Guys Read

by Jon Scieszka

  CONTENTS

  Before We Begin . . . by Jon Scieszka

  1. Sahara Shipwreck by Steve Sheinkin

  2. Tarantula Heaven by Sy Montgomery

  3. Hugh Glass: Dead Man Crawling by Nathan Hale

  4. A Jumbo Story by Candace Fleming

  5. Uni-verses by Douglas Florian

  6. This Won’t Hurt a Bit: The Painfully True Story of Dental Care by Jim Murphy

  7. A Pack of Brothers by Thanhha Lai

  8. Mojo, Moonshine, and the Blues by Elizabeth Partridge

  9. A Cartoonist’s Course by James Sturm

  10. The River’s Run by T. Edward Nickens

  About Guys Read

  About the Authors

  Back Ad

  Also Available in the Guys Read Library of Great Reading

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  BEFORE WE BEGIN . . .

  Have you ever imagined what it would be like to grow up in Vietnam during a war, to hunt for tarantulas in the Amazon, to learn how to play the guitar using a wire from an old broom, to almost die canoeing down a wild Alaskan river?

  Ever wondered if you could draw comics, if you could learn science from reading poetry, if you could fix an aching tooth by pounding it into the roof of your mouth?

  Can you guess what it was like to be the first person in America to see the largest elephant that ever lived, to be shipwrecked then captured and enslaved in the desert with nothing to drink but your own urine, to be left for dead in the Wild West and survive by cleaning out your wounds from a she-bear’s claws by lying on a bed of maggots?

  Well, imagine, wonder, and guess no more.

  Because you’ll find all of these things and more in this volume of the Guys Read Library of Great Reading, Guys Read: True Stories.

  This is the beauty of a particular kind of writing called nonfiction or, lately, “informational text.” But I like calling it nonfiction because that’s exactly what it is—not fiction. It’s not made-up. It’s true.

  Field & Stream editor T. Edward Nickens really did almost die canoeing down an Alaskan river.

  In the 1730s a guy who went by the name of La Roche Operator traveled around the country pounding people’s aching teeth into their mouths . . . and charging them for it.

  Sy Montgomery hiked the Amazon, hunting for tarantulas.

  Doug Florian has written a collection of real science—and real funny—poetry.

  Candace Fleming knows that Jumbo the elephant brought in a total of $1.5 million in ticket sales in his first year in America . . . and released up to four hundred pounds of his “business” per day.

  But don’t thank me for adding all of this awesomeness to your knowledge. Thank our curious and hardworking writers. And thank our artist, Brian Floca, a very talented nonfiction writer himself, for his wonderful illustrations for each story. And for his almost-historical cover.

  These are some amazing stories.

  Both true and truly worth checking out.

  Jon Scieszka

  SAHARA SHIPWRECK

  BY STEVE SHEINKIN

  Like many great survival stories, this one starts with a shipwreck. To be precise, it starts with the American brig Commerce slamming into a reef off the coast of West Africa on the moonless night of August 28, 1815.

  The ship’s side cracked wide open, and seawater poured in. The good news is Captain James Riley and his eleven-man crew loaded a lifeboat with barrels of water, bread, and salted meat and made it to shore. The bad news is they’d just wrecked on the western edge of the Sahara desert. Also unfortunate: Shortly after sunrise a band of spear-wielding bandits spotted the sailors, robbed them, and carried one off as a slave. Riley and his remaining crew escaped to sea in their rickety lifeboat. They had a few bottles of water, a few pieces of salt pork, a sack of soggy figs.

  Seven days later they were still in the boat.

  They’d hoped to spot a passing ship. No luck. The nails holding their vessel together were working loose in the waves, and the boat was coming apart beneath them. Their legs were underwater; their upper halves roasting in the sun. The food was gone. The water was gone. Abandoning hope of rescue, Riley and the men paddled to shore and collapsed on a patch of wet sand. Exhausted, starving, and utterly lost, the men moistened their burning throats with sips of their own urine.

