I.
In my memory, we are awake in the pre-dawn dark, walking to where the earth dives down to kiss the pond. Loons and secretive deer watch us make our way to water that shimmers with the scrabbling of hundreds of thousands of mayflies, reminding us that what makes the world go on are often the smallest things most easily overlooked. The air is thick with the exhalations of water and moss, and to protect himself from the bone-deep damp my father wears a gas-station poncho. I wear a trash bag with holes cut for my arms and head and, in spite of my layered long johns, shiver with the cold. My father, if he notices, pretends not to.
At the edge of the pond my father flips over a canoe and snakes the colors of tabby cats twist away from the light. I’d like to catch one but I dare not stop. For the past three weeks, my father has worked the night shift. For three weeks, my father has been a set of shoes near the door, a snore from a darkened bedroom, his patience measured by the puffiness beneath his eyes. My father wants me to be a certain kind of child and I will never be this child, although at my early age, I do not yet know it and so I hurry along, leaving the snakes alone.
The canoe is loaded with our fishing poles, a tackle box, a Cool Whip container filled with night crawlers and dirt. A small cooler with bologna sandwiches, Bud Light, water. We step in and push off, each dip of the paddle rocking the canoe. If we were closer to home there would be things to pluck from the water—styrofoam, a Butter-finger wrapper, a half-crushed Moxie can. But out here, the only signs of human life are the gentle drips of the paddle, the swooshing of our patched fiberglass canoe. Out here, we are lost between layers of pondfog and looncall.
Fish bite better in the rain, says my father. If you’re ever hungry, and it’s raining, go to the water.
I am hungry, but my father’s advice is meant for some other time, a future in which there is no food in a cooler in a canoe, just waiting to be eaten. A future in which he, too, is absent. I have not known the kind of hunger implied by my father’s advice, yet I understand it anyway, always feeling the presence of its possibility. We have food and we will eat. Our hunger is checked by free school meals, by leftovers eaten at my grandmother’s house before dinner, by samples handed to us at discount shopping centers. But we live in a state of readiness, feeling acutely our need to survive, and today the fish we seek costs us only time and effort—resources we have more abundantly than others.
We stop the canoe near reeds and rocks. I ready a kid’s plastic fishing rod, a bobber, and hook a worm I dug myself from the soil. I worry over the worm until my father, exasperated, tells me worms have no nerve endings and cannot feel the hook. I cast the line a few feet from the canoe and reel it slowly in, watching the worm.
My father uses a fly-fishing rod made by a friend and a fly he tied himself from the fur and feathers of animals found on the side of the road. Our freezer at home holds many of these animals—turkey, mink, fisher—wrapped in plastic and frozen until they are needed. If my father cannot make the gear himself or find it for near to nothing, he goes without.
Soon, the subtle zipping through the air of his fly-fishing line joins the quiet morning sounds. With each tick of my father’s line the canoe rocks back and forth. It is not long before I forget to fish, instead leaning to look into the water at the bones of a long-sunk rowboat. The glare on the water makes it impossible to tell if the skeleton is a few feet below us or dozens, but at my age this pond is an ocean, our canoe is a ship, and if it sinks we will be thrust deep into the depths to contend with whatever monsters lurk below.
We return to camp after my father catches a fish. I stand beside him at the cabin’s aluminum sink, watching as he inspects the contents of the fish’s stomach, his pocket knife deftly separating the matter and debris. He does it slowly so I can see, and with his care and my attention, we are, for once, not at odds. I watch not because this is my father’s ritual but because in doing this we come to know the fish, what she saw and ate before we took her. Then, my father holds the knife out to me. Whether he understands how I feel about the fish or not doesn’t matter, for a truce has been borne of our time in the canoe.
I take the knife. I have cleaned a fish before and am not afraid of her body. The blood and innards, the scent and feel of her tissues are as natural as the sustenance she will provide us. To not know her in this way would be to ignore the life she lived and also the lives she took. A fish purchased in a supermarket, already cleaned and packaged in plastic, would be a stranger and a commodity, but this fish is not because it was our hands that took her life. We are lucky to have her.
