The Footloose American: Following the Hunter S. Thompson Trail Across South America (12 page)

Still, he and his family were kind to let us stay. We could sputter into Girardot in the morning, we decided, where a friend of Ivan’s could retrieve him, Sardino, and the boat. So we settled into our hammocks beneath the stars, the gurgling river within earshot. Around midnight, the skies suddenly opened up with a tropical storm, and we all roused sleepily to settle inside on the farmer’s dirt floor. No one thought much about the boat anchored up along shore, covered only partially by a fiberglass awning and filling slowly with rainwater.

The next morning, I learned what it was like to see the river as an obstacle, robbed of its romance. The sunrise sight of Ivan’s submerged boat was as surreal as anything
from Márquez, and twice as disquieting as Thompson’s gruesome bugs. I woke up and walked outside shortly after Ivan, and I found him just standing on the lawn, looking out sadly at the river, from which only the rear half of his small boat was protruding. The rain was still coming down hard, and that part was disappearing fast. Ivan and I looked at each other for just a moment. Then he ran toward the river as I turned back to wake Sky and the others.

Within minutes, I was fully immersed in the dark swell of the Magdalena River, breath held and heaving against the fiberglass hull of Ivan’s half-submerged boat. Somewhere to my right was Ivan, and I could feel the force of him as we strained against the current to keep his lancha from capsizing completely. The shouts of the men onshore sounded thin beneath the gasoline-contaminated water. My nostrils stung. My sinuses burned.

The irony of the situation struck me while my hands blindly scoured the river bottom for one of the full gas canisters we’d had on board. Sky and I had set out upon the Magdalena hoping in part to gauge its ecological health. Now here we were, just miles from our terminus, leaking fuel into it at an alarming rate. When I came up for air, I saw my reflection, wavering and distorted on the water’s oily surface. I heard the swish of the rain through the long-leafed palms. Then I shut my eyes and plunged back underwater.

Don’t think of this as a catastrophe
, I told myself.
Think of it as a rite of passage. Think of it as a baptism
.

We worked for hours to pull the lancha up from the current—Sky and the farmers all heaving at ropes, Ivan and I straining underwater against the hull. It was early afternoon before we recovered enough of the boat to start bailing. Sky’s hands were lacerated, and I reeked of petroleum.

Ivan, however, kept his cool throughout, and as I watched
him take charge of the situation that day, I felt myself coming to an understanding about the Magdalena and its people. As was probably true in both Márquez’s day and Thompson’s, most
magdalenos
seem to regard the river simply as an entity in flux, something to be enjoyed one day and struggled against the next. For better or for worse, life along the Magdalena just seems to foster more stubborn will than it does romantic appreciation. It’s an adaptive mind-set, and the ecosystem occasionally suffers for it, but it’s an outlook that fortifies people, that helps them to function in a sometimes violent and capricious society.

Hours later, a friend of Ivan’s arrived with a pickup, and Sky and I slumped into the truck bed with Sardino, riding in defeat the last ten miles into Girardot. For the second time in two days I found myself identifying with Thompson’s bleak disposition—specifically with his river-weary assertion that “if I ever get to Bogotá, I may never leave.” He wrote nothing at all about the end of his journey on the Magdalena River, but somehow I imagined that it was more jubilant than ours.

Girardot itself looked bland as we drove into town, passing big-box stores and cheap-looking resorts for vacationing Bogotans. We parted too hastily with Ivan at a downtown intersection, grateful for the time we’d shared but feeling awkward about the damage to his boat. By then, we’d all run out of things to say anyway, and Ivan smiled with resignation as we told him good-bye—a smile that said,
Well, I guess I got myself into this
. Sardino was wearing a shirt that I’d loaned him after our battle with the sunken boat. It had been my grandfather’s, but I didn’t have the heart to ask for it back.

That evening, Sky and I stood on a railroad bridge, too tired to drink the celebratory champagne we’d bought in
Honda. Beside us was a historic depot that once welcomed steamboat passengers to board the seventy-five-mile train ride to Bogotá. We looked away from the bridge to the south, where the Magdalena ascended another 250 miles to its source in the Colombian Massif. I imagined skimming the surface of the water for the length of that trip, hovering above it as it grew fast and shallow in the Andes, then watching as the river reclaimed its youth, dwindling away into a thin mountain stream, a trickle, and then nothing.

Sky and I passed our remaining time together riding out a few additional small crises. By sunset in Girardot, we both felt sick with headaches and chills. I chalked it up to having spent our morning submerged in a cold and angry river, and we spent the night wallowing in our motel room, eating pizza and watching a Jeff Bridges movie that turned out to be about a sinking boat.

By morning, I’d made a full recovery, but Sky looked rough—pale and jittery, with bags beneath his eyes. On the short bus trip into Bogotá, he coughed and groaned, too tired and achy even to point out the attractive women seated nearby.

“I had better not have the swine flu,” he croaked, slouched against the Plexiglas window. “I have a plane to catch, and if they don’t let me on, I’m going to be in real trouble.”

It’s hard to remember now, but at the time, swine flu was the international apocalyptic disease du jour, and we’d been hearing about it regularly since Barranquilla. Former president Uribe had been diagnosed with the H1N1 virus just three weeks earlier, after falling ill during the same UNASUR conference we’d watched on the bus. Since then, we’d heard rumors that Colombia’s whole cabinet was afflicted. Then it was the whole legislature. It was a brutal pandemic, warned the sporadic TV news we’d seen along the way, and it was sweeping unstoppably across Bogotá. But we didn’t put much stock in such reports, since Colombian media is in no way above American-cable-news–style sensationalism, and since ratings-wise, contagious respiratory diseases rank right up there with earthquakes and blond-girl kidnappings.

