It really knocked my wind out, this story.  I know some stories come at you like falling feathers: they drop so slowly that finally you just can’t stand waiting anymore and you reach up and snatch them out the air.  And you’ve got it.  But I never saw this one coming.  I’m still not even sure what it looks like (I’m wondering whether I’ve waited long enough to understand all the parts).  I’ve been swinging at this story for a while, using my thoughts like machetes, trying to get it untangled.  It’s resisted me.

I’m still sitting here – like I was before this story blindsided me – spinning across the wooden floor in a red, rolling chair, hoping to bump into something really solid just so I can push off and keep it going because there’s nothing else going on.  I’m not even waiting for the phone to ring.  I’m just waiting for the story to sort itself out.  I know I have a beginning, a middle, and an end but the parts slip through each other like they are lost on mud-slick trails and barefoot.  I’m still not sure how the beginning led to the middle or how or how the middle led to the end.  But at some point we’ve all got to stop worrying that what we’ve got might not be enough, and I’ve been swinging and spinning for too long.  Here is my solution: I’ll call it The Story of Ecuador and tell it before I change my mind.  It’s time to get up and let the chair spin itself for a while. This is the Story of Ecuador:

 

I was there before, spinning across the wooden floor in a red, rolling chair waiting for the phone to ring.  My friend calls.  Come with us to Ecuador, he says.  So I wait for that.  I pace.  I stand.  I watch my suitcase to see if it is filling.  I see what I have to take.  Three things:  A boat, a paddle, a toothbrush.  I see what I don’t want to take.  Three things:  Shoes, sunblock, a water bottle.  And then it’s time to go.  My gear collapses suddenly into a backpack and a paddle bag, and I can’t help but think about how George Carlin would just laugh at me and say: ‘Stuff.  It’s all stuff.  That’s all your house is, you know.  Just a big pile of your stuff with a cover over it.’  And then I’m out the door.

 

 

I met up with them at the pizzeria.  It was such a relief to see them again.  We didn’t really have to talk about it because our weak posture and dirty fingernails spoke for us.  Two of the hardest days of our lives caught back to back, and the best thing to do was eat warm, rich pizza and drink frozen, blackberry batidos.

The Jumanji bus hurried us away to creeks in the mountains where we could see above us, on vast snow-capped peaks, what made the water beneath us so icy.  And from there we vaulted – boofing and wheeling – over the high plateau of the Andes down into the city where a plane was waiting.  Standing.  With open doors.  Ready to magic us home.

 

I’m worrying again.  I expect someone will stand up and say I’m losing my grip on The Story of Ecuador.  The end comes more easily.  It’s just harder to get there from the beginning.  Someday there might be a sunny lane sprawling through this story, when it all becomes clear.  Until then, I’m walking paths that swell upwards, dark and mud-spattered, with only these words:

 

    In a white taxi pickup we charged along dirt roads that cut through banana fields like strings of ants through grass.  At the edge of the muddy, swollen river we snacked on half a bag of chips, two cans of tuna, eight mini chocolate eggs, and half a bottle of water.  There, a mile upstream from the first rapids, we watched as an entire family stood one behind the other in a dugout canoe twenty feet long but as narrow as their shoulders, while the eldest son ferried them and big bunches of bananas across the river with a bamboo pole.  

    Downstream the waterfalls were tremendous.  We floated, hardly dipping our paddles into the hurrying current, until canyon walls emerged around us and grew.  And as we ventured still further into the gorge, the waterfalls, which splashed ferociously over the hundred foot canyon walls into the river, grew and grew, until the biggest one – with the grandest postcard spray – stopped us.  One thousand cubic feet of water per second hurled itself from some elevated ravine beneath the tangle of vines, but one hundred and fifty feet below, there was scarcely enough water left to wash a mud-coated pickup truck.  It was as if even the largest things were dwarfed by the enormity of the jungle river-gorge, life-blood of the Amazon.

