Origins of the Universe and What It All Means (12 page)

“River,” I read. “Rio. Thanks.”

Somewhere deep in the jungle (had the driver-guide not spoken English, I'd have been sure we were hopelessly lost, never to be found), we left our motorized boat and walked along a slippery village path that led to an elevated boardwalk through a flooded palm forest.

My mother stopped and pointed. Two giant electric-blue butterflies clung to huge leaves overhead. “It's an omen,” she said.

“Yes, a good one,” I said. I took out my phrasebook and turned to the dictionary. “Butterfly: mariposa. Blue: azul.” That's when it dawned on me that we weren't so different, my mother and I. There we were, in a strange land far from home, carrying slightly different items—lip gloss in my pack, Pepto-Bismol tablets in hers. Practical items for different reasons, things a person might need on an adventure through the jungle. The jungle. How many daughters and mothers have canoed the Amazon River together? There we were, living the
Wild Kingdom
adventure. This time there was no television, no thirteen-inch Zenith to fight over. Just us, two butterflies, and a Spanish-English dictionary. “
Dos mariposas es bonitas azul
” I said.

“
Si.
”

Then finally, the last leg of the journey: a peaceful, twenty-minute paddle in traditional dugout canoes through the swamp to the lodge.

jun•gle:
A wilderness of dense overgrowth; a place or situation of ruthless competition. My mother and I have always been competitive with each other, even though we outwardly appear to be opposites. Granola Granny and Girly Girl. But secretly, we vie for some unnamed, intangible prize.

com•pe•ti•tion:
My therapist once asked me, “Is your mother jealous of you?”

“I don't know.”

“Are you jealous of her?”

“No. We're just so...opposite.”

As we approached the lodge, I was shocked to see the locals swimming in the black water, diving from the dock and frolicking without a care. Kids and adults alike played and splashed and laughed, just like the public pool in my hometown. “Aren't there piranhas?” my mother asked our guide. That's when we were told that yes, there are piranhas here, but unless you're gushing blood from a main artery, there's no danger of attack. Evidently there are forty to sixty piranha species, some much more aggressive than others. It's the really aggressive ones we hear about, the ones that make world headlines. The ones featured in Loney Planet. The Tupi devilfish of legend.

Sacha Lodge would be home sweet stilted home for the next several days, the closest thing to luxury one will find in Amazonia. The main building is literally a tree house about six feet above the water—three stories high with a dining room on the bottom floor, a bar on the second floor, a small library on the third floor, and a little observation deck on top. Boardwalks lead to seven duplexlike, thatched-roof cabins. Each room features a flush toilet, hot water (a rarity in this neck of the woods), and screened walls. A generator provides electricity from 6 a.m. until 10 p.m. Accommodations fit for Farrah.

For the first three days in the jungle, I was able to keep up the arduous pace of my diehard travel companions. Before sunrise the first morning, we pulled on our Wellies—knee-high rubber boots—and hiked through the fauna. A bare-chested native guide, a black-haired man with a round face, blazed the way with machete in hand. Bringing up the rear was our other guide, the Australian woman with pointy red hair.

The trail led us through pristine high ground where the rainforest canopy reaches its greatest height. Hundreds of fifty-foot kapok trees towered above, their roots forming huge buttresses and stilts to give support on thin soil. That afternoon, we climbed to the top of a 130-foot observation tower perched above the biggest kapok of all. It was there, high above the canopy, that my mother leaned against the damp wood rail of the observation platform and peered through her binoculars.

“It's a three-toed sloth,” she said, giddy with childlike excitement. With an outstretched arm, she pointed in the sloth's general direction while keeping the binoculars pressed firmly against her face. Watching her revel in her discovery reminded me of Marlin Perkins's narration, the episodes we'd watch when I was a kid, how I'd dream of exploring exotic jungles and faraway lands. And now here we were, traipsing among spotted toucans, parrots, monkeys, and snakes.

“This is the life,” my mother said when the sloth had finally climbed out of sight, and I agreed.

