Savage is the Dawn

Machete Trail

When the day broke and the dew dripped off the bottom of my hammock, I made a faint-hearted attempt to roust my eyelids to look deep into the disappearing specters of the jungle mists. Listlessly I swung in the air hammocked between the two wet and mossy sides of great black trunks. I hung in the space between rest and exhaustion, that fogs the mind and memories of a body in repose. The weight of drowsiness always hangs about the heaviest when one knows what herculean labors the oncoming sunlight must herald.

The air vibrated from the cacophony of sharp shrill squawks and guttural chirps of the birds and monkeys, waging wars way above in the great canopies. From these dauntless heights dropped the thick cords of tangled vines that bunched and twisted and tore at the trees around me. The giant's feet pierced into the earth all around me. High above where the last vestiges of my vision terminated into the stark white of clouds I saw winding vines and stained-glass leaves, cutting the sun's sacred love into ribbons and scattering them unevenly about the dense ferns and scarlet orchids that bubbled up from the sweet-smelling decay of the ageless marshes, just below my tired and aching back.

That's the thing about jungle travel. In my last few weeks as an off-trail wanderer here in Peru, you never seem to own, or can remember ever having owned, a pair of dry socks. Within every ten feet there is an unavoidable puddle. And these puddles scattered about contain spirits; they must, for each seems content within its deeply peevish reflections to smile, by way of mosquito wrought ripples, at even the concept that a traveler might wet their foot within.

When you have to, you find some log or branch to step on top of; the alternative is that you may find the bogs bellow, without a stable bottom. Should there be a bottom to the pits at all, they would only contain the thick tarry muck that would spill over the leather top of one's boot and seep placidly between the wet sock and the strained fabric on the inside of the boot. The rancorously foul-smelling rot would pierce the air with its thousand-year-old smell, as soon as you lift your leg to try and free yourself, should you be able to lift your leg at all. Upon freeing your limbs the putrid black filth would only work its way down the boot line unto your toes, where it would puddle between your sweaty digits and fester with oncoming disease.

It was a slow nasty business, moving through the undergrowth, filled with the ends of worms and an ever-present fear of snakes. My body quaked with the labor of rising into the warm, thin beams of light. My hammock swayed as I surveyed the forest floor for overt dangers. By this I mostly meant snakes; little snakes, which posed as branches and vines, and whose bite meant a slow untimely death, far from all help of modern medicine and big snakes, whom I have heard of men in my position, sleeping in hammocks, when they awoke to a strange lack of sensation in the right or left arm, only to discover the appendage buried up to the hilt in the stomach of an anaconda, who had already begun his digestion of that limb, and who's backward-facing needle-like teeth, will make the dismount, quite troublesome.

There was no fear of exhausting a list of possible dangers here. There were wild men about too, not just the rumors of tribesmen, who have been since long left to the privacy of their practices, because of their lack of interest in institutionalized man's quirks and perceived advantages, or because of the lethality in which they regarded the trespassers into their territory. But also, men of society who wished not to be remembered and moved about much as I do, yet not from a sense of artistic purposes, but are men who should be regarded with care as 'end-of-the-line'ers.'

In the saturated dawn, I checked the dampness of my footwear. My hope, last night as I laid down my wet boots upon cut shoots of undergrowth, was that they may be half dry for the next days' travel to Akatan: a little fishing village along a great muddy snake of a river. My socks were gray with overuse and were starting to develop holes around the toes. I looked at them helplessly laid across the backs of my overturned boots. They had hardly dried by my campfire and what progress was made, had been undone by the onset of the dew.