To the Jungle

November 10, 2004

The jungle has a voice. It spoke to me. What did it say?

Stephen Budd and me walked the streets of La Paz. A strange pair, me and him, a forty-something lank Englishman with high-pants pinched tight at the waist and long-billed ball cap atop his skinny head. I could see that he was inclined to my company, we related somehow, and though the coupling seemed odd it was right for the time. In the morning we strolled into Iglesia San Francisco and grew solemn, speaking of heretic things in a sacred way, deeply philosophical suddenly when before we'd hardly discussed anything of much significance. I found there was more to Stephen Budd than previously reckoned, and we whispered around the altar until mass began and the faithful shuffled in.

We walked, and along the way we picked up others, an Israeli I kept running into, who over lunch told us about the war in his homeland. "I buried two of my friends," he said, bowing his head. "I truly believe there will never be an end to the conflict until Israel ceases to exist..." He was small and boyish, but his temperament was hard and there was something fierce behind his eyes: he'd seen war all his life. A silence followed his story. I think we all mourned for him a little.

Afterward a few of us took a bus up to the outer hills of La Paz to the Valle de la Luna, a dessicated lunar landscape with pathways for tourists to walk along and pay as much money as possible. I scoffed at the charge and found plenty of moony rock to suit my fancy outside the fenced-off tourist trap. "Let's get the hell out of here," I said.

We did, and that night there was a dinner round a big wood table with all sorts of travelers we'd met, and there was storytelling. Everyone knew someone who'd been robbed or pickpocketed or held at gunpoint at some point. I was told of a Slovenian guy who the day before in broad daylight had been abducted by an evil taxi with a gun-toting cabby––that was Sylvester, I'd meet him later in the jungle. I wondered when my time would come and what I'd do. I envisioned myself knocking down handguns, followed by roundhouse kicks to the throat, just like I've imagined all my life when it comes to the enemy. In the battles of my imagination, at least, I'm invincible.

The dinner dispersed. I walked home with Stephen Budd. All I could think about was the jungle in the morning. I kept telling Budd excitedly. He laughed Brit-like, like the Brit he was and always will be. "I sure hope this jungle of yours is all you've hoped for," he said. I appreciate that, Budd, now it's time you go disappear forever. And he did, the next morning.

The busy early morning streets were filled with buses and bus-vans going everywhere, brown faces jutting out of windows rambling Spanish destinations incoherent to my ears. I stood with rucksack on by side of the main drag watching for a ride to the military airbase nearby, where I was to catch a plane to the Amazon town of Rurrenabaque. At the base I waited around in the sun while the officials prepared the prop-plane, other travelers showing up. I noticed one tall guy with a full brown beard and Castro-style hat sitting across from me; I didn't know it yet but this was Urs, and later that day we'd become great friends. I met a Canadian couple, Kathy and Kevin, and we talked until boarding time.

The plane ride was loud and quaking, and the cabin wasn't all that pressurized so I woke from sleep with my ears shrieking out in pain. I grabbed my head and made insuppressible pain-faces, looking around to see others, but I seemed to be the only one in agony, until I found a little packet with two nice cottonballs in it. I stuffed them in my ears and felt better. Out the window the landscape sloped down from high rock places and descended into the dank jungle vegetation, vast and inhuman, streaked by sinuous brown rivers. I watched wide-eyed, cotton-stuffed, deaf.

We landed on a long field of grass outside town, hearken back to Indiana Jones. I stepped off the plane into thick hot air alive with insect sounds. My lungs ballooned, I hadn't been down from high altitude in weeks. The airport was just a shack, and there I went searching for the jeep that was supposed to me meet me there, an emissary from the tour agency I'd signed with in La Paz. Trucks were picking up travelers all over the place, and I discovered my ride left without me. I got pissed, ending up hopping in a van that charged me five bolivianas to town, about forty cents, and I was pissed anyway. But out the window the verdant hills rose like all my dreams of Africa. There were sun-worn palms bending everywhere, kids tottering at roadside on rusted bicycles, and the dust from the dirt tracks rose behind us and hung there in the sun.

