jellyfish protection, as nylon does not trigger the chemical receptors on the nematocyst. Lycra 'stinger suits' work on the same principle.

③ And they lack the resources to coddle! In researching anything about Australia, you are liable to come across an arresting reminder of just how big and empty the country is. For example: ”The Northern Territory has a coastline of 10 950 km, and the Royal Darwin Hospital (RDH) is the 300-bed referral hospital servicing the region."

Total Eclipse of the Sun

Sun, 18 Nov 2012 21:00:00 -0800

The Air New Zealand person checking me in for my flight in San Francisco tells me the plane is unusually full. “Is there some kind of conference over there?”

I explain about the total eclipse in northern Queensland, and how the plane is probably full of astronomy nerds like me. Of course there are the ones who chase every eclipse, but there's also a contingent who has seen the crappy hand nature is dealing us this decade and decided Australia is the best chance we'll get.

And what a crappy hand it is! What you quickly learn from eclipse travel is that most of the Earth is remote, and the parts that aren't remote are cloudy. A total eclipse happens somewhere every one or two years, but the spectacle is limited to a narrow strip of land rarely more than a hundred miles across. The Moon's shadow crosses the earth like a reverse searchlight, skipping along for thousands of miles from sunrise to sunset ①. The eclipse in any one spot lasts for only a couple of minutes ②, and that is only if you can get within a few miles of the centerline, which mother nature has selected with perverse disregard for our convenience.

But don't take my word for it—look at the facts:

The 2009 eclipse looked like a friendly, populist eclipse, crossing India, China and Japan. But its late July date ensured that almost everyone in its path saw it through thick overcast, an effect easy to reproduce at home for free with a stopwatch and a good set of Venetian blinds. ③
The total eclipse of 2010 was almost comically unreachable, visible only from wallet-obliterating Easter Island, or else as a sunset blip from extreme southern South America.
There was no total eclipse in 2011.
In 2013, the moon's shadow will cross equatorial Africa, right through the thunderstorm factory known as the Intertropical Convergence Zone. Most of the eclipse track traverses country that is expensive to reach and has few or no roads.
In 2015, whatever tiny tourist industry exists in the the Faroe Islands is going to be steamrollered by people willing to pay a fortune to see what stratus clouds look like in the dark.
The theme of the almost wilfully pelagic 2016 eclipse is "Expensive Cruise or Borneo?"
And then finally in 2017 there is relief in the form of an all-American, Republican eclipse crossing most of America's red states.

And for those of us who can't wait, there is the total eclipse of November 13, 2012, in northern Australia. The destination is remote, and since the eclipse is happening in the tropics on the cusp of monsoon season, the chances for clear skies are poor. But it is the best of a bad bunch, and the consolation prizes are frankly incredible: kangaroos, cassowaries, the Coral Sea, and the Great Barrier Reef.

Friday, November 9

The in-flight map on Air New Zealand is lovely (like everything on that magical airline) but it poses a design challenge. How do you keep a featureless blue square fresh and interesting for fourteen hours? If I have failed to truly appreciate the size of the Pacific Ocean before starting this trip, the error has been corrected by the time we finish the six hour hop over 'the Ditch' from Auckland to Cairns.

If you look at a map of the eastern half of Australia, far northern Queensland is the pointy part that sticks out like a spike on a Prussian helmet. The top half of the spike (the Cape York penninsula) is very remote rain forest, but the bottom half down is full of hotels, resorts, sugar cane plantations, and sleepy inland towns. This is Australia's Florida. You come here in the winter when you want to sit on the beach, or when you're in college and the idea of drinking in a room you've rented with fourteen other students is still fresh and appealing.

The eclipse will actually start to the west, in a part of Australia called the 'Top End', then cross the Gulf of Carpentaria, traverse Queensland, and head off to sea to entertain rich people. An absolutely exhaustive review of the local climate, prevailing winds, topography and cloud dynamics has reached the conclusion that it is probably a good idea to just go sit on the beach. So I have placed my bets on Port Douglas, a resorty town close to the centerline.

Sunday, November 11

Given how far I've traveled, the journey to Australia is surprisingly comfortable. Cairns is a small, tropical airport, and the little minivan takes me sixty kilometers to Port Douglas along a postcard drive. The nice people at my vacation rental have set out two pairs of eclipse glasses and a special edition of the Port Douglas gazette, with a commemorative sixteen-page eclipse supplement folded in among the regular articles about council by-laws and crocodile safety. Some sixty thousand people are converging on northern Queensland for the event. As this is normally the off season, the tourist sector is not worried at all about handling this large influx of visitors. In fact, it would be fair to describe the tourist sector as rubbing its hands.

But there is perfidy afoot! There have been several reports on television and in the international press about hotel rooms being sold out in Port Douglas, even though I still see vacancy signs all around town. This kind of wet work, I will hear from several people, can only be the work of neighboring Cairns, a town as far removed from basic Australian values of fair play as it is from the eclipse centerline. Cairns will stop at nothing in its efforts to steal tourists and Port Douglas, shackled as it is by profound decency and kindness, can do nothing.

There are some real shortages, too. All the rental cars in the region have been booked (strangely enough, many of them just for the day of the eclipse, the one time you don't want to be anywhere near a car). And booking a flight at the last minute is almost impossible. It takes more than an eclipse, or spring break, or holiday, or any kind of completely predictable spike in tourism, for Qantas to adjust its Queensland schedule. The radio tells a sad story of a local worthy who has won an eco-sustainability award but is unable to fly to Brisbane to collect it, for want of a plane.

Tuesday, November 13

I get up early to watch the sunrise, partly because jet lag makes it easy, partly because I want to see what conditions might be like tomorrow, and mostly from my irrational fear that every one of us has done the date math wrong. The eclipse is marked on November 13 in my date book, and while I believe in the International Date Line, I don't believe in it enough to sleep in.

5:30 AM

I take a short walk down to the beach, where the sun is rising into a belt of clouds on the horizon. Port Douglas is at 16 degrees latitude, closer to the equator than I've ever been, and the ocean here is one giant heat engine, converting sunlight and humidity into cumulus clouds and sadness. The conveyor belt of tenacious little puffy clouds starts forming at dawn at low altitude and churns through the rest of the day. The little clouds move fast, so it's hard to tell even half an hour ahead of time whether the sun will be visible. But they are awfully numerous.

Despite the early hour, I see many people on the beach reconnoitering. Some fellows are setting up a tripod, others are just standing and squinting at the sunrise.

A nice thing about Port Douglas is that the view is very democratic. The best vantage will be from aptly-named Four Mile Beach, which faces due east. Like all Australian beaches, and despite the efforts of the Sheraton to stake out a wide claim along its property, it is open to the public. No one is going to have to fight anyone for a spot.

6:40 AM

The cloud has thickened into overcast. If the eclipse had been today, it would have been rained out. I get on my bike and go to my happy place, the Port Douglas Wildlife Park, where Cassie the cassowary is about to have her breakfast. The wildlife park is a large enclosure run by worthy conservationists, and the less carnivorous animals in it roam free. The place is a reminder that depite the suburban surroundings, this really is Australia. Like all sane creatures in Queensland, the animals take naps in the worst of the midday heat, but at opening hours everyone is active and squawking or hopping along, in search of treats.

2:12 PM

I purchase, for a princely sum, a crappy little alarm clock. The price is absurd until I remind myself that I'm not buying a timepiece, but eclipse insurance.

5:00 PM

This is about the time when the region was supposed to be shutting down. Based on the press coverage, I expected fires on the horizon and crying children in the streets. Instead, it's quiet and peaceful outside, except for the squawking of the pseudo-chicken, a ridiculous ground fowl that runs through backyards on its big red feet crying "ca-caw!" late into the night.

Wednesday, November 14

4:10 AM

I have set two alarms, arranged for a wake up call, and have been waking anyway every hour out of excitement. It helps that I need to run the air conditioner, and I'm even grateful for the raspy squawking of that pseudo-chicken. Anything to keep me from having the most humiliating eclipse story I can imagine.

Figuring I've taken enough chances with sleep, I get out of bed. Outside it's sticky hot and completely black except for the streetlights. There's an impressive infinity of stars overhead, which encourages me.

4:30 AM

I walk down the little path to the beach. Already I have perfected the North Queensland Morning Walk, a kind of cross between the Hitler salute and a rhythmic "get up and dance" arm pump, suggesting that MC computer tourist is about to spit some rhymes. The flailing is not elegant, but keeps my face free of some of the spider webs that little Eldritch abominations have spent the night weaving across every footpath. ⑤

I cross through a little wood, feeling grateful for the moonlight that is making it easier to see where I'm going. Then my mind spins for a while and I realize that this can't be moonlight, not unless I've made a really huge mistake, and looking up I see that the glow is coming instead from thick clouds to the south, over Cairns.

"Cairns!"

The eastern horizon still looks fairly clear. That means nothing, because clouds here can develop so quickly. But we are creatures of hope.

On the beach, the most prominent sight is a glowing cruise ship perched just off shore, lit up like a chandelier. it looks unearthly and regal, like it has descended from heaven. Daylight will reveal that this is possibly the gayest vessel to ever ply the ocean sea, the word AUSTRALIA festooned across its side in giant rainbow balloon letters, but right now it shines with quiet dignity. On the beach, some doofus is shining his flashlight around, dazzling people. I can see isolated silhouettes, and about three dark objects that can only be a lurking salt-water crocodile.

4:41 AM

The ground fowl have concluded their performance. Now the more twittery morning birds are at it.

4:55 AM

The sky to the east is becoming a pretty shade of lavender, and the sky above is has gone dark blue, with only the bright stars remaining. I am grateful that M J Minnaert has already done the scutwork of describing the minute-by-minute color changes of a sunrise.

A number of people are arriving and getting set up on the beach. I am not normally a member of the cult of the marine tropical sunrise. I think things happen too fast in the tropics, and often times the main event is just a big orange ball popping up and trying to give you cancer. I like sunrise at high latitudes, from a skyscraper or mountaintop, when you can watch the thing drag itself above the horizon and think your thoughts. But it's hard to look away from what's happening now on the eastern horizon.

5:10 AM

The sky is getting bright and orange, with silhouettes of clouds. Clear sky is beating clouds, but not by much. Now it will be a bit of a race between the sun and the moon. The test will be how much damp air the newly risen sun can churn up as it hits its stride, versus how much of a cooling effect the moon will have as it starts to cover its partner.

5:25 AM

The beach is full of joggers and dogs, in addition to the growing contingent of spectators, and the mood is a kind of festive anxiety. I am pleased to see that Australians consider 5:30 AM a perfectly decent time to start drinking beer. I run into my hosts setting up chairs, but I'm too excited to sit still and will spend the rest of the eclipse pacing.

5:43 AM

The sun is up and burning everyone. Nobody minds today. Just stay visible, is all we ask.

6:10 AM

It's going to be close. The sun has gone behind a big cloud and is radiating out angelic rays, which we can trace back to see where it's hiding. It looks like the sun might rise above the clouds in time, but there's also lots of overcast building up in the south (Cairns!) and the wind is blowing all this mess northwards towards the beach.

6:23 AM

The suspense is awful! Looking the four-mile length of the beach, I can see spots of sunlight that open up and then disappear again over the course of a minute. Most of the time, we are in the shade. When the sun does peer out, we can see through the eclipse glasses that it's had a big bite taken out of it.

6:33 AM

The cloud is still blocking our view, and the light has become noticeably dimmer. The light is fading fast!

Some intrepid soul is flying over the clouds in an ultralight.

6:37 AM

Things happen quickly. The photos capture what it looks like to see the sun turn into a crescent and then wink out. What they don't capture is that feeling of the world fading out just as if someone were turning a dimmer switch. It's darker and cooler than sunset, even though the relative colors are those of a bright, sunny day. The effect hits a big red button in the reptile brain, saying 'something is not right'. The closest I can remember to it is those summer storms in Illinois where it would get really dark in a matter of seconds, and you knew you had best go hide under something sturdy.

6:38 AM

Totality! And we can see it! The beach goes completely dark, except for hundreds of flashbulbs from fools who have forgotten to set their camera correctly. I fumble to get a picture, and my flash goes off. The sun has tricked us all! It was behind a very thin cloud at the end, but so dim that it looked like it was blocked out. Now it's clearly visible, a dark hole punched in the sky, surrounded by the corona. I don't have the equipment for a precise reading, but I estimate the metalness of the eclipse at 2.4 megaslayers. I am getting good value for my eclipse-viewing dollar.

The beach is whooping and hollering, looking at the apparition in the sky. The cruise ship is lit up like a chandelier again, and all around the horizon you can see the red and orange sunset colors, where the sunlight from a hundred kilometers away is filtering through to us. Up in the sky the planets and brightest stars are visible, but no one can look at that since we're all riveted by the sight of the ridiculous, over the top, airbrushed-on-the-side-of-a-van thing hanging in the sky where the sun used to be. I am thankful I have not taken any drugs.

6:40 AM

A single dot of sunlight emerges through some lunar crevice, and for an instant it's reflected in the ocean, like a distant lighthouse at night. An instant later it's too bright to look at, and then daylight starts coming slowly back again. I notice that high tide has snuck up on all of us in the past hour and is menacing our feet. The mood on the beach is as jolly as I've ever seen people before seven in the morning. My guess is that half the crowd is from the region, and half are visitors, but everybody is glad they came out, and that the clouds didn't steal the eclipse from us. I am happy that the timing of the eclipse gave everyone in Port Douglas the chance to come see it, not just us tourists.

6:42 AM

I stop to take a photo of an adorable basset hound sitting on the beach. He's having none of it. First the very sun was plucked from the sky, and now someone is up in his grill. It's too much. He goes over the edge and enters a barking frenzy.

7:15 AM

Everyone is walking from the beach back to their homes and cars. The eclipse won't technically end for another few minutes, until the moon has completely moved off the sun's face, but for us it's all over.

7:55 AM

On the drive-time radio show in Port Douglas, Australia, the host promises to bring on an astrologer to talk about “what the eclipse means for your life”. But for me that's the opposite of what makes it wonderful. The eclipse doesn't even know you exist. Nature provides a brief alignment of the Moon and Sun that is completely foreordained, immutable, and will happen with Swiss precision for another billion or so years, whether or not anyone is looking. It is on us to aggregate into litttle bubbles of protoplasm, develop eyes, emerge onto land, discover fire, evolve language, ask the brainier among us where the thing will happen, and make the appropriate travel arrangements.

A good way to feel small is to look at the Wikipedia list of future solar eclipses, and think about that fact that between one and another of them you are going to disappear, but the eclipses will keep happening, about one a year, until the moon finally drifts too far away from the earth to perform the magic trick anymore.

It's the greatest thing that happens in the sky. Find one on the list you can go see, and see it!

① Exercise for the reader: explain why an eclipse must always start at sunrise and end at sunset.

② The longest a total eclipse can last is 7'31". But it's going to be over a hundred years before the next seven-minute eclipse.

③ I had hobbled across the world on an injured foot to see the 2009 eclipse, traveling with my friend Brendan O'Kane to a mountain resort built by the Europeans in colonial days for when Shanghai summers got unendurable. The resort, Moganshan, is couple of hours inland from Shanghai, a complex of old stone buildings set in an upland bamboo forest, and at the time it included a terrific cafe run by a half-assimilated Brit ④ who had been attempting to make his life there.

The day of the eclipse dawned overcast, like we feared it would, although here and there were thinner patches of cloud that momentarily showed the disk of the sun. There were other Europeans staying in the hotel with us, including two French couples with serious eclipse fever. The men had brought crates of photographic equipment numerous enough to put on a decent summer theater production, and giant lenses like barrels. Like all true connoisseurs, their passion for eclipse chasing had seared away any traces of actual enjoyment, and the mood was grim as they decided whether to chance it on the stone patio, or drive somewhere in search of a gap in the clouds. Their wives had the quiet and tight-faced look of women who are earning triple-overtime relationship points.

