Jungleland Read online

  “YOU WANT TO do what?” Amy asked the night I told her my plan.

  We were having a drink at the dining room table of our Brooklyn apartment one early-winter night in 2008, while Sky was asleep in the back. It was mostly quiet, except for the occasional car that groaned past on the street below and the footfalls of our neighbors overhead.

  “I want to find the White City,” I said. “Ciudad Blanca!”

  She laughed, swallowed a sip of red wine, and, though she’d heard many of my phone conversations with people about the city, searched my face for a sign that I might be joking.

  “I’m serious,” I said.

  “Yeah, I bet the others who went out there were serious too,” she said. “How many did you say?”

  “I don’t know the exact number.”

  She took a strand of her blond hair and began to twirl it, winding it around an index finger and then letting it go.

  “Your hair,” I said.

  “I can’t help it.” She let the strand drop. “You don’t even know how to camp!” she said.

  True: I’m not a backpacker or a trekker or even much of a hiker. I have a bad back. I have lived in New York City for more than fifteen years, so the idea of going to the rain forest might as well have meant heading off to Mars.

  “I’m more qualified for this kind of trip,” she said before reminding me that she had gone on Outward Bound as a teenager in the High Sierra.

  “You were like sixteen,” I said weakly.

  “Yeah, but I spent twenty-six days in the mountains. And three of those days I was completely alone!”

  “Still—” I said, but she cut me off.

  “How many days have you spent camping?” she asked.

  The answer was probably twice—and I’d hated it both times.

  We sat there in silence for some time.

  “What about your explorer?” she asked finally.

  “Morde?”

  “What happened to him?”

  “He’s dead,” I said.

  She nodded, as if to underline my obvious lunacy.

  “But he didn’t die in the jungle,” I said.

  “That’s comforting!”

  We laughed uneasily together at that, poured out the last of the wine, and listened as a siren rang out on the street below.

  “I feel old,” I said as the noise died down.

  “Is that what this is about?”

  “I’m just saying.”

  “You’re not the only one.”

  “I’d just like to do this.”

  “When?”

  “Soon, I guess.”

  “You don’t have a plan, do you?” Her green eyes widened. She couldn’t believe it. “You’ve lost your mind. You have.”

  I told her that there was still a lot to do.

  “You and the man-eating, what, jaguars?” she said after some time. “I can just see it.”

  “They don’t eat people,” I said. “Jaguars don’t.”

  “Sure they don’t. Wait until they see you!”

  The Mountain That Cries

  ARCHAEOLOGISTS SAY THE rain forest is one of the worst environments to dig for human remains. Left to the sodden air, a body is stripped to the bone within eighteen days. The downpours and the resulting streams work away at the crumpled skeleton, breaking it apart piece by piece. The water erodes the bones and ferries them away. Animals take what they want. In a matter of weeks, there is nothing left. The body vanishes.

  This is to say that you must want something desperately to even think about venturing into the Mosquitia, 3,300 square miles of relentless nature unfurled along the Caribbean coast between Honduras and Nicaragua. The author Peter Keenagh, who traveled into the Mosquitia in the early twentieth century, described it as “one of the wildest parts of earth.”

  It is a place of savannas, rolling hills, cordilleras, and many, many swamps. But most of it is rain forest. The jungle is dank and buggy; mosquitoes teem. Trees stand as tall as office towers and in many places block out the daylight. Rivers meander into and out of the fertile gloom. The rain comes without warning, persistent and forceful, a harbinger of some bigger, more malign force that presides out of sight. In places, mountains climb as high as 4,000 feet, with steep intermingling hills packed close like bad teeth. The jungle generates fear. As Theroux put it in The Mosquito Coast, “Once you get in, you never get out.”