I got out in the center of town, heat beating down on me, drawing profuse sweat on the old brow and up inside my shirt. I checked in with the agency, they told me to meet back there in the morning to depart, so I went to find a hostel to unload my bag. The town was small, the roads dirt, and there were hardly any cars for all the motorcycles. I got a room with a bathroom on the third floor where I could look out over town and see the small green mountain rise from the jungle and cut its ridge against the sky. I put on my sandals and just a white undershirt and went back out. I took a trail out to the river where women were selling watermelon on the banks and naked children hauled their little asses through the slackwater. Just walking along, pensive, receptive. I felt like I was in a Hemingway novel, except more alive and with heart. And scenes from old movies passed in my mind, of far places and adventure in mysterious hot jungles, and they found a place at last in the reality of my life. I felt as if I'd found the place where I was meant to be, where I'd build a shack along the river and write my novels, and smoke a corncob pipe on the porch at sundown. An overwhelming urge to write overtook me so I ran back to my room to get my journal, figuring I'd write over a beer at an open-air bar I'd passed on my walk.

The Moskkito Bar was a traveler's bar on the street near the river, thatched roof, two good pool tables, playing rock'n'roll you could hear down the street. I got a beer and opened my journal, and at that moment I might have written my masterpiece, I might have scrawled it all just right and died happy, but before I could put down a word someone called out to me. It was Urs, the bearded hat-wearer I'd spied earlier at the airbase, sitting alone with a drink.

"Hey man, do you want to sit here--I'm tired of sitting alone."

He was smiling hugely and looked like such a happy madman that I had to close my journal and take a seat with him (it reminded me of Coleridge, when in the middle of an epic poem a knock at the door interrupted him, a stranger who would go down in history as the Person from Porlock, who'd gotten the wrong address; Coleridge blamed him for the incomplete masterpiece). I didn't blame Urs though, it was my choice and I wanted the company. Urs was from the German part of Switzerland and had been traveling for months, beginning in the Canadian Yukon, where he hitchhiked around, got a job with a miner he met, fished, and grew a wilderness beard. It turned out we were doing the same jungle tour the next day. Our enthusiasms met head on, and we spent two hours in wild conversation before the Canadian couple I'd met earlier that day, Kevin and Kathy, came in and joined us.

We stayed at that bar through sunset and midnight, magnanimously drunk, playing pool. Kevin took Kathy home and came running back, saying, "Man, it's so good to just have a night out with the boys again." He kept extending his hand to me for various exultant handshakes, which I obliged most readily. Suddenly I needed to hear Bob Dylan and ran to request Mr. Tambourine Man at the bar, and it made the night even greater to hear old Dylan sing out in the jungle. "Take me disappearing through the smoke-rings of my mind, through the foggy ruins of time, far past the frozen leaves, the haunted frightened trees, out to the windy beach, far from the twisted reach of crazy sorrow..."

I went home happy.

It rained in the morning. I gathered my things together with pulsing brain and went to find breakfast and coffee. I got both for a dollar, then ran to meet the rest of the group, ducking into the room under dripping eaves. Urs came around the corner smiling, wearing a poncho made from the thinnest plastic anyone had ever seen. We loaded all our bags onto two jeeps and divided the group between them, then set out down a long muddy road, where at the end our wood boats waited on the river. The jeeps swung and fishtailed all over the road, sometimes even going perpendicular; we all howled and laughed and cracked jokes. I was overjoyed to have such a great crew with me, we all got on with fantastic humor.

A few hours later we reached the river and loaded our packs onto the boat and draped them in canvas. The rain stopped. Me and Urs bought cookies and cigarettes from a hawker on the bank and climbed into the boat as it set off.

It was a gray day with a heavy mat of clouds overhead, but cool and comfortable, mosquitoless. The guide's name was Luis, he motored the boat slowly up the river. Everywhere the eyes of alligators and caymen peeked sinister above the brown water. Colorful Birds of Paradise swooped from overhanging limbs with red-orange-blue feathers. "Those are funky looking birds," I said, and from then on every time we saw one we shouted, "Bird of Funkyness!" We may have annoyed some people doing that. Families of capybaras sat along the banks, giant tailless rodents, like monolith hamsters; they were everywhere. And more goddam eagles than you could shake a stick at, sometimes even coming right for us with full facial, gliding right over the boat, or often just sitting proudly on a limb somewhere watching after us.

