Part 3: Fish and Farine to the Extreme

My group moves FAST into the bush, and all I can do is watch my feet and the back of the man in front of me. Vaughn is behind me and sees me struggling with my slippers. He suggests I rinse them off at the creek we’re coming up upon. I do so, but realize they all keep moving… I look up, though, and there’s ever-faithful Matthew behind, waiting for me. We go a ways, and the boys see a labba – wild meat, a rodent. I see SOMEthing, but don’t really catch any distinguishing marks. Someone takes a shot, a loud BOOM, but misses, though some chase off after it as the rest of us continue. It’s a slight path in the woods, but a lot of it is cut by whoever was in front. We climb over and ontop of logs fallen, through ant hills, down into creeks and back up onto dry land. We walk over this fallen log about 15 feet in the air and if I’d had time to carefully measure each step, I probably would have fallen. But fear for losing my group had me move quite fast and steadily across it. Anthony remembered to look back and advise me NOT to brace onto a branch hanging for support. Thanks, Tosh. I both was resentful and exhilarated at being so casually regarded.

We cross a knee-deep creek and I finally had to let go of my desire to not get my pants wet and just jumped in – not a moment too soon, either, because the creeks kept getting deeper and before I knew it, I was walking waist deep down creeks, Forrest Gump style. They’d stop and clear out a cove to do fishing in later; they’d use face masks and shotbows for this sort of fishing. I wondered in watching them all: though the area was new to some of them, they knew how to move things, knew where to look for fish. They had no regard for getting their clothes wet – though, what man would, I suppose – nor showed any hesitation to jump where they wanted to jump, cut down what they needed to cut down, climb what they needed to climb. They took to the landscape, and the landscape responded to their attention, bending to their will. Each man took a separate job, helping everyone, with little communication between them all.

It was cool to sit back and just observe. They didn’t ignore me, but there wasn’t really anything I could do, nor would they ask me to do, so I just kept out of their way, and would fetch or do something if I saw it needed to be done and I could do it. The symbiotic relationship worked. We just kept moving and moving. I impressed myself with my agility, though I knew I’d pay for it the next day. We’d be walking through a creek and it’d start raining. They’d go diving under rocks, looking for fish, but finding crabs and other treasures along the way instead. We’d stop to take a drink, not from bottles of water or Nalgene bottles filled previously, but from the stream we were walking in, the cool, fresh water coursing around us.

I’d slip on and off and then on again my slippers. I actually blew my nose on the corner of my shirt a couple times. At one point, Dillon called to me, with some urgency, “Miss Sarah, please move over here quickly!” It wasn’t because I was slowing them down, it was because there was a red ant nest in front of me and he was scared of me getting stung. All around, I was moving quite lithely that day.

We hit the point of return, and – turned around and started retracing our steps back. Whew. The plus side was, we couldn’t get any wetter; the rain had continued pretty steadily. Though we get back to that perilous log-bridge and somehow, somewhere, they stop and some take off on a sniff of some animal or something. I, tired, say I’m gonna just sit and wait there, Matthew, Albertson and Charlie hung back with me. It started raining harder and Matthew collected some palm branches and draped them over a leaning tree for a makeshift shelter for me, quite cute. We sat in silence for quite some time until they all pass back and begin digging and cutting branches for some purpose I never got, but Vaughn asked if I wanted to head back to the Lawrence camp and I said yes, so “Lehwego!” (Let we go) and he, Matthew and I took off. I had to use Vaughn as a lift up and down a couple times, but the trip is uneventful, just the sound of rain falling and me making little leaps here and there to keep up to Vaughn’s long legs. We get back and wait under the fireside cover for the rest of them, then head back. It was only noon! But the jungle adventure was over. Time for some processing.