Feeling like the getaway driver in a caper movie, I looped the accelerator-rope around my big toe and floored it. The boat careened upstream for a few thrilling minutes, until the engine overheated and abruptly cut out. Aiming for a sandbar, I let the Salmon run aground with a thud. Meanwhile, our lead boat stormed off, disappearing around a sharp bend.
“Well done,” Flint nodded, his tone chagrined. “I can’t get the bloody pipe to clear, either. She was going to quit on us no matter who was driving.” From our awkward emergency parking spot, we could hear the other boat charging away.
“Why does he have to go so fast, anyway?” I groused.
“Not to worry,” said the Skipper, “I’ll have a quick tinker and we’ll be off!”
Within minutes, the errant engine snarled to life; Flint gleefully kicked the boat back into the current and leapt behind the wheel. It was too late to catch our lead boat, but at least we knew which way it had gone. Lurching blindly around the bend, we found ourselves in a box canyon: a chute of whitewater enclosed by sheer cliffs on one side and stacked boulders on the other. At the bottom, wrapped around the rocks, lay a hulk of rusting metal and splintered teak—the remains of a riverboat. Even with my limited nautical experience, I knew we’d just made a very bad mistake.
Under the looming shadow of the cliff wall, the Nam Ou was stripped of its emerald hue, leaving us in a maze of seething whitecaps and black, sucking eddies. Boulders seemed to leap out of the current like gunslingers in an old Western, menacing. Flint hunched over the wheel, steering on his knees, trying to coax enough speed out of the wheezing engine to haul us up the ladder of water. Clamping his jaw in concentration, he held the Salmon steady, her gangly body flopping up, up, up.
“Can you see if we have water?” he shouted over the roaring engine and crashing rapids. Crouching behind him, I ducked spray and craned my neck toward the spit pipe.
“No water!” I shouted back.
“What about now?” he yelled, seconds later.
“No!”
“Keep watching!”
With the engine straining hard, the cooling pipe should have been gushing, but it produced nothing. Flint, on the other hand, spewed a constant and impressive stream of epithets, collected over a lifetime in boatyards. The boat swayed and wobbled, shuddering with effort. As I clung to the cabin’s frame, training one eye on the impotent spit pipe and the other on the rapids ahead, I wondered how much time we had before the engine quit or caught fire. I wondered why life jackets couldn’t be found anywhere in this country, and why I’d waited so long to learn how to swim. Between my panicked mental checklist and my pipe-watching, I barely noticed the sudden reappearance of light and color—shimmering greens and blues—along with a jump in air temperature. We were clearing the canyon. Even if the rapids were unrelenting, we now had a good chance of colliding with a mud bank rather than a rock wall. But when I glanced at the pipe again, the scrap of relief slipped away.
“Still no water!” I reported, with rising alarm. “And now there’s smoke coming out!”
“Whore!” the skipper screeched at the engine. The engine screeched back, and then cut out. It took a full second to register the absence of mechanical racket, and one more to comprehend our situation. In an almost-comic moment, Flint and I both rubbernecked wildly toward the engine, then at each other. Next, Flint did something I’d never actually seen before: he turned stark white. Without four cylinders to propel her against the current, the Salmon had stopped moving forward and seemed to be considering a suicide run, back into the boneyard.
Flint gunned the starter a few times, then skittered out onto the prow where he pushed our sandbag into the water and jumped in after it. The rope went taut and the Salmon began to drag the sixty-pound bag like a fly-fishing weight, with Flint as the fly. Waist-deep in current, struggling with the lifeless riverboat, he began speaking in his “sail-training voice,” the one he generally saved for coaxing inexperienced crew across the Atlantic.
“Laurie, I can’t hold this boat by myself. If you can, very carefully, I need you in the water. Watch your step, now—get a good foothold.”
Water cascaded around him. I moved in slow motion; the combination of adrenaline, giardia, and Tinidazole created a heavy and not unpleasant tranquilizing effect. Wearing black knit yoga pants and a tank top, I was underdressed for a shipwreck. I had no life jacket and my feet were bare. I noted all of this as I lowered myself over the side of the boat, half-listening to Flint’s nervous patter:
“Mind your feet on those rocks—careful! That’s it, now just hold on to the boat and try to keep your ground!”