Inside the fish are tapeworms, but these make no more impression upon me than other parts—her organs or gills, the mayflies or smaller fish she ate before us. The tapeworms are always there, and become, in their constancy, forgettable.
II.
In fully-colored images from a scanning electron micrograph (SEM), tapeworms are not worms, nor are they monsters. Their whitish-grey bodies are transformed, become rainbows. Their heads come ringed with neatly-ordered tentacles. They can be spherical, or double layered, or look like peanuts in shells. Their segments are delicate folds, layers of ribboning curves that coil unselfconsciously, or tilt jauntily at the camera as if all too aware. Under an SEM, tapeworms are polyps on reefs, passionflowers from forests. Anything but themselves.
III.
We cope by telling stories. We snatch details from the fabric of our lives to weave our own realities. It is a fine craft, this making sense of things. Sometimes the stories are true, sometimes they are not. It rarely matters; stories become our shields, protecting us from harm but often blocking our view or letting us hide from truths we could be better facing.
IV.
Science Daily calls tapeworms “pervasive and unapologetic mooches.” When someone has tapeworms, we say they are infected, like they have a condition. We think in terms of invasion—the tapeworms are squatting where they don’t belong. Infest comes from the old French infester, which can mean to hurt or annoy, but also the Latin infestus, which means inexorable or not to be handled. The etymology of infect has roots in the Latin infectus, which can mean to corrupt, stain, or spoil. The language we use to describe tapeworms refers to unstoppable and corrupt forces. It is language for closed interpretations that place the infested and infester along a binary of good and evil, of those who belong and those who do not, and because a stomach belongs to a fish or cat or person we think it cannot belong to a tapeworm. This is because we often think of belonging in terms of ownership and things, but this, too, is a binary, a closed interpreting.
Tapeworms can only live in the stomachs and flesh of others; without these places, they cannot survive except as eggs, as life waiting to begin. Tapeworm eggs can linger for days or months, feeling the need of a place as urgently as life itself. It is the same for us. Our places become integral to the fabric of our selves. When we are away from our homes, we grow sick with longing. Sometimes, we sense we belong to a place even if we have never been there, experiencing the pull of a place as a tug of desire that hooks us through the heart and will not let go. Yet we also belong to our places in the most physical of ways. With each breath, we inhale the dust and particles of a place; with each sip of water or bite of food ingest its dirt and substance, our places moving in molecules through our membranes, fusing with our cells. Acting upon us until the lines blur, until we become our places and they become us, and no one can tell who belongs to what, or what to whom.
V.
My family didn’t fit neatly inside the world of business suits and IRAs. Our lack of education meant we struggled against the structures and systems of our society, fought to turn them in our favor and failed because we had a class and it was the wrong one. So we spun a story to negate our hurt. We told ourselves that we were as tough as clover in the summer heat, that we were survivors. We grew proud of our ability to make do on little. We were protective of ourselves and what we had. We thought of Round Pond as our pond, as pristine, a place untouched by humankind. We forgot that we were humans, too.
VI.
Societies often think of conservation as nature set aside. With childlike earnestness, we draw boundaries around pockets of forest, swampy wetlands, prairies, and proclaim them preserved. People are sometimes allowed but with stipulations for leaving no trace. Stay on the trail. Carry in carry out. Make sure the land doesn’t register us at all. In the name of conservation we heave a collective sigh of relief when people emerge from nature to return to their cities and trash mountains and smog clouds, imagining our detritus as separate from the trees and fungal webs, ponds and soil.
This method of conservation is forgetful. It forgets that pollution and atmosphere are solutions and not suspensions. It forgets microplastics. It forgets that nature is not outside ourselves. It forgets the people who lived on and tended this land before white settlers decided it needed to be tamed. Natives lived for hundreds of years in partnership with their landscapes, tending them through planning, planting, burning, and pruning to suit not just human needs but the needs of animals and plants. When settlers ar-rived, the pristine wilderness they saw was not pristine at all, was instead shaped by people who learned over generations how to alter an ecosystem in ways that did not permanently des-troy it.
