The Escape

Hours seem to have passed. I must have dozed off. As I try to open up my eyes again, my eyelids seem burnt and heavy. “What the hell?”, I blurt out. I can tell that my pants are off and I smell like birdshit. I stop and listen carefully to the night air, trying to orient myself. The river is lap-dancing on the banks. I hear the flutter of wings overhead and my heartbeats underneath. I begin to put the pieces together. ”Shit, I’ve got to get the hell out of here,” I whisper under my breath. Glancing down at my wound, I pull my pants back on. It looks nasty. Fire-engine red and already full of puss. I put the oar back in the water and pull the canoe clockwise toward the shore. I can almost hear the sun start to crack the horizon. As I jump out of the canoe in to the shallow water, my left side screams in protest. “No piranhas or crocs around I hope.” Once in the damp underbrush at the river’s edge, I again try to orient myself. The aromatic loam of the night is beginning to mist away as the sun comes up on the leaves around me. “What’s that sound,” I hold my breath. It sounded like gunfire. A truck back-fires again far off in the distance. “Shit,  a road is just behind me.” Clawing my way as rapidly as I can through the thorny and sticky underbrush, I limp out on to a narrow asphalt two lane backroad. A weatherbeaten white truck is headed directly toward me. “Damn, it’s loaded to the teeth,” I mutter under my breath. It slows to a stop as I flag it down. Two Panamanian truck drivers lean out their windows, one on each side. “Que Paso, Amigos,” I greet them. “Can you give me a lift?”  ”Where are you going my friend,” the driver asks me as he curls his nose and looks at me curiously. “To the harbor.”  “Ah, Amigo, lo siento, we go to the harbor too, but as you can see our truck is loaded with pipas de alcantarilla and we have no room for passengers.” “Sewer pipes, huh. They’re muy gigante.” I answer looking at the huge black pipes packed into the truck’s payload. “Si, mucho mierda to flow into the Caribbean,” the trucker on the passenger side chimes in laughing. As his laughter dies down, I try hard not to look desperate. “Amigos, how bout if I just crawl into one of these pipes and catch a ride with you anyway.”

 

The Antidote

The fabric of my safari pants bit uncomfortably into my rapidly swelling flank. Modesty was not an issue due to the darkness. I painfully slipped my pants down to around my ankles. Using the tiny Mag Light attached to the zipper of my jacket, I lay down in the canoe and turned on my right side as best I could to examine the wound. It was red, swollen and angry, and this was just a graze. How much poison had been infused into my system? It is a fact that everything is a poison depending on dosage; perhaps the amount in my system was too small to cause permanent damage?

I had heard that the best cure for the poison encountered in this part of the world is the guano of a rare bird, the Foo, which follows a migratory path about this time of the year. No sooner had I considered this than the beating of many tiny wing feathers sounded overhead. This must be an hallucination, I thought to myself. Then, I saw them in the waxy light of the full moon…a giant flock of rare Foo birds flapping and squawking overhead.  Iridescent blue and green bodies careened joyfully through the air. As I watched slack-jawed, mouth agape, I felt a warm creamy substance land on my head, chest, and exposed injured leg…it ran directly into the wound and immediately soothed the inflamed area. The flock of Foo birds had dropped ballast in exactly the right place! I remembered my jungle survival class taught by Professor Wendell. As we studied the culture of the region and the natives’ affinity for poison darts, I remembered her favorite quote when discussing lifesaving antidotes to these poisons – “If the Foo shits, wear it”.

The Dart

…the poison from the dart which grazed my left flank is starting to take hold. My mind is fading in and out as I paddle feverishly with the current. I must not sleep I keep telling myself. I must not sleep! The constellations are so beautiful. From the bottom of the canoe I hear the rippling current of fresh water as it begins to meet the sea. I hear waves breaking far ahead in the distance. I gaze one last time into the eyes of the stars. I hear Connor Oberst singing “Milk Thistle” somewhere in the night as my silent canoe now spins slowly in small circles. I can’t feel my arms. I must not sleep I keep telling myself. I must….

The New World

Yes, I can clearly recall the dark Panamanian evening. Clouds of fluffy white cotton are pierced with the yellow tint of the moon, light reaching down into the river water like arms from the sky. Humidity, like a wall of water, pinned me to my seat i…n the canoe. Parrots squawked their goodnights to each other in trees growing close to the water; elsewhere monkeys tossed handfuls of guano at each other, shrieking loudly as the poop splatted on their small faces. Tiny piranhas crested the waves of the river, some jumping for joy as they caught the smell of human blood in the air. Far away, the sound of cannibal drums sounded in the distance. I worried that…