by Sarahlee Lawrence, River Rafting Guide
The fog burned off as we ate that next morning and the jungle was a vibrant new place. We dried our tents and our wet clothes for the first time in eleven days. I scrubbed Marco’s leg with a scarf over my nose, agitated puss dribbling down his calf…

by Sarahlee Lawrence, River Rafting Guide
or three days Marco and I ate pasta with salami, cheese, carrots, garlic, and onions. We drank coca tea with so much sugar we couldn’t sleep. When Marco’s bandages started to stink, I boiled them and redressed his wound twice a day to fight infection…

by Sarahlee Lawrence, River Rafting Guide
The next morning, misty clouds hung low in the forest and put contrast in the layers of dense green. The white trunks of the trees sketched across the horizon like pencil lines, marking the skeleton of the canopy. Condors circled down the river…

By Sarahlee Lawrence, River Rafting Guide

Marco made the long trek back to the village while I waited with the gear. Trapped in the white bubble of my tent, I felt the sweat drip down my eyelids and onto Thoreau’s Walden. A visceral longing for my desert home developed there in the dank, skyless snarl. I wanted the sky that my dad worked against like a red ant, where he could watch a storm build for hours and flood east over the mountains before it swung north and swept over his fresh cut hay. Thoreau helped me accept going on as better than back, despite the unknown, if only to “drive life into a corner and reduce it to its lowest terms.” My mind went numb in the drone of drizzle and I ate one bite of bland bread at a time…

By Sarahlee Lawrence, River Rafting Guide

Relieved, I pushed off the shore and headed around the bend out of town. Condors circled and landed on the rocks in the river before me. Plain brown birds opened their wings and exposed huge red and orange eyes. River otters played in front of my boat. The air was thick, sweet, and loud with life. The short, ‘easy’ run turned out to be steep, rocky rapids…

By Sarahlee Lawrence, River Rafting Guide

We crouched, sweating, in a tent while rain beat through the fabric. I held the napkin with the map on it. It was a little napkin, meant to go with a rum and Coke at a discothèque in downtown Cusco, Peru. The sketch on the napkin depicted a two hundred mile section of river. A single line squiggled out of some stick mountains. The single line became a ball of black scribble and had two words next to it: Los Monstruos, i.e. the monsters, the rapids in the inner gorge. The map did not explain how to run these. At the top of the squiggle, two streams came in on either side of the ink river. At the bottom of the scribble a stream came in on the left and there was a giant boulder with a tiny tree on top of it. From there the single line ran off the bottom of the napkin. I looked out the door of the tent and wondered — how in the hell did I come to be here…