Like a lot of people, I liked The Revenant, and the grizzly attacking Leonardo DiCaprio was one
of the most intense cinematic scenes ever.
After seeing the movie, people who know I travel a lot to wild places
asked me if I’d ever had a dangerous wildlife encounter. I’ve had sketchy encounters with wildlife so
I tell them about stumbling on a black bear sow and her two cubs, a face-to-face encounter with a moray eel in a sunken wreck in the
Bahamas, skirting a caribou bull in Alaska and being charged by an
angry bull elephant in the Serengeti. I
unknowingly parked directly under a leopard crouching on an overhanging acacia
tree limb in Tanzania. I’ve run across
more snakes than I care to remember, found a scorpion under my sleeping bag in
the Grand Canyon and tagged angry sharks in South Carolina
But my worst encounters were with nemeses smaller and much
less menacing.
My most memorable experience (in many embarrassing ways) was
caused by a microscopic critter called giardia lamblia. Ran into this one on a canoe trip in
Minnesota. I picked up my little friend
by drinking contaminated water in the northern backcountry. My friendly giardia protozoa zeroed in on my
gastrointestinal track where he immediately found things to his liking and
proceeded to wreak havoc, his specialty being a nice little affliction called
giardasis.
I don’t need to explain here the symptoms of contaminated
protozoa in your small intestine, just suffice it to say that you don’t want to
be on an airplane when those symptoms hit.
Which, of course, is precisely where I was. Dominating an airline toilet when 150 other
passengers are aboard does not make one a popular travel mate but I didn’t
really care, I locked the door and spent the majority of the flight in rumbling
seclusion. Longest, most miserable
flight of my life. Followed by two more
weeks of bathroom sprints and churning stomach aches before antibiotics finally
kicked Mr. Giardia’s butt. Lost five
pounds and my dignity. |
| My Nemesis |
Now you have probably been bitten by a fire ant and know the
unpleasantness of that pain. Trust me,
you don’t know pain. The Schmidt Insect
Pain Scale Index (yes, there is such a thing), developed by Dr. Justin Schmidt,
ranks insects based on the severity of pain of their bite or sting, 1.0 through
4.0, increasingly more painful. Fire
ants rank a lowly 1.0, bullets ants are alone at the top of the heap, the most
painful of any insect on the planet, an excruciating 4.0+. Schmidt further provides incisive, and rather
humorous, descriptions of the various stings (a raving masochist apparently, he
actually allowed himself to personally experience the bite or sting of each of
the 150 ranked insects). He describes a
fire ant as “like walking on carpet and getting a static electricity
shock.” A bullet ant is described as “walking
on hot charcoals with a 3-inch rusty nail in your heel.”
I was hurting—HURTING—for eight hours, the pain crawling up
my hand, my arm, into my chest. I
thought I was having a heart attack. I broke out in sweat, I panted, I was
nauseous, I almost threw up. Searing
pain surged through my hand and arm, a severe debilitating pain that lasted for
more than four hours. I wished I had encountered a lion or tiger
or bear instead of an ant. Our guide led us into a nearby village where the
local shaman offered a cure, which I declined after seeing the concoction he
wanted me to drink. I gained a new-found
respect for bullet ants.
So there you go Leonardo, take your wimpy old grizzly
attack, ants and parasites are what I fear.
