Amazon Stranger

from Chapter One, published on The Washington Post Book Review Web Site

It's not a good feeling to be lost over the Amazon jungle. Inside an airplane. During a storm. With the navigation equipment down and visibility virtually zip. Looking for a landing strip the size of a butter knife.

It's not a good feeling especially when, already, you hate to fly, and the only reason you've lived to be twenty-nine is that there happens to be an island in the middle of the Mediterranean called Crete and our Cairo-to-Athens flight a few years back, engines barely functioning, just happened to reach the island before crashing into the drink.

So I had a bad feeling that morning sitting in the military C-130 Hercules, circling over the Amazon, those front propellers whirring overtime against a paint job of jungle camouflage. I didn't realize at first that we were lost, that the Ecuadorian pilots were searching frantically for an airstrip called Tarapoa somewhere down there amid all those Ecuadorian trees. The scheduled arrival time had come and gone, the landing gear had gone down, noisily, and come back up, curiously, and the plane had begun banking, backtracking, flying in circles.

The few odd civilians who hitchhike into the jungle aboard these military flights are given seats amid stacks of cargo, between bare, curving fuselage walls. For the deafening engine noise, the crew hands out bolls of pink cotton to jam into your ears.

So there I was on this particular flight, surrounded by cargo at the very rear of the fuselage, alone except for a crew member next to me in a baggy jumpsuit. His name was Jose, and he slept most of the way despite wearing headphones that connected him directly to the pilots in the cockpit.

It is my curse that even minor wind turbulence scares me badly when I fly. But my main rule is this Never get totally terrified until the crew starts to look mildly concerned. Yet when dose sat bolt upright from his sleeping position just then, passing the headphones tightly to his ears, listening intently as the plane banked and turned another time, he didn't look mildly concerned. He looked totally terrified, which put me--by extension--in an emotional state beyond known psychiatric/orders.

A split second later Jose ripped off his headphones and thrust them into my hands. I pulled the cotton out of my ears. "Here," he said in rapid Spanish, "put these on and listen to the pilots. If they call for me, you come and get me as fast as you can."

Then he was gone, off to a starboard window, scanning downward with mile-wide eyes. Glancing out the window myself, all I could see were clouds and an occasional treetop. I put on the headphones as ordered, a draftee, and listened to a conversation I would gladly pay to have surgically removed from my memory.

Pilot One "It's no good! I don't see anything! Let's turn north again."

Pilot Two "We've tried northl We've tried it! Maybe we're not even close."

Pilot One "But where could it be? Trees! Trees! That's all I see. Dios mio!"

The voices were scratchy, full of that rough electronic sound that somehow makes even routine cockpit communication seem dire and foreboding. As I listened, I realized that not only were we lost, but I was hearing the only thing investigators would find after the crash. I was getting a grotesque and very unwelcome prescreening of that very terrible thing: THE BLACK BOX.

Jose was still glued to the window. It seemed academic to ask him the question. His face said everything "Can't turn around. Not enough fuel to make it back to Quito. Must land. Must find airstrip."

And God, I thought, I wasn't even supposed to tee on this flight. It was the classic plane-crash tragedy. There had been a change of plans, a last-minute decision to fly. A series of strange events during the past week had come together to put me on this plane at this moment--and now, in a rush, those events passed through my mind. Why, for heaven's sake, couldn't Russell and I have just had a nice, peaceful trip into the rain forest that first time, without all the intrigue? Why did we have to stumble onto a bizarre and complicated news story, one that was sending me back into the forest this second time? Russell was my companion, a crazed genius of a photographer who wore piranha teeth and a light meter on the same necklace and who carried an eight-foot-long fishing rod with him wherever he went. What in the world did Russell and I know about news. We hated news. We had abandoned newspapers for travel magazines years earlier, we hated news so much.

Which is how, the week before, we wound up in the Amazon in the first place, deep inside Ecuador's lower Cuyabeno Wildlife, Reserve. Planning to focus on wildlife, nothing more, we traveled by plane, then by motorized boat, then by dugout canoe; then we walloed part of the way; then we waded through swamps pulling boats behind us a la Humphrey Bogart. Then, when we finally reached the end of the earth, suffocating in the dense greenery and isolation of the Amazon, ready to do a light story on leaf-cutter ants and freshwater dolphin, we discovered the unexpected Something just shy of a shooting war was stirring in the Cuyabeno. Beleaguered forest Indians were using dynamite detonation wire as clotheslines. Rogue oil explorers--from whom the dynamite came--were muscling in illegally on the reserve lurking behind every tree. Oil production would obliterate the forest; and the Indians, it turned out, were backed into a corner with nowhere left to run. They were making a last stand. A showdown was in the works.

All of which was startling enough even before the Oil Helicopter from Hell swooped down on our canoe that one afternoon, buzzing the water angrily, telling Russell and me, in effect, to split. But just when things couldn't get weirder, we heard the rumor about the small village down the river where the great white chief lived. The chief was an American, reportedly born and raised among forest Indians, a blowgun hunter since age four, a man gone totally native. With paint on his face and wild-boar eye teeth strung around his neck, this bushed-out Caucasian was leading the Indian campaign to keep the oil intruders out. The name Kurtz settled over my mind like equatorial heat when I heard this. I saw a malarial dream of a man. Conrad's antihero fast-forwarded to the late twentieth century.

But Russell and I refused to track the rumor down. The whole jungle situation, in fact, had too many markings of a greet news story, so we did the only appropriate thing: We ignored it completely. I went back to Quito when the nature tour ended, leaving Russell behind only to get a few more tree shots. And that's when, inside my head, the whisper started. A voice from my newspaper past. Find Kurtz, it kept saying. Go back and find Kurtz. I banged my palm against my temple a few times until word reached Quito that the white chief, back in the jungle, was taking hostages now as part of his bizarre crusade. The whisper grew louder. "What are you awaiting for, pal? Go on. This ain't no page-twenty house fire. Get the story. Find him. Find Kurtz!"

And the next thing I knew, I was back on the Hercules, pink cotton in hand, Jose by my side. Despite myself, I was obeying the voice. I was on my way back. Back to the forest, back to the Indians, back to find Russell, back to find the oil explorers. Back to find Kurtz.

But first, God, the Hercules had to land. We had to find the airstrip. dose was still staring, mouth open, out the window. The cockpit conversation was still crackling in my ears. "Mierda!" one pilot said. "Let's turn around! Turn around! Try west! Too far this direction!" I learned later that, by the end, there were six crew members and two civilians crammed cheek-to-jowl in the cockpit, all searching the ground for the butter-knife runway. I had the sudden urge to add my own voice to the black box"--Good-bye, Mom. Good-bye, Dad. I love you, Sis."--when at last the cockpit words hit my ears "There it is! There it is! There it is!"