We Came, We Saw, We Left

by Charles Wheelan

  Katrina had reached out to the Valley News, the newspaper I had written for on my first global adventure, and offered to write a series of columns during our travels. She pitched her editor a story on the Colombia peace agreement. The country was fatigued from decades of war. Polls were showing that the peace deal would be approved by a wide margin. It would be an uplifting story for readers back home: “Colombia Votes Overwhelmingly to Bring Fifty Years of Violence to an End.”

  As a cub journalist, Katrina was running into two problems. First, she did not like to interview people—not in English, and definitely not in Spanish. Second, every person she interviewed said they planned to vote “no” in the referendum, despite what the national polls were showing. In the evenings, she and I discussed why her interviewees might not be representative of the country. It was possible that she was going to places likely to attract “no” voters—the Colombian equivalent of asking members of the Nantucket Yacht Club if they are in favor of a wealth tax.

  Katrina went back out and did more interviews in different places; again she encountered lots of people who planned to vote “no.” The general theme she encountered among the “no” crowd was that the FARC were getting a better deal than they deserved. The guerrillas had terrorized the country for decades. Now, in exchange for giving up kidnapping, killing, and drug trafficking, they would get cash and seats in Congress rather than long prison sentences. The son of our finca owner spoke angrily about how the FARC had terrorized his family during the violence. He planned to vote “no,” he told Katrina.

  Katrina’s reporting turned out to be more accurate than the national polls. Shortly after we left the country, Colombia’s voters narrowly rejected the peace deal (50.2 percent “no” versus 49.8 percent “yes”). President Juan Manuel Santos resurrected the deal by renegotiating parts of it and then asking the Colombian Congress for approval, rather than the voters. Katrina had stumbled onto a larger lesson: The enticements necessary to get an armed group to put down its weapons will inevitably be repugnant to the population they have victimized. Who wants to put killers in Congress? But if violent groups don’t get a better deal than they deserve, they won’t give up the fight. No one voluntarily agrees to life in prison.

  Some years earlier I had taught a class on the Northern Ireland peace process that ended up with a trip there. I remember a former member of the Irish Republican Army in Belfast telling me, “The bumper sticker is wrong. If you want peace, you don’t work for justice.”

  Too many people have done too many terrible things to too many other people—and those other people have often struck back in ghastly ways. Justice is not consistent with reconciliation. Giving everyone what they deserve will likely prolong the conflict, not end it. Unfortunately, that does not make for a good bumper sticker: IF YOU WANT PEACE, HELP THE PEOPLE WHO KILLED YOUR FAMILY GET A FRESH START!

  There was one other complication related to Katrina’s reportorial work. Turns out she was not particularly keen on getting journalism tips from me, despite how helpful they were. Whenever someone would offer a pithy remark about the FARC or the upcoming referendum, I would exclaim, “There’s your quote! Write that down!” She would scowl ferociously in my direction. Also, she really, really, really did not like it when I began calling her “Scoop.” Upon reflection, I should have stopped calling her Scoop when she told me to stop calling her Scoop.

  Some of Scoop’s friends were taking gap years, but most had gone off to college. This made Scoop highly sensitive to the fact that she was spending all of her time with her parents. She insisted on carrying her own passport. In the Fort Lauderdale airport, Leah and I stepped to the counter with CJ and Tess to check in. Scoop stood behind us and checked in separately. Once I instinctively told her to be careful while crossing a busy street. She roared, “I’m eighteen years old! I know how to cross the street!”

  CJ and Tess, both thirteen, entertained each other. They looked like twins and most people we encountered assumed they were. They talked to each other incessantly. Tess was a wonderful traveler—pleasant and adaptable and interested in the places we were visiting. She spoke Spanish better than the rest of us. Only when Tess returned home a few weeks later (as planned) would we fully appreciate what an important companion she had been for CJ.

  Leah and I had it easiest. Our travel regimen was just an extension of our everyday life. We had each other to talk to, and we were comfortable with our respective travel-related tasks. Leah planned the route and kept the budget; I took photos and managed the blog. Meanwhile, Sophie was still at home in Hanover, playing volleyball, taking classes like World Drumming, and using her free time to get started on her more substantive online classes. Or so we thought.

