Jungleland (7 page)

“No,” she said. “Just know that.”

Now, as we stood there on the street, I expected Amy to make some jest about Outward Bound and her being the better camper, but she didn’t. She bit her lips. I could tell she was worried about me, about what I would get myself into, especially now that there was a coup. But she didn’t say it. She didn’t say that she was upset either. She twirled a piece of her hair and said, “Be safe, okay?”

Then Sky bounced down into my arms and said, “I love you, Daddy,” and I could have held her like that for hours. “Watch out for the crocodiles,” she said. “Remember, Daddy, they have sharp teeth.”

We said good-bye, and I stepped into the car. As the taxi pulled away, I realized it would be an eternity before I saw Amy and Sky again. I missed them already, and, for the first time, I thought, You’re probably making a big mistake, you’re screwing up everything that’s good in your life.

BEFORE BOARDING MY
plane, I puttered around the gate for a while, restlessly walking up and down the long corridor, past the fast-food restaurants and magazine shops, battling second thoughts. At one point, I sat across from a family and watched as the man read
Goodnight, Moon
to his baby son. I had read that book to Sky when she was a baby. The family looked as though they were going on vacation, something that I should have been doing instead of heading into a virtual war zone. My chest felt hollowed out, and my head was light. For a moment I considered getting up and walking out of the terminal.

I popped some Tylenol and closed my eyes. My thoughts dispersed with the woman’s voice over the speaker announcing it was time to go.

The flight to Atlanta was without incident. But Delta flight 575 from Atlanta to San Pedro Sula, Honduras, was mostly empty, with entire rows of seats without passengers. When I asked an older flight attendant if that was typical for the season, she laughed. “It’s not exactly tourist season with a coup going on,” she said.

Even with the State Department’s recent travel advisory warning Americans to stay away from the country during the conflict, all the flights were still going.

“Let’s just hope we can land,” the man next to me interjected. He smiled, as if he knew something I didn’t.

The week before, the exiled president had attempted to fly back into the country on a jet supplied by Chávez, but the army had blocked the runway with trucks. Rumor had it that he was now planning a return, either dressed as a woman or on a donkey over the mountains and through the jungle.

The pilot throttled the plane, and it charged down the runway. In the air, some of the flight attendants looked a bit nervous about what they would find on the other side.

I slept through the trip. Six hours later the plane skidded onto the runway. San Pedro Sula, Honduras. We were early.

Part II

“Left for Dead but Too Mean to Die”

A
FTER ALMOST A
week of being tossed around at sea, the explorers arrived at La Ceiba, Honduras. It was April 6; the port air was hot and muggy. As Morde and Brown gathered their equipment and lumbered ashore, their muscles throbbed from all the awkward sleeping positions, their heads bursting from the onslaught of the rough waters. They needed rest, but giddiness ran through them like a flash flood. Looking up, they could see the green mountains, angled and curved like a broken rib cage, climbing in the distance before disappearing into a white haze that appeared slightly cursed. Morde wore gabardine breeches, leather boots, and a lightweight shirt. At customs, he and Brown registered their guns; then they headed for the town.

The streets were mostly unpaved, heavily dusted, and dimly lit. There were few electric lights to hold off the darkness pressing in. It was Saturday, and people milled outside—dockworkers, banana hawkers, missionaries, whores. The scene was not unlike the old cowboy West, a place at the edge of civilization, ceaselessly teetering on the verge of chaos. As they walked, they noticed that men carried weapons: guns tucked visibly into their pants, machetes dangling off their belts. There was liveliness in the air, though it was hard to read: a land where you had to watch your back.

La Ceiba wasn’t much different from the rest of Honduras, which was going through a stormy moment. The economy, supported mainly by fruit exports, was struggling to get back onto its feet after suffering its own Great Depression. Neighboring countries had dissolved into coups, and the lantern-jawed Honduran president, an ex-general named Tiburcio Carías Andino, was doing everything he could to stave off bedlam. Dissidents were jailed and occasionally executed. A brutal secret police force ranged over the country.

The American banana companies—Standard Fruit, based in La Ceiba and New Orleans, and United Fruit, out of Boston and Tela—had inserted themselves into this political void, and very little happened without their knowledge. They behaved like drug cartels that happened to sell fruit. The companies had muscled their way into most of Central America, with the help of the region’s cruelest dictators, and were notorious for their blood-soaked labor fights.

One of the most extreme episodes occurred in Colombia in 1928, about a decade before Morde’s trip. It became known as the banana massacre. Banana workers took to the streets to demand more pay and better hours. Military forces, reportedly operating at the behest of United Fruit, which had become known as El Pulpo, or the Octopus, for its wide, sucking strength, opened fire on the crowds. How many died that day is unknown; stories say between forty-seven and two thousand. Later, Gabriel García Márquez would fictionalize the event in
One Hundred Years of Solitude
.

That night, Morde settled down in one of the few hotels in the city—the Paris, a multistory hulk of a building on a public square a few blocks from the sea. There were parrots and palm trees in the courtyard. The jungle was only a few blocks away. Other internationals were also putting up there: hard, grizzled men looking for an angle in the frontier, maybe in bananas or rubber. Restless from their sea voyage, Morde and Brown wandered out for a drink at a rough bar. Still, even with a few drinks in them, it was hard to sleep that first night. Voices from the street kept them awake. So did the temperature.

THE FIRST FEW
days were enervating. The narcotic heat never let up. It took almost every ounce of their energy to get themselves together and plan out their thousand-plus–mile journey. There was a lot to do. They visited the port looking for boats to take them down the Caribbean coast into the jungle. They went through their equipment, pored over maps, and bought antisnakebite serum made with potassium permanganate. They inquired about guides. Who could help them navigate the wilderness?