The rest of us stayed put, eating incongruous but tasty English breakfasts under the cloud cover. For me it was an easy choice - the only thing that seemed worse than getting rained out of an eclipse while on crutches was being stuck in a car on a Chinese mountain road while it happened. Meanwhile, tripods were going up all around me. The urge to photograph a total eclipse, the one thing you know with moral certainty that professionals will be taking and sharing far better pictures of than you, is as profound as it is illogical.

The sun teased us a few times, appearing as a white disk with a bite cut out of it through the veil of stratus clouds, but they never cleared. In fact, just for laughs, the fog came in. Then right on cue it got dark, rapidly and utterly dark, as if some large object were interposing itself between the clouds and the sun. It felt like the onset of the worst and darkest thunderstorm of your life. Then for four minutes it was nighttime. Cars below were honking (I wondered if any of the drivers had been taken by surprise). The lanky fourteen-year-old Chinese kid who had been sitting on the nearby wall took out his guitar and started playing a soft rock instrumental. We all toasted each other in the dark. And then the light came back up, and it was over.

④ I later learned that the Brit, Mark Kitto, was a pretty famous guy. Earlier this year, after years of frustration, he published a heartfelt and thoughtful rant about why it was no longer possible for him to work in China. Having kept the cafe's business card in my wallet for three years in hopes of going back to Moganshan, I was sad to read it, though I found his reasons convincing.

⑤ The place is called Queensland, but how long could Queen Elizabeth survive if you dropped her here, naked and alone? I'm guessing no more than four hours.

Drum Bun

Tue, 25 Sep 2012 03:00:00 -0700

Botoșani! Botoșani! Botoșani!

What poet can sing your praises? Whose arms are thick enough to heft that industrial-strength lyre? Whose inner eye can see past your grit and mud, your packs of ownerless little nippy dogs, your undrainable streets, your unsportingly silent mosquito, and celebrate the glowing, inner you?

I guess it's no coincidence that Botoșani gave us the great bard Eminescu, the Romanian national poet and only man of sufficent tonnage to handle the job. I certainly could never do it. I loved Romanians, loved their country; I even loved Moldavia, but felt like I met my match with Botoșani.

And it was always so damn hard to get out of there.

In the spring of 2009, Diane (who was doing a Peace Corps stint in Romania) decided to go on vacation with her American friend. She needed to get to the airport in Cluj-Napoca, to catch a discount flight to Italy. Rather than condemning her to an overnight bus journey or train trip on the local bone-shaker, we decided it might be fun to rent a car and make the drive over the mountains. In the process, we could see a chunk of the country that is ordinarily hard to get to.

The car rental place was (like so many things in Botoșani) an ad-hoc outfit run out of somebody’s back office. The proprietors seemed surprised that someone was actually renting their car, but rallied quickly. We filled out the handwritten rental forms in pentuplicate, participated in the fusillade of stamping that accompanies any official transaction in Romania, and set off on the Friday before Easter in a growly diesel Renault.

Urban catastrophe though it may be, Botoșani is surrounded by lush agricultural land, and it does not take many minutes of driving on a beautiful spring day before you have a song on your lips, and begin to think the great bard Eminescu may have been on to something.

The first part of our drive is the familiar road to Suceava, the city you go to when you want to go somewhere else. We pass the large metal stork statue near the local airport. Spring is far enough along that the real storks have started making their way back to Romania, too. They are big, goofy birds who walk through fields with a quiet dignity, looking for frogs to eat. Whether because they eat pests, or set a good example by mating for life, storks are universally beloved. You can see their big nests on top of some power poles and a lucky roof or two. It's a longstanding superstition that having a pair of storks nest on top of your house brings luck, so many people will set up a platform in hopes of enticing a couple.

Botoșani and Suceava are both in a region called Bucovina famous for its old painted monasteries. To my regret, there's no time to visit them now, though some of the gorgeous wooden churches are visible from the road. I am told there are guesthouses you can stay in along the way, where the table groans under the weight of your breakfast. Romanians are deeply religious, and somehow the wooden Orthodox churches survived the insanity of the Ceaușescu era, and are lovingly tended now.

A BRIEF INTERLUDE ON DRIVING IN THE FORMER EASTERN BLOC

Limited-access highways in the style of the German Autobahn don't really exist in Eastern Europe. Every country has a couple of dozen kilometers of the stuff built for demonstration purposes, in hopes of luring more European Union funding, but apart from these show pieces the road system consists of two-lane roads with lots of roundabouts and no restrictions on traffic. However many legs or wheels your means of transport has, and however low your top speed, you are welcome on the roads of Romania.

Passenger cars must contend with horse-drawn carts, overloaded trucks, cyclists and pedestrians for control of roads that double as the main street of every village they pass through.

Home builders in a Romanian village approach the main road like a basketball player muscling in towards the basket. They try to get in as close as possible, back side first. Houses are never built to face the road, which was traditionally a place of mud, dust, and horse crap. Rather, there is a big windowless wall with a tiny gate leading to the courtyard, where you find the real entryway. From the driver’s perpective, this turns each village into a twisting tunnel of masonry, with pedestrians pinned between the walls like cattle in a chute. Nor has any provision been made for the speed of modern auto traffic. The road whipsaws between buildings at odd angles with no warning, until abruptly you are back out in the fields and everyone is pretending they're on the Autobahn again.

The typical Romanian driver is a man of faith. He sees the road as it is — a densely congested, shattered series of uneven concrete blocks — but does not let the sordid reality obscure the promise of what it could be: a ribbon of silken asphalt winding from horizon to horizon, without another car in sight, if only he could get past the moron in front of him. And, he feels, God will reward those who put their faith in Him, floor it and swing out on a blind curve. Look in any truck or taxi and you will find a little icon of a saint dangling from the rear view mirror. This is basically an admission that the driver does not expect to survive without sustained and direct divine intervention, something that I will find easier to believe after returning home from this road trip.

To pass in an underpowered car on a two-lane road requires pretending that the middle of the road is a kind of third lane. Drivers coming from the other direction will believe the same thing, creating a tendency to turn any straight stretch of road into a game of chicken, as two Dacias with throttles wide open simultaneously pull out from behind their respective poultry trucks into a showdown.

Where the road enters a village or crosses some particularly hilly terrain, passing is just flat-out prohibited and everyone settles into a sulky, single file convoy.

The two-lane passing game is not unique to Romania. But the Romanians have brought it to a higher pitch. Not content to just plant big death trees lining the road like they do in France, the Romanians have added a kind of concrete-lipped slit trench the exact width of a car tire along the edge of the asphalt. I assume that, like blood gutters in a bayonet, these trenches are intended for drainage. The ditches are not always there — sometimes there is just an unpretentious dropoff into an adjacent valley.

These six elements: all-purpose roads, huge variations in speed, constrained shoulders, novice drivers, Balkan ideas of manhood, and mountainous terrain - conspire with the awful state of the pavement to make memories of driving in Romania ones that will last a (possibly very abbreviated) lifetime.

A BRIEF INTERLUDE ON ROMANIAN GEOGRAPHY

Cluj (pronounced ‘kluge’) is an old Transylvanian city in the northwestern part of the country. Botoșani lies in the pancake-flat eastern strip called Moldavia, not far from the Ukrainian and Moldovan borders. To get from Botoșani to Cluj, you have to cross the Carpathian mountains.

Everyone in Romania will tell you the country is shaped like a goldfish. To me, it has always looked more like an overturned jug, with the Black Sea spilling out. The Carpathians come in from the top and cut about halfway down the middle before turning sharply to the west just before Ploiești.

This geological double-take divides the country into several mutually inconvenient regions.

The strip between the mountains and the Moldovan border, where we lived, is a flat, fertile plain identical in every way to the fields of Ukraine, Poland and Moldova.

South and east of the mountains is the Danube delta, a swampy wetland and summer vacation paradise that serves roughly the role of Florida in Romanian life.

Along the north and west of the country are flat bits with historical ties to Serbia and Hungary, of which they form a natural extension.

Squeezed between the mountains and the Bulgarian border is the province of Wallachia, historically the most accessible and easiest to oppress by Turkish neighbors, and home to Bucharest and most of the country's population.

And in the center of Romania, where the mountain range makes its bend, is Transylvania.

To American ears, the name immediately conjures vampires, or at least early childhood lessons about counting things. But the literal meaning of the name is just “beyond the forest”①. In German and Slavic-speaking countries, Transylvania has a more evocative name, Siedmiogród, or Siebenbürgen, that translates to ‘Seven Cities’.

A BRIEF INTERLUDE ON EARLY EUROPEAN MIGRATIONS, OR WHY THERE ARE SEVEN CITIES IN TRANSYLVANIA

A very long time ago, the Eurasian steppe was full of hordes. The hordes had names and histories, but were all basically mounted nomads who had indestructible little horses and were good at shooting people. Sometimes, a horde out in Central Asia would pick a fight with a neighboring horde, and it would start a domino effect from west to east, ending when some disposessed horde finally galloped out into Europe.

Eastern Europe at the time was full of fat settled Franks and beefy Slavs, good at tilling the soil, but no match for the mounted horrors from the steppe. At some point in this process, the nomadic Hungarians arrived from Siberia, and quickly acquired such a taste for European looting that they proved impossible to get rid of, spending the best part of a century sacking the stuffing out of places as remote as Spain and Italy.

At that point, perhaps out of sheer fatigue, the Hungarians decided to settle down.

The place they picked was the Carpathian basin, a flat bowl of land comprising modern-day Hungary, northwest Romania, and parts of Slovakia and Serbia. It was nice, fertile, completely flat ground protected by the Carpathian mountains in the east and the Alps in the West. A good place to graze horses, a nice place to raise a family.

The problem was how to prevent the next group of nomads from coming out of the steppe and out-Hungarianing the Hungarians at their own game. So the Hungarian king undertook to fortify the Carpathian mountain passes, the only useful natural obstacle between him and his old friends out east.

Lacking manpower, he turned to western Germany and Luxembourg, and invited colonists in those overpopulated lands to come to Transylvania and build some castles. This group came to be known as the Transylvanian Saxons (still one of the finest things you can name a sports team). The Hungarians promised the Saxons autonomy and a good cut of the merchant traffic that came through the mountain passes. The Saxons, handy with a mortar and wise to a deal, agreed, and built seven beautiful cities.

So this is why, in the center of modern Romania, there is a province that speaks almost exclusively Hungarian, and in that province lie seven German cities called Kronstadt, Schäßburg, Mediasch, Hermannstadt, Mühlbach, Bistritz and Clausenburg②.

A RETURN TO THE GRIPPING STORY OF A ROAD TRIP TO CLUJ-NAPOCA

The rolling countryside is pretty in the springtime. The only thing that mars the landscape are the telegraph and power poles, which for whatever reason are made of poured concrete rather than wood or metal, and have that instantly dingy look that was only achievable under advanced socialism.

West of Suceava, as we enter the forest, the drive grows hilly and dusk begins to descend. As we enter the high foothills and approach Transylvania, a sinister orange full moon pops up, as if on cue, over a ridgeline. A solitary wolf fails to howl in the distance — he must have the night off.

Our entry into Transylvania does mark the start of a night of terror, but for completely mundane reasons. As I reach the bottom of a gradual downhill curve, the road suddenly turns from smooth concrete into a chaos of loose. Someone has cut a wide trench across the pavement and, satisfied with a job well done, left it unmarked and invisible. For a moment I fear I might lose control of the car.

Further on, just as my pulse is settling, we come across a railroad track. The lights are blinking and the semaphores are down, but they are only about a meter long, barely reaching over the packed earth along the edge of the road. I stop to wonder at this just as a train thunders across our path.

“You have got to be kidding.”

Around ten o'clock, we arrive in Bistrița, the setting of Bram Stoker's Dracula. This is one of those seven German cities, but the name comes from the Slavic phrase for 'fast water'. It's a beautiful, clean town full of trees. I remember being particularly impressed by the freshly-painted, functioning crosswalks, an undreamed-of luxury in our corner of the country. Bistrița is not shy in the pursuit of the vampire tourism dollar. We pass a hotel called the Golden Crown, lifted directly from Stoker's novel, along with several other Dracula landmarks before reaching our hotel.

A very un-vampire-like young man with careful English greets us at the door. We appear to be the only guests in the entire hotel, and briefly I am filled with hope that I'll hear the Tocatta and Fugue blaring in some distant attic as he escorts us up the stairs with a dripping candelabra. Instead, he asks us if we have eaten, and when we say we have not, he rouses the hotel staff to make us supper. The meal is delicious but hard to enjoy, given that we seem to have gotten at least four people out of bed to cook. As we eat, our host hovers over a computer console at the other end of the dining room, putting together a playlist for us.

After dinner, he takes us up to our room. In the lobby and on the landing we see some some strange cushioned platforms about a meter square, with joystick-like handles at opposite corners; they look like something you might use for physical therapy, or an excessively comfortable torture device. We ask our host about them on our way out of the dining room.

“This week we have been hosting a Skanderbeg tournament,” he explains.

Noting our blank faces, he apologizes for his English and tries again.

“Skanderbeg. Do you know it? For the men with big mushrooms?”

I take some time to reflect on this question as we continue up to our room. It gives me comfort to know that, since I could not possibly become more confused than I am now, I can only grow less confused later. I prove this to myself with calculus. Little theorems like this make my stay in Romania easier.

Diane, meanwhile, has solved the mystery and is silently shaking in her corner of the elevator. “Muscles,” she whispers when we're alone in the room. “He meant the men with large muscles.” And so we discover that Skanderbeg is the Romanian term for arm-wrestling③. I peer into the hall with new curiosity, wondering how many asymmetrical large-armed men are slumbering in the hotel, flexing as they dream of victory. But the place feels completely empty.

We wake up in bright sunlight and descend to see the same faces who served us the night before, bringing out our breakfast with the same boundless solicitude. Breakfast, of course, is a cold plate, but it’s the most lavish one I've seen even in Romania, a country that takes cold plates seriously, a peacock tail of sliced salami, cheeses, radish, lettuce, ham, and even tiny little meatballs.

Coffee and eggs materialize the moment we sit down, and I seriously begin to wonder if we've been mistaken for hotel inspectors, clandestinely rating the place for a guidebook. We linger over breakfast, but either the Skanderbeg athletes are late risers, or they have already gone their way, and we never see them. I want to move in to this hotel and live in it forever. But there is a plane to catch, and the car is due back the next day.

Transylvania by daylight is lovely. There are lots of pine trees, lots of birds, and the roads are much better here. It is unfortunate that all over the province they have started clearing brush by burning, obscuring the mountains with a dirty haze. The smoke will persist for another couple of weeks, obscuring what would otherwise be a picture postcard view. Even with the haze, it's the most beautiful part of the country I have seen so far.

It takes us about two hours to make the gradual descent westwards. The Cluj airport is one of those little regional airports that has been caught unawares by the explosion of budget airlines in Europe at the turn of the millenium. The terminal is bare of any amenities, there is just a large open floor into which a long queue of people has been folded, waiting for Wizz! airlines to start check-in. I leave Diane to her discount fate and turn the car around for the long drive home.

I take a more southerly route back to see the Hungarian section of Transylvania. The Hungarians in Transylvania are called the Székely, and they have lived in these mountains since time out of mind. They like to fancy themselves lineal descendants of Attila the Hun, but it's more likely they were just a Hungarian tribe who drew the short straw on mountain sentry duty. Even through the Ceausescu regime they were able to keep their separate language and identity, and all the signs in this part of the country are in Hungarian④. The look of the Székely houses and farms is very distinctive. One particularly lovely feature repeated from village to village are the ornately carved wooden gates and fences in front of every house, complete with a little steeple roof for the fence.