I realized then that, although we weren't getting along particularly better at that moment than we had during the day, at least we weren't
not
getting along. In fact, we were having a pretty good time. Standing in the sky-high treetop, spotting exotic animals in their natural habitat, we shared an experience, did something that most mothers and daughters would never do. We had embarked on an adventure, and now, in the thick of it, halfway through the journey, the three-toed sloth brought the old
Wild Kingdom
show to life. Real life. Real time. No closed door. No dictionary or heavy sighs. We'd grown past that, at least for now, for this moment.

 

Twenty-Nine

 

That evening we all piled into a single dugout canoe to search for caiman, the alligators of South America. In the dead of night we paddled silently through the swamp. With six people in one canoe, it would have been easy to tip over. Our native guide called out in caiman-language grunts—a deep, throaty grumble. And then, when something in the darkness grunted back, a sharp stabbing pain shot from my belly up through my throat. With a flashlight clutched between his teeth and the machete tucked into the waist of his shorts, the guide got out of the boat, walked barefoot through the waist-deep water, and picked up a two-foot-long baby caiman. Its eyes reflected the light and its vertical pupils narrowed to knife-thin slits. The guide clamped the caiman's long, teeth-filled mouth shut with one hand and pinned its writhing tail under his arm. Its glowing yellow eyes made me gasp. “You want to touch?” the guide asked, and brought it over so we could have a look.

I wondered where Momma Caiman was. Any momma of any species will protect its young, will attack and kill any perceived threat. Momma bears will rip a man from limb to limb to protect their cubs. Momma humans can lift cars to save their children. My mother would do anything for me. That's what mommas do—they turn off the television, they get their Ph.D. and buy a house and put food on the table. They buy you dictionaries. They make mistakes and they're hard to get along with and they disapprove of things they don't understand. But I understand, so she must have done something right. I understand that we each have our own definitions of what makes a woman. I need not define our relationship by our differences. I understand that my mother saves packets of saltine crackers while I imagine Wonder Woman somersaulting from a crashing plane. And that's okay, it's all okay. That's what mommas do; they remember the
Wild Kingdom
dream and they stuff snacks into fanny packs in case we're hungry later.

“You touch?” the guide said again. How many teeth does a momma caiman have, I wondered. As the guide stepped closer, I protested and squirmed involuntarily. The canoe tipped side to side and almost flipped us out. “No move!” the guide yelled at me, and henceforth I was banned from nighttime canoe rides.

a•dap•ta•tion:
The ability of a species to survive in a particular ecological niche, especially because of alterations of form or behavior brought about through natural selection. It's not like the Amazon trip fixed everything. We still annoyed each other plenty, believe me—we still do. But we've learned to work around each other's quirks. Or just give each other space. Every creature requires a certain amount of unencumbered habitat, a zone of no-enter-dom. I stopped slamming the door in my mother's house years ago. Now we find other ways to keep a wide berth, sometimes wider and sometimes narrower, but a tacit agreement exists. And it mostly works.

 

Thirty

 

By day three, I'd gotten the hang of jungle life. There are some simple rules to living in Tarzan's kingdom:

a)
    
Everything is sopping wet all the time—your clothes, your bath towel, your bed sheets. Your shirt will actually mold while you're wearing it. There's nothing you can do about this.

b)
    
The drinking water is brown. It's filtered water from the river. The brown is tannin and harmless (so I'm told), so pretend it's flavorless tea and enjoy.

c)
    
The insects are huge. If you wake during the night to find a beetle the size of a dinner plate clinging to the cabin screen or the wall next to your head, don't scream. It will wake Momma Caiman under your boardwalk, and she's already perturbed.

d)
    
Don't wear makeup, not even mascara. It doesn't fit the safari-vest image, and it just slides off in the humidity anyway. Clear lip gloss is okay.

e)
    
A Swiss Army knife is every woman's best friend. Scrape the muck from under your fingernails; trim your bangs; flick dime-sized ants off your pillow and wrestle your crackers from their mandibles.

