Jungleland (11 page)

Brayton was not unlike the other wanderers before him who had come to Honduras to find themselves, to forget, to restart—Cortés, Pedraza, Walker, O. Henry. All had left their old lives behind in dreams of transformation—of finding riches or fame or simply something to cover up their past, the way a scar grows over an old wound.

A FEW MORE
miles upriver, the explorers encountered another American, Will Wood—“half blind and feeble with age.” Slumped in a hammock in front of his warped wood shack, his clothes were dirty, his teeth yellow and broken. He didn’t want to talk about why he had left Minnesota, why he had decided to become a wanderer, because that was a long time ago. Since then, the damp green air had worked away at his mind.

“Silent green is creeping in on the old man inch by inch, day by day,” Morde wrote. “The man is battered by time, by a life spent fighting the jungle, the river and the inexorable lassitude that sucks out a man’s guts down here.”

The only story Wood told the men was about his dead uncle. Wood had left him behind, like everyone else. But when his uncle had died a few months before, Wood had found out that he had inherited $40,000.

He snickered about that, knowing it was a lot of money. All he had to do was motor out to a coastal town and sign for it.

“Are you going to do it?” Morde wondered.

“Not now,” he said, sliding deeper into his hammock, waving his hand at the heat. “I’ll go down a little later.”

BEFORE THEY LEFT
the grasslands, the explorers stayed a night with a clutch of German Jews hiding out from the war. They spoke in thick enough accents that the other expats just called them “the Germans.” Hardy Feldman, Franz Jeffries, and Mrs. Jeffries were all in their late thirties, tall and blond, and ran a small banana plantation. The Jeffrieses had two small children with them, and there was a drifter who came and went and was known only as Charlie.

Morde was fascinated by their lifestyle. “High on the left bank,” he wrote of this unusual family, “three young people try to work out a system of living. Their children have to be taught by their parents, the problems of the community settled harmoniously and the unaccustomed hardships of frontier life accounted for.”

Years earlier, the group had purchased the plantation from a western company, but things had not gone as planned. They were sitting on a lot of debt, and their bananas were diseased. When they weren’t working the trees, they squatted in front of their one-room shack with its corrugated tin roof and stared out over the river. Their boat had broken down. “They live entirely on credit,” Morde scribbled on the night he stayed with the family. “Working, struggling, praying for the day when they can get away.”

There was a long history of people trying to exploit the river for riches: loggers, rubber hunters, prospectors. Most of the forays ended badly.

Decades earlier, the banana companies—United and Stan-dard—had started laying train tracks through the country to construct an efficient passage to deliver fruit from the interior plantations to the seaports. Those efforts were soon scotched as the firms learned, in the way that the Spanish had learned centuries earlier, that the jungle resisted development with relentless force. As soon as the greenery was cut down, it began to grow anew and in no time would be just as densely packed with the high trees, the dangling vines, the snaking undergrowth.

So the jungle and the river through it were graveyards; abandoned prospecting sites littered the edges, as did old mining facilities and banana outposts. Farther up the river from the Germans, for instance, was the sunken wheeler ship
Maid of the Patuca
, which had once ferried prospecting supplies. When the river was low, you could see the ship’s ruined iron boiler sticking up from the muck, like a monument to a dead utopian dream. After the boat ran aground, the operation was ditched, and the American entrepreneurs behind the project cut a trail to Catacamas—the small city to the northwest—and sold everything to get back to the States. As Morde wrote of the misadventure, “sic transit Gloria mundi.” Easy come, easy go.

That night, the Germans switched on the radio and there was news of the war. According to the announcer, Germany was now attacking Belgium and Holland, while the British army was withdrawing from Norway. Among Morde and his party, there was some momentary concern that the world would be altered in their absence. Morde tried to imagine where the war was headed, where Hitler would go next, but he couldn’t get his mind to see it and went to sleep trying to forget it all.

