And on every street corner and tidy parkette, Beth spotted the strollers. For her they were little buggies of anguish — their sturdy wheels and bright utilitarian fabric, their multitude of clipped-on accessories and soft, cushioned interiors. She wanted to puncture their tires, spray paint their protective sides, slash their UV-blocking visors. Paul knew this, he saw this, and he said, “Let’s go away. Somewhere where people don’t think this way, the way we think.”
Beth had nodded, semi-entranced by Paul’s ability to imagine quick fixes and to act on them with a kind of jittery intensity. When he suggested Ecuador, the emerald light and mercurial moisture of the rain forest, she had shrugged then wondered sheepishly, “Isn’t it a bit, I dunno, cliché?”
“It won’t be cliché for long,” he said grimly. “It will be gone.”
“That’s what I mean,” she said. “It’s like we’re peering in at a dying, caged animal, isn’t it?”
“Maybe,” said Paul in a way that suggested he hated himself, “there is a way of helping.”
He looked like he wanted to stick forks in his eyes, so Beth agreed to go. Paul had a friend who had been through the region with an NGO. The friend gave them tips and details: what to bring, whether to tip or haggle, which immunizations to endure and delicacies to sample. They were to spend two weeks in the Amazon basin, in Cuyabeno National Park.
The trip had been literally breathtaking, fourteen days and nights where Beth spent whole minutes trying to teach herself to breathe again. Was it the humidity or simply the intensity? They called it the world’s pharmacy, an Eden: sweet balm and scourge, the innocence and viscera of new beginnings. But it was also something more sinister, something cloying and stealthy. To say it was unlike anything Beth had ever experienced might have been inaccurate — there were woods in northern Ontario whose fog of blackflies and sneering impenetrability came close, maybe. But where the native people of her northern province had been decimated by white man’s guilt, these jungle lands were still inhabited by their original denizens — men and women with wide implacable faces and smooth, rubbery skin who clambered up the banks of the river with ease, clutching plastic jugs of gasoline, babies strapped to their backs with long strips of cloth.
Miguel, their tour guide, was such a man. Short and compact in body, barrel-chested, with a few uneven black sprigs of hair for a beard, he had a thin, rosy scar along his jawline and the haircut of a more urban, moneyed man. When he smiled, Beth noted his strong, small, pointy teeth.
This was in a café in Lago Agrio, way-station for travelers, frontier town for the desperate and entrepreneurial. She and Paul had been waiting a long time on a patio, clinking their cups of Nescafé against their saucers.
“Do you think that’s him?” Paul pointed toward the street, where a mocha-skinned man was pulling a trolley. They were to expect a guide who spoke five languages, a war veteran, friendly and “uninhibited,” the keen teenager who booked their trip had reassured them. When Miguel appeared it was from within the rendezvous restaurant; his arms made his T-shirt bulge with their baseball-sized biceps and he was sporting cheap orange flip-flops, which he continued to wear for the duration of the journey, exposing his long, yellowy-tough toenails, and making the rest of the tour group, in their beige, super-tread hiking shoes, feel subtly, wonderfully mocked.
On the bus to the oversized, motorized canoe, which was to take them to their campsite, the dust from the window made Beth cough, and the rutted roads caused the bus to jump. The inside of her head was all jangly with priorities and survival, and she felt sunburned although she had not been in the sun. She nodded to the two Germans who had joined the group, and then pushed past Paul, who was sleeping, a thin line of spittle reaching from his bottom lip to the strap of his day pack, which he had, wary of pickpockets, left attached to his back.
“Do you mind?” She motioned to the vacant aisle seat next to Miguel.
“Not at all,” he said. “You are welcome.”
She sat next to him, not speaking, trying to catch her breath.
“You are having some difficulty, some respiratory difficulty?” He turned toward her, face creased with concern and something else — amusement or maybe lust?
“I’m fine,” she said, and took in a big lungful of air, right down into her diaphragm, as she’d learned in a few yoga classes and tricky situations.
“Good,” he said and went back to his book.
Beth closed her eyes, but that made her dizzy, so she opened them. It was difficult, sitting on the aisle, to find a place to look. Straight ahead meant a row of seatbacks, brown vinyl and grimy. It meant absorbing the reality of the interior of the bus, a rollicking, wretched press of passengers, bulky bags, boxes, and bound chickens. It meant considering which qualifications, exactly, were required to drive a bus in this strange country. And looking outside, well, that would involve craning over Miguel to the window so that her head was positioned directly above his crotch.
Also, Beth was experiencing traveler’s terror — the pervasive notion that each moment represented a small treasure trove of noteworthy difference, of sights, sounds, smells completely and utterly foreign to what she had ever encountered, and that she would never pass this way again. She pivoted her body and her breast grazed Miguel’s arm. She muttered an apology, and squinted out at the side of the road. Outside was both hazy with dust and excessively green. The foliage looked prehistoric — gigantic ferns bowing chaotically to the palms reaching high up into the cloudless sky. This was it — the jungle. Miguel shifted to turn the page of his book and she felt obliged to speak. “What are you reading?”
He closed the book to show her the cover, a sepia-toned watercolor of a barn with a fair-haired woman standing in the foreground looking to the horizon. In the top right-hand corner of the book was a gold seal. Beth peered at it. It was one of Oprah’s book club picks. Miguel was watching her.
She had no idea what to say. The man in the tour agency had told them Miguel still had a bullet in his thigh from fighting in the border dispute with Peru. Finally she settled on, “Any good?”
Miguel nodded eagerly. “Very good, and it helps me to practice, to stay fluent, use new words.” He opened the book to the page he was on. “What does this mean?” He pointed to a word.
Beth did not know what the word meant. She took the book from Miguel and read the blurb on the back. A multigenerational saga set in the American Midwest with a complicated, malevolent patriarch at its core. “Must be dialect,” she said, shaking her head. “Sorry.”
“It’s okay.”
But she knew she had fallen in his estimation. She glanced out the window again. There were black pipes running alongside the road that seemed to be made out of the same plastic used to make heavy-duty sports drink bottles. The pipes didn’t look very serious, especially next to the profusion of vine and leaf that surrounded them. They passed a length of pipe covered in white spray paint. Beth caught the word OXY repeated in messy, angry capital letters. “What is that?”
Miguel closed his novel, placing a purple bookmark in its pages. “Oil pipelines,” he said. “My people, the people of the river, the Siona, they want the oil companies out. They’re sabotaging our home. We have stopped them before. We are well-organized, and although it is not entirely in our nature, we protest peacefully.”