It is weird to see Hungarian signs in these little mountain villages. Imagine coming across a Swiss German enclave in the flat polders of Holland and you will understand the incongruity. The Hungarians, a steppe people, are not normally found at high elevation. It reminds me of the small and very culturally distinct mountainous piece of Poland in our own small corner of the Carpathians.

I zigzag down to the pretty city of Târgu Mureș, following a series of hairpin turns. A line of trucks is struggling in the opposite direction. In keeping with the charming Romanian custom, each has a little doily curtain hanging along the top edge of the windshield, and shows the driver's first name in big letters above the dashboard, so you can cheer him on. "Downshift, MIHAI, downshift!". At the apex of each hairpin turn is a giant billboard for the “XX-LARGE GENTLEMAN'S CLUB” in Târgu Mureș. My mind fills with questions, but there is no time.

East of Târgu Mureș, the mountains get serious again. I drive past a salt mine museum, and a lunar-like stretch that has been stripped completely clear of topsoil to feed a cement factory, before starting another descent into Gheorgheni. This is a small town so pretty and welcoming that I wish I could stay a few hours, but it's getting late in the afternoon, and I want to get out of the moutains by nightfall.

After Gheorgeni, the road turns into a winding canyon with breathtaking views that I cannot enjoy. All I can think about are the impossible overhangs of ice above my head. The road has been built along the bottom of a natural gully, and the snowpack that has accumulated on the edges all winter long is melting, leaving behind thick sheets of unsupported ice weighing hundreds of kilograms. These drip menacingly onto my windshield as I pass underneath, and every few hundred meters I drive through a shattered heap of ice fragments where a piece has detached and fallen onto the road.

I emerge from the canyons towards sunset at the town of Piatra Neamț. I am safely back in the flatlands of Moldavia, and the road ahead is ruler straight, leading some hundred kilometers to a town called Roman. But as the light gets dimmer, I notice some drivers behind me are flashing their brights. A quick stop at the side of the road shows me almost all the air has leaked out from one of my tires.

At this point, I've stopped making any assumptions about what to expect in the way of roadside amenities. Mercifully, Roman turns out to have an American-style service station with an air pump. But it has gotten quite dark, and I have seventy miles left to Botoșani. I have no idea how bad the leak in the tire is, but I when I put my ear to the wheel I can hear it hissing.

Night arrives and the drive becomes featureless, just a line of unreadable milestones and series of headlights passing me by. The Google map I have printed out is beginning to diverge from reality. None of the roads I pass are marked, and at intersections it is becoming difficult to tell which is the main road, and which is the spur.

I take what I believe is a turnoff for Botoșani, and find myself following a series of progressively smaller roads through thick forest. Mine is the only car around. The road crosses a railroad track and emerges back out in the fields again. It is pitch dark, but I can see as I pass that all along the road there are houses, and people sitting out in lawn chairs, and even some kids kicking a ball around. It's a bustling Friday night without a single street lamp. There's no light of any kind except my headlights, which illuminates the figures like ghosts as I pass by. People naturally turn to look at the car, which makes the impression even spookier.

If I spoke any Romanian at all, I would pull over and ask for directions, or help with the tire. But I don't; I'm an obnoxious American in a new car, destroying these good people's night vision, and disrupting their soccer game. I deserve my fate!

I see now that I'm on a grid of hard-packed dirt streets, and that this completely unlit place is a little town. I make my best guess about which road is the main one, and follow it back out into the empty fields. After a kilometer, it turns into a two-rut dirt road, and a little while after that, it fades into pasture.

I can see city lights headlights far ahead of me. There's clearly a major road out there, and I can even see the bright glow of Suceava over the horizon. It's a beautiful, clear night. But the tire is almost flat now, and there's no way I can change the spare in the dark. I'm starting to worry that I'll be spending a freezing night asleep in this field, or one like it.

Feeling low, I nurse the car back down the road, back to the strange unlit village, and try another direction. At some point a car passes me, which fills me with irrational joy, but it is just some local pulling into his driveway. For a while, the road looks like it might fade into another two-rut track, but it rallies and suddenly grows a coat of asphalt. A little further along, I see a milestone. Corni, 3 km. I know Corni! Corni is a tiny little village on the outskirts of Botoșani. The turnoff for it is on the main road that I've been looking for, the road which must be directly ahead. I'm saved!

And that is how become one of the few people ever to be glad to be back in Corni.

The last leg of the trip is pure luxury. The Botosani-Suceava road feels like a superhighway. I pass the giant DEDEMAN megastore on the outskirts of town, climb the familiar hill, enter the roundabout, and run right in to a police patrol. They are stopping all traffic, checking documents.

The cop signals me to pull over and takes a long look at my California license.

“Vorbiți românește?”

“Nu.”

“American?”

“Da.”

“Where are you going?”

“Home. I live in Botoșani.”

“You live in Botoșani?”

“Yes.”

There's a long pause as he looks at my license some more.

“What is an American doing in Botoșani?”

It's an excellent question. I wish I could answer it in any language.

Perhaps sensing that we've entered deep waters, or maybe because it's late at night and he doesn't feel like stamping anything, the policeman waves me through.

It means ‘bon voyage’.

① There is a long and exquisitely pointless debate between Hungarian and Romanian historians about who came up with this concept.

② Now known as Braşov, Sighişoara, Mediaş, Sibiu, Sebeş, Bistriţa and Cluj-Napoca. But though the names have been changed, and very few ethnic Saxons remain in Romania, the architecture is still as German as it gets.

③ Skanderbeg is the Albanian national hero, a military leader who spent years harrowing Ottomans in the fifteenth century. He was the subject of a popular movie which included a scene of him arm-wrestling an Albanian shepherd. This scene, or related legends about him testing his soldiers' prowess by arm wrestling, are the reason for the association. Why the Romanians are the only ones to use the name, while nearby countries call it things like 'armsport', is a mystery for the language geeks.

④ It's worth remembering places like the Transylvanian exclave of ethnic Hungarians whenever you hear talk about ‘age-old ethnic tensions’ making conflict in some part of the world inevitable. At the end of the Cold War, this region was a more natural flashpoint for ethnic conflict than comparatively wealthy Yugoslavia. The Székely had been oppressed for decades and subjected to forced Romanization. Hungary and Romania had a long list of mutual grievances, including territorial disputes over the Székely lands. But unlike in Yugoslavia, the respective leaders were not warmongers, and local skirmishes never turned into a broader conflict, though such violence would have been easy to rationalize.

No Evidence of Disease

Mon, 17 Sep 2012 05:00:00 -0700

Diane Person and Stephanie Bourque

My girlfriend Diane met Stephanie last October at a free makeup event for women with cancer called Look Good Feel Better. It was one of the curious get-togethers you get invited to when you are ill. Women showed up, got a make-up kit, and listened to some instruction in how to use it, including useful tips on drawing in the eyebrows (the most visually unsettling side-effect of chemotherapy).

Diane is not normally a makeup person, but she decided to attend on the principle that there should be some kind of benefit, any benefit, from being sick. She and Steph were the only two younger women present at the event, and they hit it off immediately.

Diane, who is 33, had just started chemotherapy for recurrent cervical cancer. Her initial tumor had grown undetected while she was serving in the Peace Corps in Romania. It was surgically (robotically!) removed after her return to the States in the autumn of 2010.

Surgery for cervical cancer has a very high success rate if you catch it early, and our oncologist had been optimistic. There would be no need for chemo. After the operation, Diane would have to come in for regular checkups, and if she made it through two years with no evidence of disease, it was likely the cancer was gone for good.

Once you've had cancer, no one will ever tell you you're healthy. The best you can hope for (and it's wonderful) is the little phrase ‘no evidence of disease’, often shortened to NED. This is less comforting than what you really want: a 100% guarantee that your body is cancer-free. But for many types of cancer the detection methods remain primitive. Absence of evidence is the best you can get.

The first few check-ups turned up nothing. Recovery is a strange time; it's not clear when you're allowed to start your normal life again. Diane and I traveled to Japan, and signed up for a summer language school in Monterey, and tried to figure out what came next.

And then there was the exam that was a little equivocal. An ultrasound showed a mass in one ovary, and a PET scan found some anomalous glucose uptake. The oncologist did not think it was cancer. It was normal to see the gonads light up in a PET scan, she said, and it was normal for ovarian cysts to form after a hysterectomy. But the cyst was large, and it would have to come out.

So... what are you doing later?

I knew the news was awful when the normally wry, sarcastic Dr. Powell gave me a hug outside the operating room. Oncological surgeons are unsentimental people. You don't want them hugging you.

No one could give us a helpful answer on survival rates, because the cancer had come back in an such an uncommon place. With two operations behind her, Diane now faced the rest of the cancer triad, chemotherapy and radiation. We met with new doctors who used slippery language about ‘still considering this curable’, and adapting to the ‘new normal’ (otherwise known as the ‘old shitty’). We had appointments in the kind of places that are decorated with tactful posters about end of life care. It was a long way from the festive optimism of early stage cervical cancer, with its minimally invasive robot surgery and >95% cure rate.

After hitting the five percent jackpot, we would not have been comforted by the statistics on further recurrence even had they been good. And the statistics sucked. Diane's case history was idiosyncratic and hard to match to the literature. But I couldn't help but notice that the tables in the papers had captions like ‘two-year survival rate’, and the percentages in the tables weren't high.

Cancer comes with an entourage: fear, loneliness, and isolation. Diane didn't go to the makeup event expecting to make a new friend, but it was a way to get out of the house. She came home excited about having met Stephanie.

Stephanie was ten years younger than Diane. Her illness was acute myeloid leukemia (AML), a type of blood cancer in which cancerous precursor cells completely take over the bone marrow. Steph had gotten her diagnosis while studying abroad in Spain, and had been treated there long enough to put her into remission and send her home. Now her life was on hold, and the cancer was coming back.

Her long-term prognosis was poor. Steph was reticent in talking about it straight out, but after she and Diane became better friends, it became clear that she did not expect to survive a year. Her only hope lay in a difficult and risky transplant procedure. I couldn't imagine having to face this at 23, but of course no one gets to make the choice.

round 1

round 3

round 6

Chemotherapy is a word that covers many miseries. For some people, it's weekly pills that cause fatigue; for others, it may mean daily injections that will make you wish you were dead. For Diane, chemo was a series of intravenuous infusions administered every three weeks, for a total of six cycles.

The actual treatment was not eventful. We would arrive at Kaiser on a Thursday morning, chat with David the chemo nurse, and then sit for seven hours as he hooked Diane up to a series of plastic bags. First came the hundred-dollar nausea pill, then saline, abraxane, cis-platin, and saline again. And a sensible dinner.

It took some hours for the side effects to reach full strength. The first couple of times, before the nausea came to stay, we were even able to stop at the Japanese market to pick up treats, and take a walk on Bernal hill. But with chemotherapy, the trend is downward.

The night after the infusion would be okay, the next one not so good, and then the weekend was awful, like a severe flu, until the acute effects gradually faded over the following week. With each cycle the recovery got less pronounced. The first few rounds, Diane made little graphs of how she felt in the first ten days after chemo. Here is her graph for cycle 2:

And six week laters, the graph for cycle 4:

She stopped making graphs after that.

The nausea took a while to set in, but it was cumulative and it did not fade. It took skill to find foods that would get past it. For a while, I had success with plain sushi rice wrapped in an omelette. After that, we fell back to the food of last resort: McDonald's happy meals. It was good when Diane could sleep a lot, but often the drugs she took to control side effects left her restless and antsy.

Our landlady, a decrepit eighties rock star, had chosen this time to renovate. The windows were full of workmen, and we would often wake to the sound of power sanders and scraping. The equally decrepit dog would stomp around upstairs and bark for hours when she was not home. I have never been so miserable along so many dimensions, and I wasn't the one getting chemo.

Into this world, Steph would come to visit. It was good to have her around. She was smart, acerbic, and talkative. Cancer had derailed her life right at the time when most people get to jump into adulthood and independence, and she did not hesitate to express her feelings about that. She did not hesitate to express her feelings about much of anything. She and Diane would sit and knit together, watch TV, or on intrepid days go down the hill to attend a restorative yoga class. I would go off for a while into my computer world, happy that there was someone else in this extremely confining world of disease and home renovation.

The friendship (and the makeup kit) was one of the few silver linings in a bad year. Steph and Diane could talk to each other without bullshit or all the emotional work that goes into conversations between the healthy and the well. They were on the same side of that invisible barrier. Stephanie was unsentimental, and her sense of humor was even darker than ours. It was a nice change from the near-Canadian levels of earnestness that ordinarily accompany cancer chat. I admired her lack of self-pity, given the harshness of her diagnosis. But she was an angry person, and the enormity of her anger could be unsettling, even though it was never directed at us, but only her doctors and family.

Cancer is a crucible that tests every relationship you have. One of its first lessons is that having your relationships tested sucks. At 33, Diane found herself in the role of patient zero for many of her friends, their first time confronting real illness. Some of them disappeared. Others wrapped themselves so tightly in platitudes that they might as well have not been there. Still others accepted the news, but did not seem to internalize it, talking and behaving as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened, as if the best way to deal with the cancer was to ignore it. And a few sterling people came through, offering comfort, giving rides, showing up, and finding creative ways to help.

In many ways, it was worse for Steph, who was barely out of school. I know that when I was in my twenties, my friends would have found it a spiritual trial to lend me fifty bucks, let alone help me deal with something like cancer. Steph was so young that some of her treatments were still taking place at the pediatric hospital. The people she knew were fresh out of college and starting a brand new life. So she and Diane formed a strong bond, though for Diane it came at the price of knowing she might lose her closest friend with little warning.

From what we could tell, Steph's home life was weird. Her mother, as described to us, was some combination of nemesis and chauffeur, shuttling Stephanie between medical appointments while having towering arguments with her daughter. We saw Stephanie's mom sometimes when she dropped Steph off, but never interacted with her. Steph often seemed slightly manic, and it was hard to tell how much of her family drama was exaggerated or self-inflicted, or magnified by illness. But it didn't really matter.

Treating Steph's cancer meant replacing her bone marrow, either through a transplant (if she could find a matching donor) or with an infusion of umbilical cord blood, which is rich in undifferentiated cells. The doctors would first have to destroy her bone marrow with full-body radiation and chemotherapy, then inject the donor cells and keep Stephanie from dying of infection long enough for the graft to take hold. The first few weeks were the time of maximum risk for infection, and she would have to spend them in a sterile hospital room. After that, the danger would come from graft vs. host disease, as the transplanted cells tried to mount an immune defense against her own body. This condition could become chronic, but it was at least treatable.

Steph had her transplant operation in November. As many people do, she declared it her 'zeroth birthday', and posted a picture of herself holding a carefully sterilized cupcake from her treatment team.

To our immense relief, she told us there was no post-operative infection, and her doctors sent her home to recover when the graft took, only three weeks after the transplant. The donor tissue had successfully moved into her bones and started making blood cells. It went about as well as these things can go .

But then her recovery seemed to stall out. Her native cells, which should have been destroyed by the radiation she got before the transplant, were still showing up in her counts. Her doctors told her she was at high risk for a relapse, and she had to decide whether to try going through the whole procedure again.