Our ideas of conservation can be rooted in the belief that we are returning the wilderness to itself, but this is not possible. We should think instead in terms of restoration, not to some pristine state but to a state before human activity altered it too rapidly and in ways that allowed for the destruction of entire ecosystems. We cannot know what wildness is. Even land that has never felt a human footstep—if there is any such land at all—senses our presence in the chemical alterations of the air, in the fluctuating temperature of our atmosphere and water. Our presence is an algal bloom across the earth, and the lines that divide wilderness from humans are murky, clear only in the language we use to draw them.
VII.
One time before I was born, my father was fishing at Round Pond with my uncle and they caught a large trout, fifteen or seventeen inches. Their habit was to kill the fish and open his stomach to see what was inside. An inquiry for technique. Depending on what they found, they might change bait. Bits and bobs of steel, fur and feather like delicate mayflies or robust caddisflies could be swapped for something like glimmering dace. But when they looked inside the fish, they found angel hair pasta. Or that’s what they thought it was, until it began to move. From then on, they paid special attention to the fish they caught, and in all of them, they found at least one tapeworm. Maybe they had never paid attention before; maybe the worms were always there. But the way my father tells the story is this: the fish in Round Pond were tapeworm-free until suddenly they weren’t.
VIII.
A fish’s body knows when it has a tapeworm. It is a covert knowing, hidden, surfacing only at the level of cells and chemical reactions but not into consciousness. When a fish’s body senses a tapeworm, it might launch an aggressive response, encasing the tapeworm with the kind of thick, fibrous tissue found in an alcoholic’s liver. The tapeworm, pearled in the flesh to which it belongs, can no longer grow. Progress slows, then halts. Scar tissue layers itself upon the tapeworm, squelching life through bodily resistance.
But not all fish do this. Fish from bodies of water only a few miles apart can respond differently to their tapeworms, opting to tolerate instead of resist. While these fish can, and do, grow scar tissue—their flesh scabs and bubbles hard over injuries from jagged rocks and eager teeth, hook holes left by close encounters—they allow their tapeworms to settle in and grow large.
Scientists recently studied populations of three-spine stickleback fish in two different Canadian bodies of water with the hope of learning why some fish resist tapeworms and some do not. Fish and tapeworms have evolved together over millennia, each species changing and reacting in a delicate dance of survival that is still going on today. The scientists wondered why some fish had evolved to resist the tapeworms while others had not, and set about isolating the gene responsible. They found it, but when they examined the gene in fish who do not resist, they found something surprising: the gene had recently evolved, which could mean the fish are tending toward tolerance, not away from it. Resistance is evolving out—but why?
Tapeworms are a burden. They grow to impossible sizes, up to a third of the fish’s body weight, as long as their host and nearly as wide. For perspective, imagine a squirrel with a tapeworm the size of a golf ball. A Dalmatian with a tapeworm the size of a toddler, or a human with a tapeworm the size of a bearded collie. Without resisting, the fish’s body is weighed down by another. Swimming and eating grow difficult. So does reproducing.
Yet a three-spine stickleback who opts for resistance trades growing a tapeworm for growing scar tissue. Its body is also weighed down, not by another but by its own efforts. Pockets of flesh filled with pearled tissue can be a burden as much as any tapeworm and worse. Fish who resist by forming scar tissue are up to eighty percent less likely to reproduce. By resisting their tapeworms, they are resisting themselves and generations thereafter.
Perhaps tapeworms evolve likewise, learning to take enough from their hosts but not so much that populations suffer. Perhaps it is that evolution has always, will always, tend toward co-existence.
IX.
When I contacted the Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife to find out whether tapeworms were always in the fish in Round Pond, the representative told me tapeworms weren’t a concern, that as long as I cooked the fish, I wouldn’t get tapeworms. He thought I was asking one thing when I was asking something else. It took a few emails back and forth to bridge the gap between the information I wanted and the story he was telling himself about our conversation. Even so, when it was done, he could only tell me the varieties of tapeworms known to be found in salmonid fish. The department had no statistics because tapeworms aren’t a matter of significant concern. He sent me the list of tapeworms anyway, and I read their names like incantations:
Cestoda diphyllobothrium sebago
Eubothrium crassum
Eubothrium salvelini
Proteocephalus pusillus
Proteocephalus ambloplitis
He told me some smaller towns might have what I was looking for. He thought there must be interested parties somewhere, citizen scientists with spreadsheets and paper tallies in boxes. He suggested I call around.
