“I think she got twisted around after we went to sleep.” I stood up to help.
“We’ll get her out of here after breakfast. I’m starved,” Fitz said, weaving his way out of the foliage and brushing a spider web from his cheek.
Following Fitz into the mangled tent to pull out the Spam and eggs, I noticed the wall flapping slightly behind the boxes at the foot of the sleeping bag. How had I not seen that earlier? It was no longer attached to the tent’s frame. Two boxes were on their sides, facing the water.
Fitz reached them first, righting them. “I don’t believe it! The food was knocked overboard by that damn tree!”
There were only six items left: a four-ounce can of tuna, a 1.4-ounce package of dehydrated pea soup, a small chunk of cheese, a jar of instant coffee, a half cup of sugar wrapped in plastic, and a can of evaporated milk. Two other boxes of food were missing completely. My heart plunged.
“Damn!” Fitz yelled. “This isn’t enough food for a baby bird!”
“It’s only for today, Fitz. We’ll find a nice place to stay in Riberalta, and eat a big dinner at a cozy café. We’ll celebrate over a beer.” I glanced into the overturned toolbox in the corner. Our hammer was gone, but the nails and extra rolls of plastic were there. “Let’s repair the tent and get going,” I said.
Fitz didn’t say anything. He stared into the almost-empty boxes, his hand rubbing the back of his neck.
“We can use my wooden sandal for a hammer,” I suggested. “I knew it would come in handy sometime.”
He reached for a cigarette.
I touched his shoulder. “Fitz?”
He shook his head. “There’s nothing in here,” he said, gripping his cigarette in his mouth as he shuffled through the same few items over and over. Then he picked up the small jar of instant coffee. “Let’s start with this.”
“Yes, let’s.” I let out a sigh.
In an undisturbed box, my pot-and-pan kit was nestled with the halazone tablets. So were the small bottle of iodine and two filled bottles of purified river water. Grabbing the pot and a water bottle, I ducked back outside.
Fitz brought the coffee and cups and removed the dry matches from the tin cigarette container. The kindling was wet from the rain, but he placed some into the oilcan anyway and was able to make a fire. We let the water boil for several minutes as an added precaution before we poured it into the instant coffee. Then sitting, feet resting on the log in front of us, we cradled our cups. The coffee tempered my hunger.
Fitz’s cerulean eyes stared at me through metal-rimmed glasses, brilliant in the tropical morning light. He took a puff of his cigarette then gazed at the river. Just looking at his somber face made me worry.
“The river’s a lot slower than it was before—and narrower,” he said quietly. His eyes turned to the trees next to us. “I don’t see any land.”
“No land?” I followed his stare, bending my head to peer under the brush. Tightly knit bushes and trees were growing out of the water. As far as I could see into the thicket there was no earth. My stomach suddenly felt like twisted rope.
“Oh, Fitz.” My voice rose. “Where are we?” I looked at the river. “Why’s it so sluggish?” I felt like a little kid wanting to be reassured. “We can’t be off course, Fitz. Juan swore that if we followed the river we’d be fine.”
Fitz flicked his cigarette. “That’s my point. This may not be the river. It’s too damn slow for the river.”
“It’s got to be the river. What else could it be?” I jumped up. “Let’s get out of here. It’s getting late!” The sun was halfway toward the top of the sky already, so I estimated it must be about 9:00 a.m.
Fitz bent down to grab the pot and water bottle to take back into the tent.
The tepid morning wore off quickly. It was blisteringly hot. “Should we fix the tent or just push off to make sure we’re still in the river?” I asked.
“Push off. If we find the current, we’ll have plenty of time to fix the tent.”
We rushed to free the raft and untie the painter. Fitz pressed the pole against the brush while I paddled in the bow. The minute I stopped for a breath we slid back into the trees.
Fitz gave up steering to use the rudder as a big paddle. Muscles straining, we tried to reach the center of the river to catch the current.
We kept paddling, but the raft was dead weight.
Fitz groaned. I glanced around the tent to see how he was doing in the stern. Sweat poured down his face and neck.