  It was at this point that the pleasant portion of their journey came to an end.

  At dawn Riley stood on a narrow beach, looking up at a rocky cliff rising a hundred feet from the sand. A powerfully built man of thirty-seven, the captain stood over six feet tall and weighed 240 pounds (remember that number). He wondered what was above the cliff. He said a silent prayer that, in the past week, they’d drifted far enough south to get past the dreaded Sahara.

  But first things first—the crew was desperate for food and water. Searching the beach, they found and devoured a few mussels, which did nothing for their hunger but did succeed in intensifying their thirst to the level of torture. Hoping to find edible plants on the land above the cliff, the men began walking along the beach, searching for a way up.

  Many boulders, fallen from the cliff above, blocked their path. The men climbed over the smaller ones and waded through neck-high surf, clinging to one another, to get around the ones they couldn’t climb. The sun’s rays bore down from a blindingly bright sky.

  Riley had now gone so long without freshwater, his saliva had stopped flowing. “My tongue,” he would write, “cleaving to the roof of my mouth, was as useless as a dry stick.” Only way to get it unstuck: a sip of urine.

  After hiking all day, accomplishing nothing, the men lay down in their wet clothes. The captain gazed at the youngest member of his crew, the fifteen-year-old cabin boy, Horace Savage. Before setting out, Riley had promised Savage’s mother that he’d watch over the boy as he would his own son. Now, even in sleep, Horace’s face was twisted with pain and terror. “I took him in my arms,” Riley wrote, “and we all slept soundly till morning.”

  At dawn, while the crew scooped holes in the sand in a frantic search for freshwater, Riley found a place where the cliff looked climbable and began a slow ascent. Dragging himself up and over the edge, he stood and gazed out to the east.

  He fell to the ground in shock.

  No trees. No grass. Nothing green in sight. Just rocks and reddish-tan sand straight to the horizon. “Despair now seized on me,” the captain confessed, “and I resolved to cast myself into the sea as soon as I could reach it, and put an end to my life and miseries.”

  But he thought of his wife, Phoebe, back home in Connecticut. He thought of their five children. He thought of his ten men on the beach below. He started down the cliff.

  The crew gathered around to hear the news. Riley warned it wasn’t good, but there was nothing keeping them on the barren beach. They climbed the cliff and stared in horror at their new home. Many of the men began to weep.

  “Nothing can live here,” one said.

  Another muttered, “Here we must breathe our last.”

  The Commerce men were standing on the western edge of the Sahara desert. Stretching three thousand miles across Africa, this is a desert about the size of the United States. Daytime temperatures soar to 120 degrees. After sunset, without moisture in the air to hold the heat, temperatures can plunge into the 30s.

  Riley encouraged the men to move. He told them there’d be plenty of time to lie down and die when they could no longer walk. They trudged along on sand baked as hard as stone and hot enough, Riley thought, to fry eggs. By dark they were near collapse.

  “I think I see a light!” cried one of the sailors.

  In the distance was a campfire. “Joy thrilled through my veins,” Riley recalled. “Hope again revived withi
n me.” The captain’s “joy” shows just how desperate he was. According to stories he’d heard from fellow sailors, Christians marooned in the Sahara were seized and enslaved by the native nomadic tribes.

  Well, at least they might get something to drink.

  The next morning Riley prepared his crew for what lay ahead. “Submit to your fate like men,” he told them. “We must submit to save our lives.” If enslaved, the captain explained, the men’s one hope would be to somehow convince their masters to take them north to a port city in Morocco. There, with luck, an American or European merchant might agree to buy them and set them free.

  They walked toward a camp with dozens of white tents and a few hundred camels. A man in the camp spotted the approaching sailors. Drawing his scimitar and screeching, he ran toward the strangers. Within moments about forty men and women in flowing robes were sprinting toward Riley’s crew, many waving guns and swords.