I wish I could say Steph opened up and talked frankly at this point. But she was always oblique, always deflected attempts to be direct about her illness and to what extent she was willing to fight it. Diane got the impression that she was focusing now more on the day-to-day, and on enjoying the time she had, and less willing to undergo difficult and risky treatment. But aside from a few earnest blog posts, everything about her status was communicated through jokes, hints, and banter, and it was hard to get Steph to give us the full picture.

For Diane, the New Year brought radiation. The procedure itself was quick. After the first two visits, when they calibrated the machine, she could be in and out of the cancer center in ten minutes. But getting there meant half an hour in the car every day, for six weeks, and that meant vomiting and misery.

The radiation treatments ended in February. Towards the end of that month, when Diane was beginning to recover from the side effects, and Steph had recovered enough from her graft, I suggested that the two of them take a trip somewhere. The tacit understanding was that it might be the last opportunity for Stephanie to have a vacation, sit on a beach, and feel like a normal human being. Because of her immunosuppressed status, it was risky for her to fly, and risky for her to be in a new place. But she responded to the idea, and thought it was worth the risk.

The trip carried some dangers for Diane, too. Coming so soon after pelvic radiation, airplane travel could lead to serious complications, including lymphedema. But given the situation, it was a risk she was willing to take to be with her friend.

Steph and Diane spent five days on Kauai, sitting on the beach, washing their hands a lot, getting stared at by tourists. Stephanie had brought along a list of hospitals in case there was a crisis, but luckily they never had to use it. I got a nice postcard, and the two of them returned happier than I'd seen them in a long time.

Through the course of her illness, Steph had to endure weekly bone marrow biopsies - an awful, painful procedure that requires jabbing a thick needle into the hipbone. At one point she even posted a photo of the disturbingly thick needle they used for this. And while the graft had taken, the biopsies showed her old cells were still present, and had not been entirely replaced.

We had a couple of bad scares with her; nights when she would be admitted to the hospital with a fever. Many times she was too weak to correspond or chat, and the only point of contact between her and Diane would be a game of online scramble. As the spring went on, Stephanie developed signs of necrosis in her hip joint (a common complication after cord blood transplant) and had to spend a couple of weeks on crutches. It was possible she would require hip surgery or replacement.

-:-

In the middle of July, Steph posted a series of messages on Facebook. Something was wrong at home. She was half-crazy with sleep deprivation, bouncing from hospital to hospital in search of a place to just lie down and rest, and had finally landed in the emergency room at CPMC. It was hard to piece together what was going on. Diane drove to the hospital to see her, and waited with her until she was checked in to the psychiatric ward. The next day, Steph's psychiatrist suggested she could have her discharged if she had somewhere to stay. We figured Stephanie could sleep it off at our place, calm down, and we could talk about the situation once she was rested and more lucid.

But that never happened. For the next two days, Steph was either fast asleep or endlessly talking. She had always been a talker, but now it had become a river of words, pressured speech that jumped from topic to topic. Whatever was happening to Steph resembled mania. She was riffing on everything, telling stories, and finding it hard to listen.

It had me puzzled. I wondered if Steph had abruptly stopped taking some drug and was experiencing a reaction from withdrawal. I also knew there had been CNS involvement in her leukemia, and worried that this might be a neurological symptom of her cancer. On the third day, Diane drove Steph home to pick up some medical paperwork, and things got even stranger. Stephanie locked herself in the shower, started breaking things, shouting threats against her own mother (who was not home at the time), pleading with Diane to leave, and crying.

Not knowing what else to do, Diane called Steph's psychiatrist, who seemed just as surprised. Her only suggestion was that Diane not leave Stephanie alone. But towards ten o'clock, Stephanie came out of the bathroom, dressed, and declared she was "going for a run", leaving Diane by herself. Diane called a friend of Steph's who lived nearby, and eventually they collected Stephanie and left her in the friend's care. Diane came home exhausted.

While we were still discussing what had happened at Steph's house, the psychiatrist called. She had been speaking with Stephanie's mother, and had an urgent question for Diane.

"How certain are you that Steph has cancer?"

Well, it was a ridiculous thing to ask. At this point Diane had known Stephanie for ten months. She had seen Steph through the worst of her treatment, seen her lose her hair, her frequent bruises, her jaundiced complexion, the wound under her clavicle where the I.V. port was put in, dozens of pictures of her in the hospital, months' worth of Facebook posts encrusted with comments from family and friends.

She had also been to Steph's house, seen vials of drugs, stacks of medical paperwork, all the various medical stuff you accumulate as a cancer patient. She had met and spoken with Steph's mother, who for months had driven Steph to chemo appointments, and who cared for her after the cord blood transplant. Unless you assumed that Steph's whole family was complicit, it didn't seem possible for it to be an act.

But.

There were things that didn't fit. The mildness of the graft vs. host complications after her transplant, and how quickly the complications had faded. At the time, it seemed like incredible luck, and we didn't question it. But it seemed to fit a pattern where alarming symptoms would show up for a while, and then fade away unresolved. There was the way Steph deflected all attempts to visit her in the hospital, and never gave a straight answer about exactly where she'd be. There was the box of surgical tubing, scalpels, and bag of fake blood in her room, which Steph had dismissed as a gag gift.

And there were the photos. Stephanie had posted lots of photos from the hospital to her Facebook feed, and they had not seemed peculiar in that context, but looking at them all together revealed a disturbing pattern. There were lots of pictures of hospital 'stuff', examining rooms, and equipment. But none of those pictures ever showed Steph, or anyone we might recognize. The photos that Steph posted of herself were all tightly cropped on her face, with only a pillow or blank wall as background. While she wore a hospital gown and had an oxygen tube, they could have been taken anywhere.

Her photos didn't look anything like the photos I'd taken of Diane in the hospital, where there was always medical junk somewhere in the background - outlets, wires, IV stands, posters, whiteboards, gas valves.

And the photos I had were full of people. There were only two photos Diane could find that showed anyone from Steph's medical team. Both were pictures of a nurse in full surgical scrubs holding Steph's bag of umbilical cord blood right before the transplant. In one of them, the nurse was mimicking a cradle with her arms. The picture was taken against a blank white wall, and for some reason the nurse was wearing a wig. Her face was completely covered with a mask, but looking at the photo, and at the nurse's eyes, I had no doubt that it was a picture of Stephanie.

On the one hand, it seemed to beggar belief that a young woman would make an entire illness up out of whole cloth, for no apparent reason. That she could lie so outrageously, and for so long, to one of her closest friends. On the other hand, something extremely fishy was going on. Diane told the psychiatrist the truth, which was that we had no direct evidence Stephanie was sick.

The psychiatrist, meanwhile, had had her first conversation with Stephanie's mother. She learned that Steph had not spent a night away from home in months, even after the transplant. Stephanie had told her mother that it was an outpatient procedure, which the psychiatrist called "a medical impossiblilty".

Stephanie's mother also said she had never been allowed to come in to chemotherapy, or to meet her daughter's doctors. Stephanie had threatened to call the police if her mother tried to enter the hospital.

And Stephanie had a curious morning ritual. Was it normal, the psychiatrist asked, for a cancer patient to be shaving her head every day?

Normal was not a word that leapt to mind.

“You think that was a real psychiatrist?” I asked Diane after she got off the phone.

Yes, she was an actual doctor; Diane had seen her in the hospital wearing ID, interacting with staff, doing doctorly things.

“She's not very good at her job, is she?”

The final confirmation came through UCSF, where Stephanie had supposedly had her transplant. They had no record of her as a cancer patient. The whole procedure, from weekly biopsies, to chemo, to hip necrosis, to sudden fevers, to 0th birthday cupcake, had been a fabrication.

-:-

I sent Stephanie a draft of this post, curious what she had to say, and she made the good point that I know nothing about her real medical status. “For the record,” she wrote,

“I wasn't lying about everything. I was treated for cancer, and I did lose my hair. I was told that, should I relapse, my only treatment option would be an allogeneic stem cell transplant.”
“I did lie to some people (Diane included) about some of the details of my treatment over the past year, but please do not assume you know the "truth" about me or my medical conditions.”

And this is sound advice. I don't know anything about Steph's real cancer status (though I have a hunch!). All I know for certain is that she feigned a life-threatening medical procedure and grueling course of treatment for ten months, and did it well enough to fool her family, therapist, and friends.

-:-

People who do fake cancer seem to fall into three groups. The first is the easiest to relate to — regular old swindlers like Jessica Vega who do it for the money. Cancer is an efficient way to open pockets, and while repugnant, the scam doesn't hold real deep psychological interest.

The second group are people like Suzy Bass or Ashley Kirilow, who pretend to have cancer in order to get an emotional fix from their loved ones and community. They seek attention and sympathy from healthy people, and tend to steer clear of the medical system, perhaps for fear that any real scrutiny will expose them.

And then there is the third group, the professionally ill, who are drawn towards the medical system like trainspotters to a railroad track. They are a disease of the medical system itself, subverting its resources and draining time and energy from those who can least afford to spare either.

Ironically, this fakery has itself been medicalized under the rubric of factitious disorder. It's defined as a chronic and intentionally deceptive pursuit of medical treatment, to the point of self-harm, for no apparent benefit other than assuming the role of patient. The Mayo clinic has a page describing Munchausen syndrome (one subtype of factitious disorder), and by reading it, you can see that the disease template is an uncomfortable fit. There's no known cause, no treatment, not even a consensus about how to confront 'sufferers', or minimize the damage they do, or advice to give them about getting better.

And really, what are you supposed to do if you suffer from a factitious disorder? Go to the doctor? You're already at the doctor! And anyone who wants to get better, by definition doesn't have the disease.

Almost everything that happens in a hospital depends on the assumption that patients and doctors are on the same team, working together. But a factitious patient is an adversary, and will go to astonishing lengths, including self-harm, to get a diagnosis.

I am not a doctor, so I am not qualified to say whether Stephanie suffers from factitious disorder. In my mind, she's not so much a medical parasite as she is a cancer remora, eager to attach herself to a genuinely sick person and go along for the ride. Had Diane's cancer not gone into remisison, I'd like to think that Stephanie might have come clean about what she'd done, in order not to sap attention from a dying friend. But I have a hard time believing it.

I have wondered to what extent Steph (and people like her) are broken, and to what extent they're just bad. That is one of the questions of mental illness — at what point does being crazy excuse you for being an asshole?

But I also feel I've met my lifetime quota of worrying about the inner life of Stephanie Bourque.

-:-

Being duped is humiliating. You backtrack and see how unconvincing the props and scenery look in the light of day. The storefronts turn out to have been cheap painted wood, the mountain landscape is just a flimsy canvas. But that feeling is normal. The lies only needed to be convincing in the moment, and their very audacity made them easy to sell.

Given a choice between thinking something is an odd coincidence, and deciding that your best friend's entire identity, down to the scar on her chest, has been constructed to deceive you; that she has gotten up every morning and shaved her head just to fuck with you, you are unlikely to choose door number two.

The unusual thing about Stephanie is that she played this out in real life, and duped even her family. Fake cancer is much more common through the Internet, for obvious reasons. Cancer is an intensely lonely experience, and the Internet offers a way to connect with the only people in the world who really know what you're going through. This intense bond of love and support attracts some very broken people, who are the bane of online support groups.

Referring to this elaborate lie as 'some of the details of my treatment' is characteristic of Stephanie. In every communication with her, there's that note of victimhood, of righteous anger at being misunderstood, of being at the immovable center of a vortex of events that are private to her.

"I am working really hard to put my life back together, and though I do not need/expect you to care or understand my life or my "problems", please try to be compassionate or at least patient, I don't deserve to be attacked publicly.There is no need to publish some story about me out of anger and misinformation."

And so I've sat on this story for a while, for fear of writing it out of anger. But everything I've learned about people who fake serious illness makes me skeptical that the world has heard the last from Steph. And I know there are still people in her life who are genuinely sick, and who don't know that her medical drama this year was a fabrication.

Of course, Stephanie's medical journey continues. Shortly before she shut down her cancer blog, she used it to announce her latest test result - NED. Her focus now has moved to getting her physicians to correctly diagnose her with Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, and on treating a chronic heart condition that causes her pulse to race when she stands up. This is something we failed to notice in the time we knew her, but she has posted incontrovertible proof:

Sarcasm aside, I really hope Steph finds a way to get better. I don't think her problems have anything to do with her heart rate, but they are real enough, and can only continue to hurt her and the people who love her most.

Diane, thankfully, is doing well. I don't want to jinx anything by saying more than that. But in a year or so, I want to bake a batch of (real) zeroth birthday cupcakes.

Joo Janta 200 Super-Chromatic Peril Sensitive Sunglasses have been specially designed to help people develop a relaxed attitude to danger.

Białowieża Forest

Fri, 17 Feb 2012 03:00:00 -0800

One August morning in 2010 I woke up before dawn to go bushwhacking near the Belarussian border. My guide, a friendly Polish geography teacher named Romek, was waiting outside to take me into one of the last patches of primeval wilderness in Europe, Białowieża Forest.

Primeval forest is what covered nearly all of Europe from the time the glaciers receded to the late Middle Ages. It’s the spooky, dense forest of Grimm’s fairy tales, full of danger and beasts (there were lions in these woods!) For anyone used to the tame farm landscape of modern Europe, it takes quite an imaginative leap to realize how threatening and impassable the continent used to be. It’s easier to just come and see it.

In most of Europe primeval forest disappeared as fast as people could cut it down. Today there are only a few stands of it left, mostly in inaccessible corners of the Carpathians and other mountainous areas. Białowieża is unusual both because of its size and because it lies right in the middle of the E-Z-Invasion strip through the Central European plain, not the first place you think of when looking for something that’s been left alone for ten thousand years.

The forest spans the border between Poland and Belarus; the two countries manage it jointly as a strict biosphere reserve. And they mean strict! If I have a heart attack this morning, Romek tells me with a smile, I must not expect an ambulance or helicopter to come get me. Paramedics will arrive on horseback, many hours after I first clutch my chest, and my mortal remains will be dragged out of the forest by cart.

There hasn’t been a motor vehicle in the forest since World War II, and that’s only because a couple of Nazis (of course) needed to unload bodies in a hurry and violated the driving ban. But even the Nazis only did it once. Before them, the last vehicle to enter the forest did so in 1922.

Should I find a feral apple or pear tree (there are a few), I’m allowed to eat the fruit, but I can’t drop the cores. Those have to come back out with us. Strict!

But the greatest temptation in Białowieża grows on the ground. Poles love mushrooms, every family has its expert, and on autumn weekends you will find the forests around any major city getting strip-mined by packs of intent and mutually suspicious day-trippers. We grow up in an atmosphere of scarcity and distrust where mushroom picking is concerned, particularly since it’s considered extremely bad luck to even talk about where to find them, for fear of jinxing yourself.

So visiting Białowieża is like being one of those dogs whose master stacks dozens of treats on its muzzle and just makes it sit there. There is suffering. No hobo passing a pie cooling on a windowsill ever faced greater temptation than the daily procession of Polish day hikers forced to stroll past perfectly formed two-kilo flavor monsters growing right out in the open, the fungal equivalents of a thirty-pound lobster or fist-sized golden nugget.

Like Mordor, one does not simply walk into Białowieża forest. There’s no obstacle preventing it apart from a simple wooden gate, but if you are caught without a guide you pay an enormous fine. God help you if you’ve picked a mushroom. Most visitors confine themselves to a group hike around a loop trail of several miles along an abandoned road bed, but there are longer hikes if you’re willing to get your feet wet and pay for a permit. I figure if I’ve come out all this way to see primeval forest, I should see some primeval forest, and so I spring for the special backwoods hiking permit. It buys me six hours of Romek’s time and the right to go bushwhacking in a more remote area of the forest that sees about forty human beings a year.