  For all the relaxing comfort of our finca, Bogotá beckoned. To get there, we would have to take another eight-hour bus ride eastward through winding mountain roads. The whole family loaded up on Dramamine, except for Katrina (the writer formerly known as Scoop), who opted against it, probably because Leah or I told her it would be a good idea. Katrina planned to use the bus ride to interview passengers for her Valley News article on the peace referendum. Shortly after we pulled away from Salento, Katrina found a man eager to share his thoughts on the referendum. She settled into a seat across the aisle from him. The bus wound its way through the mountains, slowing down for the curves and then lurching uphill. “Excuse me,” Katrina said as the man began talking about his family. She walked quickly to the bathroom in the back of the bus to throw up. She returned looking pale. “Sorry,” she said to the man, who resumed his story. Five minutes later, Katrina stood up again and rushed back to the bathroom.

  “Scoop, how is the interview going?” I asked as she passed me. For some reason this made her angry, even though I had suggested that she take Dramamine before we got on the bus. Katrina threw up six more times before our bus stopped at the Colombian version of a highway oasis: an open-air restaurant with long wooden tables. The stop turned out to be long and leisurely, allowing Katrina sufficient time to medicate and get beyond the motion sickness. After the meal, I walked out of the restaurant to admire the views. The moment has stayed with me—being on the side of the road in a tiny, picturesque, middle-of-nowhere mountain town.

  The Bogotá bus station was bigger and more disorienting than the others we had encountered. We arrived after dark—tired, hungry, cranky, and mildly anxious about being in a new, chaotic place. I yelled at CJ for wandering away from me while I was in the bathroom. Leah got angry with me for yelling at CJ. I became frustrated with Leah when she transposed the numbers of the address for our Airbnb, causing us to spend a long time in a taxi looking for an address that did not exist. Eventually the taxi driver dropped us off on the street somewhere near where we thought the apartment ought to be. In the confusion, I made a currency calculation error and paid the driver ten times what I owed him—the equivalent of paying sixty dollars for a six-dollar ride. The driver expressed pleasant surprise and drove off. I was frustrated with myself for making the error, and then mad at the driver for not calling it out.

  To recap: I was angry with CJ, Leah, the taxi driver, and myself. Leah was angry with me. The others were generally cranky. Only the taxi driver emerged from this sequence of events in a good mood.

  Things got better quickly. Our Bogotá apartment was in an elegant building in a residential area. The apartment was not big—two bedrooms, a small but functional kitchen, and a little common area with a table—but we immediately grew to love it because we were embedded in a charming neighborhood. A few blocks down the street, I found a bakery with a confounding array of freshly baked confections. The glass display case had four rows, each with six compartments of pastries: cheese; sugar; fruit; fruit and sugar; sugar and cheese. I asked about the prices but soon realized that I was overthinking the selection process. The items were so cheap that for two dollars I could fill a bag with everything that might possibly be good. Later in the day, Leah and I found a large supermarket and bought staples for our
apartment: bottled water, cereal, milk, nuts, jam, Nescafé, dried fruit, beer. There was a doorman who greeted us effusively every time we went in or out. He told us how impressed he was that the gringos had figured out how to go grocery shopping.

  Having been off-line in Salento, each of us seized on the apartment’s strong Wi-Fi to catch up. Almost immediately the Wi-Fi became especially slow. “What’s going on?” Katrina asked, looking suspiciously around the room.

  “It was working fine until a minute ago,” Leah said.

  We stared at our devices waiting for the Internet to rebound, but it stayed frustratingly slow. CJ was the only one who had not complained. He was sitting on the couch with a guilty-looking grin, like he had just farted and was hoping no one would notice. Katrina rushed over and grabbed his iPod. “He’s downloading a movie!” she yelled. CJ pleaded “no contest” and threw himself on the mercy of the family. Katrina canceled his download and we all went back to work.