The real adventure began on May 14, just over a month and a half into their journey. In the mountains, the men watched as steep moldering limestone rose up above their narrow boat like “grotesque pillars.” Within the jagged cliffs, caves opened up like tiny gaping holes in the earth. The rapids became treacherous at times, which worried the adventurers a bit because the river would grow only more intense. Morde began to sketch maps of the landmarks they passed, marking down the rivers so they knew where they had been. “This is striking country,” he wrote that day, his mind imagining all the amazing possibilities ahead. He noted that they had passed “the last outpost of white civilization,” and soon the rain forest was everywhere—the trees, the vines, the overwhelming mess of moist vegetation. Anything could happen now. With a mixture of eagerness and trepidation, he wrote, “From now on the interests of everyday existence are of more concern than foreign wars.”

Bandit Alley

O
N THE WAY
across the country, our Geo Prizm began to overheat, and so did our driver Juan. “Where are we?” he shouted to no one in particular as he veered the sedan to a halt in a scrum of low-lying bushes. We had expected to make that leg of the journey in less than six hours, with no stopping. We were about two thousand feet up a mountainside after almost two hours of driving and two earlier pit stops.

Juan slammed his hands down on the leather-gripped steering wheel and dropped his forehead. The hood looked as though it was hiding a fire, white smoke rising out of its seams. The dirt road had been climbing thousands of feet through hairpins and streambeds and eroded earth that plunged straight into the green abyss. We had passed vehicles left for dead—a pickup in a ditch with no windows; a sedan in the pine trees, missing doors. Sometimes SUVs with blacked-out windows zipped past us, likely carrying narcos. Our car had struggled the whole ride. The suspension was shot. I hadn’t seen another truck in half an hour.

Juan jumped out and threw open the hood and immediately began to hyperventilate. “
Problema! Problema!
” he yelled. The last time we had stopped was forty minutes before. The radiator was low on coolant, and Juan hadn’t brought any backup. He made a sign toward the sky, as if he were either looking for God to help his car along or hoping that the heavens might have an answer for what he was doing out here in this forsaken place.

As Pancho and Chris uncapped the radiator and filled it with one of our last bottles of drinking water, Angel paced in tiny circles with his cell phone raised up in the scorching air, hoping to catch a signal so he could say another good-bye to his girlfriends.

With the sun descending, we climbed back into the car and drove on. For a while, we rode in silence, as if the quiet would make us lighter, cooler, swifter. We passed mud and stone huts with corrugated tin roofs, and then darkness started to usher out the day. Soon there were no more houses. There was nothing, but we seemed to be getting along fine.

Occasionally we stopped to relieve ourselves in the bushes. I was standing at the edge of the road, angling away from the wind, when a man and a woman appeared out of nowhere and caught me in the act. I froze, as if I were poisoning their backyard. Then I put one hand to shield my eyes to make it appear as though I was actually staring out over the valley, a gringo enjoying the sweeping views. They didn’t seem to care either way and walked on. I was a stranger here, but only the most recent of my kind.

We made it almost another two hours—climbing higher into the mountains—before the hood started smoking again. The radiator consumed another bottle of water and then another. We had one left. We drove on at a crawl, the car transmission jerking along, Juan swearing in Spanish. It was when the smoking recommenced that I was hit by the terrible realization: the car wasn’t going to make it.

“Where are we?” Juan asked as he looked out from under the hood. He had just poured our last bottle of water into the radiator.

No one seemed to know how far we were from Catacamas. Every journey had these moments—times when you were completely adrift, feeling a bit helpless and more than a little terrified, with no clear notion about how a situation was going to play out. This wasn’t too far from how I’d felt the day I’d left Amy and Sky in Brooklyn.

“Should I be worried?” I asked Chris.

“Let’s not talk about it.” He said it without a laugh or a smile.

“But should I?”

“The Equivalent of a State Secret”

I
T IS THE
equivalent of a state secret,” Morde wrote at one point about the lost place.

As the expedition pushed farther into the rain forest, the men prepared to encounter the more remote tribes dotting the upper reaches of the Patuca. Those were the people Morde would have to befriend if he wanted to learn anything about the vast jungle around him.