  Howler monkeys shriek around the clock, lending the jungle the weird sensation of attending a rock concert. Other strange sounds come and go, sourceless and spectral, without a face. Jaguars prowl, eyes black as asphalt, and bullet ants sting like a .22. The men who roam the forest aren’t any better: drug runners, lumber thieves, gold diggers, murderers, outlaws, treasure hunters.

  There are stories of downed planes never found again. The natives fear ghosts and jungle spirits that chatter loudly at night and sometimes send messages in gaudy white and purple lights. One of their stories tells of an ugly black witch who guards a pile of gold up a creek off the Río Blanco, in the western part of the country. She preys on men with her striking voice, like the sirens of the Odyssey. Sometimes she appears as a beautiful woman with flowing hair that is either blond or black.

  “I WAS SITTING in a bar in La Ceiba, Honduras, thinking what the hell am going to do?” the explorer Jim Woodman recalled to me one afternoon on the phone.

  It had taken me two weeks to track him down. Many of the phone numbers I had turned up online were switched off, and just as I had been about to give up he responded to one of the half-dozen e-mails I’d sent.

  “We started talking about the interior of the country with some locals,” he said. “From time to time, the Indians would come in with a piece of pottery and try to sell it. I kept hearing stories about this White City. No one went to Mosquitia. It was unexplored. And we thought, ‘Goddamn, let’s go out there and find this place.’ ”

  It was 1976 then, and Woodman was forty years old. He knew Theodore Morde’s story of finding the lost city and wondered if Morde’s sudden death had had something to do with the “jungle spirits.” He believed in that sort of thing.

  Back then, Woodman was still fit from his days as captain of the swim team at the University of New Mexico. Straight and lean as a surfboard, with a mop of brown hair, he was the son of an Illinois newspaperman, had served as a marine during the Korean War, and had then worked as a kind of scout after it had ended—“a destination consultant,” he said—for Pan American World Airways, jetting all over the globe in search of new markets for tourism. He married a girl from Rio, and together they had three children and settled in Miami. By the time he felt the pull of the White City, Woodman was a full-time travel writer and explorer who spent much of his time in Central America. He was loose in the world, a kind of hippie without the drugs, but contemptuous of social convention and of setting down roots in one place. He could never sit still.

  As he investigated the White City with Bill Spohrer, a Fulbright scholar and archaeologist, they found an old map of Honduras, charted by a local cartographer named Dr. Jesús Aguilar Paz in 1954. To make the map, Aguilar Paz did a lot of walking and talking to the jungle’s tribes: Tawahkas, Miskitos, and Pech. At some point, the cartographer met Morde, according to some news reports. His map is curious not for its numerous blank spots—there are a lot of them—but for the tiny black question mark printed near the Pao, Plátano, and Paulaya rivers, next to the words “Ruinas Ciudad Blanca.”

  Aguilar Paz’s marking became the starting point for their adventure, Woodman said. They asked an old friend, Bill Earle, who owned a handful of planes that shuttled people around the country, to fly them out to look for it from the sky. Years before, Earle had left the United States to start a new life in Honduras. But he was afraid of the jungle.

  “You’re crazy,” he told the men. “You have no idea what you’re asking. It’s loco.”

  Woodman said he had laughed, not because he thought the response absurd but because he knew an honest warn
ing when he heard one. Earle had already lost three planes to the jungle. Mountains jumped out of nowhere. You’d be flying through gobs of mist and then a piece of rock would appear. Winds shook you up like a soda can. Every trip was a risk, a roll of the dice. But Earle needed the work.

  They took his single-engine Cessna for a dozen flights in all. Buzzing over the high jungle canopy, the explorers scanned the sea of green for signs of white. Some days Earle dropped the plane down on a cleared piece of jungle, from which the men would make daylong hikes into the house-high bush. They circled outward from the spot they thought was Aguilar Paz’s mark.