You reach the forest by walking through its exact opposite, a beautiful, meticulously groomed English park created for Tsar Alexander III near the end of the 19th century. There are broad lawns between copses of trees which have been selected to give nice color contrasts in the autumn, or to pleasantly offset each other with different shades of green in the summertime. Almost all of these the trees here are rare exotics, many brought from North America at terrific expense and by the express request of the Tsar. It doesn’t do much for me personally to see a Douglas fir, but I can understand why they were a big hit with the Russians.

Beyond the park is a brief stretch of open country that leads to the wooden gate. It is just before daybreak when we arrive, and the world is completely still. Later on there will groups of hikers passing through, but for the moment we have the woods completely to ourselves. The gate opens and I prepare to enter a world of magic.

Instead my first impression is of extreme clutter. It looks exactly like any other Polish forest, except no one has cleared all the dead branches and trees that lean in every direction or just lie rotting on the ground. Some trees have died in place and their bare trunks rise out of the undergrowth like ghostly masts. I fully expect to see the rusted skeleton of an Ursus tractor in between the brambles. The place looks like it could use some pruning and a judicious series of fires. I shoot Romek a wounded glance, but he has already disappeared into the trees.

As we walk deeper into the woods I begin to notice that the trees are very tall. In fact, I’ve never seen broadleaf trees this big before. If they were growing anywhere else there would be a chain around them, a little brass plaque, and a place to park the tour bus, but here they are just average. If you’ve ever been in a redwood forest you will know the feeling. The immensity isn’t immediately obvious because everything is on the same huge scale, but all you have to do is walk up to a trunk to realize that you are now a smurf. What looked like saplings from a distance are perfectly respectable beech or ash or linden that are just completely out of their class here.

From reading descriptions of old-growth forest, I had expected the landscape to be very uneven and hard to cross. The idea is that when a dying tree falls over it tears a big hole in the ground, and the earth trapped in its root system accumulates in a litte hill next to the depression when it rots away, creating a landscape of pits and hillocks.

But where we’re walking the earth is packed and flat, with barely any underbrush. A troop of cub scouts could pitch their tents here with no trouble (though they would quickly find themselves exsanguinated). I shoot Romek a second wounded glance, but he knows the secret of the forest, which is that if you want a complete change of scenery you just have to walk a few hundred steps. Before long I will see my pit-and-hill forest, then bog, thick brambles, tall bushes, and even a kind of oversized lush meadow between the trees, the comically big blades of grass looking like a lawn misrendered at the wrong magnification.

The forest is sensitive to small changes in microclimate and soil chemistry. They determine which species of tree will grow best, and the trees in turn affect everyting else. Some of them engage in ruthless chemical warfare, dropping leaves or seeds that poison the soil for their rivals, or attracting animals to trample the competition. Others suction up water at a prodigious rate to dry out their neighbors. The forest is one giant monument to plant’s inhumanity to plant.

The oak tree has a clever way of eliminating its competition. Boars go insane for the rich taste of acorns, and under every oak you can see what looks like a garden that’s been tilled by a drunken backhoe, where boars in search of a fix have carved up the ground with their tusks. This helps fertilize the tree and uproot all competitors, but at the price of nearly the entire acorn crop. The oak owes its continued existence to forgetful squirrels, who will hide away a store of acorns and nuts for the winter and occasionally forget where they buried it. The little storehouse sprouts the next spring and the crisis is averted for one more generation.

A tree’s life in Białowieża begins with a race to the canopy and never gets significantly easier. As it grows, the sapling has to contend with every kind of opponent, from bark beetles to grazing deer. The ugliest of these is a fat, leathery parasitic mushroom that grows on a tree’s trunk like a shelf, and can kill it in a handful of years. You can count the layers on the ugly thing to get an idea of how long the tree survived before succumbing.

Once the tree dies, the real party begins for the many species that survive on dead lumber. This is where old forest comes into its own, with specialist bugs to eat the rotting wood, specialist woodpeckers to eat the specialist bugs, and onwards through a whole chain of endangered animals and plants designed for the business of tree removal, whose world is confined to a few small areas of forest like this.

The principal large mammals in Białowieża are the bison, moose, wolf, boar, bobcat, and graduate student. The last spends a lengthy juvenile period studying forest theory in Western Europe before migrating in to do field work and possibly mate. The nutrient-rich graduate student is a cornerstone of the forest food pyramid, a conveniently mobile, heated feed bag for a variety of small cosmic horrors. Since there is so little real forest left in Europe, the supply of these initially pink-cheeked graduate students is limitless and easily replenished. If you step quietly, so as not to spook them, you can see them sometimes through the trees, catching frogs with nets, cataloguing the various insects buried in their skin, or peering resignedly into bird holes. They look pale.

As Romek and I walk deeper into the brambles, I find my own interest in the forest reciprocated by a dismaying variety of parasites. Anything with legs, wings and a bloodsucking proboscis has perked up and come to greet us as we enter areas that have gone a long, hungry time since their last warm mammal. The ticks are the most horrifying. Romek is talking to me about the subtleties of forest ecology when I see something with far too many legs run up from his collar directly into his ear canal. He doesn't notice and keeps talking, but unconsciously pokes at his ear with an idle fingertip as I die on the inside. Moments later, of course, I feel a certain scrabbling at my own hairline. Whatever Romek says for the next hour is lost to me as I claw at myself, every once in a while catching a little facehugger that makes a tiny popping sound between my fingernails.

Ticks wait on the tips of leaves and drop on you from above when they detect a plume of your sweet breath. Or else they climb on grass or bushes and will hitch a ride on you as you brush past them. Their instinct is to climb before attaching, so you have a few minutes to intercept them before they reach the Klondike of your scalp or armpit. If you are really tough, you’ll just ignore them and wait until they’ve inflated to their full raisin size a day or two later. “Check your groin when you take a shower!” Romek warns. “They sure do love the groin!”

Providing air support for the ticks are mosquitoes that swarm so densely in places they have to take turns landing on us. We slather ourselves with DEET on the half hour, and the effect is immediate. Now we are only bitten by the mosquitoes that blunder into us at random, while the remainder hover in a confused and hungry cloud.

Later, as we’re leaving the forest, we pass an inbound group of hikers wearing just shorts, t-shirts, and open sandals. Even at the edge of the woods, they already seem mildly uncomfortable and are swatting at the air. My stomach clenches in sympathy knowing what awaits them. Either that, or something has successfully bored its way in.

A paradox of the primeval forest is that nothing in it is very old. The longest-lived organism in the forest is an oak tree, and the most it can reasonably survive before lightning or rot does it in is eight hundred years (1). So while the ecosystem has existed in its present form for over a hundred centuries, the oldest artifacts in this forest are all of human origin.

These are low mounds of earth called kurhany in Polish, курганы in Russian. They are paleolithic gravesites. Some were made for just one person, others hold a number of bodies along with artifacts like pottery shards. Excavations show that they were built by a number of unrelated cultures at different times in the far past, and that they range from opulent to purely utilitarian. Further batallions of graduate students have been deployed to study them.

Early in our walk we cross a section of the forest called ‘Lagery’ (The Camps), which peasants since time out of mind have used as a hiding place in time of war. The giveaway here is a birch tree, the only one I’ll see in the entire forest. To a forester it’s about as blatant a sign of human presence as a lamppost. In a real contest against broadleaf species, the birch has no chance, but as soon as people cut a clearing somewhere, the tree seizes its opportunity to grow. So the vast birch forests emblematic of Eastern Europe are really a memorial to the much mightier forests of years past.

There are less subtle signs of human presence, too. Romek points out a long, slotted board leaning against a tree trunk. It looks like a weathered piece of driftwood. This board used to hang ten meters up the trunk of a nearby tree, suspended like a pendulum over a small hollow in the trunk. Wild bees had made a hive there, and some enterprising human foragers found it and hung the board to protect the hive from bears. A bear could climb the tree and swing the board aside with one paw while still holding on to the trunk, but the board would swing back before the animal had time to reach in and scoop out the sweet, sweet contents. So the poor bear would just hang there getting stung, unable to use both paws without falling out of the tree, staring at the unreachable honeycomb, thinking its thoughts. A small peephole in the board let the insects come and go unimpeded.

This clever device kept all the honey safe for the foragers, who could come back at regular intervals to collect it until they were killed by a furious bear. This particular specimen probably dates back to the eighteenth century.

A little further along, we pass a set of fresh bison hoofprints, which Romek says are extremely rare in this part of the forest. This is not because the European bison (a fearsome, top-heavy beast that looks like an ox wearing a sweater) is rare, but because it prefers to stay in closer proximity to people, in the hope of finding treats. Nothing stirs the heart of a bison faster than the thought of uprooting someone’s vegetable garden. Even though it's the symbol of Białowieża forest, one of the last places on earth where it survives in the wild, wildness is somewhat wasted on the bison, and it must be watched to keep it from sneaking out of its majestic habitat.

The park is also home to a homely little plant called bisongrass (żubrówka), named that because it is one of the very few plants that bison can’t stand and will not eat. Bisongrass is used to flavor a Polish vodka of the same name; the vodka turns a faint yellow green and the dried plant gives it a pleasant herbal taste. Because this grass is endangered, the fines for actually picking it in the wild are astronomical. Special indoor bisongrass plantations supply the vodka industry, though from the way the vodka is marketed you'd think it was collected like dewdrops from right under the noses of the thirsty beasts(2).

The first mention of Białowieża is in 1409, when King Jagiełło used it as a royal meat factory to supply his army for a campaign against the Teutonic Knights. The king and his party arrived in the autumn and hunted through the winter, sending hundreds of barrels of smoked and salted meat down the river to Płock, where his troops waited in winter camp. This was pre-potato Poland, where if you didn’t find a boar to roast you'd be stuck until spring eating bread, sorrel, turnips, onions and beans, so the expedition to Białowieża was a big deal. It was also the closest thing the fifteenth century had to military exercises. The king could test the mettle of his lieutenants by pitting them against various large game, and the survivors would bond afterwards in the mead hall.

That giant hunt whetted a royal appetite that was the key to the forest's survival. The forest became crown territory, a hunting preserve strictly reserved for the king. No one was allowed to enter it without royal leave, even to gather hay, and only the local peasants were given passes to enter. A small cadre of royal game wardens patrolled the lands to keep poachers out. Woe to anyone caught entering the forest with a dog or a firearm. Every few years the king would return in splendor for a few weeks of hunting.

As time passed, these royal hunts grew more decadent. To save the king the discomfort of riding through the forest, carpenters would build a big stage-like dais for the entire royal party, with a large corrall connected to it by a chute. In the weeks before the ‘hunt’, the king’s minions would catch dozens of bison, deer and other game animals alive in nets and fatten them in the corrall.

On the day of the hunt, the King gave his signal and the animals were driven down the chute one by one, emerging directly in front of the platform where the King and Queen could shoot them point blank. A line of servants stood by to clean and reload the royal muskets. A stone obelisk near the park entrance commemorates one of these slaughters in 1759:

On September 27, 1752 His Royal Highness Augustus III, King of Poland and Elector of Saxony, along with Her Royal Highness and Princes Xavier and Carl, hunted bison here, killing:

42 bison, of which:

11 large, the greatest weighting 14 hundredweight 50 lb.

7 small

18 cows

6 calves

13 moose, that is:

6 bulls, the greatest weighting 9 hundredweight 75 lbs

5 cows

2 calves

2 deer

Making 57 all together.

Augustus III was no gym rat, so this kind of hunting was just his speed. The queen bagged ten bison while reading a novel.

After the partition of Poland in 1795, Białowieża became Russian territory. The tsars briefly allowed the forest to be logged before recognizing its value as a hunting ground and putting it back under protection. The Russians were the first to survey Białowieża, leaving behind a grid of small stone markers that forest rangers still use today. And since doing things in moderation is not really the Russian way, they imported thousands of game animals in from Siberia and the Caucasus to stock the forest for hunting, badly overstressing (and probably perplexing) the local habitat.

Tsar Alexander III was particularly fond of hunting here, which is why he ordered the fancy English park and wooden palace. Things remained calm until the First World War, when famished German soldiers descended on the forest like boars on an oak grove. Over four years they exterminated essentially every animal in the forest, including the entire remaining wild population of European bison. The bison only escaped extinction thanks to some zoo specimens brought from various European capitals after the war. So thanks to the Germans, all remaining European bison are near-clones of one another.

When the war ended, Poland popped back into existence and resumed stewardship over the forest. The new government sold a logging concession to an English company, which horrified everyone by starting to clear-cut the lumber. The concession was soon taken away.

The forest continued its role as a privileged hunting preserves. Göring and Ciano both visited here before the war, and Göring (who fancied himself a master hunter) made sure the forest remained intact during the occupation. The Nazis confined themselves to massacring the locals and hunting partisans in the woods. Stalin, also an avid hunter, drew the new Soviet-Polish border right down the middle of Białowieża as part of his successful ploy to shift the country bodily a hundred miles west. The story has it that he intended to annex the entire thing, but took pity on Polish communists who also wanted somewhere to go hunting.

The grateful Polish comrades adorned Alexander III’s beautiful park with a two-story turd of advanced socialist architecture called the Hunting Lodge. In its day this was a very exclusive mini-hotel for entertaining visiting dignitaries from fraternal nations. A whole book could (and should) be written about the Communist obsession with hunting. Poland was no exception, and the likes of Tito, Ceaușescu, and the gorgeously named Valéry Giscard d’Estaing all helicoptered in for a quick murderous visit to the woods. Today the lodge stands empty, though still maintained, a series of lovely flower gardens surrounding it making a contrast with that special Brezhnev-era concrete that somehow looked filthy from the moment it was poured.

Towards noon, Romek and I emerge onto the main forest trail, a broad dirt path wide enough for horse-drawn carts to come through. These take people with limited mobility (or unlimited laziness) on a short loop along the edge of the forest, where some of the biggest oaks are. The sun has come out and is streaming down through the leaves in thick beams like a bad inspirational poster. The light is not only lovely but makes it easier to avoid the trampoline-sized spiderwebs suspended between the trees, where many-eyed spiders as big as a hazelnut sit and await their supper. Romek exchanges greetings with every guide we pass; most of them are leading clusters of German or English-speaking tourists from oak to oak. Soon after that we're back out in the open fields, in one of the most placid landscapes in Europe.

As I climb into bed back at the hotel, I try to summon a deep, National Geographic-style thought about the meaning of this place and my role in it. Instead, I quickly pass out. This teaches me that, given ideal weather conditions, modern clothing, and a thermos full of coffee, I would survive for under twelve hours in primeval forest before a passing wolf found my sleeping body and made me one with nature again.

But it's a hell of a place!

(1) There’s a lovely custom in Poland of baptizing notable oaks and giving them proper names. The reigning old-timer in Poland is a giant named Bolesław, who sprouted from an acorn in about the year 1200.

(2) Apart from a blade of bisongrass, each bottle of this vodka also includes an implicit raised middle finger to the Latin alphabet, in the form of the magnificent Polish word źdźbło (blade of grass). That last vowel represents the rest of the word laughing at you after you have tried to pronounce it.

Why Arabic Is Terrific

Sat, 20 Aug 2011 03:00:00 -0700

I just finished a summer studying Arabic at the Monterey Institute for International Studies, an enjoyable adventure that I hope to write about in more detail later. MIIS offers a nine-week program in a bunch of languages and is just down the road from a grim military counterpart called the Defense Language Institute, where young men and women learn how to eavesdrop on the nation's enemies, provided that the enemies speak slowly and limit their conversation to hobbies and the weather.

The DLI is big on hiring native speakers, and ever since the scary men in turbans replaced godless Communism as a mortal threat to America it has not been hard to find good hummus in Monterey. About two thousand soldiers grind their way through a sixty-three week intensive Arabic program each year, while about sixty civilians attend the unrelated and much shorter programs at MIIS.

