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Fear, Loathing and Copulating Worms Our intrepid reporter prepares to depart for foreign climes. By Susan Zakin "I'm here to give you new things to be afraid of," said the reasonable-looking woman. Little did she know how easy her job would be. A few months ago, I applied for a fellowship named after a U.S. senator who died in a plane crash and happened to be the heir to a ketchup fortune. I would have to train environmental journalists, but I could also haul ass around a foreign country of my choice and work on any story that interested me. All the guy writers I know go to places like Africa and Comoros and Brazil, while I keep drawing plum assignments like interviewing a rancher in Deming, N.M., a place where the motels sport signs saying "American-owned" and the food tastes, well, American. Why should David Quammen get to write Song of the Dodo, I reasoned, probably the most important book of the last 20 years, while I'm relegated to writing about the varied and wondrous ways Western Republicans are squeezing the last nannopennies out of the scorched and scarred basin and range? No reason at all, it turns out. "Congratulations," said the fellowship director. "You're going to Madagascar." For the next few months, I was too busy to think about what I had unleashed. The truth was, I was terrified. Why? The answer is somewhere in Portnoy's Complaint. (Sorry, guys, this has nothing to do with liver.) Remember the part where Portnoy, proud of his ascension to the upper middle class, tells his mother than he's going to Europe? "Why are you going there?" his mother asks. "We escaped from there." I was 15 when I read this and I laughed out loud. I had heard the exact same conversation between my grandmother and my father. Like Portnoy, my family ascended to the lofty heights of assimilation. (In New York, this means moving to Manhattan.) But when it came to braving the Old World, I've always been a bit of a wimp. As for the Heart of Darkness ... fuhgeddaboudit. Leeches, malarial mosquitoes, famines in Sudan? Is this supposed to be fun? Christiane Amanpour I'm not. It didn't help that someone very close to me had bit the big one 10 years ago when his bus rolled off a mountain in Nepal. So many phobias, so little time. But I desperately wanted to go to Madagascar. Why? The easy answer is lemurs. Like every Child of Disney, I think they're cute. Madagascar is the only place that still has them. The other reasons are more complicated. Madagascar's plants and animals make it one of the world's biodiversity hotspots. But what struck me is that Madagascar has the same amount of uncut forest that we have here in the United States. That's 5 or 10 percent, depending on who you talk to in either place. In other words, not much. Are we really that different from these exotic places you see on the Discovery Channel? I suspect not. Think about it. Madagascar also has a high degree of endemism. That means plants and animals that evolved specifically in that place and don't exist anywhere else. So does the Southwest. Madagascar is making those plants and animals extinct at a rapid clip. So are we. To write about extinction in foreign countries--a soupçon of holocaust with your ecotravel--lets us off the hook. This is ridiculous, when you think about it, since the U.S. consumes 40 percent of the world's resources with about 3 percent of the world's population. It's even more ridiculous when you figure out that we're nuking our forests and deserts without the excuse of poverty. I have to admit that my crusading ecojournalist aspirations are coupled with a healthy dose of hedonism. Madagascar was settled by Indonesians and later by Africans. It was a British colony until the French took over in the late 1800s. The island, which is about the size of California, has cool music because of the Polynesian and African influences, and, reputedly, excellent food, thanks to the French. Although Madagascar recently established a national park to protect some of the country's last remaining rainforest, a lot of the island is desert. After spending my last summer vacations slipping around in the mud of Latin American rainforests, this was the clincher. I hate mud. Of course, Madagascar is an island, so it has beaches. The southwestern part of Madagascar is supposed to be like the central coast of Baja, where the boojum tree lives, only with even more weird-looking desert plants. Maybe it was Malagasy version of boojum trees. Or it could have been the chance to meet people who are still close to their animist roots. But here I was about to get a shot in the arm from Allison Clough, the nice doctor who was trying, with great success, to make me afraid. Clough, who once headed the University of Arizona's travel clinic, is a refugee from the dastardly world of HMOs. After her private practice went south, partly because she couldn't bring herself to see 50 patients a day, Clough is running a private travel medicine clinic. "There are two kinds of fish poisoning," she tells me cheerily. "Scombroid and ciguatera." "Can you spell those?" I ask, retreating unconvincingly behind my professional "just the facts, ma'am" persona. She obliges. "There are other fish poisonings, but we don't get into that. Just eat what the locals eat," she says. The list goes on. The really fun one was Schistosomiasis, or Bilharzia, worms that live in a state of perpetual copulation. In you. I lay back, a patient etherized on a doctor's Barcalounger, hoping it would all be worth it. I'll keep you posted.
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