  We planned to be in Bogotá long enough that I bought fresh flowers for our apartment from a street vendor—and then we were forced to stay even longer. On our third afternoon, CJ rushed to the bathroom and threw up. This happened several more times. By evening, he was lying on the couch looking green. “I have never felt this bad in my life,” he declared repeatedly. We bought him Gatorade to protect against dehydration as we tried to figure out what was going on. He had a modest fever but no other symptoms besides extreme nausea. Food poisoning? Something contagious?

  “Katrina, can you look up the symptoms of Ebola?” I asked.

  “That’s not funny,” CJ croaked.

  “High fever,” Katrina reported.

  “Hmm,” I said.

  “Also, bleeding from every orifice,” Katrina continued.

  “Okay, we can cross Ebola off the list,” I said.

  “Please stop,” CJ pleaded.

  The next day Katrina came down with the same extreme nausea. The good news was that the pattern suggested something contagious like the flu rather than a more exotic travel-related illness. The bad news was that there were three more of us who might succumb. Katrina, who is not one to admit weakness, felt so bad that she could not sit up. When we played cards that night, we dragged her mattress into the living room so she could join the game while lying on the floor with her head propped on a pillow. The other players spread around her, using her mattress as a card table.

  Our flexible schedule allowed us to shelter in place. We checked in with Sophie back home, who told us how much she was enjoying her junior year. She was taking courses like the aforementioned World Drumming with the understanding that she would use her extra time to make progress on her online classwork: precalculus, criminal justice, and chemistry. These classes were offered by the state of New Hampshire as part of the Virtual Learning Academy Charter School, or VLACS.

  Leah decided to check the online VLACS portal to see how Sophie was doing in her three classes. “This cannot be right,” Leah mumbled when she logged in. “Nada.”

  “What does that mean?” I asked.

  “‘Nada’ means nothing in Spanish,” Leah said impatiently.

  “I know what ‘nada’ means,” I said. “How could she have done no work in a month?”

  “Not one single assignment,” Leah said (in English).

  Surprisingly, none of the rest of us fell sick. By Sunday, both CJ and Katrina were on the mend. Normally we were not particularly conscious of what day of the week it was, but in Bogotá, Sunday is ciclovia, a communal event in which a major avenue is closed to car traffic and opened up for bicyclists, Rollerbladers, runners, walkers, people with big dogs, people with small dogs, and anyone else who wants to enjoy a car-free stroll on a wide urban boulevard. We joined the throngs and walked all morning—nearly the entire length of the city. We admired the sites as we were swept along with thousands of people for whom Bogotá is home. We stopped for a while in a huge park where some kind of public exercise class had been organized. CJ enthusiastically performed aerobics along with the crowd.

  On our final night in Bogotá we attended a “peace concert” in the main plaza to promote a “yes” vote on the referendum. We arrived early, expecting a large crowd. The security presence was impressive. The Bogotá police, the army, and all kinds of other uniformed officers were spread across the plaza. In fact, there seemed to be about five armed officers for every visitor. I decided to take some pictures. The plaza was picturesque under any circumstances; the police presence juxtaposed against the huge Spanish cathedral made for a great visual.

  I took my camera out of my backpack and began shooting. Less than a minute later, an officer across the plaza pointed at me. I was well aware that soldiers and law enforcement types generally do not like to be photographed. The officer began walking briskly in my direction. I did my best “confused American” impression: I looked behind me and pretended that he must have been signaling to someone else. Despite a compelling dramatic performance on my part, the officer continued to stride with determination in my direction. When he was ten yards away, he raised his arm and made a small circle motion with his hand: the universal sign for, “Turn around.” I obeyed and slowly turned my back to him. When he arrived at where I was standing, he pointed at my backpack. “Abierto,” he said. Open.

  I was genuinely confused. My backpack was already open; I had unzipped it when I took out my camera. As I stood there looking befuddled, the officer zipped the backpack closed. He wagged his finger and said in Spanish, “The plaza will be very crowded. Please be careful with your bag.”