  They didn’t find a thing. When their efforts with Earle failed, they hired a helicopter and traveled in dugout canoes through the winding brown rivers. They carried guns, dehydrated food, compasses, and an extra pair of clothes each. They covered hundreds of miles, though so slowly it felt like thousands, because walking anywhere involved slashing away thick growth with machetes, wall after wall, which occasionally revealed drug runners and lunatics. “We got lost a lot,” said Woodman.

  Death lurked in the verdure. They discovered two loggers hacked to death with machetes. Their helicopter pilot died in a crash. Occasionally, though, they found clues, reasons to believe that they were closing in on what they were looking for. Shards of ancient pottery with strange markings. Metates, or corn grinders, stuck in the mud. Carvings on jagged granite cliffs along the rivers, like signage on highways, urging them forward.

  Along the way, they consulted psychics, snake and jaguar hunters, grizzled prospectors who had logged enough time on the rivers for the rain to ruin their minds. A man who had once owned a rubber plantation on the Río Patuca told them he’d heard a lot of stories about the city, but the thought of actually discovering it frightened him. It’s haunted, he said. You’ll never come back. Another guy told them that he had been to the city and drunk from a golden mug. A few people told them that they should be looking not for a White City but for a White House. Casa Blanca. Or that the city’s outer walls, which one man said were as “tall as skyscrapers,” were white. Or that, in fact, those walls were simply the razor-edged mountains that rose all around the place.

  One year passed, and then a few more. When they weren’t working at their day jobs—Woodman as a tourist consultant, Spohrer as an airline operator—they returned to the search. But the more time they spent in the jungle, the bigger the jungle felt to them. They grew tired and dispirited. At one point, ABC filmed a few segments about their exploration. Like many of the explorers before them, they couldn’t find a trace.

  It was during one of those lean years that they met an old Tawahka Indian woman named Juana. She lived on the Patuca in a leaky wood hut amid a grove of coconut trees. Pigs roamed around her land at the edge of the river and helped keep away snakes. It was hard for the pair to guess her age. Her wrinkled face was a map of her hard life. There were few women like her left. She had never seen a lightbulb.

  The men set up camp at the confluence of the Wampú and Patuca rivers, not far from her village. At first, like many tribal people, she was reticent about the city. Woodman told her in his fluent Spanish that he had been searching for the lost city for some time, and she nodded quietly, the river breeze in her matted black hair. Woodman noticed a single gold earring catching the sun. Her nails were unevenly cut.

  As the episode was retold in Sports Illustrated, she pointed out a high mountain in the distance. It reached into the clouds. “It’s there,” she said. “You see the white on the mountain?” she asked the travelers. “That is the door to the city. It is the city of the dead.”

  The explorers stared up at the mountain as the woman looked on. “At night we hear them crying,” she said.

  “Who?”

  “The dead.”

  “Have you ever gone there?”

  She shook her head and looked at him as if he and Spohrer had turned into ghosts. “No one has gone there. You can’t.”

  I ASKED JIM WOODMAN on the phone one day if he thought the city existed, because I was still wavering on it. But he wouldn’t give me the concrete answer I wanted. “It’s a funny thing,” he said. “I mean, it’s a hard question. Are you going to be in Miami anytime soon?”

  I knew from my years as a journalist that there was no substitute for a face-to-face conversation. I had so many questions for him. Most important, I wanted to know what he had found down there.

  Amy had an art panel to attend that winter in Miami, and my parents offered to take Sky for a few days. There was still time to change my mind.

  OVER LUNCH PLATES of rice and beans at a popular Honduran diner in Miami Beach, Jim Woodman told me all about his trip. He wore a faded T-shirt, jeans, and Top-Siders, which he called his “yachtsman shoes.” Now eighty, Woodman had lived in Miami for years. He was tanned, with white hair swept back like an old movie star’s. He seemed healthy, and his years of tromping around the wilderness still pulsed through him.

  He said he had never found it; however, there was a lot more to his story. “I’m glad you came,” he said.

  From a duffel bag he pulled out an old map, creased and stained, of Honduras, and laid it out on the table. He began pointing on the map to the rivers he had navigated and the mountains he had climbed.

