Jungleland (27 page)

Chris stuck his machete into the soft earth and gave me a look that said, stay with me. “For the indigenous people, it seems in general that the legend refers to the last areas in which these groups lived prior to being in close contact with other groups, like where they lived before the Spanish arrived. Essentially the White City is the place [in their memory] that no longer exists anymore—their lost frontier, their lost lives, their lost autonomy, the good old days. They believe in it because it represents the past that they don’t want to forget.” He stopped for a second and then added, “It is their story.”

He motioned for us to walk on, and we made our way over the ruins, where he said that a thousand or so people had lived more than a thousand years ago. Then he continued with his theory. “The thing is, this lost city is no longer lost,” he said.

What he seemed to mean was that it had been discovered (by him) and mapped (by him), just like Las Crucitas. “So in my opinion, that disqualifies it—it’s important archaeologically, but it can no longer be the White City, because the White City must always be lost.”

“So this is why you brought me all the way out here?” I said, half jokingly and still half not. “To show me something that isn’t the White City?”

“Sort of,” he said. “This is the story. You have to understand this.”

It was around that time, just as I was starting to calm down, that I had a revelation about Morde. It had probably been bubbling up inside me for some time but only now made sense. What if he’d actually understood what Chris was talking about now and made a deliberate choice not to go back to the city? Like the indigenous people in Chris’s telling, what if Morde, at some point after the war, after his life began to fall apart, suddenly recognized that his lost city had to remain untouched, that he couldn’t give up the directions, that it had to stay a secret?

In Morde’s time, the world was shrinking and frontiers were being lost. In the midst of war and upheaval, the popular imagination needed romance. What better romance was there than the continuing story of a great lost civilization, shrouded in foggy wilderness, inhabited by ghosts and monkey gods, with gold buried amid all the fetid green? It was a hopeful story for a darkly claustrophobic time—that there were still places to discover, that there was forgotten beauty somewhere out there. What if Morde hadn’t gone back because he’d decided to protect what had been lost, while at the same time protecting his story, an unforgettably vibrant and freeing moment in his life? At no other time did he seem to be so alive, so young, so in need of being transformed again and again. I liked to believe that.

Just then Pancho came running out of the brush. He had an urgent look on his face. “You need to see this,” he said, pointing through the trees.

We bushwhacked for half an hour or so until we stood in front of a white cliff. Rising steeply for about a hundred feet into the blue sky, the cliff was overgrown with trees and creepers and moss. It was pure white. Midway up, two caves, like eyes, had been carved out of the rock. Chris had never seen it before. “Damn,” he said. “Now, this is interesting.”

Epilogue

A
FEW DAYS LATER
, I was on a plane zipping back to New York, and then, after a connecting flight and a long cab ride from the airport through midafternoon traffic, I was standing on the sidewalk in front of my brownstone in Brooklyn. Moisture from the jungle had destroyed my cell phone, so I had not been able to call Amy and Sky to tell them when I’d be back. By now I had been gone for more than a month. As I stood there in the August heat, I thought, “Here you are.”

It had taken us two days to trek out of the jungle and then another day in the back of a 4×4 pickup to get back to La Ceiba. Since then I had been processing everything that had happened, the stories of those days on playback, my brain trying to piece them all together—the Paris Hotel that first morning after landing when I’d had no idea how things would turn out, the Queens guy trying to meet up with his hotstuffie92, the dead motorcycle man in the road, the Geo Prizm busting up on Bandit Alley, the pirate named Frog, the old Indian Marcos, the man rushing to see his sick son, Pancho’s homecoming, and, of course, Las Crucitas.

The images stuck with me as I turned the key in the lock and trudged up the two carpeted flights of stairs. My backpack was a lot lighter now, as I had given away the last of the food and dumped my jungle boots and ruined clothes. But it didn’t matter much for my back, which still hurt from the weeks of walking. It would be months before I straightened it out again.

I pushed open the door, and there they were, the two of them, my girls. Finally. Sky screaming and Amy smiling. I could have held them all afternoon.

On the flight home, I had attempted to play out this reunion a million times, imagining the stories that I would tell and how Amy and Sky would respond, but I couldn’t ever fully see it.

“I can’t believe you’re four,” I said to Sky.

“Soon I’ll be four and a half.”

“Not if I can help it,” I said.

In the bedroom, I noticed the duct-taped window and the ripped screen where the raccoon had attacked. “He’s gone,” Amy said.

“What do you mean?”

“A guy came with a trap and caught him.”

“I’ll fix the window,” I said.

Amy leaned in to me, and I held her. She traced a finger down my bearded face and said, “Is that really you behind that?”

As I shaved later, I thought of Morde shaving away his beard, a man trying to scrape through the buildup to find himself. Adults, unlike children, are guided by memories, driven by them until they figure out how to contain them, live with them.

We ate pizza on the roof that night with the city skyline rising in front of us, and later we watched the sun sink over the East River. I kept thinking, “I’m home, I’m home.” This was my return, probably the last one—at least for a long time.

Soon Sky climbed into my lap and nuzzled into my chest, and I knew what would come next. Amy leaned over the table toward us and sipped her wine. Her eyes were greener than I remembered.

At that moment, I could not imagine being anywhere else. I held her stare, and we were quiet for a bit, until Sky broke the silence.

“So, Daddy,” she said, “tell me what you did in the jungle. Did you find what you were looking for?”

Acknowledgments

Many people helped me along on this adventure, and there is no simple way to say thank you, especially in such limited space. But I will give it a shot.

