Paul Theroux - The Mosquito Coast

The hard thunder rains of the lagoon and the ruination of our garden were nightmare memories. But the very moment we believed we were rescued and could make it to Brewer's to shelter safely in one of those stooping belfry-like huts, Father turned us around and began fighting us upstream.

Jerry said it looked dangerous.

I told Father I was scared.

Mother said, "Allie, why don't we take a chance on the coast? At least we know what's there."

Father called us savages. That kind of thinking had doomed mankind's carcass. Did we want our goose cooked? It was not the unknown that was dangerous, but the known. Only drowning people clung to wreckage. Those who bothered to seek the unknown were saved — but who bothered? Of course it was hard to get a heavy boat up a flooded river on one engine! That proved it was worthwhile!

He had been right in other things, so we went along with him in this, and found ourselves agreeing with everything he said.

"Dentists in the States had an interest in candy factories," he said. "Doctors owned hospitals. Detroit kept bankrolling oil wells. America had terminal cancer! I saw it was all leading downstream. Why didn't anyone else?"

An aerosol can of bug spray swept by us one day. Father did not question where it came from: he was too busy railing about it. And plastic jugs on the current. He railed more. He railed against fat people and politicians and banks and breakfast cereal and scavengers — there were turkey buzzards and muddy vultures right overhead. He bawled them out, he cursed machines.

"I look forward to the day when I can cut this outboard loose; turn it into the meat grinder it really is." All machines were grave-diggers, he said. Leave them alone for a minute and they bury themselves. That's all they were good for — holes.

"I had a Hole once."

He smacked his lips, congratulating himself. "I made ice out of fire!"

He named our floating hut the Francis Lungley, then changed it to the President Fox, and finally scratched Victory on its side with a nail. He said it was the world. It was twenty-seven feet long and six feet wide. He and Mother had the "master cabin" (the cookstove, the chair, the pelican-feather bed). With the excess weight of timbers thrown overboard or cut for fuel, our craft moved more easily in the water, with the hefty grace of a canal boat or a motorized barge in the Connecticut Valley. As soon as we were past the cutoff, where branches banged our roof, we plugged along the creek, staying midstream. Anywhere, Father said, as long as it was against the current.

We entered the Patuca that first day. We were surprised that this great river had been flowing all this time beyond the swamp to the east of our little Laguna Miskita — four hours' chug. But the river was hidden. We did not see it until we were almost on top of it. Father said he was not surprised at all: right again! The rain had swelled it over its red banks and into the trees, and made it silent and so wide that in some reaches it hardly seemed to flow at all.

Father worked the boat along the edge of the submerged banks, where the current was easy. We made slow progress, but, as Father said, "Where's the fire? What's the rush? This isn't a vacation — this is life."

At night we tied up to a tree and ate and slept with our smudge pots going, to drive off the mosquitoes. When a cloud of mosquitoes approached, its millions drooped over us like a terrible net and made a loud high-pitched hum, the sound a radio makes between stations.

With the river murmuring past us, slurping at our logs, Father said that in all the world we were the last ones left. If we yelled for help, no one would come. Oh, we might meet stragglers, we might bump into savages or even see whole villages on high ground that had been spared. But we were the only ones who knew that a catastrophe had taken place — the fire that had been followed by the thunder of war and the flood had been general throughout the earth. How could anyone here in Mosquitia know that America had been wiped out? It was man's narrow conceit that rain fell on him alone. But Father knew it was global. At each stage, he said, he had predicted what was to come. Even Americans themselves had seen the handwriting on the wall — they had talked about nothing else! But while they had sat and complained and twiddled their thumbs, Father had taken countermeasures to prevent our destruction.

"I may have exaggerated at times," he said. "But that was only to convince you of its seriousness, and get you moving. You're hard people to organize. Half the time you don't even believe me!"

What did it matter, he said, if he had been wrong about picky little things? He had been vindicated by great events. And what we had seen over the past year was the highest form of creation. He had outwitted the specter that haunted the world, by removing us from a fragile and temporary civilization. All worlds ended, but Americans had been sure that, in spite of the obvious flaws, theirs would last. Not possible! But Father would carry us safely upriver.

"Farter," Jerry said. "Farter, farter, farter."

Father did not hear him. He was shouting, "How can I be wrong if I'm going against the current?"

The coast was death. The current tended that way. So it stood to reason that it flowed from life — mountains and springs. There, among the volcanoes of Olancho, we would make our home.

This was what he told us at night, in the cabin, when we were tied to a tree and the frogs croaked and drawled outside. During the day he still talked, but with the outboard going we hardly heard a word he said.

The river seemed to swell out of the ground. It flooded the jungle. This was a wilderness of water. Tree stumps with crooked uprising roots tumbled past us. It rained less often — a sprinkle in the morning, a downpour in the afternoon. But, as Father said, we were waterproof. And we saved the rainwater to drink. The sun on the river turned the muddy current to brass. It gave the jungle a nice bright smack. Shining through the morning mist, it thickened the air with gold-spangled smoke that danced between the boughs. In places, there were clouds of white butterflies — regattas of them, tacking just above the water. Or blue ones, as big as sparrows, working their tottery wings so shyly they moved like beautiful scraps of silk flung out of the trees.

Two or three times a day we saw Zambus or Miskitos in cayukas, slipping quickly downstream. Often they waved to us, but the current took them so fast that no sooner had we spotted them than they were below us and around the bend.

"He's a goner," Father usually said as one went past. "He's a dead man. A zombie, not a Zambu. Going down to die."

They were wet, but they looked perfectly normal, paddling in their grubby underwear, riding across the fumbles of the current.

Jerry said that one of these days he was going to hop into our dugout and let the current take him to the coast. Father got wind of this, maybe from one of the twins, and ordered him into the dugout.

"In you go!"

Then Father cast it off and let it zoom downriver. Jerry was too terrified to paddle. He hung onto the seat and crouched with his head down and howled. When Jerry had almost traveled out of sight, Mother said, "Allie, do something!" and Father snatched up a line. It was attached to the dugout. He jerked it, toppling Jerry onto his face. Jerry was shaking as Father towed him and the dugout back.

"That was insane!" Mother said.

"I proved my point. I got my wish."

"What if the rope had snapped?"

"Then Jerry would have got his wish," Father said. "Anyone want to try it? I might just decide to let you go next time. Down the drain. Anyone interested?"

Another day, he caught me snoozing over the sounding chain. He punished me by putting me into the dugout and towing me behind the boat ("I sure hope that line doesn't snap! Better sit still!"), while my little canoe rocked and slewed in its wake.