Jungle Fever

It was April or May in 2006. I can't remember which month. It was the dry season, that much I know, because the mealy parrots weren't nesting, and I no longer had to slog through knee-deep slop along the path each morning on my way to the bird blind. There was no longer any chance of being rained out, and I remember missing those mornings where rain came down like sheets, so hard it was nothing but white through the screens of the sleeping quarters, making a rasping sound across the palapa-style roofs so loud that it hushed everybody--the researchers, the guides, the tourists, the mouthy kitchen workers with their Amanda Portales wailing from the grainy TVs in the back rooms, the men always huddled around watching the women, always with exceptional cleavage, dressed in traditional peasant clothing dance across mountaintops to Incan pan-pipe style pop--into a subdued, blank silence.

I had loved the rain. It was the rainforest, after all. It had made everything difficult. A challenge. Clothes never dried. Backpacks molded. Everyday was a rain day during the rainy season, except you were never let off the hook because the skies might clear momentarily and then you had to be there, you had to be ready, because that hour, two hours if you were lucky, was your time. That's when the birds would come down to feed, down from the trees and gone again, so you had to be on even as you watched the sheets descend from the safety of your mosquito net.

But that was all over by March, and perhaps that's why Simon, Tylor, and I went up to the bowl after dark. It was a few miles hike from the research center; the bowl was a low scoop in the ground that collected months worth of rain that never quite evaporated completely during the dry season. It would have been impassible during any other month; the water would have been too deep at the place where we waded in. And it still was deep, colder than I would have liked. There was that moment where I remember wading up to my knees, the first of the water spilling up over the top of my boots and down inside, each step heavier as we slogged on. There was that resistance, the way we all--yes, even the guy who called himself an amateur herpetologist--tried to keep the water from going over the top, and then that moment where we just give in, let ourselves get soaked. Once we stopped being pussies and just acted as though we were walking into a lake rather than an Amazonian swamp, we moved forth at a faster clip, the water up over our waists, then up to our chests, as we navigated awkwardly around buttressed tree roots, ducking so our headlamps wouldn't get snagged by a vine or a branch and plunge into the murky water, god forbid leaving us at the mercy of each other in order to get back.

It always ended up like this for me. Always me and two guys. Always (generally) a platonic, intrepid threesome. It was never about the guys, but the experience, although being being one of the guys was an integral part to the experience. Of being able to tough it out. There were the nights in the Huachuca Mountains with Zac and Wes, tripping on acid at the old miner's ruins, the way the desert can fuck you up, leave you stranded as every ravine becomes less like something you recognize and just more of the same--pin oaks and granite, pin oaks and granite, even when you're stone sober in the middle of the day. Flying through through BLM land with Jim and Colin in Colin's hippie white-trash Blazer aiming for the place where the flat expanse of sage brush gives it up to the Wind River Mountains. Chris and Petter at Invercargill, New Zealand, and jut a few months ago me, Simon and Sergio sleeping out in the observation tower in the middle of the rainforest, tipsy and not caring about the bugs. In the morning Sergio woke up with his arms all bitten up muttering fuck, fuck, fuck because this area of the Amazon was a hotspot for Leishmaniasis--a disease that's carried by a little white fly that only comes out at night. It passes the parasite into your bloodstream and if not stopped it starts to eat away at your flesh, traveling across your whole body.

What I worshipped first was always the job description. Must be physically fit. Able to carry a heavy load over tough terrain. Willing to deal with extreme heat, extreme cold, high winds, heavy rain. Must work well with others. Must work well alone, for days on end, in remote and rustic lodgings with no amenities, no phone, no internet. Intermittent face-to-face contact with outsiders. There will be biting insects and poisonous snakes and possible chance encounters with charismatic megafauna: peccaries, javelinas, jaguars, mountain lions, grizzlies, cattle on the loose, ranchers, locals, caiman.

We'd actually gone up to the bowl in hopes of seeing caimans. Not the small ones that we could find in the vernal swamps, now nearly dried up, down by the lodge. Not the ones that were maybe two or three feet in length, cute little lizards really, that lurked in minty-green algae-scummed waters and sank silently from sight if you got too close. We were looking for the big ones. The ones that grew to be six feet long. The big caimans that ate the little caimans for breakfast, that were easy to spot at night because if we could stop all the sloshing through the chest-high water and be still for a minute we could turn off our lights, grow very quiet and wait for something to cross our path. The plan was, when that happened we'd turn our headlamps on and catch a glimpse of the animal's eyeshine before it turned and retreated back the way we came. We wouldn't really get to see the animal much at all. The thrill was really in knowing that we'd been that close, in knowing that a few feet away an animal pulsed in the same water we stood in, that for a moment we'd come so very near to touching it.