Jungleland (6 page)

The exiled president had apparently gotten himself into the situation by offending elite businessmen and politicians with his populism and close ties to Hugo Chávez, Venezuela’s imperious leader. Mel had been born to a prominent ranching family and was famous around the country for his tall white Stetson hat, cowboy boots, and bushy mustache.

The feeling in some quarters of power seemed to be that he had abandoned his friends—that he had hurt them with things such as raising the minimum wage and opposing the privatization of certain lucrative industries—and was scheming to rewrite the constitution in order to extend his term. Now his old friends felt he had to pay.

As days passed, I kept hearing reports about how hazardous the situation was becoming. The State Department warned travelers to stay away, and some observers worried that the country was on the verge of civil war.

The reckless, danger-seeking part of me grew more excited on hearing such news reports. I kept thinking, perhaps selfishly, how the backdrop of the coup would make for an even better story—not to mention a more intense personal journey. But I also wondered if I simply had a death wish.

When I reached Chris Begley on the phone, he said, “You should be okay getting down there.”

“Should?”

“Well, you never know.” Then he said, with a laugh, “Very little is ever certain when it comes to this place.”

HONDURAS—ABOUT THE
size of greater Philadelphia, with a population of about 7 million—is one of the least developed countries in the Americas. After Haiti, it is the second poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere. Only about 18 percent of its more than 9,000 miles of roads are paved. It is a rough and volatile place, bursting with desperation: Transparency International ranks it as one of the most corrupt countries in the world, and frequently there are reports agonizing over the country’s rising levels of violence.

With nearly seven thousand killings in 2011, averaging about eighteen bodies a day, it is the most murderous country in the world. Many of the murders go unsolved, including most of the 108 Americans killed there over the last seventeen years. As one local man would later say to me, “It’s cheap and easy to kill a guy in Honduras. Who is going to catch you? Not the police!”

Honduras borders Guatemala, El Salvador, and Nicaragua, all of which have suffered through civil wars during the past thirty years. There hadn’t been a coup in the country since 1982—though there had been almost half a dozen over the course of the previous twenty-five years. The United States has cast a long shadow over the tiny territory for the last century, mainly once the American banana companies arrived and immediately began to dictate how the country would be run. As the former head of United Fruit Company once said, “In Honduras, a mule costs more than a congressman.”

During the 1980s, in the midst of the Cold War, the U.S. military set up encampments in the jungle, where they trained the rebel Nic-araguan contras to fight the socialist Sandinistas. Some believe the Americans never left and even today wield influence over Honduran politicians and military. The degree of U.S. involvement in the overthrow, if any, was impossible to know. But in public, the Obama administration was firm in its disapproval of the coup and called for Mel to be returned to power. The United States didn’t acknowledge the new president—few countries did—and in fact placed him and his coconspirators on a blacklist, barring them from ever coming to the United States.

I sneaked in moments to continue monitoring the situation online. By the second week, the streets and town squares were brimming with angry Mel supporters—labor union members, teachers, and especially campesinos, or peasants. Tanks prowled the cities, and there were photographs of tear gas exploding in clouds around protesters and police wielding clubs and machine guns that fired rubber bullets.

In the end it was impossible to hide it from Amy. One afternoon, I walked into the living room and saw her reading the
New York Times
. The front page chronicled the drama. “This is insane,” she said. “You know this, right?”

“It’s not that bad,” I assured her.

“It’s turning to war.”

“It probably won’t,” I said.

“But you’re still going?”

“The flights are still going,” I said. “That means it’s not that bad.” The last part didn’t sound so convincing—and she knew it.

“That doesn’t mean you should go.”

I told her I’d be out in the jungle, far from the coup. “All that stuff is going on in the cities,” I said. “It’s quiet in the jungle!”

A day later I read online that the police had started shooting civilians.