  And off he walked.

  * The curiously redundant name means, “Hotel Farm Ranch.”

  Chapter 5

  Into the Amazon

  Our time at the lodge fell into a routine: during the stretches when I was not worried about dying, I felt deeply relaxed.

  MY FIRST GLIMPSE OF THE AMAZON was from a plane. We had left Colombia, taking off from Bogotá shortly before sunset, and I had drifted off to sleep. I woke up a short time later and looked out the window to see a river meandering through a dense expanse of green, as if someone had spilled a drink on a 1970s shag carpet. “That’s the Amazon,” Leah said. There was not a single building or sign of human habitation in sight, just the multiple shades of green that formed the canopy of the world’s largest tropical rainforest: roughly the size of the contiguous forty-eight United States.

  From thirty-five thousand feet, the enormous trees looked like florets on a head of broccoli, but I knew what was lurking in that dense tropical forest. I had begun reading The Lost City of Z, a book that details the remarkable and ultimately fatal adventures of British explorer Percy Fawcett as he searched for an ancient Amazonian civilization. On his various expeditions, Fawcett and fellow explorers battled parasites, snakes, bugs, hostile natives, and impenetrable terrain. The book’s central message is that the Amazon tends to win.

  Our destination was the Abiseo Aventura Paradise, a small outpost owned by a married couple, Kevin Cleaver and Maria Nikolov, both of whom had spent their careers at the World Bank. A mutual friend had introduced us to them via e-mail. Their adventure lodge is located just outside the Abiseo National Park, an area that had been closed to visitors for decades. Even compared to other Amazon destinations, we would be heading deep into the wild. The flight from Bogotá took us to Tarapoto, a city in the interior of Peru. From there, we took a jeep ride for several hours to Kevin and Maria’s home in the small town of Juanjuí. We would spend a day there before setting out for the adventure lodge by boat the next morning.

  Kevin is American; Maria is Peruvian. Now retired, they split their time between Washington, D.C., and Peru, and would be traveling with us to their adventure lodge. Upon our arrival in Juanjuí, Kevin and Maria invited us to their home for an elaborate lunch outdoors, with bowls of fruit and myriad plates of other delicious local food. As we sat down to lunch, CJ was still heavily doped up on Dramamine from the long jeep ride. “Why are so many fruits round?” he asked in a loo
py kind of way. “Fruits,” he repeated. “That’s a strange word. Fruits. Fruits.”

  Leah and I ignored him. Kevin and Maria shared fascinating stories from their careers at the World Bank and asked about our travel plans. “Do humans really need ten fingers?” CJ interjected as he stared at his hand. Leah and I told Kevin and Maria about the places we planned to go to during the balance of the trip. This led to a discussion of our obligation to homeschool the children. CJ was still babbling semicoherently. Kevin turned to me and said solicitously, “You’re doing such great things with him. Every child learns in his own way.”

  We continued to swap stories with Kevin and Maria, marveling at the people we knew in common. “What if all the trees fell over at once?” CJ asked the table. Kevin nodded as he absorbed the question and then turned to me. “These days, people like CJ can lead very fulfilling lives. He seems so curious to learn.” Leah and I exchanged a glance.

  CJ added, “I suppose that’s very unlikely—that all the trees would fall over at once. Unless maybe there was a hurricane or something like that.”

  “That’s exactly right, CJ,” Kevin answered.

  “Do you like mangoes, CJ?” Maria asked, holding up a mango.

  “I do like mangoes,” CJ answered.

  “Mangoes grow on trees,” Maria said.

  “Yes,” CJ agreed. “Like apples.”

  “Exactly!” Maria said excitedly.

  The Dramamine wore off as the lunch unfolded course by course. CJ continued to talk incessantly, with each statement making slightly more sense than the last, as if someone were slowly turning up the dial on his intellectual capacity. He and Kevin discovered a mutual interest in scuba diving. By dessert, they were discussing the impact of climate change on the world’s coral reefs. “Even modest warming of the oceans can be devastating for the coral,” CJ said.