  Riley and his men bowed to show submission. The nomads charged into the group of sailors, several grabbing for each American, fighting over which slave would belong to which family. Riley stood helpless as his captors began yanking off his clothes. The same was done to the other sailors. “We were all stripped naked to the skin,” Riley said.

  Now officially slaves, the men were marched back toward camp. Their new owners were members of a Bedouin tribe known as the Oulad Bou Sbaa, Arabic-speaking nomads who traveled the western Sahara by camel in a never-ending search for forage and water.

  In camp the camels were gathered around a well, drinking from a trough. The sailors tried to wriggle their way to the water. Children laughed at the sight of these pale, naked men hopelessly shoving between the legs of the much stronger beasts. Adults joined the fun, shouting insults—the most popular was “Christian dogs.”

  Eventually an ancient woman set a bowl on the ground in front of Riley. He stuck his head in and downed half a gallon of warm, sandy water. Around the camp the other captives were guzzling as greedily. They knew better (a dehydrated body can’t absorb water very quickly), but they couldn’t stop themselves. Right away, the muddy liquid began squirting out the other end, streaming down their bare legs. The men didn’t care. They kept drinking.

  Their thirst temporarily slaked, the captives’ hunger suddenly roared. The men begged for a bite to eat but were told there was absolutely no food in camp.

  Later that morning the Bedouins packed up their tents and filled their goatskins with water. An ingenious adaptation to desert life, the goatskins were just that—an entire goat’s skin, with the head, bones, and everything else carefully removed. The open neck was the spout, tied with rope to keep the water from spilling.

  Once the camels were loaded, the masters ordered the animals to kneel, and made signs with their hands for the slaves to climb on behind the humps. The sailors swung their legs in the air and planted bare butts on bristly backbones. The unpleasant sensation was difficult to describe—not unlike, Riley guessed, sitting nude on the edge of an oar.

  That’s when the camels were standing still. As the caravan set out, the men clung to fistfuls of camel hair to keep from sliding off. “It seemed as if our bones would be dislocated at every step,” the captain recalled. Meanwhile, the insides of the men’s thighs were rubbed raw against the camels’ swaying haunches. Some of the men purposely fell from their camels, preferring to walk. But they had to run to keep up, and the rocky ground sliced open their bare feet.

  Also it was getting kind of hot. “Our skins,” wrote Riley, “seemed actually to fry like meat before the fire.”

  The sun finally set and the air cooled, but still the Bedouins pushed on. “I cursed my fate aloud,” Riley remembered of this moment. “I searched for a stone, intending if I could find a loose one sufficiently large, to knock out my own brains.”

  Just his luck, he couldn’t find a loose stone.

  The caravan stopped around midnight, having covered forty miles. The camels were milked, and women carried bowls of warm milk to the captives. Each was allowed to gulp about a pint. It tasted delicious but barely dented their hunger or thirst. As the men lay on the gravelly ground and attempted sleep, a chilly wind lifted clouds of sand and caked the jagged grains to their blistered skin. Riley listened to his crew groaning in misery through what he described as “one of the longest and most dismal nights ever passed by any human beings.”

  There would be many more just like it.

  In the morning the captives stood up, stiff and shivering. Each was given a sip of camel’s milk and then ordered to prepare the camels for another long march. “The situation of our feet,” Riley wrote, “was horrible beyond description.”

  After another excruciating march, the slaves spent the night in a larger camp. Curious Bedouins came to have a look at the Americans, and Riley saw revulsion on their faces. “We were certainly disgusting objects, being naked and almost skinless.”

  The captain watched the Bedouins kneel on the sand and bow their bodies toward the east in prayer. They were devout Muslims, Riley realized. He listened as they recited prayers and passages from the Koran. Riley had an ear for languages and was able to begin recognizing some Arabic words.

  Later many members of the tribe gathered around Riley and, using a combination of Arabic and hand gestures, asked him to tell the story of how he had wound up in Africa. Riley responded in Spanish, which one of the old men seemed to understand. After telling of the shipwreck, Riley told his listeners that if they would take him north to a trading port in Morocco, he could be sold there at a great profit.