“949 Miles to La Ceiba”

I
N LATE MAY 1940
, Morde was on an overnight train from New York to New Orleans, where he would catch a ship to Honduras. He sat in a Pullman car, slumped on a hard but not uncomfortable seat, close to a dusted-over window, the rolling landscape whizzing past but the air inside quiet enough to think. There was so much to noodle: what would he see and find, and would he be a different person when he returned?

By now Morde was twenty-nine years old. He had the posture of a two-by-four and tended to dress theatrically in white suits with wide lapels and string ties. Tall and square-shouldered, he had a frontier face, sharp blue eyes, and the lean physique of a long-distance runner. Typically, he wore his wavy brown hair combed back, slick with a handful of pomade. His deep voice was made for radio. Lots of people told him that. In photographs, he sometimes posed with a rifle, but, no matter what, he always seemed to project that faraway look.

The passengers around him slumped in their own chairs, men in thin ties and women in billowy dresses, sipping soft drinks, their tired faces behind newspapers and books, squinting in the cabin light. It was a hard time for most of them. Over the last eleven years, they had lost jobs and homes and dreams. Now, as the Great Depression loomed large, there was a new concern—another war in Europe. They heard about Joseph Stalin’s Soviet army gobbling up Poland, and Hitler preparing an attack on France and Britain. Would the führer come across the Atlantic? War bulletins played on the radio, stories of destruction filled the daily news. They worried that their country would again be swept up into conflict, and what would that mean for their already tenuous lives?

They tried to be hopeful, all of them, clinging to President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s promises not to be the world savior this time around, to stay out of battle.

It was hard for Morde to sit still. He was leaving all of that behind. Days before he departed Manhattan, he had written a letter to his parents in Massachusetts, explaining that he was headed “where no white man has been before”—unmapped wilderness on the Mosquito Coast that few knew anything about. He would be gone for four months, and every major news organization was watching one of the most talked-about journeys of that generation: this man headed out to discover a vanished civilization. As a media phenomenon, it was the equivalent of a man traveling to outer space.

Centuries ago, explorers had most of the world yet to discover. But now much of it had been traveled and seen and written about. Ships had circled the globe. The North and South Poles had been reached. The sea had been mined. Mountains had been climbed. There were no more continents to name. Yet Morde remained a dreamer. He had become addicted to an idea that dies hard: that there was something richer out there than the New Bedford in which he had grown up, someplace more beautiful than the sea that he had seen from the decks of many ships, more perfect than any faraway land he’d already seen—a land that could possibly tell us about ourselves, that might even have the power to make us better. He believed that he could find that place.

On April 2, a few days after he’d arrived in New Orleans, he headed straight for the Piety Street Wharf. The reek of brine stung his nostrils as he dodged banana carts and sailors and scanned the crowded docks for his ship, the SS
Wawa
. With him he hauled more than a thousand pounds of equipment, including clothing, cooking pans, candles, kerosene lights, mosquito nets, dynamite, a Luger pistol, and a rifle. He had notebooks for charting rivers and chronicling the natives he met. He had brought a camera to keep a visual record of the journey. He also had a wood walking stick—chest-high, smooth up and down, its handle emblazoned with the words
THIRD HONDURAN EXPEDITION
—to get him through the tight, tough spots. Once out of the harbor, the ship would sail down the Mississippi, through the bayous, skirting the barrier islands, and then through the Gulf of Mexico and into the Caribbean. Four days later, the
Wawa
would arrive in La Ceiba, Honduras, and from there Morde would voyage on to the Mosquito Coast.

Morde was well aware of the dark fates of the explorers who had gone searching before him. He knew the dangers of trekking into the murk—the thousands, for instance, who had perished looking for El Dorado. He knew the stories of ghosts, of warring Indians, of tropical sicknesses. And he knew he couldn’t be certain that he would make it out alive—yet still the jungle drew him.