As they asked around, they heard about expats living in the river basins: ex-cons who had fled the authorities, dropouts afraid about the war in Europe, prospectors looking to get rich. They heard about some Germans running a plantation and sent word that they were coming.

“The tropics seem to have gotten hold of us,” Morde wrote one day in his journal, as if describing a phantom parasite.

A week passed. Morde felt antsy, worried that they’d never get to the jungle. “The Patuca seems so far away,” he wrote at one point, referring to the country’s longest river, which would deliver them into the deepest parts of the country’s interior.

One night, as a diversion, they made a trip to a sparsely inhabited island off the coast called Roatán. A couple centuries before, the island had been home to a reported five thousand pirates who had worked the seas for shipments of gold and silver leaving the Spanish Main, the area from the Gulf of Mexico down to the Caribbean tip of South America. Morde had heard about some ruins in an inland cave.

It was a stomach-turning boat ride through high seas. Wedged between a man and woman “who smelled of goats,” Morde couldn’t get to sleep. It didn’t help that the woman kept throwing up as the boat rose and fell in the swelling waters. When they arrived at the port the next morning, the explorers joked that the boat was appropriately named—
Adiós
. They felt lucky to have made it back onto land.

Talking to locals about rumors of ancient life, they heard about “a great light that blazed up [in the sky] and died down three nights in a row.” It had stirred the town into frenzy. What was it? As they stood in the sunshine, a man pointed at the forested interior.

They walked four miles into the bush, looking for the source of the light or some sign of ancient life. When darkness rolled in, they were met by sand flies, which they spent the next few nights picking off their skin. No sign of anything.

Back in La Ceiba that night, they encountered a bloody man outstretched on the dirty street, not far from the hotel. It was late, with few people out. Minutes before, the man had been hacked with a machete, and big red tears of skin flapped from his slender body. Whoever had done it had fled. One hand was completely severed, and his head had been cut wide open, like a watermelon. Miraculously, he was still alive—“left for dead but too mean to die.”

If there was any doubt creeping in on them that night, it was soon after replaced by more than a little bit of hope. They located a ship that was going south, and it would take them down the Caribbean coast to Trujillo, the tiny out-of-the-way city in the east that would be their last stop before entering the jungle.

hotstuffie92

I
WOKE WITH A
jolt, immediately alert. A gray dawn seeped through the gauzy white curtains. I stared at the ceiling of my room in the Paris Hotel, the same hotel where Morde had stayed almost seventy years before, and I followed the cracks in the plaster as if they were lines of a maze. The night before, we’d arrived at La Ceiba from San Pedro Sula. On the dusty road into town, heavily armed patrols had blocked traffic, a tactic meant to deter anyone looking to cause trouble. At one point, gunshots had filled the soupy air, and I’d sunk low in my seat, expecting my door to be shot out. I sensed that I’d entered a Graham Greene novel, a world of intrigue where anything could happen. I was anxious and a little afraid, and I remembered that early on in his journey, Morde had been that way too.

La Ceiba is now a city of more than 100,000 people, but the docks that once greeted the fruit ships that brought Morde and Brown here slid sadly into the sea years ago. La Ceiba has the typical trappings of a third-world city: ambitious structures from a bygone era crammed next to shacks with metal roofs. Armed guards protect the banks, and the American fast-food restaurants—Kentucky Fried Chicken, Pizza Hut, Popeyes. The streets are noisy with traffic and littered with garbage. The buildings fronting the water are falling down or in various stages of salty decrepitude. Gates, wrapped in concertina wire or topped with broken glass, cordon off the miniature compounds of the wealthy.

The window air conditioner thrummed, holding off the tropical heat, which is oppressive even before the sun comes up. Chris Begley, who had flown down the week before for the river trip, was snoring in the sagging twin bed next to me, unbothered by what loomed ahead. The two locals he had hired to help us on our journey would meet us later.

It was 5 a.m. We would leave in six hours. Like Morde when he first arrived, I was hot and disoriented. I threw freezing faucet water on my face and sorted through my equipment, just to make sure everything was still there. All of my notebooks and maps and pills were packed in Ziploc bags to protect against humidity and rain—and against rivers when we would have no other way of crossing but by plunging in. With all of our food supplies—spaghetti, canned sausages, pancake mix, Tang, coffee grinds—my frame pack weighed about sixty pounds. Chris’s monster green army bag was about eighty pounds, jammed with everything I had in my pack, as well as American Geographical Society topographic maps, a GPS, and a bulky satellite phone with one backup battery. The satellite phone was for emergencies, and we hoped that its battery would last us for the full trip.

As Chris slept, I went downstairs to send off some e-mails to family saying I’d made it to La Ceiba and that I wasn’t sure when they’d hear from me again. The hotel didn’t have many customers because of the overthrow, and the only people up at the time were two straight-faced men in uniforms carrying shotguns, a bored guy at the desk scribbling on a pad of paper, and a flabby black man in a Mets T-shirt and sweatpants plopped down in front of the lobby computer, the one I needed to use.

The Men Without Hats song “Safety Dance” drifted quietly through the fake gray marble lobby. It made me think of a middle school dance, long in my past. A warm nostalgia pulsed through me; it was kind of comforting, an antidote for the loneliness that had already begun creeping in. I felt old again. Where did all those years go?

When I came up behind the guy at the computer, I noticed a window open to a Web site for black singles in La Ceiba, and another window was open to a chat screen, featuring someone with the handle “hotstuffie92.” Slumped over the keyboard, he pecked at the keys in slow motion as if weighing very carefully every single letter.