The archaeologist Chris Begley led me through the Honduran jungle, picked me up when I fell down—and I fell a lot—and generally kept me alive, while answering a gazillion questions before, during, and long after the journey to find the famous Ciudad Blanca.

Dave Morde trusted me enough to hand over all of his uncle Theodore Morde’s journals. Without Dave’s generosity, this book would not have happened. Thank you also to his wife, Diana, for her e-mails when Dave was off doing other things—and I won’t ever forget those chocolate-chip cookies.

A number of others of Morde’s family also helped along the way, including Carol Ross, Joseph Essaye, Susan Shumway, and Joan Cenedella.

Early on in my research, I spoke to Jim Woodman, who told me many stories about his own adventures in the Honduran wilderness. I met him once in Miami for a good Honduran meal. Sadly, Jim died in 2011, before I could tell him thank you.

A Canadian mapmaker named Derek Parent wrote me scores of e-mails outlining his theories about Morde’s discovery. He also provided extensive maps detailing Morde’s journey and where the city might be. He was always there for me.

I’m thankful to Mike Burger and Kyle Pope, who put up with reading early drafts and helped me see around some hard corners.

Others who provided personal and professional support were Brett Forrest, Alexandra Jacobs, Andrew Goldman, Cary Goldstein, Chad Higginbotham, Karl Greenfield, Allison Lorentzen, Abraham Lustgarten, Andrew Rice, Aram Roston, Lockhart Steele, and Lloyd Taylor.

I’m indebted to P. J. Mark, the finest agent around. He has had my back from the beginning.

Julia Cheiffetz believed that I could actually pull this off before it was anything more than a totally far-fetched idea to go searching for a lost city.

Christian Lorentzen was absolutely vital early on in shaping the manuscript in almost every single way.

At Harper, David Hirshey and Barry Harbaugh ultimately carried this to the finish line. To them, I am most grateful. Their smart edits and steady counsel made the book better than it could have ever been otherwise. Yes, they’re the greatest.

To Mom, Dad, and brother, DJ: thank you.

To Amy, my wife: you toughed out another book. You let me go on this crazy trip and then helped me see it through, even when you were long over it. But we did it. Obviously, I owe you big-time. Same with Sky, our daughter. I will never miss another birthday. That’s a promise.

Finally, my son, Dash, is too young now, but the one thing I hope he takes away from this book when he reads it years from now is this: if given the choice between seeking a lost city in the jungle and not, always pick the jungle.

Notes

In writing about Theodore Morde’s quest to find the lost city, I relied on recollections from his family and, most important, his personal expedition papers. Altogether, there are some two hundred handwritten pages in his journals. Some sections are hard to read, and at times it is unclear if it is Morde writing a passage or Bob Burke or Laurence Brown, the two men who accompanied him on the months-long journey. To make it easier, I always attribute entries to Morde, as it was Morde’s expedition and Morde’s journals.

I consulted many news stories and magazine articles from the time around Morde’s travels, most of which are cited in the text. Of the numerous books I read, Peter Keenagh’s book
Mosquito Coast
was particularly useful in understanding what the Mosquitia looked like several years before Morde arrived in 1940. It is unfortunately out of print. Troy S. Floyd’s
The Anglo-Spanish Struggle for Mosquitia
was also integral to my comprehension of the country’s politics.

Once Morde entered the world of spies at the start of World War II, I leaned heavily on recently declassified government files. His letters regarding the details of the plot to build a clandestine group inside Germany to capture Hitler are now housed in the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library in Hyde Park, New York, but have been collected in part in the book
American Intelligence and the German Resistance to Hitler
.

Among the critical half-dozen sources I interviewed about the OSS was Robert Amman, whose uncle was in the service during the war. He helped me in particular to grasp the life of a U.S. agent overseas. Two books provided much historical insight, helping me shape some of the context for Morde’s mission in Turkey and his later stints in Italy and China: Richard Harris Smith’s
OSS: The Secret History of America’s First Intelligence Agency
and Anthony Cave Brown’s biography of OSS chief Bill Donovan.

Meanwhile, the more pedestrian details of Morde’s life, both before his days as an explorer and following the war, come largely from Theodore’s nephew Dave Morde and a handful of others in the Morde family, along with various news clippings, which I note throughout the book.

As for my trip, it is mostly a record of personal thoughts and observations, informed by the archaeologist Chris Begley and, at times, Pancho, my local lost-city hunter. For news about the Honduran coup, I read every major newspaper every day but learned much from the coverage in the
New York Times
, as well as from William Finnegan’s lengthy story in the
New Yorker
. Some names of people I met along the way were changed to protect identities. Early on, I read a 1978 article in
Sports Illustrated
called “Quest in the Jungle.” It helped me understand the dangers of the jungle and what others had found there in their searches for the White City.

Books by Betty Meggers and Jared Diamond helped me understand the possibilities—or impossibilities—of human life in the jungle. David Grann’s book
The Lost City of Z
was also instructive.

Before I left for Honduras, William V. Davidson, a former professor of anthropology at Louisiana State University, provided a key piece of the lost-city legend—a translation of Bishop Pedraza’s letter to the Spanish emperor about standing on a rise in the jungle with an Indian princess who told him of a land beyond the horizon, where nobles smelted gold.

Bibliography

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Binns, Jack R.
The United States in Honduras, 1980–1981
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———.
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Environmental Investigation Agency. “The Illegal Logging Crisis in Honduras: How U.S. and E.U. Imports of Illegal Honduran Wood Increase Poverty, Fuel Corruption and Devastate Forests and Communities.” London: EIA, 2005.

Finnegan, William. “An Old-Fashioned Coup.”
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