Writings By Phil

Thoughts On This And That

A Truck Load of Sunshine

September 28, 1978

We hiked the last seven miles into Puerto Grether this morning. Though there was lots of morning left over, we decided to just hang loose. Tomorrow’s hike into the vast unknown would not be short. Nor would our path be easy. We would follow a trail made by Bolivian hunters to the Rio Vibora. After that, we would have to make our own way. We decided to take it easy the rest of the day.

We headed to the Pension Beni, shed our packs and ordered a cold soda pop. It was no-name-brand pop, bottled in some locality back towards Santa Cruz. The bottles were different colors and different shapes. If truth were known, the original contents of them were probably beer and wine. We didn’t care, though we hoped they had been sterilized before refilling. The refreshing liquid was wet and sweet. It went down well. It washed the dirt and dryness of the morning hike from our throats.

We spent the rest of the morning sitting under the thatched roof at a rustic table. We sipped soda and listened to Alan talk to Don Miguel. We wanted to know everything the woodsman knew about the area we would soon enter. We were curious about the terrain, the rivers, the animals, and the wild nomads.

With my limited understanding of Spanish, I hardly caught the gist of the conversation. I was always glad when they stopped talking and Alan translated what Miguel had been saying. Matt and I wanted to know what we would face in tomorrow’s hike!

Concentrating on their conversation in Spanish was hard, but my understanding so little of it made it tedious. My mind often switched into neutral. It was during a lull in their conversation that I heard a truck groaning its way towards us. It slowly made its way into, out of, and over the deep ruts of a dry season road. I wondered what it was bringing. I bemoaned its tardiness in that it did not come yesterday, or at least early this morning. Had it done so, we might have hitched a ride and arrived without hiking those extra miles.

As the truck neared the pension, all conversation stopped. We watched to see what it was bringing. Our surprise was great when we realized all its cargo was human. The back of the truck was filled with teenage schoolgirls!

I guessed they were on a field trip! But why here? There was nothing to do in Puerto Grether but swim in the river. Wherever they came from, surely there was a swimming hole nearby! Had they gone the other way, Santa Cruz beckoned. There would be parks, restaurants, shopping, entertainment and lots of stuff for a group of girls to do! The city, of course, would mean more work for their chaperons. Here, unless the girls ran off into the jungle, keeping track of the teens would be easier for the adults. That was the big advantage of choosing this end-of-the-road place.

I watched the girls jump down from the truck, dazzled by their beauty. How could so much comeliness fall out of the back of a flatbed parked on the edge of nowhere? I thought they were all beautiful. They had shiny black hair, sparkling dark eyes, gleaming white smiles, and unblemished complexions. Their skin was forever and lightly tanned, airbrushed to perfection by patrimony.

I realized that long months in the jungle had probably blurred my perception of beauty. Except during rare visits to the city, I had not seen a single (unmarried) female for eight months. Those short jaunts into populous pockets of people teeming with unattached young women were refreshing. However, had they restored 20/20 vision? Isolation and deprivation did strange things to the mind. Perhaps, at another time and place all attraction would be gone! Yet, today, these girls truly looked like a truck load of sunshine!

The second thing I noticed about the girls was how clean their clothes looked. One would have thought that Procter and Gamble had brought them into the wilderness to make a Tide commercial. Everyone I had seen since arriving in town, myself included, wore dingy clothes. They had been washed and were clean. Still, the fabric had lost its luster due to too much time in the tropics. Sweat, ground-in dirt, and unknown stains had scrawled messy signatures across the material. Not on these girl’s clothes! They wore bedazzling blouses of white. Their jeans, ranging from light to dark blue, were unsullied.

Maybe the girls were bored. Maybe they had never seen a gringo up close. Many of the girls swarmed around us like bees to nectar. Maybe they just wanted to flirt with someone they would never see again. A few stood outside looking over the half wall at us. Some came inside and pressed close to the table. They watched our every move.

Four girls stood together on the far side of the table from me. To none of us in particular, one blurted out, “I love you!” Then, all burst into gales of laughter. The phrase was probably the only English they knew. They probably learned it from American movies played at theaters and on TV with Spanish subtitles.

We ordered lunch and hoped the girls would go away and let us eat in peace. They did not, and their chaperons did not seem to care. We felt like animals in the zoo at feeding time with gawkers on every side watching us eat.

Doña Della did not fix fancy meals, but she made tasty ones. She served us a plate of rice, plantains, and boiled yuca. The steak was cut from some jungle animal her husband or one of her sons had shot recently. Most everything she served was home-grown or harvested from the jungle. It was good, hearty food!

Some of the girls peppered Alan with questions, which he patiently answered, while trying to finish his meal. I thought he was starting to get annoyed with all the unwanted attention. Since he was fluent in Spanish, he faced a feminine, often silly, interrogation. Matt knew more Spanish that I did, but he did not say much. I did not know enough to say anything; no flirting, teasing or saying something meaningful. Instead, I just sat quietly and ate my meal and watched the girl’s high jinks.

I admired their exuberance of youthful energy, their zest for life, their carefree attitude. I wondered if I was ever like them. I could not remember. In my formative years, melancholy shyness and too much emotional baggage robbed me of the insouciance of youth. I envied these girls.

A girl stood off to the side by herself. She was the one closest one to me. She was tall and slender with a great smile. I thought she was the prettiest one of the bunch. As we ate, she leaned her back against the bamboo wall and watched us, not saying much.

We finished eating. Perhaps, to flee temptation we shouldered our packs and decided to get out of town. Some of the girls followed us as we walked towards the river. They asked if we wanted to go swimming with them. Alan answered them with an emphatic “No!”

Staying on top of the riverbank, we followed a trail headed downriver. Our shadows did not pursue us further. There were girls down below getting ready to enter a boat. They planned to cross over the water to a big sandbar on the other side. They looked up as we walked by. Multiple voices called out to us, “I love you!” We kept walking!

When we were far enough from town, we opened our packs and pulled out .22 caliber revolvers. We each carried one. Target practice was fun, and it gave us something to occupy the time until the girls were gone. We threw pieces of driftwood into the river upstream from us. Then, we blasted them with lead as they floated by us.

In the jungle, there lived a type of bee that did not have a stinger. They were smaller than honeybees. The insects built their nest in a hollow place of a tree. Inside, they made connected pods of wax in which to store their honey. It was runny honey, sweet and tart at the same time. I’m sure the bees had a scientific name, but the Bolivians called them Señoritas, as in young, unmarried girls.

At certain times of the year, the señoritas buzzed around our heads. They looked for opportunities to crawl into our eyes, mouth, ears, or nose. We spent a lot of energy shooing them away. It was energy wasted, better used in hiking, clearing underbrush, or doing other tasks at hand. I was thankful they did not sting! Still, life in the jungle would have been easier without them! They were real pests!

I would never say that about the fairer sex. A woman, a wife, would be a wonderful addition to my life, I thought. I still had hopes that God had one picked out specially for me. On the flip side, a gaggle of girls, as we saw today, was a real pest!

Well, maybe not as bad as all that! In my ears still rang the echo of their frivolous, “I love you!” I knew it was insincere patter, but it sounded good to my lonely heart. Maybe someday . . .

Late in the afternoon, we walked back to the pension. The truck and its cargo of girls were gone. The sun still shone brightly between clouds, though lower in the sky. Nonetheless, the dingy little town, at the end of the road, seemed darker. It appeared more depressing than when we walked out of it a few hours earlier. I thought it needed a truck load of sunshine!

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Something Different

Phil Burns

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