Wanderlust (27 page)

“You and I, Beth—we affect people. We just do.”

This flattered me a great deal, and so, now thinking pleasantly of my own outsize impact on the world, I dropped the subject of Patricia.

Rituals fell into place. The next morning I filled my canteen from the river, dropped in a purification tablet, and gave it a good shake. Then I poured in powdered orange juice, which covered the tinny taste left by the purification tablet, and shook again. I washed and dried my feet in the stream, put fresh bandages on my blisters, pulled up my socks, and tied my boots. And we started walking uphill again.

On the evening of our third day, at sunset, we arrived where we were supposed to be on the night of day two, a village called Nauro. We came out of the jungle and down a gentle slope to a wide grassy flat dotted with huts made of sticks and fronds. Wiry children in shorts and flimsy dresses ran up the path to meet us, and then galloped alongside us as we descended, their ringmaster calling “this way, this way.” After being lost and not seeing anyone but our group for three days, it felt like a glimpse of civilization. I was pleased to see a pile of bananas and papayas. We negotiated to buy some fruit, and for the luxury of an overnight hut. It was raised a few feet off the ground on stilts and consisted of a pointed roof over a wide floor covered with woven matting, which creaked a little as we padded across it in our socks. All four of us would share the same floor space, and Patricia, I was pretty sure, shot me a warning glare before we turned in, as if to say, “You wouldn't dare.”

Godwin said he knew the way. He hadn't known the route we'd taken to get to Nauro, he explained, but this part after Nauro he had hiked many times.

The ground didn't get steep, which was briefly a welcome change, but it got swampy and swampier. I stopped to change from hiking boots into Tevas. Pretty soon we were more wading than walking. Someone had laid down logs as a path through the swamp, but the logs kept sinking underfoot. Some were so skinny and slippery that I fell off again and again, and finally just gave up and trudged through the opaque water. Maybe this was how you got through the jungle, by just giving in.

After half an hour of slogging through knee-deep water, I realized that I had no idea when it was going to end. If we kept marching forward, how long would it take to reach dry land? What if we went back? We weren't World War II soldiers under orders; we'd done this to ourselves. We plodded on, and the reed grass became so tall that I couldn't see far ahead. When I could see over it, the jungle looked to be in the far distance. “Watch out; the grass is sharp,” James called from ahead, at exactly the moment I—dammit!—felt a blade graze my forearm. A scratch in these conditions was more than an annoyance; it was an opportunity to worry about tropical diseases festering in my sores.

Justin was the first one to realize that he had leeches on him.
Gross,
I thought, and quickly looked down at myself. There were three black dots on my calves.

Appalled, the four of us wanted to stop and remove leeches, but Yepuku urged us on. “Faster, faster!” he said. “They won't stick on you.”

When we regained dry ground, we all sat down on a log and peered at our leech-covered legs.

“You can burn them,” Patricia said, and we scrounged in our packs for lighters. I plucked one off with my finger. It left a small red welt where it had been sucking my blood.

“You can pick them off!” I said.

“Only if they're small,” Patricia called back, experimenting with one of her own, finally not sounding sleepy at all.

James tried to set one of his on fire and we smelled burning hair.

Justin had two leeches bigger than quarters and was trying to decide between burning and picking.

“Let me try,” I said. I held the flame to his leg and his skin and hair started to burn. It had to hurt, but he stared at me stoically, fondly, and didn't say a thing. The leech fell to the ground.

Ten minutes later we were leech-free and comradely, back in fresh Band Aids, dry socks, and boots. I'd slathered on another layer of Bullfrog. Its chemical, lemony smell had become a fixed mnemonic. I even knew its bitter taste from when I forgot that Justin was also slathered in toxic goo, and gave him a kiss.

A little later, back in the jungle, pleased with ourselves for having conquered a swamp, we decided it was time for a map check. And we soon realized that, relative to where we'd wanted to reach that evening, we were four hours off course.

No more listening to the guides, we swore. And we'd really better start using that GPS. Patricia and I were talking about whether one of us should climb a tree—we were the most agile—when a family of six appeared. They were all barefoot and walking at twice our speed. The mother and father had weathered faces that made them look elderly, even though they were probably no more than forty; life expectancy here was fifty-something. Every member of the family, down to a girl of about four, carried his or her own bush knife.

The father explained to Godwin, Yepuku, and Samuel how very far off the Kokoda Trail we were, and our nonguides looked genuinely surprised.

The
paterfamilias
and his eldest son then led us to a fork in the trail and pointed down one of the tines. He spoke in a local language to Godwin, who translated in a mix of pidgin and English. We had an hour-and-a-half walk ahead of us. We were to go up a mountain, back down the other side (this was sounding drearily familiar), and when we found water at the bottom, we should camp there for the night.