“Do you need water?” I asked.
“I’ve got a bottle. You?”
“Okay for now.”
“She’s a bloody ton to move. There’s no current.”
Finally, after at least two hours, we caught a current, but it was lackadaisical. Without continuous paddling we would have stalled listlessly.
“Something’s very wrong,” Fitz said, shifting his stance from one leg to the other. “I definitely think the storm blew us off course. We may be stuck in a dead-end channel or swamp.”
“It’s got to be a detour. Remember what Juan said? We came from that direction,” I pointed. “You can see the current is coming this way.” Then I stared toward the curve up ahead. “It’ll take us back into the main river.”
“We’re going nowhere!” Fitz snapped. “Look at the difference in the water from yesterday.”
“Please, Fitz, we have to try. It’ll link back to the Madre. You’ll see.”
He flipped off his hat, dipped his hand into the river, and splashed water onto his head as he studied the water’s slight swirls.
Exhausted, I dropped my paddle and walked toward him. “We’ve worked half the day to get into this silly current. Let’s see where it goes. What else can we do?”
Fitz squinted at the wall of trees where I was sure the river turned. “That’s a dead end, Hol,” he said. “See, it’s not moving down there?” He pointed almost wistfully.
“Please,” I begged, desperate for him to stay strong even though we’d had little to drink and nothing to eat for hours. I honestly couldn’t see if the river was moving or not. “We have to go down there and check it out.” My voice felt like glass shattering.
Fitz could be right. What would we do if we were in a dead end? I didn’t even know there could be such a thing. Why would there be a dead end?
“All right, Hol, let’s go,” he said. There was resignation in his voice but perhaps a hint of hope.
He put the blade of his rudder-paddle back into the water.
Once again, we strained against our paddles. When I looked up we’d gone only a few feet. The Pink Palace was like an ox. I plunged the paddle back into the water, not wanting to complain for fear Fitz would give up. It ached to cock my head upward, to see what was in front of us while also peering down to be sure each stroke cleared the raft and struck the water. At last we gained momentum from the slight current. The Pink Palace began drifting quickly toward an island of huge bushes, which I realized were actually the tops of trees popping from the water. I couldn’t steer her. “Watch out!” I sputtered, my tongue dry against the roof of my mouth.
“What?” Fitz yelled from behind the tent.
“Left. Your left! Port…” The Palace slid under the limbs and foliage. I extended my paddle to soften our crash. When we hit I fell backward against the tent. The familiar sound of riiiiip sliced the air as a tree tore through more of the tent’s plastic siding.
“Jesus!” Fitz called out, running from the stern.
I ducked from under a branch to see Fitz’s stunned face. Shrubbery bits were in my hair, hanging over my eyes. “False alarm,” I called. “It’s just another tear.” The Pink Palace was tangled in vines, but her logs were unharmed.
Fitz smiled at the sight of me. “You look like a tree yourself.” He gently picked twigs from my hair.
We hastily dislodged the raft and set out toward a pile of driftwood across the water, just ten yards from the bend we sought. Finally we neared the spot. In a few secon
ds we should know if we were free.
Gaping toward the bend, I hoped to see the channel widen to open river. Then came the kick in the stomach—there was nothing ahead but a wall of green jungle flooded by lethargic brown water. The channel we had been following went no farther. Last night’s storm had pushed us down a river to nowhere.
My blood seemed to siphon from me. There was no outlet. No riverbank. No land. Just impenetrable jungle submerged in water. My eyes quickly shifted over the landscape. There was no opening where the channel sliced through the trees to reach the Madre de Dios.
Juan’s words echoed in my head: “Detours always return to the main river, but they take you longer.”
Sergeant at the Bolivian border had scoffed at the thought of our getting into trouble on the raft. “You will be fine,” he’d said, assuring us that we’d be the biggest thing on the river. He hadn’t mentioned anything about flying tree trunks or violent storms or dead ends.
I looked at Fitz. There was no “I told you so” on his face. I could see he wished I’d been right. How could we possibly escape? A raft only goes one way, and we had run out of river.