    Ahead, and in a section of canyon we could not see yet, was a rapid we knew was waiting for us.  I don’t remember the names of the people or their faces or how many of them there were, but I do remember hearing their voices blending together (until they were as loud and muddy-brown and unforgettable as that river): ‘Take the portage,’ they’d say.  ‘Do not run the rapid.’  Swinging around a bend tangled with vines and twittering with parakeets, we saw the horizon line: the place where the river seems to end and only a cacophonous empty space follows until the river appears again far downstream.  The left bank had been swallowed up and smothered by a landslide of tremendous boulders, while the right bank was nothing more than a half-submerged, slimy wet cliff.  We climbed out of our boats on the right bank and looked down at the rapid to see the water violated in a way we had never seen before.  The riverbed made no attempt to keep the water on top of it; more often than not, the current both rushed under and crashed headlong into huge piles of jagged rock.  And I lied.  I lied about the river appearing beyond the horizon line.  From where we stood on the right bank, we watched the full volume of the current smash into a cliff wall, curl hard into the left bank, rebound and vanish.

    I sat down there, in the slime on the top of a boulder, and ate another can of tuna fish.  The three others spread out.  One to stretch and two to scout.  In the muddy bowl between two massive tree roots, we congregated to devise some scheme for getting around the rapid.  The portage around was deep under water.  Everywhere the banks were steep, slick and littered with colossal fallen trees.  Deep green and black all around us.  We would hike up and around the cliff and the tangle of vines.  Among the four of us, we had half a bag of chips, two cans of tuna, twenty-three knuckle-sized chocolate eggs, and thirty ounces of water.  Four kayaks.  Four paddles.  Four helmets, spray skirts, and life jackets.  Two pairs of shoes.  Two nylon cords.  One pair of neoprene socks and a fifteen-pound camera bag.  And the boats weighed forty pounds.  It was four o’clock, and the sun was hurrying behind the mountains.

    In our foolish ambition, we began to climb straight up.  It was steeper than a ladder, and we drove our toes deep into the mud to keep from sliding back towards the cliff edge.  We hauled the boats up one by one, rope over rope, from tree to tree.  We struck a rhythm.  At every opportunity, we tried to move downstream (across the hill), but the fallen logs kept forcing us to climb.  We ventured along several trails, and each would run for a couple of yards before stumbling back into the vines.  At a level place where the upper canopy seemed less dense, we collapsed on top of our boats, stained and scraped.  Miles lay behind us.  Miles of slimy ladders and gray light.  Now the light was fading.  A hint of a trail, though still moving up the hill, wandered diagonally downstream.  We followed hoping to descend before long.  The light was fading, and the boats weighed forty pounds.  And suddenly we were frantic.  We found an empty ravine running directly towards the river.  We crashed through the vines and the leaves of the Poor Man’s Umbrella until the end of the ravine.

    

We froze.

 

None of us spoke.

 

We were breathless from running – without breath from the view.

    

    We had to lean out over the edge to see the river, which lay a devastating one hundred and fifty feet below us.  The trail was behind us: up the ravine and through the over-sized leaves and thorn bushes.  And the light was nearly gone.  And the boats weighed forty pounds.  We had fifteen ounces of water and only enough hope to carry us back to the trail.

Night fell suddenly as we dragged the boats over a steep section of what might have been the trail.  The jungle collapsed around us, and the ground began to crawl and distort and confound our straining eyes.  We had been portaging for almost five hours.  Wedging the boats against tree roots and young saplings until they lay flat, we stretched out across them.  I opened a can of tuna, and we split it four ways, two bites apiece.  We could hardly swallow it.  The oil filled our mouths, and the tuna was like cotton packed around our gums.  We put on all of our gear and anything that might keep the bugs away.  With our feet propped against tree trunks to keep us from plunging down the hill, we tried to sleep.  At eleven, by the sapphire light of our watches, we took out the video camera and documented our predicament.  It was a haunting display of shadows and sounds: rasping voices grated against dim human outlines, and the silence was filled with the hum of mosquitoes.  As we lay across the boats, sweat from the climb collected under our gear, cooling until we shivered with weakness and cold.  We stripped to neoprene shorts and felt the warmth spread as the sweat evaporated.  At three, the moon reached its zenith and poured a diamond-paling light through the branches.  Cold and swollen with bites, we donned the gear again.  By six we were walking through the soft but golden light with four chocolate eggs, two bites of tuna and three ounces of water in our bodies.