"Time for a cookie?" Urs asked me.

"How about a cookie followed by a little ciggyboo?" I said.

Somehow we began to coordinate everything between us, like complete traveling companions, which I guess we both sought a little refuge in since we were traveling alone, and it was great. We came across a tree full of yellow-black squirrel monkeys, they all were reaching out to us with little shrieks. We pulled our boat up and played around with them for a while. A giant alligator slept in the mud nearby.

Our camp stood on a high bank above the river. We unloaded our packs and went up for lunch. Urs and me went around the camp afterward, swinging on vines and investigating the area. We discovered an encampment of howler monkeys high up in the tree boughs. They would make their debut the next morning.

That night six of us got back in the boat with flashlights to go looking for alligators and the other nocturnal creatures we could spot. There were gleaming eyes everywhere. The guide turned the motor off and we switched off all our lights. All we could hear were the jungle sounds, the cacophony of insects, the shout of a monkey or night bird somewhere nearby. I wanted to sleep in the drifting boat and just listen. When we were done hunting we raced back down the river with the lights off, which was a good thrill.

At the camp after dinner all of us sat around the table in candlelight talking. We had some of the greatest most imaginative conversation. It began when Urs said, "Who do you think would win, a grizzly or a tiger?" This spurred over an hour of Colosseum-style match-ups, everyone pitching in animals: polar bear vs. wolf, gorilla vs. hippo, rhino vs. elephant, shark vs. crocodile, etc. Then I started asking some of my famous which-would-you-rather questions: "Ok, you get a billion dollars straight-up, except there's one catch: at some point in your life, maybe tomorrow, maybe fifty years, a werewolf is going to attack you." Russel from England asked, "Can you keep a gun on you with silver bullets?" I said, "You can have a holster with two silver bullet six- shooters if you want, but would that quell your constant life-destroying fear of the werewolf?"

Anything anyone could think of was fair game that night. "Where would you go if you had a time machine?"

In his thick Slovenian accent, Sylvester said, "I'd smoke the joint and go to ancient Egypt and just watch fuckers make the pyramid."

I envisioned meeting old Chris when his boat pulled in: "Columbus comes ashore and I'm sitting there in the sand eating peanuts. I walk over and punch him right in the face and drop him." Emma from London asked me, "So do you always keep a bag of peanuts in your time machine?" And so on into the night, laughing and laughing. When the candles died we all left to crawl into bed, pulling our mosquito nets shroud-like around us, and everywhere the jungle kept at it as we drifted off.

Early in the morning I woke to the strangest sound. At first I thought Urs was snoring. It was this incredibly low, guttural, baritone sound, almost as if something was right there in the room. But it was right above the room, in the treetops: the howler monkeys were going apeshit as the sun came up. All of them joined in, like an ancient tribal chant. I lay in bed listening, amazed. The whole jungle went into a riot. Birds shrieked in chorus, the monkeys were going strong, the whole room was full of sound. Urs went into a rendition of 'Welcome to the Jungle' by Guns'n'Roses over top of it––that song kept popping up, way too many times, everyone breaking out in Axel Rose impressions at appropriate times.

We got up for breakfast, then set out through the nearby fields to look for anacondas with our rubber boots on, plodding through the mud. We ran across the sloughed off skin of anacondas, and sometimes the bones of them, but we saw none living. Our guide left us to go searching along the waterside, but came up empty. In the meantime the gray sky had cleared and now it was blue and the sun shining. We took the boat upriver to the deeper water to go swimming. I knew there were piranhas and dickfishes and everything else in there, but I had to get in. I didn't have trunks so I stripped down to my boxers and leapt in the water. It was lukewarm, my feet sank into the mud at bottom, I could feel little fishes nipping at me from time to time. I swam out.

Suddenly there was a jet of water next to me, and a pink river-dolphin broke above the surface and dove back in again. I swam toward it and got within reach, but it disappeared and came up further away on the opposite side. There were two or three of them. So I was swimming with pink river dolphins. A few of us stayed out there treading water, trying to touch them, but they were evasive and kept just away.

