while a “bright-eyed little Indian girl” kept his house; he told the men that he was planning to marry the younger one as soon as she learned a bit more English, maybe around Christmas. While Morde and Brown bought a few last-minute provisions, Brayton talked about his old life and how he’d left the States behind because he couldn’t find a job. “What good was I back there?” he asked. “No good at all!” On the river, he could “just sit here and the money comes.” He didn’t miss home at all.
Brayton was not unlike the other wanderers before him who had come to Honduras to find themselves, to forget, to restart—Cortés, Pedraza, Walker, O. Henry. All had left their old lives behind in dreams of transformation—of finding riches or fame or simply something to cover up their past, the way a scar grows over an old wound.
A FEW MORE miles upriver, the explorers encountered another American, Will Wood—“half blind and feeble with age.” Slumped in a hammock in front of his warped wood shack, his clothes were dirty, his teeth yellow and broken. He didn’t want to talk about why he had left Minnesota, why he had decided to become a wanderer, because that was a long time ago. Since then, the damp green air had worked away at his mind.
“Silent green is creeping in on the old man inch by inch, day by day,” Morde wrote. “The man is battered by time, by a life spent fighting the jungle, the river and the inexorable lassitude that sucks out a man’s guts down here.”
The only story Wood told the men was about his dead uncle. Wood had left him behind, like everyone else. But when his uncle had died a few months before, Wood had found out that he had inherited $40,000.
He snickered about that, knowing it was a lot of money. All he had to do was motor out to a coastal town and sign for it.
“Are you going to do it?” Morde wondered.
“Not now,” he said, sliding deeper into his hammock, waving his hand at the heat. “I’ll go down a little later.”
BEFORE THEY LEFT the grasslands, the explorers stayed a night with a clutch of German Jews hiding out from the war. They spoke in thick enough accents that the other expats just called them “the Germans.” Hardy Feldman, Franz Jeffries, and Mrs. Jeffries were all in their late thirties, tall and blond, and ran a small banana plantation. The Jeffrieses had two small children with them, and there was a drifter who came and went and was known only as Charlie.
Morde was fascinated by their lifestyle. “High on the left bank,” he wrote of this unusual family, “three young people try to work out a system of living. Their children have to be taught by their parents, the problems of the community settled harmoniously and the unaccustomed hardships of frontier life accounted for.”
Years earlier, the group had purchased the plantation from a western company, but things had not gone as planned. They were sitting on a lot of debt, and their bananas were diseased. When they weren’t working the trees, they squatted in front of their one-room shack with its corrugated tin roof and stared out over the river. Their boat had broken down. “They live entirely on credit,” Morde scribbled on the night he stayed with the family. “Working, struggling, praying for the day when they can get away.”
There was a long history of people trying to exploit the river for riches: loggers, rubber hunters, prospectors. Most of the forays ended badly.
Decades earlier, the banana companies—United and Stan-dard—had started laying train tracks through the country to construct an efficient passage to deliver fruit from the interior plantations to the seaports. Those efforts were soon scotched as the firms learned, in the way that the Spanish had learned centuries earlier, that the jungle resisted development with relentless force. As soon as the greenery was cut down, it began to grow anew and in no time would be just as densely packed with the high trees,
Brayton was not unlike the other wanderers before him who had come to Honduras to find themselves, to forget, to restart—Cortés, Pedraza, Walker, O. Henry. All had left their old lives behind in dreams of transformation—of finding riches or fame or simply something to cover up their past, the way a scar grows over an old wound.
A FEW MORE miles upriver, the explorers encountered another American, Will Wood—“half blind and feeble with age.” Slumped in a hammock in front of his warped wood shack, his clothes were dirty, his teeth yellow and broken. He didn’t want to talk about why he had left Minnesota, why he had decided to become a wanderer, because that was a long time ago. Since then, the damp green air had worked away at his mind.
“Silent green is creeping in on the old man inch by inch, day by day,” Morde wrote. “The man is battered by time, by a life spent fighting the jungle, the river and the inexorable lassitude that sucks out a man’s guts down here.”
The only story Wood told the men was about his dead uncle. Wood had left him behind, like everyone else. But when his uncle had died a few months before, Wood had found out that he had inherited $40,000.
He snickered about that, knowing it was a lot of money. All he had to do was motor out to a coastal town and sign for it.
“Are you going to do it?” Morde wondered.
“Not now,” he said, sliding deeper into his hammock, waving his hand at the heat. “I’ll go down a little later.”
BEFORE THEY LEFT the grasslands, the explorers stayed a night with a clutch of German Jews hiding out from the war. They spoke in thick enough accents that the other expats just called them “the Germans.” Hardy Feldman, Franz Jeffries, and Mrs. Jeffries were all in their late thirties, tall and blond, and ran a small banana plantation. The Jeffrieses had two small children with them, and there was a drifter who came and went and was known only as Charlie.
Morde was fascinated by their lifestyle. “High on the left bank,” he wrote of this unusual family, “three young people try to work out a system of living. Their children have to be taught by their parents, the problems of the community settled harmoniously and the unaccustomed hardships of frontier life accounted for.”
Years earlier, the group had purchased the plantation from a western company, but things had not gone as planned. They were sitting on a lot of debt, and their bananas were diseased. When they weren’t working the trees, they squatted in front of their one-room shack with its corrugated tin roof and stared out over the river. Their boat had broken down. “They live entirely on credit,” Morde scribbled on the night he stayed with the family. “Working, struggling, praying for the day when they can get away.”
There was a long history of people trying to exploit the river for riches: loggers, rubber hunters, prospectors. Most of the forays ended badly.
Decades earlier, the banana companies—United and Stan-dard—had started laying train tracks through the country to construct an efficient passage to deliver fruit from the interior plantations to the seaports. Those efforts were soon scotched as the firms learned, in the way that the Spanish had learned centuries earlier, that the jungle resisted development with relentless force. As soon as the greenery was cut down, it began to grow anew and in no time would be just as densely packed with the high trees,
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