By day four, I really needed a day off. Between the day hikes and nighttime scary noises, I was worn out. “Go on without me,” I told the Rambo chicks as they tromped into the jungle.

My mother reached into her fanny pack and handed me packages of pulverized Saltines. “Here, I saved these for you,” she said.

“Thanks. I'm going to nap in my hammock, then do a little Lonely Planet reading. I might even go for a dip—I've seen the locals do it. It's safe.”

But now, in the middle of this black lagoon—what a fool, I said to myself.

I was alone in caiman territory. In deep water. How deep? I pulled my arms through the water, but I got nowhere. I wondered how long it would take a school of piranhas to devour my flesh, clean my skeleton of all muscle, tendons, and cartilage. Would my bones float to the surface or settle into the mud? Or I could simply drown out there. Panic and flail and choke. Sink below the surface in a frenzy—down to the dark depths of the Tupi devilfish, like a Domino's Pizza delivery to the underbelly of the Amazon.

What's a girl like me doing in a place like this, I wondered. A girl...like me?

e•vac•u•a•tion:
1) Expulsion, as of contents. 2) Physiology: discharge, as of waste matter through excretory passages, especially from the bowels. 3) Removal of persons from an endangered area. 4) Get me the hell outta here.

Girl like me, I thought.

Lid still on. Ears above water.

There is no other girl like me.

In my head, Marlin Perkins narrated the scene. The camera panned around, focused on me, and
Wild Kingdom
's sky sang: “... you can count on when the going's rough….”

I was a Charlie's Angel, holding the bad guys at bay. “Freeze, motherfuckers,” I said out loud and took another stroke—or maybe I just thought the words.

Arm out, stroke. Lid on. Stroke.

Stand back, all evil fish, all things creepy and crawly. I swim where I dare!

I roared in unison with the howler monkeys above and glided with ease toward the marshy bank.

Stroke and glide.

Because like my mommy said, I am so much
more
.

 

PART IV

Starry Nights

 

Thirty-One

 

Visalia, California (2013)—

My father telephones from Mexico to ask how things are going. I answer in half-truths.

“How's my house?” he asks.

“Great,” I tell him. I don't tell him I've let a friend move in for free.

“How's my stuff?”

“Good,” I tell him.

I tell him that the one hundred and one legal-size boxes from Office Depot that he packed during his last visit home have been moved into the shed. (Save for a brief return to Visalia several months after the three-week-visit-with-a-vague-return-date scheme—just long enough to box his belongings—he's stayed in Mexico. So far, so good.) My father still has hopes that my brother will arrange to have the boxes shipped via an international moving company, but the fact that it would cost ten times more to ship the stuff than it would to replace most of it has my brother stalling. I tell my dad that shipping is expensive. I tell him that because my brother lives half of the time here and half of the time there, he might drive to Mexico with my dad's stuff sometime in the (vague) future.

I don't tell him that other than the one hundred and one boxes in the shed, almost everything is gone. My brother and I got rid of the furniture and knick-knacks and clothes and DVDs and magazines and, yes, even the massive porn collection that took up half the garage cabinets. I don't remind him that when he left two-plus years ago he vowed (promised?) he wasn't coming back, not ever, that Mexico would be permanent, that my brother and I should keep or otherwise dispose of his stuff—all his stuff—other than the Office Depot boxes. I don't tell him that we gave much of it away, some to charity, but most—even the porn—to a pair of men fortuitously cruising the neighborhood in a broken-down pickup and asking for scrap metal. It was their lucky day. I don't tell him we did this to make room for my friend. I don't tell him we let my friend move in as barter for maintaining the place, how David and I are planning things out for when David moves to Mexico for good, how I'm up to my eyeballs as it is and maintaining yet another a vacant house will put me over the edge. I don't tell him about my friend moving in because I don't want to hurt his feelings. I don't tell him for fear he'll get territorial and rush back to Visalia, to his rightful house, to his boxes, to me.