Paul Theroux - The Mosquito Coast

We passed flooded villages. They wei; deserted — the wooden bones of huts standing in water, huts tipped over, others with fractured roofs, no more. These dead empty huts proved Father right. He said the people had been swept away — those were the folks in the long Johns we saw paddling down the drain to be swallowed by the sea.

"They won't need these," he said, as he picked alligator pears and limes and papayas and plantains off their trees. We found bags of rice and beans in some of these empty villages.

Father said, "This isn't a raid. It's not theft. And it's certainly not scavenging. They don't need this where they are."

But sometimes the birds beat us to it.

"Scavengers!"

One day we thought we saw an airplane, but our outboard was so loud we could not hear the plane's engines. Father said it was a turkey buzzard. What human had the sense to come here? This was the emptiest part of the map. In the whole world, this part of Honduras was the safest and least known — the last wilderness.

"But don't praise me — praise this boat." Our Victory was like a wooden pig in the water, creaking and oinking upstream. "She's futuristic!"

The rain had watered the ants and made them sprout wings. At sundown, these flying termites flaked onto the roof of our hut-boat. The jungle was dotted with these winged ants feeding. The twins called them cooties. The river water changed its color with every change in the weather, and it was different at every hour. I liked it brassy, its daytime green, the red mud bank showing underneath like soaked cake, its shoving, slipping bunches of spinach, the way it moved through the unmoving jungle.

At twilight the air was sooty with insects, and swampwater diseased the dark spaces under the trees. The sky grew clearer as dusk fell. Shadows straightened up and stiffened. Then a dirtying of the sky, and it was night, nothing to see, the black so black you could feel its fur against your face. Without the hot sun to burn it away, the smell from the trees was like the hum of green meat. The full river snuffled like a pack of hogs, and birds lolloped in the branches near us and made loud cranking cries. We felt sick at this still, leftover time of day. We tied up and sat among the smudge pots of our wooden floating hut and ate whatever we had managed to gather from the drowned villages.

"This is the future," Father said. He stuck his burned nose in our faces until we agreed we were cozy, we were lucky, we were having a good time.

"This is what it is," he said. "The fatal mistake everyone made was in thinking that the future had something to do with high technology. I used to think it myself! But that was before I had this experience. Oh, gaw, it was all going to be rocket ships."

"Monorails," I said.

Clover said, "Space capsules."

"Smellovision," Father said. "Video cassettes instead of school. Everything streamlined. Meals were going to be pills. Green ones for breakfast, blue ones for lunch, purple ones for dessert. You popped them into your mouth — all the nutrition you needed."

April said, "And space suits."

"Right," Father said. "Stupefied people with pointy ears and names like Grok wearing helmets and living in chrome-plated houses. Moving sidewalks, glass domes over cities, and no work except playing with computers and sniffing the smellovision. 'Get into the rocket ship, kids, and let's go have a picnic on the moon'—that kind of thing."

Mother said, "It might happen."

"Never. It's all bull."

Clover said, "I think Dad's right."

"Science fiction gave people more false hope than two thousand years of Bibles," Father said. "It was all lies! The space program — is that what you're saying? It was a hollow, vaunting waste of taxpayers' money. There is no future in space! I love the word — space! That's what they were all discovering — empty space!"

April said, "I think Dad's right, too."

"This is the future," he said. "A little motor in a little boat, on a muddy river. When the motor busts, or we run out of gas, we paddle. No spacemen! No fuel, no rocket ships, no glass domes. Just work! Man of the future is going to be a cart horse. There's nothing on the moon but ruts and pimples, and those of us who have inherited this senile exhausted earth will have nothing but wooden wheels, pushcarts, levers, and pulleys — the crudest high school physics, that they stopped teaching when everyone flunked it and started reading science fiction. No, it's grow your own or die. No green pills, but plenty of roughage. Hard backbreaking work — simple, but not easy. Get it? No laser beams, no electricity, nothing but muscle power. What we're doing now! We're the people of the future, using the technology of the future. We cracked it!"

***

He wanted us to feel, in our creaking hut-boat, like the most modern people on earth. We held the secret of existence in our smoky cabin. Now he never talked about changing the world with geothermal energy, or ice. He promised us dirt and work. That was glory, he said.

But after these short nights, he started the outboard and set the front of the hut against the current, and Jerry whispered to me, "He's killing us."

We stuck to the river's edge, creeping around the reaches and studying the flow of the current before we moved forward. We made five or six miles a day, and still had plenty of spare gas. And what did it matter if we used it all? We had the rest of our lives to get upriver.

I thought everyone except Jerry was convinced. But one day, as we furrowed along, the outboard went mad. It quacked, its noise climbed higher, became more frantic and animal, and soon it was shrieking. Birds exploded out of the trees. Then something snapped, and after a quack or two the engine went dead. But its echo continued to quiver in the jungle. The boat hesitated and became light and directionless. It tipped, it rolled back.

We were going downstream sideways on the river's tongue in silence under the dropping ants.

"Anchor!" Father vaulted toward the bow. "Get out the lines!"

Our anchor was beautiful — we had found it on the beach near Mocobila — a cluster-fountain of curving barbs on a thick shaft. But it was also very heavy. It took Father's help to get it over the rail, and by then we were moving so fast that it did not seem to take hold. Father jumped overboard and swam to the bank with a line. He secured us, the anchor caught.

We were in a curve of the river — the current swung us out on the line and held us gushing in the middle of the stream. Water plumed from either side, and the whole hut-boat tottered as we helped Father aboard.

We had lost the shear pin, he said. It wasn't much — only a cotter pin — but it meant the propeller had flown off and spun to the bottom of the river.

"Can't you make a new prop?" Mother asked.

"Sure I can. Pass me that lathe, the calipers, the machining tools, the set of lugs and files. What's that? You mean we only have spit and a screwdriver? Then I guess we'll have to dive for that old prop."

We looked upstream at the dark horns of waterflow pumping out of the river.

"Don't worry," Father said. "We have the rest of our lives to find it." He was smiling, biting his beard. He turned to Jerry and said, "What are you smirking at?"

"The rest of our lives. It sounds daffy when you say it like that."

"We'll see how daffy. You're going to dive for it."

"What about the alligators?" I said.

"You're not afraid of alligators," Father said. "You go after Jerry."

Mother said, "No — I won't let those boys go in there."

"Listen to me," Father said. "It's not a question of what you want. It's what I want. I'm captain of this ship, and those are my orders. Anyone who disobeys them goes ashore. Your lives are in my hands. I'll maroon you — all of you."