Our bus shuddered up the steep grades into Colombia’s
high-mountain capital, and by the time we found a cheap hostel in the colonial district, Sky was bleary-eyed and incoherent. I was helping him carry his bags into our dorm room when we both noticed the large-print poster stapled to the door:

“Well, shit,” Sky said slowly, sounding a bit dazed. His face had lost its remaining traces of color. “Dude, am I going to die?”

I tried to sound upbeat. “Probably not,” I said. But the symptoms did seem to line up, and I imagined he was right about the airlines taking swine flu seriously.

So we opted to play it safe, and within a few hours of arriving in the cold, gray capital, we were standing outside of an even colder, grayer hospital, watching ambulances fight their way up the crowded street toward the ER.

I have never cared much for hospitals. I grew up just down the street from one, and looking back, it seems like someone I knew was always in it—an uncle following a stroke, my dad with a kidney stone, a classmate after a near-fatal asthma attack. The hospital’s boxy brick exterior loomed oppressively over our neighborhood, and it made for a steady stream of sad-looking people pacing up and down the block. Today, as a perennially uninsured adult, I’ve come to think of hospitals as strongholds of disease rather than places where I might receive treatment for one.

That everyone pacing outside Bogotá’s hospital wore a surgical mask only heightened my unease. This is a creepy
thing to see in any town—a crowd full of half faces, noses and mouths hidden behind paper muzzles of pale green. I felt sick just looking at the place.

Sky was already a goner, I decided, but there was still hope for me. If I hadn’t already contracted swine flu from a month of close quarters with the photographer, I would sure as hell pick it up in there. I grasped Sky’s shoulders in what I hoped was a brotherly manner and gave him an encouraging send-off.

“Best of luck in there, buddy. I’ll be in the café across the street.”

If you must seek medical treatment abroad, you can do a lot worse than Colombia. Statistically speaking, Sky was just one of 15,000 or so foreign visitors who see the inside of a Colombian medical facility each year, and the great majority of these actually schedule their own appointments. Medical tourism is big business in Colombia, where the expertise of doctors is high and the costs (compared with Europe and the United States) are staggeringly low. A hip replacement that might set you back $50,000 in the United States costs only around $9,000 in Colombia. A gastric-bypass surgery in Colombia runs around $15,000, compared with ten times that in the States. According to Colombia’s Trade Ministry, about half the country’s medical tourists come for either bypasses or heart surgery.

Of course, Colombia is probably more famous for the 10 percent who come seeking plastic surgery. It is this sector, in any case, that the country’s tourism industry seems most eager to promote. During my time in Bogotá, headlines there trumpeted the construction of a brand-new cosmetic tourism facility on the city’s glitzy north side. When completed, the $19 million Bosque Beauty Garden will be
Colombia’s first hotel/surgical center, appealing to those who seek both lofted luxury and lifted brows.

That plastic surgery is popular in metro Colombia is not a fact that requires much support from government stats or medical journals. In certain neighborhoods, the signs and billboards for boob jobs seem almost to outnumber the total number of available boobs. And if the advertising doesn’t tip you off, the suspiciously high number of suspiciously round buttocks probably will. Colombians take beauty and body image very seriously, and it’s their proud reputation for superficiality that attracts so many nose-job nomads. Sky had actually explained this to me during our very first meeting back in Barranquilla, during an opening soliloquy about the virtues of Colombian women, and I’d seen plenty of evidence since. Yes, there were the ubiquitous ads for plastic surgery, but there was also the country’s conspicuous obsession with beauty pageants. I’d flipped past half a dozen of them on motel TVs and seen pictures of winners splayed across every supermarket newsstand we’d run across. On Mompós, we’d caught the tail end of a parade dedicated to the town’s
reinas
—pageant-winning “princesses,” all dolled up like child victims of reality-TV moms and carted around on streamer-lined floats. Even as I settled into the café across the street from the hospital, it was hard not to notice how explicitly sexualized were the soda posters and the ice-cream ads—collagened lips pressed against Coke bottles, buxom young women simulating fellatio on their cones.

Even fifty years ago, Thompson had noted approvingly that Colombia had a “wholly different sexual climate” from the United States. It was, in fact, one of the things he’d most admired about the country’s Caribbean coast. In his letters, he writes admiringly about “the fine, lusty tension in
the air” in what he’d seen so far of Latin America. In general, Thompson’s letters from the continent exhibit a healthy libido. He writes candidly, for instance, of having visited a brothel in Barranquilla, but he also seems to have a sociological interest in sex that transcends the mere chasing of tail. With anthropological detail, his letters describe the relationships among Colombian men, their formal prostitutes, and their informal mistresses. Then as now, prostitution was legal, but its legality conferred none of the borderline respectability enjoyed today by sex workers in progressive enclaves like, say, the Netherlands. It was one thing to legally patronize a working girl, Thompson explains, but quite another to be seen in public with one. The mistresses, meanwhile, were considered “nice girls”—debutantes who kept their bedroom exploits clandestine. Specimens from either group, Thompson told an editor, “will knock your eyes out.”

Sipping a beer in the café and trying not to ogle the ice-cream models, I thought, not for the first time, of how much the young Thompson reminded me of Sky, and I realized how much I was going to miss the rakish photographer when he was gone.

When Sky emerged eventually from the hospital’s creepy rotating doors, he had a paper mask stretched across his face.

That’s it, I thought. So much for the Thompson Trail. They’re going to quarantine us with the legislature, for sure.

But Sky, it turned out, did not have the swine flu. After a long wait and an hour of poking and prodding, the doctors had diagnosed him with a workaday respiratory infection. They shot him up with penicillin, tied a mask on him, and sent him on his way. His total fee for the consultation, a blood test, and the drugs? About $30. Slightly less than the cost of our bus tickets from Girardot.