On the morning of May 15, the men paddled ashore to a Tawahka camp, where blank faces met them. The Tawahkas were one of the jungle’s two main indigenous groups—the other, known as the Pech, lived more often in the mountains.

The Tawahkas looked at Morde like the stranger he was—a tall, rangy man visiting from another world. “All politely gazed down from their huts,” he wrote.

It was as if the tribe was trying to decide whether to attack or retreat—no different from when the conquistadors had come asking questions. Some carried spears. The women wore threadbare dresses, and most of the men were in pants and T-shirts. The babies were mostly naked.

It was a tense standoff until the chief of the village finally emerged from the brush. In his journals, Morde called him Nicolas; though he was fifty-five, he looked much older, with deep lines stretching across his face. His hair was straight and black. He was short and muscular from years of swinging machetes and paddling up and down the river.

Just as the rain came, Nicolas invited the men up to his hut. His was one of the larger ones, about forty feet long by thirty feet wide, with five low-slung wooden beds inside. Bananas and plantains adorned the wood rafters. In a corner were fish spears, wood bows, and a trough of chichi, a homemade beer brewed from sugarcane and pineapple juice.

The storm continued through the night, allowing the men to dry off next to a cooking fire at the center of the hut. They ate wabul, boiled and mashed plantain with coconut water. At first Nicolas was reticent, but then he began to open up. He said he had fifteen children, the youngest still an infant. Bringing up children in the jungle was a game of chance. He said his people married at twelve and became parents a year later. “We have many children, but many die and are buried in the ground,” Nicolas said.

Anthropologists know little about the two tribes, except that they are Amerindian groups with linguistic ties to Panamanian and Colombian cultures. They speak languages in the Chibchan language family, which include speakers from as far south as Colombia. Culturally, the tribes are thought to be similar to people from South America, from whence they likely migrated some three thousand years ago, after war or disease forced them out. Some scholars believe their ancestors were the even more mysterious Chorotega. Before the Spanish invasion, the Chorotega were thought to have been dispersed across Costa Rica, Honduras, and Nicaragua, and they were either distantly related to the Maya and Aztecs or perhaps their contemporaries.

Morde—and Captain Murray before him—believed that the Chorotega had once been part of the lost civilization he sought. “Whether they built the city, or conquered it from an older people and occupied it, is not known,” Morde would later write. But the lack of any extensive ruins associated with the group was baffling.

Morde hoped to change that, but when he encountered Nicolas and the other tribesmen, the Indians were dying out as a people. Though their pre-Columbian population was thought to have been in the tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, Morde estimated that the two tribes now numbered in the thousands. Spanish missionaries had converted most of them to Christianity. Now after many generations, they were rapidly becoming exiles from their own land, pushed out of Eden, now on the lam.

As they died out, their history died too. “They have no written language to record the exploits of their ancestral heroes,” Morde wrote the night he met with the Tawahka chief. Their entire life, the life that they remembered, was passed down orally. In time, stories became warped, blurred, twisted. There were few hard facts, especially because the Indians were fearful of telling their stories to strangers. Something Nicolas narrated as if it had happened yesterday might actually have happened a hundred years before—or not at all. For Morde, as they wandered up and down the shores of the river and into the surrounding forests, life quickly began to feel less real and more like a tropical romance.

Mortal Threats

T
HE RADIATOR COOLED
, and we continued again—in vain. As we built speed and optimism, the Geo Prizm began falling apart. First, a low-hanging branch knocked off the driver-side mirror, and about twenty minutes later, as the rain came in sheets, I looked up to find a crack in the windshield. The road became a muddy stream. The car fishtailed back and forth, huffing up a hill, and a hubcap spun loose. Each time a part flew off, Juan stopped, climbed out, and examined the broken car. Soon he was soaking wet, his chest visible through his blue shirt. When one of the headlights cracked, he’d had enough. Something inside him snapped.