Of course, now that Arabic is the key language for career advancement in places that have no sign out front and a large eagle emblem in the lobby, the civilian programs have begun started to attract the kinds of calculating douchebags who used to make studying Russian so unpleasant. They are still in the minority, but having even one of these guys (and they're always guys) in your class can lead to needless suffering *.

So I would like to stand up for the language nerds and give some reasons for studying Arabic that have nothing to do with politics. The language of the National Designated Other is bound to switch to Chinese in a couple of years, but until colleges start teaching Martian, Arabic is going to remain the strangest, most interesting language you can study in an undergrad classroom.

And don't fall for the bait and switch with Chinese or Japanese! They might tempt you with an exotic writing system, but after a few months you find out that the underlying language is pretty vanilla, and meanwhile there is a stack of three thousand flash cards standing in between you and the ability to skim a newspaper.

Arabic, on the other hand, twists healthy minds in twelve ways:

The Root/Pattern System

Nearly all Arabic words consist of a three-consonant root slotted into a pattern of vowels and helper consonants. The root gives the word its base meaning, while the pattern modifies this meaning in a systematic and predictable way. This idea is so cool that you'd think it came from a constructed language, and yet Arabic has actual native speakers who live completely normal lives and will not try to talk to you about Runescape.

For example, the pattern ma--a-, where the hyphens are placeholders for three root consonants, is nearly always a place name in Arabic. The pattern i-a-a-a generates a verb meaning "to cause someone to do X", where the meaning of X is determined by that three-consonant root.

Here are some common patterns using the root k t b, whose basic meaning is 'writing':

pattern	pattern meaning		result
m--a-a	place name	Ù…ÙƒØªØ¨Ø©	maktaba (library)
-aa-i-	active participle	ÙƒØ§ØªØ¨	kaatib (writer)
ma--uu-	passive participle	Ù…ÙƒØªÙˆØ¨	maktuub (written)
-a-a-a	basic verb	ÙƒØªØ¨	kataba (to write)
a--a-a	causative verb	Ø£ÙƒØªØ¨	aktaba (to dictate)
-i-aa-	noun	ÙƒØªØ§Ø¨	kitaab (book)
-u-u-	plural noun	ÙƒØªØ¨	kutub (books)

The root/pattern approach really goes crazy with verbs. There are ten common verb patterns in Arabic, and each one alters the base meaning in a semi-predictable way.

For example, putting a verb into pattern IV will often make it causative (baqaa - to stay vs. abqii - to keep in place), while putting a transitive verb into pattern VI tends to make it reflexive (thakara - to remind; tathakara - to remember). These meanings are not completely predictable, but you can use them to make very good guesses about new vocabulary.

There's even a verb pattern (IX) devoted entirely to changes in color and acquiring a physical disability.

Broken Plurals

In English, you make most words plural by adding a suffix, except for a very small number of words (like 'feet') where there is a vowel change instead. Arabic does this the other way around. There are a few words that take a regular plural suffix, but most of the time to make a plural you have to change the structure of the word quite dramatically:

kitaab	->	kutub	(book)
ustaath	->	asaatitha	(teacher)
maqha	->	maqaahi	(cafÃ©)
dukkan	->	dakaakiin	(store)
ahdar	->	hudur	(green)

This holds even for borrowed words:

film -> aflaam

jaakit -> jawaakat

Other Semitic languages have broken plurals, but as with other unusual language features Arabic runs this one furthest into the end zone.

The Writing System

The Arabic writing system is exotic looking but easy to learn, which is a rare combination. The language uses a straightforward alphabet, but because letters change their shape depending on what their neighbors are it is quite impenetrable to the uninitiated.

For exmaple, here are some "words" consisting of a single letter repeated three times:

ÙŠÙŠÙŠ Ø¹Ø¹Ø¹ Ù‡Ù‡Ù‡ ÙƒÙƒÙƒ Ù„Ù„Ù„

You can easily master Arabic writing without learning the language (here is a great book for it if you're interested); it will take you about two weeks. Go to the museum and impress your date with your ability to appreciate Arabic calligraphy on a deeper level!

Dual

Arabic has a grammatical dual â€” a special form for talking about two of something. That means there's a distinct set of verb conjugations for 'you two' and 'them two' (but not 'we two'!), along with adjective and noun suffixes for pairs of things. This is pretty cool.

Plural Lite

Some words have separate broken plurals depending on whether you're talking about a small or large number (the cutoff is somewhere around seven).

The Feminine Plural

Formal Arabic distinguishes between groups composed entirely of women and groups that contain one or more men, and has distinct pronouns, plural forms, and verb conjugations for feminine dual and feminine plural.

This gives Arabic a total of twelve personal pronouns. No other language will make you work as hard to avoid speaking formally to pairs of women.

Crazy Agreement Rules

Arabic has a number of very unusual agreement rules. My absolute favorite is that all non-human plurals are grammatically feminine singular:

al-kutub hadra' (Ø§Ù„ÙƒØªØ¨ ØØ¶Ø±Ø§Ø¡)

"The books, she is green"

Phonetics

Several enjoyable consonants wait to greet the foreign learner. Most of these are emphatic consonants, which are just like the familiar consonants /k/, /t/, /th/, /s/ and /d/ except that as you pronounce them you must simultaneously try to swallow your tongue.

And then there is this beast: Ø¹ a consonant pronounced so far back in the throat that you must wait two hours after eating to safely attempt it. Naturally it's one of the most common sounds in the language.

Arabic also treats the glottal stop (a soundless catch in the throat) as a regular consonant. Glottal stops are everywhere in English but we are not trained to hear them, so a long portion of one of your first Arabic classes will be devoted to blowing your mind with the fact that English words like 'apple' and 'elegant' do not start with a vowel.

Funky Numbers

What we call Arabic numerals aren't used in Arabic except in extraordinarily formal contexts. Instead, Arabic uses "Indian numerals", which look like this:

These are just similar enough to English to ensure that you will always, always do exercise 10 when assigned exercise 15.

The names of the numbers come with truly terrifying agreement rules, like "if the number is greater than three but less than eleven, it must take the opposite gender of the noun that it modifies". Since it so much easier to talk about unspecified plurals (which you'll remember are always feminine singular!), this gives foreign students of Arabic a positively Oriental tendency towards vagueness.

Arabs themselves just ignore the agreement rules altogether and talk about whatever number of things they want.

Unlike the rest of the language, numerals are written left-to-right, and pronunced left-to-right until you get to the tens place. So Ù£Ù¤Ù¦Ù¢ is read "three thousand four hundred two and sixty". This is particularly fun when talking about date ranges, since the earlier date will be written on the right side of the hyphen, but read from left to right:

Diglossia

Muslims believe that Arabic as written in the 7th century A.D. is the language of divine revalation. This has served as a tremendously conservative force on written Arabic, with two important consequences.

The first is that texts from over a thousand years ago remain accessible to modern readers. If you're an English speaker, where even texts from 200 years ago can be rough going, this is quite a treat.

The second is that spoken Arabic has diverged substantially from the written language, so you can study it formally for years and not be able to understand a television commercial.

This is where it really helps to love language study. Arabic has a large number of dialects, some of which are not mutually intelligible, but all educated Arabs will know the formal written language, which they consider to be a higher form of their day-to-day speech. This 'higher' language is used in speeches, news programs, lectures and other formal contexts, but never in casual conversation unless differences in dialect make it absolutely necessary. The combination of numerous dialects and a formal/informal continuum is pretty much unique to Arabic and gives rise to fascinating situations watching Arabs calibrate their lanugage based on the situation and the linguistic background of their interlocutor.

Learning Materials

Nearly every Arabic program in the country uses a four-part textbook and DVD series called Al-Kitaab . Even after studying from it for three years you won't be able to find enough words to express how terrific it is, particularly if you've been exposed to Arabic teaching materials. The books are stuffed full of authentic texts, and there isn't any of the usual filler or pointless mechanical practice that plagues other textbooks of "hard" languages.

At the more advanced level, I strongly recommend the Anthology of Arabic Literature and the very idiosyncratic All the Arabic You Should Have Learned The First Time Around.

Finally, for a more detailed and informed geek-out about the Arabic language, please see this excellent short essay from Indiana University.

1. There's something about intelligence agencies - maybe the familiar comfort of a three-letter acronym on the wall, maybe the late-night spanking parties - that draws fraternity boys like ants to a picnic, and right now the road to bro advancement leads through an Arabic classroom. Their complete lack of a sense of irony allows these students to combine sincere appreciation for The Fountainhead with a desire for a lifelong career in government service, and the hardest part of studying Arabic is having to listen to their asinine opinions after they have gained enough proficiency to try to express them.

Mission: Burfjord

Mon, 12 Jul 2010 03:00:00 -0700

On my fourth day in a remote cabin up in Norway my host Ivar asks me if I would like to come along on a day trip to Burfjord, a little town on the mainland about forty minutes away.

I don't have to think twice. Going to the mainland means a chance to charge my camera battery, use a flush toilet, and buy some groceries without having to carry them home on my back. And I know for a fact that Burfjord has TWO grocery stores - I can, if I wish, shop around. Ivar warns me that the weather is worsening and we may end up windbound for many hours in town, but I am not easily deterred. "Well," he says, "I suppose anywhere is interesting the first time. Even Burfjord."

The day is a little breezy, but it's warm enough to be out without a jacket. Still, I put on a pair of special insulating overalls for the boat ride. They feel insufferably hot on land but are a grateful presence after five minutes on the water. They are also buoyant, so that if the boat capsizes we can have the satisfaction of dying of hypothermia rather than drowning.

The sea is already quite choppy as we pass the shelter of the main breakwater. Even in the larger boat, motoring along at twenty knots feels like falling down a flight of stairs while holding a bucket of seawater. The distance between waves is almost equal to the length of our keel, and so every ten seconds or so the boat falls into a resonance and starts leaping higher and higher in the air, forcing us to slow down for a few seconds in order to break the spell.

Some five minutes after leaving port, Ivar swerves the boat very suddenly to avoid hitting a whale that he sees at the last second. "It's too bad we missed," he says, "the meat is excellent". The whales are invisible to me, but every few minutes we get passed by a puffin, crusing low above the water with a dignity completely unbefitting its little clown beak. If you can imagine a cross between a penguin and a toucan, then you have gone a long way towards imagining a puffin. They are numerous over the open water but I never manage to spot one on land.

The only other boats out today are trawlers fishing for prawns. Each trawler is followed by a swirling cloud of gulls, looking for an easy meal. The gulls steal food from fishermen in any way they can, and the fishermen even the score by stealing eggs from the gulls during the spring laying season. Gull eggs are large, bigger than a goose egg, and come in a mottled camouflage pattern. The cooked egg white is translucent and somehow contrives to have less flavor than the white of a chicken egg, but the extremely rich yolk makes the meal worth it. It's legal to pick these eggs without restriction, I learn later, but if you steal too many from a single bird it will finish the season by laying a final miniature, yolkless egg, and you may feel quite guilty indeed.

Seagulls are so tightly linked in my mind to urban garbage dumps and dirty beaches that I have quite a hard time accepting them as regular animals, making their living here amid postcard scenery. It's like seeing pigeons or sewer rats out in the wild. But of course this is the kind of place gulls come from; a landfill is a sumptuous feast rather than a necessity of life.

Those gull eggs that don't make it to a Norwegian table soon hatch into a surprisingly large ball of fluff very adept at hiding among the rocks while its parents are out stealing more prawns. If you get too close to its hiding place, the fluff ball waddles away from you in a panic, then freezes motionless and nearly invisible on the nearest patch of grey stone.

Justifying all the gull chick's anxieties is the elegant and lazy sea eagle, who every day makes his rounds above the island doing his very best never to have to flap his wings. The gulls know what he is up to and harrass him by diving at him and trying to stall his wing. The sea eagle bears this with fortitude, sometimes finding an upcurrent that lets him soar to high altitude, where the gulls (who have to flap as hard as they can to match his speed) don't have the strength to follow. The sea eagle is basically just a bald eagle in different livery, repackaged to meet the demands of the European market. Here his head is the same brown color as his body, though he retains the pretty white tail of his American cousin.

On the water there are many grey geese and eider ducks. Many of the geese trail a flotilla of a half dozen tiny goslings, surprisingly seaworthy. The eider ducks don't look like much, but a duvet cover made from their down sells for as much as a new car. Their tiny bits of fluff, which have amazing thermal properties, have to be painstakingly gathered by hand from cliffside duck nests by fully unionized Scandinavian workers who are required by statute to receive 25 vacation days a year, massive amounts of parental leave, and a living wage in a country that considers $30 to be the right price for a pizza. So the cost of an eiderdown anything is astronomical.

Before synthetic fills were invented, the eider was the Cadillac of sleeping bags, especially for Polar exploration, because of the combination of light weight and unparalleled insulating power. Now it's the material of choice for rich people in all climates. If you can afford the luxury of a cozy eiderdown bedspread, you can likely also afford the cost of air conditioning your house to the low temperature required to sleep under it. Someday someone will figure out how to put this stuff through a civet cat and throw an Apple logo onto it, and then we will have the ultimate luxury.

As we round a cape and turn towards the base of the fjord, the waves calm down a bit and human settlement picks up. Soon there are power lines, phone lines, and then the very backbone of civilization itself, the paved coastal road that runs all the way from Oslo to Kirkenes. A typical farm in northern Norway consists of a main house, a boathouse, and some outbuildings. Everything is new. When the Germans retreated in 1944, they burned this entire province to the ground with legendary Teutonic thoroughness, and the Norwegians have rebuilt with legendary Scandinavian uniformity of design. The result is identical buildings of different colors at a very, very low density, like a scattered Levittown.

Burfjord, population 397, rises out of the mist in the form of an empty pier and a service station. We lash the boat to the pier in anticipation of rough weather and penetrate inland, where Ivar gives me a tour d'horizon. Two grocery stores face off across a small street, each a cube of corrugated sheet metal, containing miracles of transportation like the five-dollar mango. Later on I will stand in one of these stores in front of a pyramid of Coke Zero bottles and consider the fact that a whole infrastructure exists for bringing this substance of no nutritional value from wherever it's bottled in Europe up to a place like this. I happen to love Coke Zero and whatever cyclopyrimidines or butylated phenols give it its weird fake sweetness, but seeing it stacked in quantity after coming off an island where everything has to be carried in by hand gives me pause. I feel like the Burfjord grocery store will someday form part of a sanctimonious diorama about the folly of late-period humanity in someone's well-meaning, sustainably-built museum or alien terrarium, and the thought fills me with irritation in advance. I buy a large bottle of the stuff as my way of shaking a fist at the future.

The social center of Burfjord is the small service station with attendant cafe. All the rest of the buildings in Burfjord seem to be owned by the government. There is a school, hospital, nursing home, administrative center, and some kind of cultural meeting hall. Like in a lot of remote outposts of the first world, pretty much everyone in Burfjord is employed in bringing social services to other people in Burfjord. One way to see this is as a hideous waste of taxpayer dollars in support of unsustainably fragmented communities; a different way to see this is as an acknowledgement that the only way to preserve a way of life that makes the region so attractive to visitors is to make it feasible for people to continue to live there without turning it into a tourist theme park.

Norway, as a rich country, has the luxury of pursuing this policy quite directly. There are strict limits on food imports, for example. If by Herculean effort a crop manages to grow in Norway, then by God you will have to pay if you want to buy its non-Norwegian equivalent. If you come down with an exotic disease in Burfjord, then the government will make sure you can videoconference in with a specialist in Oslo, and if you don't speak Norwegian they'll throw a translator in the mix at no charge. The point is to prevent the country from draining into its two or three main urban centers, and losing a distinctive tradition of stoic small farming under ridiculous climactic conditions. Otherwise Norway would just be another Canada, with fjords.