I didn’t call around. I didn’t know who to call.
X.
Our camp was an old logging cabin, rotted and mossy, its four walls made of logs bored porous by the insects that lived in them. It had a window or two, a homemade wooden door held on with a spring that could pinch fingers and flesh. In the cabin’s single room there were two bunk beds, a wood stove for heat and cooking and boiling water. On a sagging screened porch there were other bunk beds, but they were weighed down with boxes of junk, old magazines, life jackets half eaten by mice. The screens of the porch were riddled with holes that let in mosquitoes, and at night it was cold, but the inside of the cabin was insulated from the worst of the elements with twisted rope crammed into holes and between beams. I used to run my fingers along that rope, imagining ships and their pirates, ancient seas and their Vikings.
The cabin had running water by means of a tap plumbed into a spring. The water that burst from it was arctic and frothed so thick with bubbles it was white, only settling to clear after resting a minute on the counter. I don’t know if it was ever tested for drinkability, but we drank it.
There was an outhouse, and beyond that a boathouse the pond was working hard to reclaim. My father said somewhere beyond there was another camp, but I don’t remember ever seeing it. When I asked him about it, he said maybe the camp was built after us, but couldn’t be sure. He wasn’t sure he remembered seeing it himself, could not remember what it looked like. This other camp is a ghost presence, existing only in the memories and stories of others who had heard of it. But in my memory, there is no other camp. There is only us, the fish and their tapeworms, the newts and the loons, the green sound of forest growth, the brown of padded paws through underbush.
We belonged to the camp, but it was never ours. We had no means to own such a place. Members of my family I have never met had rented the land from a paper mill and the cabin itself was owned by my father’s great-grandparents and their siblings. When I asked my father how they came to have such a place, he didn’t know. It might be that no one remembers how it all came to be, only that it did, and we know this to be true because we were there. What I do know is this: I was still in elementary school when the paper mill decided the land would be more valuable if it were sold instead of held, so they auctioned off the land for around $60,000. The cabin, deemed worthless, was not included in that cost. No one in my family could afford such a price, although my father wishes he could have organized, split the cost however many ways with however many people it would have taken to not let the place slip away from us. But it did. Others bought the land and tore down the cabin. They banned our family from Round Pond, which they could do because the shoreline was deeded and notarized in their favor.
When my grandfather died, my family went back in secret to scatter his ashes. The gathering was intentionally small, hard to detect. They went to the far side of the pond. The spot where our old cabin had been was visible from where they stood, but the landscape was strange and altered. Replac-ing our cabin was a larger camp, shining with newness, brazen with success in ways our old cabin never was, in ways we never were. It was empty. They released the ashes, watching deer-like as they mingled with the air, settled into the water and grass and forest loam until my grandfather, who had for so long belonged to the pond, at last became it.
XI.
To celebrate their thirtieth anniversary, the University of Connecticut’s Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology held an auction. All of the items were posted on their website before the event. Many of the items tended toward the obscure or unusual. There was a live corpse flower, Amorphophallus titanum. A silver brooch sculpted into the shape of a cicada, four and a half inches from tip to tip. A consultation with the Connecticut state ornithologist regarding woodpecker removal. A hand-mounted butterfly display. A life-sized replica of a sabertooth tiger skull. And the ability to name a newly discovered tapeworm. The highest bidder could name the species after an individual of their choosing and the namesake would receive a full-color, scanning electron micrograph of the tapeworm’s head. The fair market value of such an honor was $500. It sold for $3,000.
XII.
The sun rises and the hum of insects fills the air, but still it is quiet, for my father and I barely speak to one another. I am a rock and our silence is water, wearing me down. At last I tell my father I saw a massive trout breach the surface of the pond, pointing to the evidence in ripples that could have been made by a large fish, or a small one. A bird or a water beetle. I cup my hands together to show my father the size of the fish’s tail. He moves the canoe toward the ripples, which have faded, but I am pleased even though he does not catch a fish there. Over the course of several days, and then years, my father will have me tell this story again and again. I interpret my father’s entertainment as pleasure and so I will readily perform the story whenever he asks, for whomever is listening, each time cupping my hands as I had done on the boat, and each time, the fish will be larger. My hands are growing, after all, and by the time my fingers and palms are as long as they will ever be, the trout I might have seen in Round Pond would be the size of a large striped bass, but my father no longer asks for the story.