  The Bedouins shook their heads. Impossible. Too far to travel. No water for the camels along the way.

  So Riley and the other captives returned to their agonizing routine: broiling all day, whimpering all night. The group camped where they found dry, thorny bushes for the camels to eat. They found no water. They found nothing edible for humans.

  “The sun beat dreadfully hot upon my bare head and body,” Riley wrote of these seemingly aimless wanderings. “It appeared to me that my head must soon split to pieces.”

  The other slaves were as bad off, or worse. The men’s burned skin peeled off in sheets, and the raw, red layer beneath bubbled in the blazing sun. A crew member named James Clark, Riley noted, was “nearly without a skin.” The captain was even more alarmed by the condition of another sailor, George Williams. “His skin had been burned off,” Riley wrote, and “hung in strings of torn and chafed flesh. His whole body was so excessively inflamed and swelled, as well as his face, that I only knew him by his voice.”

  Riley continued to drink his own urine, though it turned dark orange as the fluids in his body dried up. At this extreme stage of dehydration, the body no longer produces tears or sweat. The eyes sink into their sockets. Muscles cramp and spasm, making movement awkward and painful.

  At some point Riley realized he’d been sold from one family to another for a blanket. It hardly mattered.

  Quietly cursing their captors as “savages” and “barbarians,” the Americans continued moving southeast, usually about thirty miles a day. There was nothing in sight but more of the same flat, rocky land in all directions. The slaves hung on the backs of camels or staggered along beside on feet so cut up, Riley wrote, “We could scarcely refrain from crying out at every step.” Riley was traded again. His new owner beat him with a cane when he couldn’t keep up.

  The thought of conversion to Islam crossed the captain’s mind. Maybe he’d get better treatment. But to convert, he knew, he’d have to get circumcised. Didn’t seem worth it.

  At night Riley was put to work searching for sticks for the campfire. Then he would sit and watch the men pray. How could such devout men, he wondered, be so inhumane? How could they buy and sell and abuse their fellow human beings?

  It didn’t occur to him then—though it would upon reflection—that he came from a religious country that did the exact same thing.

  By September 18 (Riley was keeping track of the calendar by slicing his leg w
ith a thorn for each day) the goatskins of water were nearly empty. The slaves lived on one cup of camel’s milk per day, and the camels’ milk was starting to fail.

  The Bedouins gathered for a meeting, and Riley was able to follow some of their conversation. They’d given up on finding water. They would return to the well by the sea, where the Commerce crew had been captured eight days before. Just the thought of covering that ground again, this time without water, nearly crushed what remained of Riley’s spirit.

  Nearly—but not quite.

  During the next day’s journey, the captain saw a camel begin to let loose a stream of urine. He lurched forward, caught the liquid in cupped hands, and drank. Bitter, he thought, but not salty. The other slaves did the same. But anytime they drank anything, their hunger became unbearable. Riley saw some of his crew chewing strips of their own peeling skin. “I was forced,” he wrote, “to tie the arms of one of my men behind him, in order to prevent his gnawing his own flesh.”

  At night he watched two of his emaciated sailors lure a Bedouin child out of camp. One of the men lifted a stone to smash the boy’s head. Riley jumped in their way. “They were so frantic with hunger as to insist on having one meal of his flesh, and then they said they would be willing to die,” wrote Riley. “I convinced them that it would be more manly to die with hunger.”

  A couple horrible days later Riley was lying in his master’s tent, barely able to move. He watched two strangers ride into camp on camels packed with goods. According to custom, guests were to be offered water. There was none. Using sticks and tent cloth, women from the camp built the visitors a shelter from the sun.

  “Where do you come from?” they asked the men. “What goods have you got?”

  The men sat in the shade, each holding a double-barreled musket, and told their story. They were merchants and brothers, Hamet and Seid. They had traveled from their homes far to the north. They had blankets and blue cloth to sell.