Back to the Amazon
It turns out returning to the rainforest is not like riding a bicycle.
On the Rupununi River, it’s been raining for four hours. I know this because we’ve been navigating upriver for five, and huddled under a tarp for most of it. I’ve never been this wet before, not even in the shower, I think bitterly. A drop of water, flavored, ironically, with sunscreen, drips off my nose onto my lips. It trickles down my chest, teasing and tickling the tender welts that dot my neck.
Surely I’d be used to this by now, after three years. The place is not exactly a misnomer. My guide shoots me an annoyed glance; he senses my frustration but cannot place its origin. She’s worked in the Amazon for years, I imagine him thinking. What did she expect?
After a year indoors though, the rainforest is wetter than I remembered. Buggier than I remembered, too. I sense myself once again fighting that fruitless war of trying to control time in the forest. I’d been here before, after all, three years ago when I first set foot in a canoe at dusk to row deep into the jungle. At least this time, I wouldn’t be afraid of the caiman when their gleaming red eyes pierced back at me through the darkness. Hard to see caiman in the daytime, anyway.
As we chug upstream, asses sloshing on the tin seats, I have way too much time to reflect on my sorry state. That little gremlin that lives in my brain (everyone’s brain?) tells me I’ve become too comfortable with city life; you said you loved the jungle but here you are complaining. He quickly receives a talking to from the suffering city girl, whose clothes have been wet and reeking for two weeks now. She’s warning him they’ve had no coffee in almost a week, and she’s not happy about it. In their cacophony of criticism, they hardly hear the murmured reminder that there’s still a pandemic raging and the fact that she is here — that we are all here — is a miracle.
Almost impossibly, with this thought, the clouds break. The boat driver hands me a half gourd filled with warm soup and cassava bread and the mental critics are briefly distracted as I work my way around a tough chicken wing.
Then, we reach the shore and are rapidly savaged by biting black flies. I’m taken back to sunny spring mornings in Seattle, where I spent quarantine cozily ensconced in my father’s home office, frustrated that I could not travel to work in the field. Now in the field, I admit I’d happily head back to that warm, safe room to sit by my computer. Funny how life works.
My first step onshore yanks me out of reverie as my boot sinks up to the ankle in mud. We appear to be in an endless, abandoned field but my guide strides confidently across it until we reach a beautiful ranch house. It’s mercifully dry and open, so when they show me my room, I strip naked and stand on the back porch in the sunlight like a cormorant.
And after a shower to remove the stickiness of rain, my guide hands me a coffee. Not instant coffee, but the real stuff, steaming hot.
I still know how to work in the Amazon, I realize. Even before the pandemic, I never would have attempted it without coffee. Lesson learned.
