Writings By Phil

Thoughts On This And That

How To Dispatch Mosquitoes When Bored!

February 23, 1978

It was mid-afternoon and radio time was fifteen minutes away.  I would not understand much of what was being said on the radio, but listening to the back and forth chatter from missionaries from all over Bolivia broke up the boredom of long days in camp, an anticipated landmark in the day’s slow march towards dark.

My back ached so I retreated to my bed to escape the mosquitos and rest my spine against the split palm walls of the Pension. From there I could listen to the radio and read or write. My bed wasn’t a La-Z-Boy recliner, but it was much better than sitting outside on tocos, short pieces of log about eighteen inches tall, or small metal barrels where we stored our food supplies. Those we positioned around a crude wooden table, where we sat when eating our daily bread, playing board games, or whatever else occupied our time. My body could only endure so much sitting without back support and I had already reached my limit for the day.

The clothes I was wearing were clean, so I laid on my bed without removing them.  Earlier, I washed my dirty clothes in rainwater caught in the trailer of the buggy.  It was a  cloudy day, threatening rain, but I thought I better take the chance and wash them before they started to rot. I hung them on a line out in the clearing to dry, but had to run outside and take them down, then hang them out again, two times, because the clouds played a silly game to dampen my clothes and my disposition. The sprinkles stopped almost as soon as they started. Then the clouds stopped playing around and poured angry rain upon us. By noon, the soaking outrage had subsided, and the clouds grudgingly shared the blue sky with the sun. Out went my laundry, again! The clothes were almost dry when at three o’clock, the rain returned.

We all had laundry hanging outside the hut that didn’t quite get dry, but with the latest outburst we gave up and brought our clothes under the thatched roof. Underwear, socks, pants, and shirts were strung out everywhere, hung on the ropes that held up our mosquito nets, on horizontal poles that held up the thatch roof, and anywhere else that would allow air circulation and a hope the clothes would dry before morning.

We found a barrel back in the weeds, discarded by the loggers. Denny decided to make a better oven from it than the one he used last time. He baked a batch of bread. Next, he made cinnamon rolls and put them in his oven. We all looked froward to eating those!

It was dark out.  Nighttime was my favorite time in the jungle.  It was a shade cooler than the daytime, and the responsibilities of camp and contact had ended for the day. I was free to escape into my net and be safe; safe to read, or write, or go to sleep, and above all, safe from attack by the wild Yuqui, who we believed, at the time, were afraid of the dark and stayed in their camp at night.

Nocturnal noises blended together to sound like a beautiful, but dissonant symphony. Insects played stringed instruments, using their legs or wings as bows. Frogs blew on wind instruments, brass and woodwinds, a raucous belting of songs in four-part unharmony. Rain, or dew dripping from leaf to leaf and the occasional crash of a tree falling somewhere in the distance made up the percussion section. Then, to keep it interesting and maybe to keep me awake, there was the scream of a jaguar! That is what it sounded like to me, but Alan said it was a night bird, a bird the Bolivians called the flying jaguar. I hoped he was right!

I slept without covers most of the night, but in the wee hours of the morning I pulled my sleeping bag over me. When I packed the bag to take to Bolivia, I was afraid it would be too warm for tropical nights, but I was glad I had it to chase the morning chill away! I blamed the humidity for messing up my internal thermostat. Nobody should be cold, ever, when the temperature stays above 70 degrees all night!

Feb 24

One o’clock in the afternoon almost set the record for the most time without rain.  It was cloudy so probably would rain before the afternoon was over.  Already, boredom had set in! I tried going fishing, but the only bites I got were from the ever present mosquitoes.

The blood suckers became harder to kill in the middle of the day, it seemed. Maybe morning and night air slowed their metabolism, so they were slower and easier to squash during those hours. I didn’t know. Even so, I still managed to kill many of the buzzing nudniks.

This afternoon, I was sitting on the edge of my bed, outside the mosquito net, reading, and squashing mosquitoes that violated my space. Unceremoniously, I dumped their flattened carcasses onto the dirt floor. A while later, I saw black ants carrying smashed insect cadavers up one of the tocos that held up my bed. I noticed there was a hole in the log into which the ants disappeared, triumphantly holding their load of dead mosquitos. I guessed the ants had their nest inside the log. It was okay with me if they lived there, as long as they didn’t ride the elevator to the top floor and get in my bed!