—
It was 1:00 to 2:00 p.m. by the sun. We decided to paddle back toward the little cove where we’d tied up last night. If we could make it there, maybe we could get beyond it and find the river before sundown. The only way we could navigate the raft against the current was by pulling ourselves along branch by branch, not even stopping to purify water for the empty canteen or water bottles, afraid we’d slip backward. Panting, sweating, too tired to speak, we pressed on for several hours.
Fitz broke the silence between us, suddenly shouting, “¡Socorro! ¡Socorro! ¡Socorro!”
Birds ceased their chatter at this strange, loud wailing. The air itself seemed empty. Soon I began to shout, “¡Socorro!” too, more in solidarity than with any belief that anyone might hear us.
As our voices echoed across the water, unanswered, I shivered at just how lost we were.
Chapter 14
The Rains Poured Down
Fitz and I yelled until we were hoarse. Even droning insects seemed stilled by our voices, heavy in the dead air. We continued to grab on to flimsy boughs, reeds, vines, anything to pull the raft back up toward the true river. After another couple of hours, we’d made it a few yards beyond the cove.
Sheets of rain began to sweep across the sky. The petulant current shoved us backward as rain drenched the inside of the roofless tent.
“We’ve got to paddle her in!” Fitz yelled.
I barely nodded. My body felt like an elastic band ready to snap. Fitz threw the painter over a tree branch near the cove and drew the Pink Palace beneath it.
Light had been sucked from the sky by a thick, dark bank of clouds. We collapsed on top of the sopping sleeping bag, too weary to nail up new plastic. Hungry, thirsty, soaked, and shivering, I recorded a couple of lines in my journal before darkness descended: “Trapped. Will we ever get out? No one answers calls for help. Current pushes us back. Rain in tent from missing side. Scared.”
We lay in each other’s arms, whispering soothing words to each other beneath the steady splash of rain. The raft rocked in response to the waves.
It rained well into the night. When it finally stopped, we groped around for the flashlight then changed into drier clothes that had been protected in the backpacks under the one side of the tent that was still up. We then lay back down under the dripping mosquito netting. Even as I tightened my hold around Fitz, I felt my confidence slipping out of me. I couldn’t speak my thoughts for fear I’d burst like a dam. Pulling out my journal again, I wrote by flashlight, “Please don’t let us get sick, please give us the strength to get out of here. I’ll kiss the river if I ever see her again.”
A large animal growled in the dark. It seemed awfully close. There was a loud thumping overhead and off to the right. Of course—we were at the tree line. Animals live in these trees—they could drop down on us at any moment.
“Fitz! Did you hear that?” I quickly stuffed the journal back into the black bag. He lifted himself onto his elbow.
We held our breath.
“I don’t hear anything.” He patted my side.
His voice sounded so tired I wanted to crack. The thumping in the branches came again, right over our heads this time. “There!”
Fitz sighed. “Squirrels.”
“In South America?”
“Then it’s probably birds.”
My back arched upward as I listened. “What about that growling? It was so close.”
“I can hear weird sounds, Hol, but all this water could be magnifying them to seem closer than they really are. Come on, we have to sleep. Big day tomorrow, getting out.”
“I don’t know how you can sleep when we’re so vulnerable.”
“This isn’t my first time sleeping in the jungle, remember?”
I thought about Fitz in Vietnam, where he’d been wounded twice. He’d told me he’d trained himself to fall asleep on his very first night in the jungle, surrendering to the prospect of death while sleeping, knowing that otherwise he would never make it home.
Fitz brushed his hand lightly down my hair. “I wonder how far off the river we are,” he said. “Could be miles.”
“I’m sorry I pushed to take the raft. I didn’t know we could get lost.” Tears swam in my eyes.
“Shhh, I didn’t either. I wanted to take the raft. You know I’m too stubborn to do something I don’t want to do.” He rubbed my shoulder. “It was fun, wasn’t it, before the storm?”
I could hear him smiling. I snuggled into him, sniffling.