The city, for Morde, seemed to represent something profound—not just a vanished metropolis, concealed by centuries of moldering soil and lavish vegetation. He imagined an important regional capital, a sprawling city with high walls to fortify it against marauding armies, many buildings and plazas inside, with roads coming and going. A city in the jungle was a grandiose idea, audacious even, challenging the popular view going back centuries that such a developed civilization, with its own economy, politics, and religion, could never have emerged in such an unkind place. And then, if it ever existed, there were further questions to ask: how had it all come to an end, and where had the inhabitants gone?

Wrapped up in all this mystery was another mystery, something even more personal, more elementary to Morde. He was just about to plunge into his thirties. Youth was falling away. Was part of his wanderlust born of anxiety or ambivalence about reaching middle age? Was he feeling the pressures that society put on a man to settle down into domestic convention and make a family? Perhaps he looked at his stable parents, who had been living in the same two-story Massachusetts house for most of their lives, and saw what he didn’t want to become, what he thought was too limited. Maybe this journey would help him understand his life better, bring the world into perfect, crystalline focus, the kind of insight that every human being wants.

AS HE STOOD
on the deck of the
Wawa
, Morde watched workers load the hull with lumber, cement mix, gas, dynamite, and drums of oil. A 1,650-ton steamer, with two hulking smoke stacks and a dinged-up hull, the ship was owned by Standard Fruit Company, which, along with United Fruit Company, controlled the lucrative banana trade between the United States and Honduras. (Decades later, Standard Fruit would become Dole Food Company, and United Fruit would become Chiquita Brands International.) Because it was a working boat, though, there were only a few other passengers, among them a commissary agent and a salesman of cast iron.

There was also Laurence Brown, whom Morde had recruited to come along with him. Brown was an old university classmate, a year older and quieter than Morde. He was tall, with a heavy build, dark buzz-cut hair, and a crooked nose that looked as though it had been broken one too many times. In college, Brown had studied geology and played varsity football. He was a quick thinker with the brute strength of a bull. When Morde contacted him about the expedition, he was working for a company in the oil fields of Texas.

The men made beds in the lower cabin with the other passengers, making sure to keep their belongings close. With the tight quarters, the rolling seas, the gale-force winds beating against the ship, and concern about pirates haunting their dreams, there was no way to get comfortable. They would hardly sleep.

It was 3:30 in the afternoon when the crew finally threw off the thick ropes and picked up anchor and the
Wawa
steamed away from the wharf. Later, as the ship rolled out of the Mississippi and into the bluing Gulf of Mexico, Morde wrote in his journal, “949 miles to La Ceiba.”

Good-bye

I
FEEL LIKE YOU’RE
going off to the moon or something,” Amy said on the day I left to find the White City. It was early July, punishingly hot. On the steps in front of our brownstone, Amy and my daughter watched as I headed for the yellow cab waiting at the curb.

I felt a little queasy and wondered if Morde had felt this way when he had said good-bye himself. Amy had come around grudgingly to accepting the trip by now, but her anxiety persisted. She still didn’t think I knew what I was doing—and part of me knew she was probably right.

As I threw my bag into the trunk, she stepped down and asked, “Are you sure you have everything?”

The day before, I had spread out my things on our living room floor: two sets of “jungle clothes,” which consisted of one pair of pants and shirt for the day and one set for sleeping at night; Tylenol with codeine; Tiger Balm hot pads, to take care of the pain after the marathon walks; Valium, to fight back those anxious nights of being days from anywhere; Lariam, to kill off malaria; iodine, to purify river and stream water for drinking; and a bagful of antibiotics.

In bed that night with Amy, there had been some last-minute discussions about abandoning the trip. “You don’t have to do this,” she had said. “You could just not go.”

“I have to,” I said.

“You don’t have to do anything.”

“I thought you wanted me to go.”

“I do, but . . .” Her voice trailed off. Then she turned toward me. I loved her green eyes. When we were first dating in college, I wrote a poem describing them as “bottom-of-the-lake eyes,” posturing as the romantic. I wrote her lots of poems then, but I didn’t anymore.

She said, “You know, you’re not the only one who’s trying to figure things out.”

I told her I knew that.