Jungleland Read online

  We could not take the rental truck either; our rental agreement forbade us from driving to that part of the country, and after thinking about it Chris decided that he didn’t want to risk its being hijacked. So that afternoon we dropped it off back in La Ceiba and started talking to drivers about getting over the mountains. The first few men rejected us outright. No one seemed to want to go to Olancho. The one gentleman willing to make the trip asked for $400, more than we were willing to pay, which was his way of underlining our lunacy.

  The road was more than just treacherous. In its report about Honduras, the U.S. State Department warns travelers to steer clear of the region: “In Olancho, on the road from Juticalpa to Telica, and from the turn off to Gualaco on Route 39 to San Esteban and Bonito Oriental, rival criminal elements have engaged in violent acts against one another.”

  Some locals referred to the road as callejón de los bandidos, or Bandit Alley. There are stories of carjackings, kidnappings, and murders. Gangs were rumored to hide in the rocky shadows, waiting for targets. A month or so before we arrived, a group wielding AK-47s had reportedly stopped a truckload of people, seized all their valuables, and then shot all of them dead, except for the driver.

  After we had spent a few hours talking to taxi drivers and making phone calls, one man finally agreed to make the trip for $100. His name was Juan; he was twenty-six, short and on the flabby side, with shiny black hair sticking up at illogical angles. He had never been on the cross-country road before, but he said he was eager for the experience. He had just started working for a man who ran a network of taxicabs a month before, after years of working in a Pepsi bottling plant. “I am free now and want to see all of the country.”

  Juan was certain he could borrow a 4×4 pickup, the preferred vehicle of the hinterlands, but the next morning he arrived at our hotel with bad news: the truck had fallen through. It was not, of course, advisable to take the road with anything less than a rugged all-wheel-drive vehicle, but he insisted that we go in his sedan. “No problema,” he said enthusiastically, drawing us out to the street. “Good car!”

  He wore pressed white jeans and a new-looking baby blue T-shirt, as if he were planning to attend some special event. His teeth were sharply white, and he had shaved his face to a perfect sheen. He smiled a lot, even as sweat dribbled down his face in the hot air.

  Out on the street, there it was: a new white Geo Prizm, with tinted windows. It reminded me of the tiny Nissan Sentra sedan I’d had as a teenager—cramped inside, with the suspension of a horse cart. He opened the front door, turned the ignition key, and pointed at the CD player, which was blinking purple. “It’s new,” he said. “Very loud!”

  That was when it hit me that Juan had absolutely no idea what he was getting himself and the new car into. Not only that, the car wasn’t even his; it was his boss’s car.

  “This isn’t going to make it,” I said, turning to Chris. The wheels were as smooth as pancakes. The car was practically plastic, and its carriage was too low to the ground.

  “Well, this is it,” Chris said. “We don’t have any other choice.”

  Pancho stood quietly off to the side with Angel, who was making last-minute calls to girlfriends back home.

  I shook my head. “And it’s too small! It’s a fucking breadbox. How are five people going to fit in there and then drive for five hours?”

  But we squeezed in anyway, three in the back, me up front, my knees squished against the dashboard. Once we shut the doors, Juan cranked up a reggae mix and made a magician’s gesture at the blinking purple lights, as if to say, Can you believe this radio actually lights up? Soon enough we were jetting down the road, heading for the lost city at a swift fifty-two miles per hour.

  “The Last Outpost”

  THE TREK TO the Patuca was harder than Morde and Brown had imagined: the rain, the bush, the damn mud. When they finally stopped that night at a tiny camp of Miskito Indians, forty or so miles from the sea, they were wrecked. It was May 3, almost a month after they had first sailed into La Ceiba. “Half our gear is soaked, bags caked with mud, covered in bites,” Morde wrote. “So tired.”

  The camp of about a half-dozen huts slouched along a strip of land on a curve of the river. Compared with the other indigenous tribes, the Miskito are considered relative newcomers to the area—the result of the older tribes of Pech and Tawahka mixing with the English, who had occupied the Mosquitia in the seventeenth century, and the Garifuna, who were the offspring of runaway African slaves. Early on, the Miskito accompanied pirates who roamed the nearby waters. Generally thought to be adventurous, they knew the contours of the sea like the palms of their callused hands.