My haven in Burfjord is the local public library, a cheerful little space full of comfortable chairs that seems to share space with the waiting room to a local clinic. One of the first things I see on the magazine rack is a glossy thick booklet, in Polish, called "Welcome! Things to Know About Living in Norway". Norway is extremely popular with Polish workers, who as EU members are allowed to work here with minimal formalities. There are over 120,000 Poles in Norway doing construction, driving trucks, performing seasonal and domestic labor, and working as nurses and caretakers. The appeal to Poles is obvious. Compared to back home, the salaries are princely and you get the full protection of the mighty hammer of Thor that is Norwegian labor law, which it takes half the booklet just to summarize.

By the time Ivar's meeting is over, I have learned all about my rights and obligations as a Norwegian guest worker, the several types of personal identification numbers, and how car ownership would require an expensive series of annual rituals and sacrifices that would give pause to some of the world's major religions.

My ride back to Spildra is the scrappy little commuter ferry that connects the various communities in KvÃ¦nangen. Ivar has decided to stay the night in Burfjord and wait for the weather to clear a little bit, so I am condemned to lug my groceries home on foot after all. Compared to the boat, the ferry is a luxuriously smooth ride. It's a small twin-hulled catamaran with room for about fifty people that zips along at something like thirty miles an hour. The boat is clearly designed for rough weather and for the needs of locals who have a lot of stuff to lug. If you have a pallet of furniture and a large ATV you need brought with you, you just tow it to the dock and make sure things are tied down tight. One of the young ferry operators hooks it with the ferry's miniature crane, lowers it into the hold, and reverses the operation when you get to your stop.

Half an hour after we depart the ferry drops me at Dunvik pier to start the walk back to my cabin. Burfjord is now mercifully hidden by a long spit of land to the southwest. Within ten minutes I am out of sight of all the houses and all I see are comic book mountains and open water. But all around me are the invisible tendrils of Scandinavian socialism, just watching and waiting for a single moment of weakness in order to strike, and provide me with skilful medical attention, or rescue me from the sea, or show me that despite my efforts to hide from the world entirely I am standing on a spot with five bars of cell phone coverage.

I can see the sea eagle circling high above me, but a cold voice in my heart whispers that he has already been banded. I have left my illusions in Burfjord.

Scott And Scurvy

Sat, 03 Jul 2010 03:00:00 -0700

Recently I have been re-reading one of my favorite books, The Worst Journey in the World, an account of Robert Falcon Scott's 1911 expedition to the South Pole. I can’t do the book justice in a summary, other than recommend that you drop everything and read it, but there is one detail that particularly baffled me the first time through, and that I resolved to understand better once I could stand to put the book down long enough.

Writing about the first winter the men spent on the ice, Cherry-Garrard casually mentions an astonishing lecture on scurvy by one of the expedition’s doctors:

Atkinson inclined to Almroth Wright’s theory that scurvy is due to an acid intoxication of the blood caused by bacteria...
There was little scurvy in Nelson’s days; but the reason is not clear, since, according to modern research, lime-juice only helps to prevent it. We had, at Cape Evans, a salt of sodium to be used to alkalize the blood as an experiment, if necessity arose. Darkness, cold, and hard work are in Atkinson’s opinion important causes of scurvy.

Now, I had been taught in school that scurvy had been conquered in 1747, when the Scottish physician James Lind proved in one of the first controlled medical experiments that citrus fruits were an effective cure for the disease. From that point on, we were told, the Royal Navy had required a daily dose of lime juice to be mixed in with sailors’ grog, and scurvy ceased to be a problem on long ocean voyages.

But here was a Royal Navy surgeon in 1911 apparently ignorant of what caused the disease, or how to cure it. Somehow a highly-trained group of scientists at the start of the 20th century knew less about scurvy than the average sea captain in Napoleonic times. Scott left a base abundantly stocked with fresh meat, fruits, apples, and lime juice, and headed out on the ice for five months with no protection against scurvy, all the while confident he was not at risk. What happened?

...

By all accounts scurvy is a horrible disease. Scott, who has reason to know, gives a succinct description:

The symptoms of scurvy do not necessarily occur in a regular order, but generally the first sign is an inflamed, swollen condition of the gums. The whitish pink tinge next the teeth is replaced by an angry red; as the disease gains ground the gums become more spongy and turn to a purplish colour, the teeth become loose and the gums sore. Spots appear on the legs, and pain is felt in old wounds and bruises; later, from a slight oedema, the legs, and then the arms, swell to a great size and become blackened behind the joints. After this the patient is soon incapacitated, and the last horrible stages of the disease set in, from which death is a merciful release.

One of the most striking features of the disease is the disproportion between its severity and the simplicity of the cure. Today we know that scurvy is due solely to a deficiency in vitamin C, a compound essential to metabolism that the human body must obtain from food. Scurvy is rapidly and completely cured by restoring vitamin C into the diet.

Except for the nature of vitamin C, eighteenth century physicians knew this too. But in the second half of the nineteenth century, the cure for scurvy was lost. The story of how this happened is a striking demonstration of the problem of induction, and how progress in one field of study can lead to unintended steps backward in another.

An unfortunate series of accidents conspired with advances in technology to discredit the cure for scurvy. What had been a simple dietary deficiency became a subtle and unpredictable disease that could strike without warning. Over the course of fifty years, scurvy would return to torment not just Polar explorers, but thousands of infants born into wealthy European and American homes. And it would only be through blind luck that the actual cause of scurvy would be rediscovered, and vitamin C finally isolated, in 1932.

It is not easy to find fresh foods that lack vitamin C. Plants and animals tend to be full of it, since the molecule is used in all kinds of biochemical synthesis as an electron donor. But the same reactive qualities that make the vitamin useful also make it easy to destroy. Vitamin C quickly breaks down in the presence of light, heat and air. For this reason it is absent from most preserved foods that have been cooked or dried. Its destruction is also rapidly catalyzed by copper ions, which may be one reason sailors, with their big copper cooking vats, were particularly susceptible.

Because our bodies can't synthesize the vitamin, they have grown very good at conserving it. It takes up to six months for scurvy to develop in healthy people after vitamin C is removed from the diet, and only a tiny daily amount is enough to keep a person healthy.

It has been known since antiquity that fresh foods in general, and lemons and oranges in particular, will cure scurvy. Starting with Vasco de Gama’s crew in 1497, sailors have repeatedly discovered the curative power of citrus fruits, and the cure has just as frequently been forgotten or ignored by subsequent explorers.

Lind tends to get the credit for discovering the citrus cure since he performed something approaching a controlled experiment. But it took an additional forty years of experiments, analysis, and political lobbying for his result to become institutionalized in the Royal Navy. In 1799, all Royal Navy ships on foreign service were ordered to serve lemon juice:

The scheduled allowance for the sailors in the Navy was fixed at I oz.lemon juice with I + oz. sugar, served daily after 2 weeks at sea, the lemon juice being often called ‘lime juice’ and our sailors ‘lime juicers’. The consequences of this new regulation were startling and by the beginning of the nineteenth century scurvy may be said to have vanished from the British navy. In 1780, the admissions of scurvy cases to the Naval Hospital at Haslar were 1457; in the years from 1806 to 1810, they were two.

(As we'll see, the confusion between lemons and limes would have serious reprecussions.)

Scurvy had been the leading killer of sailors on long ocean voyages; some ships experienced losses as high as 90% of their men. With the introduction of lemon juice, the British suddenly held a massive strategic advantage over their rivals, one they put to good use in the Napoleonic wars. British ships could now stay out on blockade duty for two years at a time, strangling French ports even as the merchantmen who ferried citrus to the blockading ships continued to die of scurvy, prohibited from touching the curative themselves.

The success of lemon juice was so total that much of Sicily was soon transformed into a lemon orchard for the British fleet. Scurvy continued to be a vexing problem in other navies, who were slow to adopt citrus as a cure, as well as in the Merchant Marine, but for the Royal Navy it had become a disease of the past.

By the middle of the 19th century, however, advances in technology were reducing the need for any kind of scurvy preventative. Steam power had shortened travel times considerably from the age of sail, so that it was rare for sailors other than whalers to be months at sea without fresh food. Citrus juice was a legal requirement on all British vessels by 1867, but in practical terms it was becoming superfluous.

So when the Admiralty began to replace lemon juice with an ineffective substitute in 1860, it took a long time for anyone to notice. In that year, naval authorities switched procurement from Mediterranean lemons to West Indian limes. The motives for this were mainly colonial - it was better to buy from British plantations than to continue importing lemons from Europe. Confusion in naming didn't help matters. Both "lemon" and "lime" were in use as a collective term for citrus, and though European lemons and sour limes are quite different fruits, their Latin names (citrus medica, var. limonica and citrus medica, var. acida) suggested that they were as closely related as green and red apples. Moreover, as there was a widespread belief that the antiscorbutic properties of lemons were due to their acidity, it made sense that the more acidic Caribbean limes would be even better at fighting the disease.

In this, the Navy was deceived. Tests on animals would later show that fresh lime juice has a quarter of the scurvy-fighting power of fresh lemon juice. And the lime juice being served to sailors was not fresh, but had spent long periods of time in settling tanks open to the air, and had been pumped through copper tubing. A 1918 animal experiment using representative samples of lime juice from the navy and merchant marine showed that the 'preventative' often lacked any antiscorbutic power at all.

By the 1870s, therefore, most British ships were sailing without protection against scurvy. Only speed and improved nutrition on land were preventing sailors from getting sick.

It fell to the unfortunate George Nares to discover this fact in 1875, when he led the British Arctic Expedition in an attempt to reach the North Pole via Greenland. Some oceanographic theories of the time posited an open polar sea, and Nares was directed to sail along the Greenland coast, then take a sledging party and see how far north he could get on the pack ice.

The expedition was a fiasco. Two men in the sledging party developed scurvy within days of leaving the ship. Within five weeks, half the men were sick, and despite having laid depots with plentiful supplies for their return journey, they were barely able to make it back. A rescue party sent to intercept them found that lime juice failed to have its usual dramatic effect. Most damning of all, some of the men who stayed on the ship, never failing to take their daily dose, also got scurvy.

The failure of the Nares expedition provoked an uproar in Britain. The Royal Navy believed itself capable of sustaining any crew for two years without signs of scurvy, yet here was an able and adequately supplied crew crippled by the disease within weeks. For the first time since the eighteenth century, the effectiveness of citrus juice as an absolute preventative was in doubt.

More troubling evidence came several years later, during the Jackson-Harmsworth Expedition to Franz-Josef Land in 1894. Members of this expedition spent three years on a ship frozen into the pack ice. Koettlitz, their chief physician, describes what happened:

The expedition proper ate fresh meat regularly at least once a day in the shape of polar bear. The people on the ship had, however, a prejudice against this food, which certainly was not particularly palatable, and insisted, against all advice, upon eating their preserved and salted meat. This meat I occasionally noticed to be somewhat "high" or "gamey", and afterwards heard that it was often so. The result was that, though I visited the ship every day, and personally saw that each man swallowed his dose of lime juice (which was made compulsory, and was of the best quality), the whole ship’s company were tainted with scurvy, and two died.

This pattern of fresh meat preventing scurvy would be a consistent one in Arctic exploration. It defied the common understanding of scurvy as a deficiency in vegetable matter. Somehow men could live for years on a meat-only diet and remain healthy, provided that the meat was fresh.

This is a good example of how the very ubiquity of vitamin C made it hard to identify. Though scurvy was always associated with a lack of greens, fresh meat contains adequate amounts of vitamin C, with particularly high concentrations in the organ meats that explorers considered a delicacy. Eat a bear liver every few weeks and scurvy will be the least of your problems.

But unless you already understand and believe in the vitamin model of nutrition, the notion of a trace substance that exists both in fresh limes and bear kidneys, but is absent from a cask of lime juice because you happened to prepare it in a copper vessel, begins to sound pretty contrived.

Doctors of the era looked at this puzzling evidence and wondered. Other diseases had recently been shown to have their source in bacterial infection. The bacterial model was new, and had already had spectacular success in identifying and treating diseases like typhus, tuberculosis, and cholera. What if the cause of scruvy had also been misunderstood? What if instead of a deficiency disease, scurvy was actually a kind of chronic food poisoning from bacterial contamination of meat? Thus was born the ptomaine theory of scurvy, and Koettlitz became its enthusiastic backer:

That the cause of the outbreak of scurvy in so many Polar expeditions has always been that something was radically wrong with the preserved meats, whether tinned or salted, is practically certain; that foods are scurvy-producing by being, if only slightly, tainted is practically certain; that the benefit of the so-called "antiscorbutics" is a delusion, and that some antiscorbutic property has been removed from foods in the process of preservation is also a delusion. An animal food is either scorbutic - in other words, scurvy-producing - or it is not. It is either tainted or it is sound. Putrefactive change, if only slight and tasteless, has taken place or it has not. Bacteria have been able to produce ptomaines in it or they have not; and if they have not, then the food is healthy and not scurvy-producing.

The ’ptomaine’ in the theory was never really defined, other than as a noxious waste product of bacterial action. But the theory had an internal logic. Poorly preserved meats would be contaminated by ptomaine. Under normal conditions, this was not enough cause scurvy. Not only did fresh food consumed in the diet have a kind of antidote effect (whether it worked by neutralizing the poison, or by simply displacing it in the diet, was not clear), but environment also played an important role. Certain factors seemed to predispose people to chronic ptomaine poisoning, including darkness, intense exertion, idleness, close air, prolonged confinement and cold.

On prolonged journeys under harsh conditions, the accumulated ptomaine in badly preserved meats would disrupt health, giving the classic symptoms of scurvy. Once the tainted foods were discontinued, the body would rapidly excrete the accumulated ptomaine and return to healthh.

To the extent that citrus juices were effective in preventing scurvy, it was because their acidity denatured ptomaines, or killed the bacteria that caused them. The real culprit was in the bad meat, and the casks of lime juice mandated by law on every seagoing ship were another example of outdated medical superstition that would now give way to a more sophisticated understanding of illness.

This was the latest in medical thinking on scurvy when Scott prepared for his first expedition to Antarctica, in 1903. It would be the first serious British expedition to the continent in fifty years. Scott took the very same Dr. Koettlitz along as his chief physician.

Scott was a meticulous planner, and mindful of the ptomaine theory, paid special attention to the quality of his provisions. While the cold and cramped conditions of the journey could not be helped, he knew he could avoid any risk of scurvy by using only completely unspoiled canned goods. For his part, Koettlitz predicted that as long as there was fresh seal meat available, "we can take it as certain that no scurvy will be heard of in connexion with the expedition, however long it may remain in the High South".

Scott did not have time to supervise the actual canning of his provisions for the Discovery journey, but he made sure that before being served, all tins were opened in the presence of his medical staff, including Dr. Koettlitz, and carefully examined for signs of spoilage. Any doubtful cans were consigned to the trash heap.

So it came as a bitter surprise to Scott when one of the Discovery’s early sledging parties trudged into camp with unmistakable symptoms of scurvy after only a three week absence. Subsequent examination showed that many of the men on the ship were also in the early stages of the disease. The preventative measures had failed, and Scott was greatly distressed:

The evil having come, the great thing now is to banish it. In my absence, Armitage, in consultation with the doctors, has already taken steps to remedy matters by serving out fresh meat regularly and by increasing the allowance of bottled fruits, and he has done an even greater service by taking the cook in hand. I don’t know whether he threatened to hang him at the yardarm or used more persuasive measures, but, whatever it was, there is a marked improvement in the cooking.
...
With the idea of giving everyone on the mess-deck a change of air in turn, we have built up a space in the main hut by packing cases around the stove. In this space each mess are to live for a week; they have breakfast and dinner on board, but are allowed to cook their supper in the hut. The present occupants enjoy this sort of picnic-life immensely.

