Paul Theroux - The Mosquito Coast

"We didn't get a reception like this the last time," Father said.

"I think they want us to follow them," Mother said.

As before, I ran ahead, stamping on the duckboards to frighten away the snakes. Jerry was behind me, looking worriedly from side to side.

He said, "What's that thing?"

"It wasn't here before." Clover said.

It was a wooden box in the clearing of Seville, as tall as me, and from a distance it looked like Fat Boy. It was smaller, somewhat resembling the original Worm Tub. It had a chimney stack and a firebox. Several women squatted near it. stoking its fire.

This pleased Father. "Maybe we inspired them after all," he said. He called out to the Gowdy. who was waiting to greet us. "What have you got there?" Father said. "That looks kind of familiar."

He walked straight up to it while the Seville people gathered around.

The Gowdy said, "Hice!"

Father opened the door, but the hinges of tattered vine were so flimsy the door fell off and the corner of it caught fire when it banged the firebox. Father kicked the fire out. We looked inside. It was empty.

"What the hell is this all about?" Father said.

They had made a copy of Fat Boy. But, Father said, what good was it? Of course it didn't work. It was only good for boiling eggs or setting yourself on fire. "Who gave you this harebrained idea?"

They smiled. They treated this box with a kind of reverence and asked Father to lead them in hymns in front of it. This enraged Father. He began to smell of his anger. The Gowdy tried to present Father with the lame puppy, but Father said he had enough sick animals of his own, and sick people too. So we unloaded the ice, and without even unwrapping it we went back to the Icicle. He said to Mother, "I hope you're satisfied." He also said he would never again go to Seville.

"I didn't come here to give people false idols to worship," he said. But the idol was there for all to see, made of warped planks and fastened by lianas.

"That's the trouble, really," Father said. "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."

"WHAT'S ice good for?" little Leon Maywit had asked. But Father did not mind silly questions from small children. He went on, "Mainly it's a preservative — it keeps food fresh, so it keeps you from starvation and disease. It kills germs, it suppresses pain, and it brings down swellings. It makes everything it touches taste better without altering it chemically. Makes vegetables crisp and meat last forever. Listen, it's an anesthetic. I could remove your appendix with a jackknife if I had a block of ice to cool your nerves and take your mind off the butchery. It doesn't occur naturally on the Mosquito Coast, so it's the beginning of perfection in an imperfect world. It makes sense of work. It's free. It's even pretty. It's civilization. It used to be carried from northern latitudes on ships in just the same way they carried gold and spices—"

We were on the Gallery, all of us, Foxes, Maywits, Zambus, Mrs. Flora Kennywick, and the others — one of Father's dinner gatherings. Father pointed his finger stump at the mountains rising behind Fat Boy.

He said, "And that's next. Injun country. We'll take them a ton."

The newer people looked at his finger, not the mountains, and just as he said "ton," there was an earth tremor and their eyes popped.

It was a noiseless wobble, a slow half-roll that made the Gallery quiver. It was twenty seconds of rotation, like the drop of a boat deck. Nothing fell down, though there was a human yell in the forest and a breathless bark of worry from the river. I had the feeling that everything had moved but us. The world's peel had wrinkled and made a little skid. That was the first shuddering stall, but its various shakes and smoothings lasted a full minute.

Father made a flutterblast with his hps and said, "Gaw!"

Mrs. Maywit said, "Oh, God, Roper, what we do?" and she and Mrs. Kennywick began praying.

When I heard "Roper," I looked at Mr. Maywit. He covered his face and sobbed, "Never mind!" The moment passed. I think I was the only one who heard.

"Pray if you must," Father said, "but I'd rather you listened to me."

Everyone except us looked worried, as if he might point again at the mountains and cause another earthquake.

"I'm just thinking out loud," Father said, "but if I had the hardware, know what I'd do?"

At this, Mother smiled. I guessed what she was thinking — why do anything?

It was plain from where we sat that Jeronimo was a success. We had defeated the mosquitoes, tamed the river, drained the swamp, and irrigated the gardens. We had seen the worst of Honduras weather — the June floods, the September heat — and we had overcome both. We had just this moment withstood an earth tremor: nothing had shaken loose! We were organized, Father said. Our drinking water was purified in a distiller that ran from Fat Boy's firebox. We had the only ice-making plant in Mosquitia, the only one of its kind in the world, and the capability, Father said, of making an iceberg.

Down there were cornstalks, eight-and-a-half feet high, with cobs a foot long—"So big, it only takes eleven of them to make a dozen." We had fresh fruit and vegetables and an incubator (Fat Boy's spare heat) for hatching eggs. "Control — that's the proof of civilization. Anyone can do something once, but repeating it and maintaining it — that's the true test." We grew rice, the most difficult of crops. We had a superior sewage system and shower apparatus. "We're clean!" An efficient windmill pump overrode the water wheel on the ice-making days. Most of the inventions had been made from local materials, and three new buildings were faced with Father's bamboo tiles. We had a chicken run and two boats at the landing and the best flush toilets in Honduras. Jeronimo was a masterpiece of order—"appropriate technology," Father called it.

We produced more than we needed. The extra fish we caught swam in a tank Father named "the Fish Farm" — his names were always a little grander than the things themselves. We harvested more than we could eat, but the excess was not sold. Some of it he gave to people in return for work, though he never handed out any food to beggars. What he preferred to do was cut the produce open — watermelons, say, or cucumbers or corn — and empty out the seeds and dry them. He would give these to anyone who helped him. There was always work to do — he was determined to straighten the river and clear it of hyacinths, for instance. "It could take a lifetime," he said. "But I've got a lifetime! I'm not going anywhere!" River workers were rewarded with blocks of ice and bags of seeds. "Hybrids! Burnees! Wonder corn! Miracle beans! Sixty-day tomatoes!"

We were happy and hidden. All you could see of Jeronimo from the river was Fat Boy's square head and tin hat and the smoking chimney stack. "Low visibility," Father said. "I don't want to be pestered by goofball missionaries in motorboats who want to come up here and ooze Scripture all over us."

It was now November, the weather like Hatfield in July, and Jeronimo was home. And for this, Father said, no one had said a prayer or surrendered his soul or pledged allegiance or dog-eared a Bible or flown a flag. We had not polluted the river. We had preserved the ecology of the Mosquito Coast. And all because we had put our trust in "a Yankee with a knack for getting things accomplished" — him. He often said that if it were not for white-collar crime and stupidity and a twenty-cent dollar and the storm clouds of war, he could have done the same things in Hatfield, Massachusetts.

All this was plain from the Gallery, which had just wobbled with the earth tremor, and where Father was saying, "If I had the hardware, know what I'd do?"