Jungleland by Christopher S. Stewart Read Free Book Online Page B

going,” I said. “That means it’s not that bad.” The last part didn’t sound so convincing—and she knew it.
    “That doesn’t mean you should go.”
    I told her I’d be out in the jungle, far from the coup. “All that stuff is going on in the cities,” I said. “It’s quiet in the jungle!”
    A day later I read online that the police had started shooting civilians.

“949 Miles to La Ceiba”
    I N LATE MAY 1940 , Morde was on an overnight train from New York to New Orleans, where he would catch a ship to Honduras. He sat in a Pullman car, slumped on a hard but not uncomfortable seat, close to a dusted-over window, the rolling landscape whizzing past but the air inside quiet enough to think. There was so much to noodle: what would he see and find, and would he be a different person when he returned?
    By now Morde was twenty-nine years old. He had the posture of a two-by-four and tended to dress theatrically in white suits with wide lapels and string ties. Tall and square-shouldered, he had a frontier face, sharp blue eyes, and the lean physique of a long-distance runner. Typically, he wore his wavy brown hair combed back, slick with a handful of pomade. His deep voice was made for radio. Lots of people told him that. In photographs, he sometimes posed with a rifle, but, no matter what, he always seemed to project that faraway look.
    The passengers around him slumped in their own chairs, men in thin ties and women in billowy dresses, sipping soft drinks, their tired faces behind newspapers and books, squinting in the cabin light. It was a hard time for most of them. Over the last eleven years, they had lost jobs and homes and dreams. Now, as the Great Depression loomed large, there was a new concern—another war in Europe. They heard about Joseph Stalin’s Soviet army gobbling up Poland, and Hitler preparing an attack on France and Britain. Would the führer come across the Atlantic? War bulletins played on the radio, stories of destruction filled the daily news. They worried that their country would again be swept up into conflict, and what would that mean for their already tenuous lives?
    They tried to be hopeful, all of them, clinging to President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s promises not to be the world savior this time around, to stay out of battle.
    It was hard for Morde to sit still. He was leaving all of that behind. Days before he departed Manhattan, he had written a letter to his parents in Massachusetts, explaining that he was headed “where no white man has been before”—unmapped wilderness on the Mosquito Coast that few knew anything about. He would be gone for four months, and every major news organization was watching one of the most talked-about journeys of that generation: this man headed out to discover a vanished civilization. As a media phenomenon, it was the equivalent of a man traveling to outer space.
    Centuries ago, explorers had most of the world yet to discover. But now much of it had been traveled and seen and written about. Ships had circled the globe. The North and South Poles had been reached. The sea had been mined. Mountains had been climbed. There were no more continents to name. Yet Morde remained a dreamer. He had become addicted to an idea that dies hard: that there was something richer out there than the New Bedford in which he had grown up, someplace more beautiful than the sea that he had seen from the decks of many ships, more perfect than any faraway land he’d already seen—a land that could possibly tell us about ourselves, that might even have the power to make us better. He believed that he could find that place.
    On April 2, a few days after he’d arrived in New Orleans, he headed straight for the Piety Street Wharf. The reek of brine stung his nostrils as he dodged banana carts and sailors and scanned the crowded docks for his ship, the SS Wawa . With him he hauled more than a thousand pounds of equipment, including clothing, cooking pans, candles, kerosene