We have had a thorough clearance of the holds, disinfected the bilges, whitewashed the sides, and generally made them sweet and clean.

As a next step I tackled the clothes and hammocks. One knows how easily garments collect, and especially under such conditions as ours; however, they have all been cleared out now, except those actually in use. The hammocks and bedding I found quite dry and comfortable, but we have had them all thoroughly aired. We have cleared all the deck-lights so as to get more daylight below, and we have scrubbed the decks and cleaned out all the holes and corners until everything is as clean as a new pin. I am bound to confess there was no very radical change in all this; we found very little dirt, and our outbreak cannot possibly have come from insanitary conditions of living; our men are far too much alive to their own comfort for that. But now we do everything for the safe side, and from the conviction that one cannot be too careful.

Scott sent a seal-killing party to collect as much fresh meat as possible (his crew could eat their way through a seal in two and a half days). They gathered enough to eliminate the need for preserved meat entirely. The butchered seals were stored, like logs, frozen on the ice. Meanwhile, Koetlittz had managed to sprout and grow a modest crop of watercress under a skylight, the Antarctic soil proving surprisingly fertile. His confidence in the ptomaine theory did not blind him to the practical advantages of a proven remedy (watercress sprouts contain a ridiculous amount of vitamin C). Enough cress grew to supplement one meal for all the men, and in combination with the fresh seal meat, it was enough to banish all signs of scurvy.

Scott was relieved, but he knew that something had escaped his understanding. Despite scrupulous care, the disease had slipped through, and he was not sure why his precautions had failed. Evidently it was not enough to inspect meat by taste and smell - even minute quanities of ptomaine might be enough to cause scurvy.

His solution was to move the expedition off of canned meat altogether, relying entirely on seal meat and penguin. This would be fine while the men remained on the Discovery, but it left the problem of what to do about the upcoming sledge journeys. The planned sledging ration was pemmican (a mixture of dried meat and fat) and biscuit, but since Scott had lost all confidence in the safety of preserved meat, he had to find a way to replace the pemmican with seal.

Fresh seal meat would be far too heavy a replacement, so Scott had it repeatedly boiled to remove as much moisture as possible (in the process destroying all its vitamin C). This concentrated seal meat was still almost twice as heavy as the equivalent pemmican, but it was the best he could do.

In November of 1902, Scott, Wilson and Shackleton set out on the expedition’s main journey. Their goal was to take a dog team as far south as possible along the Ross ice shelf, and see if they could find a useful route for an eventual attempt at the Pole.

Things did not go well. Scott inadvertently starved his dogs, making them impossible to control and nearly useless for hauling. Very quickly, his men had to start relaying the sledges, which meant walking three miles for every one mile of southward progress. They began killing the weakest dogs and feeding them to the remainder (the dogs were so hungry they did not hesitate to rip their fallen comrades apart). The men themselves could think of nothing else but food, their rations inadequate for the work of hauling the sledge.

Wilson, a doctor, checked the men’s gums and legs each Sunday for signs of scurvy. Shackleton was the first to show symptoms, though he was not told about this for several weeks. Soon Scott and Wilson were showing symptoms as well. Before long Shackleton was weak, had begun to cough up blood at night, and was in real danger of physical collapse.

The party barely made it home. For much of the return trip, Shackleton was unable to pull, staggering alongside the sledges. On their return to the Discovery, the men were bedridden and in a state of complete physical collapse, getting up only long enough to eat prodigious meals. Scott remarked in his journal on the extraordinary lassitude and lack of energy the disease provoked in him.

Eight years after the Discovery expedition, Scott returned to Antarctica to make an attempt at the Pole. Mindful of what had happened on his first journey, he took pains to seek the latest expert advice about scurvy, both from doctors and from Arctic explorers.

The advice he got was unchanged - scurvy was an acidic condition of the blood caused by ptomaines in tainted meat. The legendary explorer Fridtjof Nansen had some particularly curious advice - if he found himself in extremis, Nansen said, it was better to choose cans of meat that were completely rotten over cans that were only slightly spoilt, since the ptomaines were more likely to have broken down in the former.

This time Scott made sure to provide his men with fresh seal meat, and scurvy was not a problem in the main camp. In the austral winter of 1911, Wilson, Bowers, and Cherry-Garrard went on a phantasmagoric five week journey to try and collect the eggs of the empreror penguin. This journey, which gave Cherry-Garrard’s book its title, took place in complete darkness and temperatures that dropped below -77Ë™ Fahrenheit. The men, forced to relay and searching for their footprints by candlelight, sometimes made as little as a mile of progress a day. When Cherry-Garrard’s clothes were weighed on his return, they contained twenty four-pounds of ice. That the men survived defies belief - there has never been another journey in the Polar night, even with modern equipment - but they did return, and to Scott's great relief showed no symptoms of scurvy.

One of Scott's goals for the winter journey had been to determine the proper ration for sledging up on the Polar plateau, where the men would have to hike for several weeks at altitudes above 10,000 feet. After some tinkering with proportions, the men on the Winter Journey had settled on a satisfying ration, and Scott decided to adopt it unchanged for his on trip later that year:

Scott's Polar ration: 450g biscuit, 340 grams pemmican, 85g sugar, 57g butter, 24g tea, 16g cocoa. This ration contains about 4500 calories (sledging requires 6500) and no vitamin C.

Scott left camp with 16 men on November 1, 1911. His plan was to lay depots along the route, and send groups of men back at intervals until he was left with three companions on the great plateau south of the Beardmore Glacier. The expedition used men, dogs, ponies (slaughtered and fed to the dogs at the foot of the glacier), and a pair of experimental motorized sledges that broke down after just a few miles on the ice.

Scott sent back his men in stages; each group had a progressively harder time making it back to camp. The last group, sent back from the top of the Beardmore, was led by Edward Evans, who quickly developed a severe case of scurvy. After bravely walking most of the distance, he became incapacitated and had to be left on the ice in the care of a companion while the third man in the group force-marched the thirty remaining miles to camp to summon a rescue team.

Scott, oblivious to this ominous development, pressed onwards. The rest of his story is well known. Norwegian tents at the Pole, an increasingly desperate return, two in his group sickening and dying, then a terrible blizzard eleven miles short of his last depot; the three men freezing to death in their tent.

The evidence that the Polar Party suffered from scurvy on their return trip is strong but circumstantial. The wounds that would not heal, the sudden death of Seaman Evans during the descent down the Beardmore, their great weakness are all consistent with the disease. Both Scott and Wilson would have easily recognized the symptoms, but it is possible that they would have chosen not to record them. There was a certain stigma with scurvy, especially in their case, having taken such pains to forestall the disease. Scott had nearly left any mention of scurvy out of his 1903 report, before deciding to do so for the cause of science, and it’s possible he felt a similar reticence now.

Entire academic careers have been devoted to second-guessing Scott's final journey. It would probably be easier to list the few things that didn’t contribute to his death, than to try and rank the relative contributions of cold, exhaustion, malnutrition, bad weather, bad luck, poor planning, and rash decisions. But with regard to scurvy, at least, the Polar explorers were in an impossible position.

They had a theory of the disease that made sense, fit the evidence, but was utterly wrong. They had arrived at the idea of an undetectable substance in their food, present in trace quantities, with a direct causative relationship to scurvy, but they thought of it in terms of a poison to avoid. In one sense, the additional leap required for a correct understanding was very small. In another sense, it would have required a kind of Copernican revolution in their thinking.

It was pure luck that led to the actual discovery of vitamin C. Axel Holst and Theodor Frolich had been studying beriberi (another deficiency disease) in pigeons, and when they decided to switch to a mammal model, they serendipitously chose guinea pigs, the one animal besides human beings and monkeys that requires vitamin C in its diet. Fed a diet of pure grain, the animals showed no signs of beriberi, but quickly sickened and died of something that closely resembled human scurvy.

No one had seen scurvy in animals before. With a simple animal model for the disease in hand, it became a matter of running the correct experiments, and it was quickly established that scurvy was a deficiency disease after all. Very quickly the compound that prevents the disease was identified as a small molecule present in cabbage, lemon juice, and many other foods, and in 1932 Szent-GyÃ¶rgyi definitively isolated ascorbic acid.

---

There are several aspects of this 'second coming’ of scurvy in the late 19th century that I find particularly striking:

First, the fact that from the fifteenth century on, it was the rare doctor who acknowledged ignorance about the cause and treatment of the disease. The sickness could be fitted to so many theories of disease - imbalance in vital humors, bad air, acidification of the blood, bacterial infection - that despite the existence of an unambigous cure, there was always a raft of alternative, ineffective treatments. At no point did physicians express doubt about their theories, however ineffective.

Second, how difficult it was to correctly interpret the evidence without the concept of "vitamin". Now that we understand scurvy as a deficiency disease, we can explain away the anomalous results that seem to contradict that theory (the failure of lime juice on polar expeditions, for example). But the evidence on its own did not point clearly at any solution. It was not clear which results were the anomalous ones that needed explaining away. The ptomaine theory made correct predictions (fresh meat will prevent scurvy) even though it was completely wrong.

Third, how technological progress in one area can lead to surprising regressions. I mentioned how the advent of steam travel made it possible to accidentaly replace an effective antiscorbutic with an ineffective one. An even starker example was the rash of cases of infantile scurvy that afflicted upper class families in the late 19th century. This outbreak was the direct result of another technological development, the pasteurization of cow's milk. The procedure made milk vastly safer for infants to drink, but also destroyed vitamin C. For poorer children, who tended to be breast-fed and quickly weaned onto adult foods, this was not an issue, but the wealthy infants fed a special diet of cooked cereals and milk were at grave risk. It took several years for infant scurvy, at first called "Barlow's disease", to be properly identified. At that point, doctors were caught between two fires. They could recommend that parents not boil their milk, and expose the children to bacterial infection, or they could insist on pasteurization at the risk of scurvy. The prevaling theory of scurvy as bacterial poisoning clouded the issue further, so that it took time to arrive at the right solution - supplementing the diet with onion juice or cooked potato.

Fourth, how small a foundation of evidence was necessary to build a soaring edifice of theory. Lind’s famous experiment, for example, had two sailors eating oranges for six days. Lind went on to propound a completely ineffective method of preserving lemon juice (by boiling it down), which he never thought to test. One of the experiments that ’confirmed’ the ptomaine theory involved feeding a handful of monkeys canned and fresh meat. The fructivorous monkeys died within days; the ones who died last, and with the least blood in their stool, were assumed to be the ones without scurvy. And even these flawed experiments were a rarity compared to the number of flat assertions by medical authorities without any testing or basis in fact.

Finally, that one of the simplest of diseases managed to utterly confound us for so long, at the cost of millions of lives, even after we had stumbled across an unequivocal cure. It makes you wonder how many incurable ailments of the modern world - depression, autism, hypertension, obesity - will turn out to have equally simple solutions, once we are able to see them in the correct light. What will we be slapping our foreheads about sixty years from now, wondering how we missed something so obvious?

In the course of writing this essay, I was tempted many times to pick a villain. Maybe the perfectly named Almroth Wright, who threw his considerable medical reputation behind the ptomaine theory and so delayed the proper re-understanding of scurvy for many years. Or the nameless Admiralty flunkie who helped his career by championing the switch to West Indian limes. Or even poor Scott himself, sermonizing about the virtues of scientific progress while never conducting a proper experiment, taking dreadful risks, and showing a most unscientific reliance on pure grit to get his men out of any difficulty.

But the villain here is just good old human ignorance, that master of disguise. We tend to think that knowledge, once acquired, is something permanent. Instead, even holding on to it requires constant, careful effort.

tl;dr: scurvy bad, science hard.

I'll try to footnote this essay properly in the next few days; in the meantime, if you'd like to geek out with me I invite you to check out a list of collected links.

The Great Legacy.com Swindle

Fri, 02 Jul 2010 03:00:00 -0700

(See below for an update)

Last month my dear friend committed suicide, and in the middle of many emotions I came into contact with that part of the Internet that specializes in the business of dying.

My friend's parents had bought an online obituary at the New York Times website, something I later found out was run by an outfit called legacy.com. The obituary includes a guest book, where you can send your condolences. There is a little text generator, in case you're out of ideas; you can "light a candle", and there is also a tie-in to an online florist who very generously offers to say with flowers what you might not be able to express through the text generator at such a difficult time. I was mildly surprised not to find a selection of tasteful, black-rimmed emoticons, a bit of kitsch that would have delighted my friend.

I wrote a condolence letter (as I had no other way to contact her parents) and when I submitted it, the site warned me that the "guest book" would expire in a little over a month, but if I liked I could pay to extend its life by one year ($29) or keep up "in perpetuity" ($79), presumably meaning for however long legacy.com stays in business.

Since we have for-profit undertakers, it seemed tacky but not unusual that there should be a business in online guest books for dead people. Knowing a bit about the economics of online services, and what kind of a profit margin that $79 represents, it was perhaps a little galling. But legacy.com pays moderators to check death notices and screen posts, so they can certainly argue they're providing some kind of value.

Things got decidedly sketchier a few weeks later, when legacy.com decided to email me a reminder that the guest book (which I had only posted to, not created) was about to meet a fate very similar to the person it was honoring if I didn't act promptly to renew, which, legacy.com suggested, would be the perfect way to show my support to a grieving family in a difficult time.

When you are mourning someone, any automated reminder about their death from a website that wants your money is going to cause what you might call a negative customer experience. It doesn't matter whether you entitle it "A gentle reminder from legacy.com" or "DEAD FRIEND'S NAME IN ALL CAPS Guest Book" (although guess which one they went with).

I decided to see what the other end of this operation looked like. As an experiment, I visited the obituary section of the New York Times website and followed the steps to submit my own online death notice, stopping only at the final confirmation screen.

I learned the following things:

The death notice section of pretty much every major US newspaper is run by legacy.com, "skinned" to look like the rest of that newspaper's site.
The first step in creating a legacy.com death notice, before anything else, is providing a credit card number.
At no point, including the final confirmation screen, does legacy.com tell you how much you will be charged.
At no point is there a link that you can follow to find out how much you will be charged.
The site requires you to confirm that the transaction you are about to complete is completely non-refundable, even though they never disclose the amount.

Screenshots here: one, two, three, four. You can also try this for yourself, use 4111 1111 1111 1111 as a credit card number.

In other words, the site takes money from bereaved people without disclosing what it's billing them, gambling on the fact that they're probably too preoccupied to care. Whether or not this kind of thing is legal, it is completely unethical. Even an undertaker who has upsold you on everything from coffin to funeral buffet has to show you a number before you sign on the dotted line.

If you Google around long enough, you may find your way to the New York Times rate sheet, where the small print tells you that an online death notice costs "from $79". But you won't find this information from anywhere within the legacy.com payment funnel, nor will you find any more information about that evocative word from.

I find it odious and troubling that the New York Times, along with a raft of other major newspapers, partners with this kind of website. It seems like further confirmation that newspapers will now clutch at any revenue stream.

I would very much like to see an online competitor put these vultures out of business. I think a respectable and respectful business model would be to charge a small fee for death notices and make comments read-only after some interval unless the creator paid to extend a default moderation period.

Update

The day after publishing this post, I received an email from the Director of Operations at legacy.com, who tells me the direct link to their order form from the NYT obituary page was a mistake. Legacy.com has changed this link to lead to a page that includes price information.