  The explorers asked if they could stay for a couple days, and a family of six took them in. Morde and Brown slept in their hammocks, and Burke took the floor. When they weren’t resting, they broke in their boots and walking sticks, tested their rifles, and sought out a boat to take them upriver. From the Indians, they heard vague stories about ancient artifacts hidden to the west and of another American seeking gold who had died the previous month after a snake bit him sixteen times.

  The Indians called Morde “doctor”; he bandaged their cuts, caused by falls and mis-swung machetes, and disinfected some sores, healing acts that were perceived as minor miracles.

  The explorers traded salt and sugar for eggs. They ate meals of beans and rice and tortillas, until one night a man surprised them with a white-faced monkey. Jamming a stick through its midsection, the man cooked it over the fire until its skin burned off and its fat crackled.

  One afternoon, Morde and Brown decided to do some exploring and trekked away from camp in a northerly direction. Soon they wandered into a narrow box canyon with steep sides that rose high into the sky. On the canyon floor, they stopped at a long, unusual mound of vegetation. Curious about what was underneath, they set about digging away layers and layers of brush and timber. They were encouraged by what they found.

  Inside the tangle, large blocks of stone extended some thirty to fifty feet ahead of them. Excited about their find, they excavated and examined the ruins. What were they? Could they be the foundations of ancient structures? Perhaps the footprint of a tiny river village? And if a village, was it related to other villages nearby, or perhaps an outpost of a bigger city somewhere else?

  Whatever the ruins were, it was the first sign of ancient life they’d come across on their journey. It was also a very real indication of how easily the wilderness devours everything in it, how over time some things just vanish, leaving hardly a trace of their existence.

  ON MAY 6, Morde and Brown finally located a boat—a forty-foot mahogany pitpan with a flat shovel bow, powered by a three-and-a-half-horsepower engine. They had to build up the sides another five inches to protect them from the growing rapids. And then on May 7, after packing up and saying good-bye, they set off up the Patuca.

  The rain came, the sky almost always the gray color of ruined metal, and the river swelled at times to more than a hundred yards across, quickly turning into a tumult of crosscurrents and frothy churn. Morde steered, while Burke manned the bow and Brown fended off rocks from the middle seat. When the river quieted, the men noticed the ghostly landscape—the flat, unpopulated grasslands that stretched for miles like the Great Plains.

  Somewhere along the way Brown’s wristwatch broke. For the Americans, it was the last connection to the civilized world and its schedules. Cutting that tie was probably a good thing, but in their account they attached no larger significance to the watch’s failure. They lived according to the cycles of the day, rising with the sun and sleeping when it was dark, just as the natives lived.

  A few last expat outposts stood between them and the borderlands that Captain Murray had mentioned and Mitchell-Hedges had written about. Living simply, those dropouts inhabited thatched huts, which they had built with their own hands, at the edge of the world, a remote constellation of outsiders, each man on his own personal journey.

  There was George
Brayton, a cranky fifty-year-old American. Morde and Brown made it to him after eight hours of paddling and motoring. His two-story hut stood by itself atop a forty-foot bank. It was a home and also a commissary for traffic on the river. “He buys crocodile skins and gold from the Indians and sells them salt, rice, machetes and tobacco,” wrote Morde. “He pays the river price of $15 an ounce for gold and sells it for $25. He pays 20 cents per foot for crocodile skins and sells it to a merchant in La Ceiba for 45 cents.” His profits, rolled into sweaty wads, were buried in tins around his hut like time capsules, perhaps never to be located again.

  Posted on his front door was a sign: EVERYONE WELCOME—EXCEPT EXPLORERS. Brayton lived alone with two colorful macaws he had taught to wisecrack, “Get the hell out of here.” Still, he seemed to enjoy company. “He keeps three cots set up and almost anyone is made to feel a real welcome to bed and board,” wrote Morde. To the natives, he was Dama, meaning “venerable old man” or Sir.

  Every day, an Indian woman from down the river brought him meals while a “bright-eyed little Indian girl” kept his house; he told the men that he was planning to marry the younger one as soon as she learned a bit more English, maybe around Christmas. While Morde and Brown bought a few last-minute provisions, Brayton talked about his old life and how he’d left the States behind because he couldn’t find a job. “What good was I back there?” he asked. “No good at all!” On the river, he could “just sit here and the money comes.” He didn’t miss home at all.

  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

  ON 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.