EDITORIAL & OPINION — ODDS ‘N’ SODS — Reverie of a wanderer

The following is the fifth in a series of articles in which the author, an exploration geologist based in Delta, B.C., recounts his experiences working in the jungles of Venezuela in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

I’ve been back home in Delta two weeks, and a restlessness stirs my soul. I try to calm it with long walks through the mountains or around the sea wall on sunny Sundays. I seek comfort at the golf course, or at the ball park, or over long, quiet dinners with my wife at home.

Here, surrounded by our books and the smells of our own cooking, I have a childlike desire to surrender the challenge and forget that beyond these four walls lies a world yet to be discovered. In middle age, Joseph Conrad wrote, “the triumphant conviction of strength, the heat of life in a handful of dust, the glow in the heart with every year grows dim, grows cold, grows small and expires — and expires too soon, too soon — before life itself.”

The world seems dim to me, and in seeking to stir up the embers of a youthful glow, I remember snatches of the past four months in Venezuela. Out of context, snatches of memory take on a romantic hue that is otherwise tempered by the day’s reality. Still, they are all that is left of us.

I remember flying with Pedro, watching the skies open up in front of us in a sweeping afternoon storm that blows over the jungle and leaves, in its wake, mist rising from a thousand different places. I remember the rain slowly creeping straight up the nose of the helicopter, then catching the curvature and streaming by like tracer fire or exploding fireworks.

You can smell the rain mingled with your own sweat and the cigarette smoke that swirls lazily in the cockpit. And you can hear it, barely audible as it competes with the turbine whine and rhythmic slapping of the rotor against the sky.

I remember my partner of the past four months, a man who, though in his mid-sixties, was child-like in his enthusiasm for what each day might bring. Leaping from a morning chopper drop, he would strip down to a loose pair of cotton pants and perhaps light a pipeful of tobacco to suck on while drawing a file across his machete. He charged into the darkness of the jungle as fast and fearlessly as any man I have ever seen. Although the jungle holds no surprises for this 40-year veteran of these foreign shores, it retains newness. From him, in the span of only four months, I learned more about the jungle than I would have learned in a decade on my own.

I remember a day’s last light at a nameless camp so deep in the impenetrable jungle that three weeks walking might not have seen us back. There is the squawking of parrots and the eerie roar, like some distant cheering crowd, of the howler monkeys to greet the first stars overhead. Swallows dart through the sky to reap the dusk’s harvest of mosquitoes. The fire burns down, and all of us sit quietly with our thoughts of home and loved ones, sharpened by the miles that separate us. The heat abates. One last cigarette, watching lightning illuminate ghostly silhouettes on the camp’s perimeter, and then surrender to the night.

Conrad’s Kurtz saw in the jungle a darkness that consumed him. While there is horror to be sure, and hardship, in that vast and tameless place, had I met my end there, I might have cried out to whomever would listen, “The beauty, the beauty.”