Paul Theroux - The Mosquito Coast

A few days ago, it had all been dust and gray trees. Now we were in a wilderness of mud and water. There were frogs where no frogs had been, and snakes, and animal tracks everywhere. Lizards left their marks all over the bank, like bars on sheet music, with little noteprints above and below the lines of their tails. There were more birds, and crabs, and crayfish, all stirred into life by the rain. We caught them with ease. Mother boiled them on the cookstove. It made me think that we could survive without the garden.

Father came sneakily into the hut one morning. There was mud all over his chest and the front of his thighs, and gunk on his hands and dripping from his beard and on his nose. He was angry. He had not wanted us to see him. But we stared, and even Mother was puzzled.

"Pushups," he said, and snatched the rope of the outboard.

***

"The scavengers are back," Father said, looking up. The gray gulls and fat pelicans had flown inland to feed on the creatures that had sprung out of the mud. Vultures followed them, but instead of feeding they found perches in the trees and waited. Father screamed at the birds, to frighten them away. They screamed back at him. He hated scavengers, he said — hated their mad eyes and their filthy beaks, the way they pounced, the way they fought over garbage. And, as if in revenge — but what had they done to us? — he caught them by letting them swallow baited hooks, and he plucked and roasted them. He ate them. His hunger was hatred. He used their grease on his outboard motor, and left their blood and feathers in the mud. One morning we saw that he had killed a vulture and hung it high on a tree. It stayed there, lynched, until the other birds tore it apart.

"Know why I hate scavengers?"

Mother said, "Allie, please," and turned away.

"Because they remind me of human beings."

He denied the lagoon was rising. Even after the shoreline engulfed most of the garden and covered the foundation of the smokehouse, he still would not admit the lagoon was filling. He said the land was settling.

"It's a sinking effect. That's why I waterproofed the hut. I was expecting this!"

He hammered a marker in the mud, at the lagoon's edge. The next morning, the marker was gone — either submerged or swept away. Father said a scavenging vulture had mistaken it for a turd and eaten it.

The storms had tidied our camp. Destruction had made it neater. The half-made coop for the curassows was gone. The latrine was in the creek. The boards for the walkway were covered in mud. The seven-man pump had collapsed — it looked small and simple on its back.

And the hut had begun to sink. It had once rested high on the mud bank, on its own watertight bottom. But now the mud brimmed around it. It looked like one of those family tombs, the bunkers with doors that are half imbedded in the ground in old graveyards.

It worried Mother. She said she could not cook while she was kneeling in water, and what if the hut just went on sinking until mud came through the hatches? Father moved the cookstove inside and fitted it with a chimney. The hut looked more than ever like a little barge, and now the lagoon lapped against its front.

"Allie, it makes me nervous."

Father got a rope and some pulleys and, using a tree to brace the arrangement of tow ropes, tried to yank the hut away from the lagoon. He struggled, but it was no use. The hut was stuck fast in the mud. He left it tethered to the tree.

"That shouldn't be happening," he said. "It's not supposed to get bogged down."

He fitted logs to the sides, at the level of the brimming mud, to stabilize it and prevent it from sinking further. He said he was sorry we did not have time to go down to the coast — the storms would be washing lots of interesting articles onto the beach. The wildest seas gave you the best things, he said — iron chains, steel drums, yards of sailcloth. It was only the ordinary tides that brought you toilet seats.

But we stayed at Laguna Miskita and tried to secure the camp. We dug trenches, we bailed, we fished. The storms assaulted us. They crept up and darkened the day. They made us very cold, they drove us inside. They stole our wood, they broke down our trenches, they fouled the place with mud and excited the monkeys. The storms were always followed by flocks of scavenging birds.

"Sandbags," Father said. "If we had sandbags we'd be in good shape. I'll bet there are stacks of them down at Mocobila. They don't know what to do with them there. They're all busy dying on the coast."

The rain and the rising lagoon thieved most of what we had, and the wind burgled the rest. Now there was little more here than our hut. The junkpile was scattered, the barrel of gas had vanished. But this made me glad. I had no secret to keep. I would not get into trouble, and anyway there was nowhere to go. Jerry said that soon Father would give up and take us to live at Brewer's Village. He would have no choice — the camp was a failure, Father had been wrong to hide in this backwater.

Within a week, our garden was gone. Not a single sprout was left. There were no more seeds. We lived on land crabs and wet eddoes. We walked around with dirty legs. The mud dried on us and made gray flakes on our skin. "Keep clean," Father said, but the hot shower he had made was the next thing to go. The lagoon was under the front half of the hut, and now at night I could hear it like bones knocking beneath the floor. The hut was tilted forward, straining the rope. During the storms I heard this tether rope grunt.

"Any seepage?" Father asked. But there was none. The hut stayed dry. It was Father's one satisfaction — the hut did not leak. He boasted about it as the rain came down.

"There's water underneath the front," I said.

"Bow," Father said. "Underneath the bow."

He began saying things like "Get aboard" and "Go astern."

"We're roped to that tree," he said. "If the line breaks or the tree cuts loose, we'll take to the dugout. We won't be carried away! Jerry, swab the deck."

There was a strong current flowing through the lagoon. The sight of it panicked Father. In its muscles and boilings floated uprooted bushes and branches and coconuts and black fruit and dead swollen animals — all moving swiftly toward the creek and the sea.

The land had softened and turned to swamp. The trees stood in water, the paths were gone, and still the water rose, until what had once been a camp spread over a whole length of the lagoon's bank was now no more than a shallow island — our hut on a bar of mud. Creeks had opened in breaks on the lagoon's shores. There was not a living soul that we could see in this maze of muddy waterways. Birds flew around us. Father cursed them from our lopsided hut. He wanted to kill them all.

The world was drowned, he said.

He made a list of things we needed — chains, pulleys, fastenings for a paddle wheel and treadles, wood for boardwalks, sailcloth, more seeds, inner tubes, tin strips, wire mesh, salt.

"Seeds?" Mother said. "But there's nowhere to plant!"

"Hydroponics," Father said. "Grow them in water. Think of it."

He said he was sure that most of the things we needed were lying on the beach near Mocobila. As soon as the rain eased he was going to make a dash in the dugout for one last look at the Mosquito Coast.

"What if we die?" April asked.

"There are worse things."

Clover said, "What's worse than dying?"

"Being turned into scavengers." Father slapped his list. "It's already started to happen. I scavenged this paper, I scavenged this pencil. But I don't need this stuff — you do."

"Maybe they'll send a search party for us," Clover said.

"Who's 'they'?"

"The people."

"What people? You think the Coast Guard's down there waiting for us to send a distress signal? Search parties out looking for us in raincoats? No — they've all been torpedoed. Muffin, believe me, we're the last ones left."