10 was my last day of work. “What the hell do you mean, you’re not working today?” the foreman growled when he came to find me after I hadn’t responded to the wake-up call.
“Sorry,” I said. “I never work on my birthday.”
“Like hell you don’t,” he raged. “You work, or you’re fired!”
I have my principles. So I was fired. I had completed twenty-three successful revolutions around the sun, and that alone was cause for celebration. Having been born on the exact hour, day and year that all the countries of the world gathered to sign the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in Paris, I wasn’t about to compromise on my right to have the day off. As luck would have it, I had made just enough money by December 10 to pay the company back for my air transport to and from their camp, as well as to buy a ferry ticket from Ketchikan to Seattle. I was Amazon-bound again.
The journey south was anything but easy. I can vividly recall the hitchhiking ordeals, like struggling to move my three large packs through downtown LA while trying to locate an on-ramp to an expressway. I could carry only two bags half a block at a time before returning for the third bag, all the time keeping all bags in sight lest they be stolen.
Mexico and Guatemala proved even more challenging. By the time I reached the border of Honduras I was so sick and dehydrated from amoebic dysentery that I became unconscious on the roadside. I regained consciousness a few days later in an old woman’s adobe hut, and I recollect vigil lights burning all around me, fresh flowers, copal incense wafting its sweet perfume into the air of the mud-walled room and a statue of the Immaculate Heart of Mary looking down on me. A gathering of the devout were reciting the rosary in their native tongue over my lifeless body and the scene had the air of a wake. Like Tom Sawyer witnessing his own funeral, I was sure I had died, was on my way to heaven and witnessing my death in spirit form. Recovering Catholics never quite shed the illusions.
Good health has never been one of my strong points. I’d had polio when I was seven, spinal meningitis at age fourteen and an acute appendicitis attack a few years later, so the odds of even making it into my twenties were squarely against me. This was the fourth big strike, and I should have struck out long ago. Little did I know that plague, cholera, typhoid, three bouts of malaria, dengue and tick fever would still stalk me in later years. If there is any lesson to be learned surviving deadly illness, it is to never take life for granted … to cherish each day as a miracle, a gift. That’s why I don’t work on my birthday.
El Salvador proved to be my nemesis and turnaround point. It had taken me six months to get that far, my health was poor, and the Amazon still seemed as distant as ever. So with no real feeling of failure, I started the long journey back north, little aware of the changes that lay ahead.
I was travelling through the Sonora Desert of Mexico, just a few days south of the Texas border, when I was dropped off by my ride in an unusually rough-looking cow town. My driver had cautioned me about the dangers of this region: “Muy peligroso, señor—muchos banditos aqui!” I promptly headed out of the dangerous bandit town to spend a somewhat safer night along a quiet desert road. It was growing dark and I had hiked far, but I could still hear the drunken revelry and occasional gunshot from the cantinas even when the town was becoming little more than lantern light on the horizon.
Exhausted, I left the roadway and searched the surrounding desert for a place to set out my bedroll under the spectacular star-studded sky. The ground was strewn with rocks, boulders and prickly pear cactus pads, so it took some time to find a clear space to bed down. At long last I discovered a soft patch of earth, just the right size, beside a large saguaro cactus. Must be a bedding site for wild burros, I reasoned as I stretched out a horsehair rope around the perimeter of my sleeping area to deter prowling rattlesnakes. The rope was a gift from a Yaqui Indian elder I’d met a few days earlier. “A rattler will never cross the scent of a horse,” he assured me. The old man befriended me because he could see that, like him, I enjoyed sleeping alone out in the desert. It struck me that he might be a mystic or shaman of some sort.
I was asleep almost from the moment I lay on my back with my head below the trunk and beautiful branching arms of the saguaro. I may have slept only a few minutes or an hour, I’ll never know, before I awoke frozen in terror. Sweat was pouring from every pore of my body, my jaw was locked open and my eyes stared skyward in an unblinking gaze. I was sure my heart would seize up too. I’d never known such total terror in my life because I had no way of understanding the source. I lay there awake all night, unable to move a muscle, wet my parched tongue or scarcely blink my desert-dust dry eyes, but grasping fully the meaning of horror.
The stars slowly worked their arced path across the black velvet sky, and a large desert owl, not too distant, hooted throughout the night. Only with the first light of dawn was I able to close my parched mouth and painfully dry eyes. It was not until the first ray of sun slowly worked its way down the cactus and touched my face that I found I could move my neck. As I did so, I turned and saw that the woody base of the saguaro had been carved flat with a knife and inscribed with the name and date of a burial. Whoever’s grave I’d spent the night lying atop had an insanely powerful spirit, and I started to see things differently after that.
The rest of my return journey north was uneventful by comparison. I did spend a memorable week with a Navajo family in their Monument Valley hogan, a traditional Navajo hut of logs and earth, where I was inspired by their octagonal log architecture and closeness to the earth, but for the most part I was just wed to the road. I had grown so weary of lugging the damned kayak around for six months that when I got to British Columbia I decided to start paddling back to Alaska. I thumbed a ride to Prince Rupert, deciding that would be a safe and suitable location from which to work my way back through the Inside Passage waters.
It was raining in Prince Rupert. It almost always rains in Rupert, that soft but seemingly endless drip that descends in a fine mist for days. The sky was leaden and my energy low by the time I’d dragged all my gear and grub down to the dockside. Like the old Otis Redding song, I found myself, quite literally, “sittin’ on the dock of the bay, watching the tide roll away” when a Mama Cass-type character came strolling down the plank way. She was dressed in light cotton, a full-length floral printed dress, and she flowed down the dock like she was not of this earth. Ignoring me altogether, she stopped at the end of the pier and stood there staring at the ominous western sky. After about fifteen to twenty minutes of this strangely frozen pose, I couldn’t help but ask her if she was okay. I had once worked backstage at a Jefferson Airplane rock concert at Michigan State University where blotter acid was handed out freely to all stagehands, so I knew the stone-dead look of an overdose. No, she wasn’t tripping, she assured me, just “cloud busting.” She carried on with her self-appointed task while I remained respectfully silent.
“What are you here for?” she asked after a while, without looking away from a brightening spot in the sky.
“Setting off to kayak home to Alaska,” I responded.
“Cool,” she said, “but aren’t you going to kayak across to the Queen Charlotte Islands first?”
“Where’s that?”
“Out there where I’m busting that hole in the sky.”
Sure enough, a patch of blue was opening in the west. I grew excited. “How do you get there?” I asked.
“Paddle, if you want,” she said, “but it’s a long way out and Hecate Strait kicks up pretty fast. There’s a freighter that takes a few passengers. It’s leaving from the pier here this evening.”
“Thanks for the tip, sister,” I said and set off to inquire about ticketing.
“The name’s Stormy,” she called after me.
