Paul Theroux - The Mosquito Coast

We walked beside the creek for a while. The land was broken by level terraces. Father said, "This is how a river is born. You're seeing it with your own eyes. You didn't have to get it out of a book. This is the source of oceans."

It was as if Father had created the stream with his speeches, as if he had talked it into existence with the racket and magic of his voice. From will power alone, so it seemed, he had made the pleasant valley appear. We were in the open, under a strong sun. In the jungle I had not felt exposed. There were so many different kinds of tree cover. But this valley felt like outdoors — bushy walls on both sides. The stream, shrunken in the dry season, was a green vein running through the middle of a wide rocky riverbed.

"This is satisfactory," Mr. Haddy said, borrowing one of Father's words. "We can have a lanch here. Or one of them pipanto things."

There was a flat-bottomed boat in the shallow stream. It was a wooden trough, and a man was standing in its stern and poling it to a sandbank under some buttonwoods.

Father said, "I think I can take credit for inventing that boat."

"That a pipanto," Mr. Haddy said. "That a pitpan."

Father said that the fact that it was used by the Zambus and Miskitos made no difference. He had dreamed it up as the best design for our river, and he was pleased that the same design was used here.

"It took these people a thousand years or more to invent this boat. How long did it take me, Figgy?"

"We're being watched," Mother said.

The man had drawn his boat up to the sandbank. He stood there like a heron, with one leg drawn up, staring at us. He was very thin, not as dark as a Zambu, and had choppy teeth.

" Naksaa, " Father said. It was the most friendly all-purpose word, meaning hello, how are you, good day, thank you, and all the rest.

Mr. Haddy gave the man his dead curassow and made it seem as if we had left Jeronimo and walked all that way and camped on the slope especially to deliver this present.

"He look a little hungry," Mr. Haddy said.

The man was examining Father with shining eyes. He said, "Mr. Parks."

Then we knew he was a Miskito, because Miskitos could not pronounce F.

Father said, "He knows me. Which is surprising, because I've changed." He smiled. "I guess I have a reputation around here."

Mr. Haddy said to the Miskito, "Yep, that is Mr. Farkis."

The Miskito spoke excitedly to Mother. "This man give me my garden!" He began to recommend Father to us. He pointed past the buttonwoods to a hut and some tall cornstalks. "Big one right there. Big tomatoes, like this one" — he made a fist.

"The hybrids," Father said. "I practically kill myself making ice, and all I'm remembered for is the seeds I bought in Florence, Mass."

"And peppers like this!"

"You came to Jeronimo and did some work, eh? I paid you off in seeds? Too bad about the ice. It was a good idea, but a little unwieldy."

The Miskito was saying, "Yes, yes."

Father said, "I invented this boat."

"Everybody got pipantos," Mr. Haddy said. "And them that ain't, got cayukas."

"This is my boat," Father said.

The Miskito insisted on taking us to see his garden, so we climbed the bluff above the sandbar and walked to his hut. It was a rickety patched hut of grass and palm leaves, but his garden sprawled beautifully around it. It was tall tassely corn and unpropped tomato vines, peppers, string beans, and summer squashes. There were muskmelons, too. These vegetables looked out of place in an Indian's garden. There were no papayas, avocados, calabashes, or granadilla. This was like Hatfield; like Jeronimo. The Miskito had grown them all from seeds that Father had given him months before, when he had crossed the ridge to visit us. He had done a day's work, or more, and taken the seeds as payment. He had never known seeds to sprout so quickly and bear such plump fruit.

Father snapped a string bean and said, "Kentucky Wonders!"

There were bananas near the hut, the sort of plantains the Indians called "plas," because they were like flasks. But Father said the Miskito deserved no credit for growing them — they grew all by themselves.

We heard the sound of whipping. It was the Miskito's wife, thrashing rice stems against a frame and letting the rice grains fall on a cowhide mat. She stopped when the Miskito called her, and she served us wabool and fried bananas and roasted ears of corn. And she plucked Mr. Haddy's curassow and trussed it to a spit over the fire.

Father would not eat anything.

"Don't take it personally," he said, waving the wabool away.

Mother said, "It's their custom. You know that."

"What about my customs?" Father said.

I felt he had not changed at all, for he had always said this in Jeronimo.

He grinned at the Miskito.

"I'm saving up for later," he said. "Hunger's a good thing. Makes you determined. Food puts you straight to sleep. That thing you've got in your hand there" — the Miskito was holding the burned and greasy curassow—"that's a soporific. Sure, you knew that, didn't you? I'm not talking about starvation, but hunger. It's nature's mainspring. It's a kind of strength."

He smiled at us. We sat on the ground, gnawing-bones alongside the Miskito's pig named Ed.

"There's only one thing I really and truly crave," Father said. "Think you can fix me up with a bath?"

Speaking carefully and with sign language and noises, he explained that he wanted some privacy and hot water and a basket. The Miskito provided him with what he wanted. Father then hung the finely woven basket from a tree and had the Miskito fill it with hot water, so it streamed like a shower. This ritual took place behind the Miskito's hut. We heard Father encouraging the Miskito and spitting water and scrubbing himself.

Mr. Haddy said, "Fadder got customs, for true!"

"That shower bath was better than a meal," Father said when he was done. His face was pink. His ears stuck out. He jumped in the sun to dry. "And it's taken the edge off my appetite. I needed that. I'm ready, Mother."

The Miskito was bewildered by all this business and by Father's talk. As if to please him, he sent his wife into the garden to gather vegetables, about four bushels in pretty baskets. And as a last present, he handed Father the pole to his pipanto. Father went through the motions of refusing these gifts, but he accepted them when the Miskito loaded the baskets into the pipanto and waited by it, screaming softly for Father to go aboard.

Mr. Haddy said, "He saying 'lukpara'—ain't worry."

Father stepped in and said, "I'm just borrowing it, Fred. You can have it back any time you like."

***

That was how we came to be floating down the Rio Sico that day. Father poled and Mr. Haddy hung over the bow looking for obstructions. "Rock-stone!" he cried, when he saw one. There were only five inches of freeboard, but there was not a ripple in this river. It was forty miles to the coast, and Father calculated that the river was flowing at four miles an hour.

"Not fast enough, is it?" he said.

As soon as we rounded the first big bend and the Miskito's hut was out of sight, Father beached the pipanto. He found some loose wood for us to use as seats, wedging the planks amidships. He took off his shirt and rigged up an awning, tucking the tails into the starboard gunwales and stretching it over bent benches. He secured it by its sleeves.

"Looks like an oxygen tent! That's so you don't get heat stroke." He picked up a bundle of twigs. "And this is to give us a little speed. This is a real witch's broom!"

He lashed the twigs to the end of the pole, tying them with vines and turning it into a broomlike oar, so that he could scull from the stern one-handed.

Then he made a smudge pot to keep the stinging gnats away, and, smoking, we set off again. He promised that we would be on the coast by nightfall.