The Salmon lunged eagerly downstream. The river was only waist deep, but we were in the full force of it, stumbling and slipping on the rocks. A football field’s length ahead, we could see where it broadened into a glassy pond, like a mirage. We were losing ground quickly when a fisherman waded over from the shallows to throw his weight—and unbelievably buff legs—into the lineup. The boat stopped sliding. Flint and I stopped sliding, too, and we stood there panting, trying to think of what to do next. The fisherman pointed to a lee behind a cluster of rocks, and with nods of agreement, the three of us towed, shoved, and heave-ho’d the boat toward the goal, banging our shins and cutting our feet as the wicked river fought back. My clothes were soaked, and my knit pants, now twelve inches longer, threatened to wind around my feet and drag me under.
When we reached the boulders, Flint tied our towrope around the biggest one and I climbed up. Without a word, the fisherman returned to his traps, throwing us a look that clearly said, “Good luck, idiots; you’ll need it.”
While the Skipper made a reconnaissance trip to the nearest bank, I gripped the granite islet with my feet, held the bucking boat with both hands and considered our position. I couldn’t see a way out, not without a new engine or another able body to help us. I would have gladly released the damned boat right then, but I didn’t know what—or who—might be downstream. Resigned to the fate of pushing our untrustworthy vessel even farther, I stripped off my treacherous knit pants with one hand and snatched my Tevas from the steering box. The gruff fisherman passed by again and, succumbing to our frantic hand waving and panicked expressions, waded back in to help us drag the boat to the nearest bank. About halfway across the channel, Flint and I both realized that our efforts, which felt substantial, were merely guiding the boat’s direction. The fisherman was forcing our fifty-foot lemon through five knots of current almost single-handedly.
“Blimey,” Flint said, awestruck. “He’s not even that big a chap.”
As soon as we reached calm water, our fisherman-hero abruptly let go, slung his net over his shoulder, and strode off. Reaching into the hold, Flint grabbed the first thing he could lay his hands on and splashed after the man, offering meager thanks in the form of a lukewarm Heineken.
We towed the Salmon through the mud, waved a few ragged cows away and, with daylight fading, made camp. By now, the boat was leaking like an old wooden bucket. The Skipper had a long night of bailing ahead of him. As darkness eclipsed the river, I looked up at the dusky sky and noticed a single line of cable swooping over the opposite bank. Electric wire meant there was a road nearby, and only one major road ran through this part of Laos: Highway 13. Every southbound vehicle on it stopped in Luang Prabang. Fate was once again lighting up an exit sign with flashing lights, and this time I was going to follow it. Flint encouraged me to go and even apologized for getting me into trouble, but he refused to come with me. He was determined to push on to Nong Khiaw, the transit hub at the widest part of the river where most of the boats turned around.
“I want to finish what I started,” he said.
Like the river, he confounded me with his duality: was he bold and imaginative or merely grandiose and puerile? Too exhausted to fight, I simply recounted our most recent judgment errors aloud and advised him not to confuse stubbornness with integrity.
I think he heard me, but in the end, we held dramatically different visions
for the journey and for life. I had been pushing our broken boat upstream for nearly a year, against an impossible current, and as much as I treasured the picture of us dreamily afloat on the Irrawaddy, it was time to admit this river was too much for me.
For a while, the only sounds came from the whirring cicadas, grumbling cows, and the scrape-and-slosh of Flint’s bailing bucket. I tucked in the mosquito net and was drifting off to sleep when I heard him say quietly, “You were magnificent out there today, in your knickers. I wouldn’t have made it this far without you. I’d have lost the boat, or worse.”