XIII.
I thought nothing of tapeworms for nearly twenty-five years. After graduating high school and dropping out of college, I set my trajectory on a corporate path, aiming to leave behind the life I knew growing up in the country. I felt the only way to escape what I knew of poverty was to surround myself with concrete and sidewalks, cubicles and spreadsheets. I was sure that, in time, the life I wanted would appear, and I could abandon forever the insecurities of my childhood, my dependance on a natural world.
One morning, as I was finishing a cup of coffee, I removed a cat from my lap to find what appeared to be several moving grains of rice stuck to the fabric of my pants. I picked one up and held it on the tip of my finger, where I could examine it in the light from the window. It was the color of buttermilk, and the shape of a very small elephant’s trunk. It slowly pulsed and moved, unconcerned by my examination. It was a worm—of that much I was sure—but it was only after some research that I discovered these unthreatening grains of rice were segments of tapeworms.
And suddenly there it was: the realization that I had for so many years been wrong in my attempt to forge a life extricated from the wild, for there on my lap was evidence that the so-called natural world regarded my human one with something like scorn, or maybe amusement. Any differences between the me and the cat and his tapeworms were no more substantial than the permeable boundaries that had existed in childhood between me and the tapeworms in the fish we ate. In my headlong rush toward what I perceived as security, I had tied myself to systems of living that ultimately depended upon the very same ones that sustained me as a young girl. I could, onward to forever, buy my peanut butter in a jar and my vegetables in neat plastic bags, but the fact of the matter remained that those vegetables grew in the earth and the peanuts too, and the only thing dividing me from earth was garbage.
I treated the cat for tapeworms. In a few days they were gone from his system, but they had gotten into mine, because I could no more eradicate them from my thoughts than I could reconstruct the shattered beliefs I had so carefully erected about who I was and what I could be. I had never left the world of my childhood and I never would. Whether I chose to believe it or not, all I could ever change would be the way I moved within that world, because the fundamental truths of my existence were not dependent upon whatever story I told myself, and would never be.
XIV.
Tapeworms are experts in intimacy and togetherness. They claim the most interior tissues of another and they belong there, can only survive there. Perhaps this is the cause of our discomfort: that between tapeworms and us, there is hardly any difference worth counting at all.
XV.
Back at the fishing camp with my father, after I have cleaned the fish, her remains rest in little neat piles on a slip of newspaper. Everything—plants, bugs, tapeworms, fish, pond muck, us—is there in that cabin, the threads of an ecosystem defined so precisely as to be inarguable.
Mainers are the hardest workers, says my father. Remember that. Someday you’ll need a job and when you do, tell them you’re from Maine. Everyone knows what that means.
I do not know what this means, but I don’t ask. My father crumples the newspaper into a loose ball and takes it outside, to the pond. I do not follow him, but there have been other times when I did. He will take the remains to the pond and drop them in, and it will not be long before the leeches swarm to them, their dark bodies slick and graceful as mermaids.
Beside the wood stove, chopping potatoes grown in my father’s garden, is my grandfather. He takes a moment to slip a pat of butter into a cast-iron pan. When it sizzles he adds the potatoes, seasons them with salt and pepper, adds another log to the fire. In a pot on the stove, water begins to boil and into it he drops the fiddleheads we gathered earlier. Years later, after the cabin is gone and after he passes away, this is how I remember my grandfather: a quiet presence, a rocking chair, hands good with food in spite of a missing finger.
My stomach yawns, growls. When at last the fish is cooked, we sit around the card table to eat this meal that tastes of crisp and fat, of health and hard work. The room smells of loam but also the sting of salt and the sneeze of pepper. We eat, now and again pausing to remove from our mouths a fish bone, a twig, a leaf. It is good, simple food, and we eat.
D. L. Duda is a writer, visual artist, and farmer who was raised in rural Maine. You can find her at www.dlduda.com.