“We obviously can’t paddle the Pink Palace any farther,” he continued, softly.
I nodded into Fitz’s chin. I felt like we were in a giant labyrinth.
Fitz pulled me even closer. “The most important thing, right now, is to let yourself go to sleep.”
He’d often called me “the princess and the pea” for being such a light sleeper. Noise, light, and even wrinkles in the sheets could wake me.
A long hissing sound joined the jungle chorus.
“What’s that?” My body tightened again.
“Ignore it. Just get some sleep.”
I tried to tune out a sudden staccato of belching croaks. They must be some big frogs, I thought. At least they sounded familiar. An alkaline odor enveloped the raft, broken occasionally by a fresher breeze from the forest. Berries, oranges. Do I smell oranges? Thirsty, I reached for one of the bottles of turbid Madre water. I slugged a little, pretending it was fresh water from my paternal grandmother’s spring near our summer log house at Eagle Lake in the Adirondack Mountains. When we were kids, my sister and I would carry a chipped white enamel pitcher along a pungent path of pine needles to fill it with water from the spring. It was the purest water I’d ever tasted.
—
During the night we awoke once again to another downpour.
“This night is lasting forever,” I whimpered. “Where the heck is the plastic? We need to put it up.” I felt for the box and pulled out a roll of plastic and nails.
Fitz stumbled to his feet, grabbing the flashlight. “Let’s make this quick.” We nailed the plastic to the wooden tent frame, using my Dr. Scholl’s as a hammer. Fitz whacked the last nail into the wood. “Okay. We’re done,” he said.
We pushed the wet sleeping bag and blankets aside then collapsed onto the bare boards. One board had warped beneath my spine. Could this get any worse?
Two years ago, my idea of being “trapped” had meant being stranded at home without a car. As newlyweds we’d rented an inexpensive cottage nestled in snow and pine on a small mountaintop far from the small town of New Fairfield. I’d used my savings to buy Fitz a secondhand Plymouth to cover his beat as a reporter, but the car soon broke down beyond repair. We didn’t have money for another car, so Fitz had to drive my VW bug, leaving me in the country without transportation, knowing no one. Always open to new experiences, I foun
d my life suddenly had become too small.
At first, I contented myself with painting the plywood living-room floor blue, sewing a synthetic leopard-skin bedspread, and decorating the headboard wall with reeds. I mailed out résumés, took Zelda for walks in snowdrifts where she sank up to her nose, cut out old National Geographic stories to fill scrapbooks of places I someday hoped to visit. There was no television, no radio. In an attempt to connect with my xenophobic neighbors, who spoke mostly German, I planned a party. I even walked to their houses to invite them personally, but when I knocked and got no response, I slipped their invitations under the doors. On the night of the party, Fitz; his brother, Chip; Chip’s wife, Ellen; and I waited patiently. No invitees showed. Just before midnight, a frustrated, inebriated Fitz stepped into the blustery night, banging a pot with a wooden spoon, shouting: “Nazis! You’re all Nazis!”
Fitz was working long hours and was rarely home, except on days off. When I tried to convey my isolation, he scared me by smashing his foot through a wicker chair. “Jesus Christ, Holly!” he said. “What can I do about it? I’m working, aren’t I? Isn’t that what a husband’s supposed to do?” His sudden rage came out of nowhere. Stunned, I said nothing as he stormed into the kitchen and grabbed a beer from the fridge. I stared at the splintered wicker chair in the corner, feeling like Rapunzel in her tower. I knew I couldn’t tell anyone about his outburst. We were newlyweds, so it was my job to try to understand him.
I comforted myself by anticipating the pleasure we would have together on his day off, but I didn’t want that to be my life, waiting at the door like a puppy dog for its master’s return.
Loneliness began to bite like ice. One day, I painted a Chagallesque portrait of a young woman with celestial blue hair, a small bride and groom in a gondola floating over exotic scenery beneath her face. It was only when I set down my brush that I realized I had also depicted a birdcage in the corner of the canvas. The cage door was sprung open and the bird had flown out. A curly-haired guy was trying to catch it.
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