In the morning, Flint started the temperamental engine, and we buzzed to the opposite shore. Struggling up a sugary-soft dune, I found myself in Ban Had Kok—a small weaving village barely an hour by road from Luang Prabang. I returned to the boat with a fresh baguette for my queasy stomach and fresh intel for Flint: the bread vendor had a cell phone he could borrow. While he went to call for backup, I stayed with the boat, befriending a trio of little girls who had been spying on us from down the beach. Swiftly reaching the limits of my Lao vocabulary (about six phrases) and their English (A through G of the Alphabet Song), we moved on to charades and sand-pictures. By the time Flint came back, the girls were vaulting in and out of the boat, frolicking in the mucky water, and gleefully raiding our remaining stash of Lacta-Soy. It was the kind of afternoon I’d come for in the first place. Flint had managed to reach the fellow who’d sold him the boat and extracted his promise to send a “top mechanic.” When the children wandered away, I strapped on my pack and scaled the sand dune once more to reach the road—the dull, hot, blessedly dry road. Sticking out my arm, I flagged down the first vehicle in sight. Never have I been so happy to see a tour company’s mini-van.
Chastened, I returned to Luang Prabang ten pounds lighter, nursing a sprained wrist and torn rib cartilage that would never fully heal. But a hot shower, a decent meal, and another round of Tinidazole solved much of my woe. I had no regrets about walking away. For me, there would be other rivers, more reliable boats.
Flint continued up the Nam Ou alone. The trip to Nong Khiaw, less than six hours by “express boat” from Luang Prabang, took him nearly six days, even with the help of several mechanics and a local driver. He spent his final night on the boat, its keel half-submerged in mud, next to an impoverished Khmu village. Like indigenous tribes everywhere, the Khmu have genuine problems not of their own creation. I like to think it may have finally dawned on him that he was only playing castaway, an actor who had bought himself a small vanity part in a vast and complex theater of lost tribes. Like me, he suffered by choice—he had the power and the means to leave at any time. It occurred to me that he too had fallen in love with an idea, a dream that could never be fully realized in the flesh. Traveling can have that effect on people.
He later reported, Kurtz-like, that he found the Khmu village a paradise: “A howling, snorting, crying, hacking, coughing, terrible-hard paradise.” At such close quarters, he could not continue to ignore their destitution, and so he gave away the Salmon’s inventory piece by piece. The Khmu carried away his pots and pans, buckets, utensils, food, bottled water, two new mattresses, a few tools, perhaps even some of his arrogant assumptions. The next day, a tourist boat towed him and the Salmon the last few miles to Nong Khiaw, where he sold her to a fisherman’s son for 20,000 kip (about $2 U.S.). With that, the old boat became another boy’s mechanically challenged dream, and returned to her rightful place in the world. Eventually, so did the Skipper, and so did I.
Laurie Weed is a passionate traveler and hapless romantic whose stories have appeared in four of The Best Women’s Travel Writing books, in addition to magazines, guidebooks, newspapers, and on the web. She can always be found at www.laurieweed.com.
JOCELYN EDELSTEIN
What We Do After Gunfire
In Brazil, life goes on.
Jaque sits on the porch steps that lead from her tiny house down to the basement home of her uncle. Her three children, sunburned from Rio de Janeiro’s blazing February summer, hang like ornaments from her limbs and lap. I rest my elbows on the iron bar of the window and spread my fingers in the space between outside and in.
The first blast sounds like an avalanche untangling itself from the mountain. The sudden and boundless rumble shakes in my belly, echoing above my head and below my feet. From the window I see Jaque stumble down the stairs with her baby clutched to her chest and her daughter and son grasping at the hem of her skirt. She glances my way for a second, and the look on her face makes my stomach tighten. I see the warning in her eyes, and I hit the floor. My cheek presses into the dirty blue rug, and I stare at the red flashing numbers on the digital clock beside the television. It’s 3:30 P.M. on a Sunday afternoon.
When I first met Jaque, she was silent and smiling, and her third child was still in her belly, waiting to enter the battleground of Falet—one of Rio de Janeiro’s five hundred plus favelas, or slums. We pressed ice cubes against our foreheads to protest the sun that ferocious summer, and the neighborhood kids shouted “Teacher!” when they saw me on the street. Jaque’s mother called me her white daughter, but for the first two months I lived in her home, Jaque and I barely spoke to each other. She watched me, curious yet unmoved by the strange American dance teacher who had befriended her mother and become an unexpected guest in their tiny, tin-roofed house. She refused to let me help with dinner.