I decided to change how I dispatched the bodies of the mosquitoes I killed. Rather than dropping them on the floor, I pinched the carcass gingerly between my fingers and held it to the hole in the log and waited. It wasn’t long until one of the worker ants grabbed my offering and pulled it inside. The more I fed them, the faster they seemed to respond when I knocked on their door. I wasn’t sure, but I thought I heard them saying, “thank you,” every time I gave them food. Probably not, as I don’t speak Ant! How swell it would be if I could train the ants to leap in the air and snag mosquitoes by the leg and decapitate them with their strong mandibles!  Maybe my thinking was sadistic, but I wanted the plague of blood vacuums eradicated from the jungle and it was a task too immense for me to accomplish by myself, one smashed mosquito at a time!

Not so much the black ants that lived in my bedposts, but other species were a nuisance. Certain of them were always trying to get in our food stuff, especially the sugar. Thankfully, none of them sucked my blood, and made me itch! In general, the way ants marched and worked together fascinated me. At the Pension, there were black ants, red ants, ants with velvet coats, big black ants with a white design itched into their exoskeleton, ants with stingers, leaf cutter ants, and army ants. They ranged in size from the little sugar ant to the giant, solitary, velvet ant. So many ants, and not one uncle!

Denny was out back in a hammock reading.  Wally had been reading, also, but fell asleep.  So did Matt.  Alan was carving a ring for his wife, Vickie, from a palm seed. It was pretty! I thought about making one for CJ, but decided against it! If perchance the day came that I saw her, again, I was sure she would be a married woman!

The day before, I had cut some thin strips of meat from the last deer we got, salted it, stuck it on a stick, and put it over the fire to dry and smoke.  I guessed it would be like jerky.  I tried some today and liked it better than the big chucks we’ve cooked over the open fire and then smoked to preserve it.

The amount of meat we wasted out here was almost sinful! The five of us can’t eat a whole deer or pig in three days, about the length of time we can keep it from spoiling by smoking it over the fire. We had no refrigeration to preserve it, and dried, smoky meat was tasting old to my palette!

I was wrong! It didn’t rain all day.  It turned out to be such a nice evening that I decided to take a walk, to think and pray.  I wondered if God got tired of hearing the same requests over and over. Yet, the ones I prayed for were what was on my heart and mind. I knew He was patient, and He did tell us to cast all our cares on Him. That was what I tried to do!

Feb 25

Alan, Denny and I traveled by swamp buggy for an hour and a half, today. Then we walked farther than I had ever been in that direction. We found the headwaters of the Rio Hediondo, its waters pouring out of the brush and flowing down the ditches on both sides of the road. The Rio Hediondo was not an impressive stream of water at any point during its length, but especially where it started. It hardly filled the ditches in which it flowed. Eventually, its waters would follow its own channel through the jungle, joining ever bigger rivers, until it poured into the Atlantic Ocean, a small, insignificant part of the mighty Amazon River.

Not far from where we left the buggy, we heard the clacking of wild pigs close by in the jungle. Denny held his rifle at ready and followed it into the woods. I walked after him. I thought we were making too much noise. Sure enough, when the animals heard us, the whole herd hightailed it away from us. I thought all was lost and was ready to head back to the road when the peccaries started “clacking” again, this time on both sides of us. Denny went one way and I the other. Quickly, I was alone, and stories of wild pig attacks came to my mind. Worse, the pigs were coming my way!  I drew my revolver and cocked it as I started forward. I wouldn’t go down without a fight! The pigs heard me coming before I saw them and ran away leaving me alone, and relieved.

The jungle was so thick, I couldn’t see Denny, and I was afraid to move in his direction for fear that he would mistake me for a pig.  Rifle shots rang out, pinpointing for me where Denny was, and I traced them back to him. I helped him drag the big bore he had killed back to the road. There, Alan gutted it. We left it in the shade and continued to walk on down the road.

Later, when we returned to the pig, we decided to take only the hams, front legs, and the tenderloin since that was about all the meat we could eat before it spoiled. That saved us a lot of work in carrying it back to the buggy, too, than going whole hog!

On the way home, we replaced all the gifts the loggers took during their recent jaunt into the jungle, when they thought the rains had ended and that it was dry enough to work, again. Also, we met two downpours. The second one soaked us just as our clothes dried out from the first one. My clothes were still damp when we got back to camp. For that reason, I washed them once we got home. It was hard to get anything to dry with so much intermittent rain. I cleaned them with soap, but they will probably sour before they dry!

FIN

This story was from the category Tales From Green Hell. If you would like to read more of my experiences in the jungles of Bolivia, please click on that link below.

More Writings by Phil

Phil Burns

Leave a comment