By eight we had climbed several miles, crawled under countless fallen trees, and crested a gentle rise to reach a clearing.  Hundreds of trees lay strewn across the clearing where they had been felled and left to bake in the sun.  Smooth stumps showed the scars of a chainsaw blade, so we hunted for an access trail to this hornet-infested maze.  All around behind us, ravines ran down to the edge of two hundred foot cliffs.  Across the clearing – which took fifteen minutes to cross even without our boats – we found a near vertical trail writhing and switchbacking in the sun.  We crossed the logs twice more, once with the boats, while our necks and arms burned.  We scrambled over the steep beginning of the trial, looking ahead for a road.  After twenty minutes of hiking, we began to question how the people who had cut the trees had gotten there with chainsaws.  After forty we re-evaluated: a chainsaw does not necessarily signify the proximity of a road.  To the nearest approximation, the markings of a chainsaw signify, at best, that one is still on the planet Earth.

By ten, we reached the papaya groves, and crossing them, reached the banana fields.  And at the top of the hill (the top of the climb that had begun by the riverbank eighteen hours earlier) we found a deserted wooden hut.  A pair of sneakers and a toothbrush suggested that it was possible to get to and from town.  We filled our empty water bottles in a stagnant bucket swarming with bees and scanned the groves for ripe fruit.  Leaving my boat by the hut where two friends sat resting, I set out to find the trail that would lead to town.

Two hours later, mind reeling from exhaustion and dehydration, I found myself trudging alone through thigh-deep mud miles from the hut.  I had no food or drink.  I had left my friends and my boat far behind.  I was barefoot.  And in my madness, I crossed a field four miles down the hill to come suddenly upon a family, laden with bananas.  I did not speak much Spanish but neither did they.  Up there on the mountain they speak a dialect of Quitchua.  But they understood I was hungry and trying to get to a town.  They offered me several bananas gladly but when I asked for directions to the town, they hedged.  It wasn’t until a mile or so later, when I met a man outside his tiny village, that I learned the reason: families traveled village to village but many did not venture as far as the town.  I passed through that man’s village and continued on lonely jungle trails.

Descending beneath another jungle canopy, I reached a wide lane where once again, I sloshed through deep and sucking mud.  I passed through a second village, waving at another group of gawking school children.  After six hours of hiking, I arrived on a sun-scorched gravel path.  Descending that path with a Poor Man’s Umbrella leaf for shade, I reached a road and a bus stop.  With a fifty percent chance of catching the bus going in the right direction, I clambered onto the first bus that arrived.  I deposited my bones in the first empty seat, and the bus carried me away from the jungle.

I arrived at a town I didn’t recognize whose central square was filled with as many monkeys as dogs.  Unable even to pay the bus driver for the original fare, I begged to be allowed to ride the reverse route to the town where the hostel was (where I could get the money from my room).  Half an hour later, I had paid the fare, eaten five balance bars, and downed two quarts of Gatorade.  I loaded a backpack with Gatorade, water, and spare clothes.  I borrowed a pair of tall mud boots, bought a cheap flashlight, and mooched a warm plate of rice and three glasses of jugo de piña.  I found a taxi to take me as far as the gravel path.  There I pulled on the mud boots, lowered my hat’s visor against the glare, and began to run up the mountain to find my friends.  I plunged through the mud, up the winding trails, and across a soccer field.  And the light began to fade on the second day.  I passed the first village and reached the second by dinnertime.  An entire family came out onto their porch to talk to me.  In my broken Spanish and from their mountain-steeped dialect, I learned that my friends had descended – with the family’s help – down through the village with four kayaks.  On the winding tracks of the protracted jungle, we had passed like mud-smeared earthworms thick silt.