But one night as I danced with her mother in the living room, overcome with the beat of my favorite Brazilian song, Jaque leapt from her seat with a wail and started shaking her hips in circles around my body, yelling, “Eu nunca soube sobre seu coração maluco do brasileiro!” “I never knew about your crazy Brazilian heart!”
They called Jaque favelada, meaning someone with the real style of the favela. The favelas of Brazil were notorious for their tangle of colorful shacks, drug trafficking rings, violent encounters with the police, and Brazilian funk music. And oh, how the favela could be stylish. Stylish like AK-47s slipped between the hipbones and Bermuda shorts of twenty-two-year-old drug lords. Stylish like high-heeled women stomping their feet to the rat-a-tat percussion of funk songs blasting from hand-painted boom boxes at all hours of the day and night. Stylish like the coded victory cry of three bullets released into the air while dancers chanted, “The police don’t come to our parties!”
Jaque knew all the shortcuts in Falet’s maze of staircases and gutters, and she knew the people who did their business there. Because she could move quickly, without bus fare, she ran all the errands for her family. She understood the favela like a gardener understands the geometry of her garden and is willing to touch things that have not yet become beautiful.
Jaque never looked worried when the guns fired. Her two-year-old cried loudly and her mother clucked her tongue and muttered about the end of the world, but Jaque just kept sweeping the kitchen floor in her cutoff denim skirt or tickling her baby’s face. Then she’d look at me with large amber eyes and laugh: “é malucera neh?” “This is craziness, huh?”
My body is still flat on the floor, legs wedged under the bed, face against the scratchy carpet. Yes, I think. This is craziness. The hail of bullets has stopped and been replaced by an uncertain stillness. Twenty minutes have passed since Jaque fled down the stairs with her children, and I console myself with the thought that she’s in her uncle’s house taking cover in his bedroom, but the air is empty of the two-year-old’s tears or the baby’s giggle.
I crawl to the doorway, where I weigh the risk of standing upright to move toward the staircase that will take me outside, and to her. I wonder in this moment if we mimic our surroundings. If we yell back at bullets and bite our tongue in the ceasefire. When the kids in this neighborhood hear hip hop on the radio, they imitate the sound of machine gunfire to accompany the beat. I don’t know what sound we make when we imitate death, but I’m sure I have heard it here. I’m sure that in the space between Jaque and me, there is a path from the hand that resists violence to the hand
that accepts it. I silently plead with Jaque’s children to make noise, but only the high-pitched wind whistles in my ear.
Jaque’s favorite time of day, it seemed, was at night when all her kids were asleep and no one had come home yet. I often found her in bed covered in a blanket with her youngest baby on her chest, her four-year-old at the other end of the mattress, and her two-year-old on the bed by her side. The air echoed calmly around the breath of the children. And though her eyes were closed, she was always awake and whispered my name.
We had our most intimate conversations on these nights. Jaque didn’t tell secrets to her mother because they were too much alike, and she didn’t tell secrets to her sister because she was younger and more religious. But she confided in me when we were alone and her kids were asleep in the bedroom in Falet.
She told me how much she missed the father of her four-year-old daughter. He was the one she still loved, but he chose to be a trafficker. “And that,” she insisted, “is not a life. Just a short existence before death.”
One afternoon, months after this, I sat crying in her living room over a broken heart. She walked in and spilled a bag of rice as she waved her arms around and shouted through a beaming smile, “We deserve good men! We deserve good men!” It was the first time I’d heard her say she deserved anything good, and I nodded my head slowly with wide eyes. Because we did.
The digital clock above my head now blinks 4:15 P.M. Forty-five minutes since Jaque and her kids ran down below. The gunfire has returned, but this time it’s a distant reverberation. I stand up.
When Jaque cleans the house she moves briskly, never putting anything back in place carefully, yet somehow managing not to make a sound. This is how I move downstairs now. Like a gust of wind.
In front of her uncle’s door, I pause and press my ear to the splintered wood. I want Jaque to teach me how she walks through her world like a queen. I want her to show me the swiftness of her hands and the abandon of her hips. If I had a sound to mimic Jaque, it would be Rio at four in the afternoon, when the sun crackles on concrete and feet tap, preparing to dance.
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