That was at about four in the afternoon. After a couple of hours we were still walking uphill. We stopped to eat cucumbers we'd bought in Nauro, then kept going. After numerous false crests—after each of which another, higher one suddenly appeared in the distance—we finally reached the peak of the highest ridge and began to descend the other side. That was about when the last of the light disappeared.

We got out our flashlights and began, gingerly now, to make our way downhill, and the locus of the pain in my legs shifted from my thighs to my calves. After waving our flashlights around at first, we learned to point them strictly at the ground, so as not to ruin our night vision. The path was narrow, steep, and covered in places with hard, tangled roots. Sometimes a muddy patch shifted underfoot. There was no possibility of going back the way we came, and no possibility of camping on the spot, so there really wasn't much to say. At one point Patricia remarked, as calmly as a scientist observing a lab specimen, “We have redefined stupidity.”

James's flashlight sputtered out. He moved in closer behind Justin to take advantage of his light. The night became timeless. After a while I no longer had any idea how long we'd been trudging downhill in the dark. I might have been doing it my whole life;
this might have been my entire existence, and everything else just a dream. The pain, the repetitious movements, the bobbing lights. I no longer even felt tired. In fact, I felt okay. Maybe even good. I could keep going. I could hike forever.

We hiked downhill some more. Instinct was in charge now. The more evolved parts of my mind, sensing that they weren't needed, wandered off. I thought about Stu, sailing across the Pacific. How he must have loved that. I thought about a novel I'd discovered by a young Australian writer,
Praise,
and about what flakes all the characters were, and yet how they were deeply meaningful flakes because their flakiness was just a protest against life's meaninglessness. I thought about Kristin and knew that she could have handled this trek. We'd camped together as teenagers, and she was the more athletic one. I wondered again how she could have gone home.

Godwin was saying something up ahead. He was agitated. “We're here, we're here!” I didn't believe it at first, but as I descended toward his voice I saw that we really were somewhere, if not at a spot that I would have considered a “somewhere” before this trip. It was a wide flat area next to a stream. With my newly trained eye and my mind on life's basic necessities, it promised food and rest.

I took this as a new challenge, one that filled me with energy. We would set up camp! Yepuku and Godwin built a fire. When the white-gold light sprang up, I saw that James was sitting on a rock looking vacant. Samuel was missing. “He very slow,” Yepuku said without alarm.

Justin and I set up our tent and he crawled inside and lay down, booted feet still sticking out the flap. With James listless, Patricia and I set up her and James's tent, and James wordlessly climbed inside.

“Let's see, shall we have rice with soup powder, or soup powder with rice?” Patricia asked, unnaturally buoyant.

“Rice with soup powder,” I said. “And as an appetizer, a cucumber!”

Godwin and Yepuku eyed us like we were crazy, which was becoming true.

When the rice soup was ready, Patricia took a mug to James, and I took a mug to Justin.

“C'mon, you should eat,” I said quietly, and he struggled into a sitting position and accepted the soup, slurping from the top of the mug. I returned to the campfire and sat there with Patricia and Godwin, drinking my own soup and taking cucumber bites.

“I don't think I've ever had a better meal,” I said.

Justin called weakly from the tent: “Are women stronger than men?”

Typical Justin: saying something that flattered me, but that I wanted to resist, because I felt myself so easily falling for the flattery. There's something suspicious about someone who's always stroking your ego—maybe this was why I struggled to hold my feelings for him in check.

“Evidently,” Patricia said. Just then there was a rustle and Samuel emerged from the bush, and sat down silently with us at the fire. Then James called from his tent. “Do large-breasted women have bigger brains?”

What we needed to get through this was no longer physical strength. That had stopped mattering hours, maybe days, ago, when we all exceeded what we'd thought were our physical limits. We'd all pushed ourselves through pain and exhaustion. I remembered how, when we first stepped into the jungle outside Port Moresby, it had felt like going into a portal to a
different world. Now any one of us, Godwin, Samuel, and Yepuku included, would have taken an escape hatch.

Now it was psychological strength that mattered, the ability to stay calm and keep pushing ourselves. I would never set any records on lung capacity or muscle power, the things that made me resent boys because they had so much more. But maybe I had an advantage in tenacity. Maybe I wasn't faking it anymore. I hadn't been sure, but now I knew for a fact that I wasn't just saying I could do something like this, I wasn't just trying to be cool or make a point. All that was irrelevant now. I was really sitting here, lost in the jungle, probably hundreds of miles from the nearest road, at risk of illness, injury, and unfriendly locals, and I was okay.