  “It’s so big,” he said of the Mosquito Coast. “It’s all off the map.” He pointed a rough finger at the Río Patuca and followed the river to a far western part of the country, which at that point didn’t mean much to me.

  “We went to the mountain that Juana told us about,” he said, referring to the old Tawahka woman. “It was white, like she said.” He shook his head and tapped the map. “But it was a burial ground. You see them around those rivers and in the mountains,” he said, gesturing in the greasy space between us. “Big mounds of earth the size of buildings rising above the jungle.”

  Over the years he spent exploring the region, Woodman contracted malaria, witnessed men being murdered, got caught in several hurricanes, and survived drug runners and bandits.

  “There’s an American convict who hides out on that river,” he told me. “I don’t know if he’s still alive. He was hiding out from civilization.” He laughed at the thought.

  He had found traces of ancient peoples in pottery and statues and discovered an ancient cave inside a white cliff rising like a city tower off the Patuca. “If you go up the river in a low-flying helicopter,” he told me, “I’m talking a hundred feet off the ground, and you wind up that river, and go by these incredible walls of white limestone that have openings and many caves. It looks like a white city.”

  He paused, grew serious. “These were places where the indigenous pre-Columbians lived. We found more burial sites in the niches. That mountain to me—those white outcroppings lining the river—that’s the closest we came to Ciudad Blanca.”

  Woodman, though, has moved on. He writes a travel book every few years—by now he has more than a dozen to his name, one of the most recent about women in the third world. But he did not abandon the search for the White City because he lost faith in the legend. It was just that he’d grown a little restless. As Woodman put it to me that afternoon, “I had spent enough time in Honduras.”

  About the city, Woodman said, “It was a romance.” Such romances are hard to put behind you. “That’s the beauty of exploration,” he said. “The idea that something like that exists—even if it’s an illusion.”

  We spent two hours together, and before we got up the old explorer leaned over the table, as if he wanted to whisper a secret. He waved one hand. “We can talk about all this in a nice restaurant like this,” he said, gesturing to the crowded room. “But you still won’t have any idea.”

  The Mystery Stick

  I STILL DIDN’T HAVE many details about Theodore Morde’s trip through the jungle, and part of me wondered if he had been making some of it up. So I began to call around to his remaining family in the hope of shedding more light on the mysteries of his life as an explorer and spy and
his journey through the jungle. In time, I got in touch with two of Morde’s nieces, as well as one grandchild. All of them pointed me to Dave Morde, Theodore’s nephew, in North Carolina.

  Up to that point, I hadn’t planned to take another research trip, but Dave quickly changed my mind. “I have some files that might help you in your search,” he said to me one afternoon on the phone. “A lot of his papers and some other things. Why don’t you come for a visit?”

  Energized by the prospect of a huge breakthrough in the Morde story, I told him that I would be there in a week.

  I flew down to Raleigh, North Carolina, and Dave met me at the airport in his dirt-colored Toyota pickup. Now seventy years old, he is a retired air traffic controller. On his bumper, he had pasted a sticker that wondered, IS THERE LIFE BEFORE COFFEE? As we drove, Dave said, “Uncle Ted was our Indiana Jones.”

  Dave and his wife, Diana, live in a ranch house in a leafy suburb named Cary. The house is comfortable, with wall-to-wall carpet, lots of cushiony furniture, and photographs of smiling grandkids. We went straight to Dave’s basement office, where he flipped on an angled desk light and opened a box. He pulled out a stack of logbooks, maps, news clippings, and journals, all of them worn by time, and some of them flimsily bound together by tape. There was a diary documenting Theodore Morde’s Honduran expedition to the lost city. “The family secrets,” he said with a smile. Not many had ever seen it. The pages were brittle, yellowed in places, some of the edges ripped and dog-eared. “This is unbelievable,” I gushed.