Every now and then someone would shout a curse and splash frantically, feeling something down there investigating them. A few times I felt something take a bite at me, sharp-toothed, and I'd holler a curse. I knew what it was. At one point a French guy named Dominique screamed and started power-swimming ashore, pulling himself onto the boat. On his stomach there was blood, and the circular bite-mark of a piranha. "That's awesome!" I shouted. He was excited too, because he had a priceless souvenir. Later he showed everyone, garnering much acclaim.

We left the waterhole and went to a riverside shack where a man lived and sold big icy-cold beers. We didn't have money with us, but he said that was fine and we could pay him tomorrow. The sun was setting, we hung in hammocks sipping, watching it sink into the jungle. I felt as if I'd brought myself into something spectacular, something only previously romanticized and unattainable, some kind of movie screen dream that now breathed with life. The floorboards, the dusty slant of sun through the screened windows, the river passing, all of it, it was real and I was there. I felt success, I felt proud.

That night there were countless stars, I spent it in a hammock looking up through the leaves where stars were caught in the upper bows, and out over the river where the sky widened there were the strange and unfamiliar patterns of the southern constellations shining. I fell asleep, closer to heaven than maybe I'd ever come.

We went upriver in the morning with hooks and string and meat to go fishing for piranhas. The river was so full of nutty fish that you couldn't throw your bait in without it getting immediately attacked, and you'd pull out an empty hook a frustrating amount of times. But I was lucky, and with a few casts I felt a good bite and tugged, pulling out a small yellow-shaded piranha. I grabbed its face in my hand and stared it down, its mouth agape with little teeth. "You sonofabitch," I said. All my life I'd heard of this legendary fish, watched the documentaries where cows were getting skeletonized left and right in two minutes. It was like a nightmare to me, and I swore I wouldn't go anywhere near a place where those fish were. Now I'd swum fearlessly among them, and here was one powerless in my hand. The tables have turned, eh piranha? (slow shoulder-heaving laugh). Back at camp we fried and ate the sonsofbitches. Ain't no skeletonizing goin' on round here now, is there?

The rest of the afternoon we spent crafting jewelry from tropical nuts and whatnot. There was this particular nut that you could sand down to a fancy gloss and wear as a ring. I sawed apart about thirty of them without getting the right finger-size and eventually gave up. But Luis the guide had spent hours preparing necklaces with pendants for all of us, sitting us down and ceremoniously tying them around our necks. We all agreed that this would become symbol of our bond, and we wouldn't take them off until they were rent from our throats somehow against our will. I wear mine now.

Luis' wife prepared an incredible lunch with all sorts of vegetables that we devoured gratefully, and told her so. She smiled childlike and said, "De nada, amigos." Then it was time to go back, and sadly I got my pack together and we piled into the boats. It took a couple hours to make it downriver, and we all sunbathed under the hottest sun we'd ever felt. Monkeys watched us from the trees, and sometimes we'd stop to call to them, but they just shook their heads woefully and said, "Your time with us is no more. Go now, go back to that place you call home, where nothing really happens at all."

I could have spent weeks in that jungle, but my time was running short, the mundane was creeping back to claim me, the clutch of banality would return to strangle me once again, and the jungle would be a distant memory in the tear of my mind's eye, alas.

We reached the jeeps and took off down the dirt road back to Rurrenabaque. We were quiet.

Everyone checked into the same hostel upon our return, we didn't want to split up just yet, we'd grown close. That night we all went out to the Moskkito Bar for food and drinks, staying out way past midnight. But in the morning it was time for everyone to go his way, and goodbye hung over me once again. Urs was thinking of staying there longer, but when I told him I was leaving that day he said, "Nevermind, I'm not staying if you go." He wanted me to go along with him to Cochabamba, and I was going to, when I suddenly realized how little time I had left. I was supposed to be in Quito in ten days. How would I get there in time if I stayed longer in Bolivia? We hung our heads and knew it was goodbye. We shook hands sadly and he went to catch his bus, and that was it.

I went with Sylvester and Jessica to catch a prop-plane back to La Paz. I watched the jungle disappear from the plane window, tired of letting good things and friends go, weary of a world that kept sliding through my fingers.