Laying sweaty in my sheets late in the night after the accident. No sleep. No chance of it. Wondering to myself, When did it happen? I mean, when did it really happen? Not the moment of impact, but the beginning or the “birth” of it?

Maybe it happened just the night before when I said “yes” to Annabelle.

Or maybe earlier this morning when I decided to put on a pair of cut-to-be-hightop rubber boots with no tread instead of my trekking shoes.

Or maybe it happened when I put the axe and the machete in the little backpack and slung the lot over one shoulder.

Or maybe the accident was already happening when I waved goodbye to the other volunteers and found myself alone 5 miles from the nearest road.

Maybe, just maybe, that accident had been happening my whole life, moving imperceptibly faster and faster as I neared that crucial moment of impact between possibilities and the reality of the moment.

Anyway, it did happen, regardless of when it was born…and here’s how:

Night before, 1 liter beers on the table like a brown-glass forest. Six or seven volunteers lounging in green plastic chairs, everyone tired from the long day, heavy jungle air settling in around us. Huge transport trucks roaring and grinding past two times faster than they should be. They hurtle onto the narrow two lane, no-sidewalked bridge crossing the river Espíritu Santo. Any locals crossing the bridge at that moment just sidle nonchalantly up against the side railings as the 18 wheelers heave by only a foot from their faces. Gringos on the bridge though, the ones crossing into town or back to the refuge where we sat, first freeze, then jump all panicky to the rails, leaning out over the river, trying to get away from all that moving metal without falling into the shallow waters below. I liked to call that span “The bridge of death”, even though I hadn’t seen anyone get plastered on it…it just seemed a matter of time though. Such an incongruent thing, to be so close to wild jungles, in fact, to be surrounded by them, but to be only 30 feet from a busy trunk road linking two of Bolivia’s largest cities.

Annabelle was there with us, watching the “bridge of death”. All muscle and bone, annabelle. Her face seemed like it wanted to pull in toward the center, the squinting eyes, pursed lips, and the brows drawn down in thought…or disapproval…or both. She’d been there a year already, started out as a 1 month volunteer like the rest of us, but just couldn’t leave, couldn’t stop working. And here she was now, the erstwhile volunteer coordinator, caring so much for the animals in the refuge that it sometimes seemed not to care about us. But that wasn’t the case, as I found out the next day.

She leaned over to me, a thick French accent tugging on her words, “Ian, tomorrow you walk the Puma.”

“Which one?” me, surprised and already nervous.

“Gato” A hesitation, a thought “And I have a favor to ask. A tree is blocking his path. I want you to clear it away.”

“With him there…watching me?”

Hint of a smile, “No, Karen and Rachel will finish his walk. Will you do it?”

“Of course.”

“But there’s one more thing. The tree. It’s not lying down. It’s upside down. Still standing, but the wrong way. Do you understand?”

“Uh, yeah, I guess I understand…a flipped tree, sure. Happens all the time”

Another half smile. “Don’t let it fall on you, ok?”

Next day, early morning. The capuchín monkeys housed outside my room, the “quarantined monkeys” already awake, chirping, screaming, laughing, crying in they’re high-pitched human-baby/song-bird voices. All the drama of a lifetime packed into 3 minute intervals: fights, reconciliations, surprise and betrayal…all three feet from my ears. I get up; on go the already-musty-dirty clothes and my trekking shoes.

Outside, clouds and humidity, the usual. Annabelle hands me a small knapsack, axe handle and machete blade poking out the top. She looks at my shoes, her face pulls into the center again.

“No. Those shoes won’t work. You need wellies (rubber boots). You’ll be in mud pits, streams, standing water.” She marched away from me. Her back said “follow.”

“Here, take these” She said, handed me rubber boots, each one cut to half height.

Ten minutes later, on the trail with Karen and Rachel, each of us with bags of food, straw, equipment. Twenty minutes climb up to Gato’s cage, tucked into a fold in the jungled hills north of the volunteer compound.

The daily ritual: open first door of cage, slide in next to second door. Other volunteer puts foot against first door, leaving it open only enough for the leash to run free. Gato standing in front of second door, volunteer reaches in, hooks the leash carabineer onto his collar. Other volunteer hooks other end of leash onto a long “runner” cable tied between two trees near the cage. Doors are opened and Gato bursts out, a 180 pound cat at full sprint to one end of the runner. We clean the cage, put down new straw bedding, set 2 whole chickens in the feed pan, cover them…they’re for dinner.

Then it’s off for a 10 mile puma walk. Gato sprints around every corner, we stumble and lurch behind him, dodging roots, holes, small ravines, boulders. This is not a stroll. We climb along narrow trails closed in by muscled trees, everything green and brown, alive and rotting. We descend past a rubber tree plantation, the linearity of man-planted trees a shock after so much vegetated chaos. We skirt ridges and climb again to a rotting-wood lookout deck. Below the entire valley of the Río Espíritu Santo, the Holy Ghost River, a rock-littered gash through a bolt of green cloth. Then on and down and up and around, always following the blue-marked trail. The red and yellow trails belong to other pumas. These cats don’t like each other. Instincts tell them to want territory, lots of it. “Don’t let the pumas see each other” Annabelle always told us. “It’s dangerous. For you.”

We turned a corner, our trail hugging the bottom of a cliff and stopped. Had to. There was the “upside down” tree. It had fallen down the cliff, landed on its canopy, the trunk shot upward, nosed against the cliff a bit. Like a giant umbrella I thought. The branches covered part of a little wooden bridge. There was no way to get around the tree.

“Well, time for me to play lumberjack” I said.

Karen looked up at the trunk of the tree. “Be careful, Ian. ok?”

“Yep. Believe me, the last thing I want is to have a tree fall on me.”

“How long is it going to take you?”

“No idea. A couple hours. Maybe I’ll catch up with you guys at the lookout.”

“Ok. If not we’ll see you back at the house.”

Gato stood up, pulled toward the bridge and the tree, Rachel leaning all her weight against the leash. He hissed, pulled again.

“Come on Gato, let’s go this way.” Rachel cooed, keeping tension on the leash, trying to convince the cat to turn around and retrace the trail we’d been walking. Gato hissed again. “Pumas want routine, understand?” Annabelle had informed me the night before. “Break that routine and they get grouchy. When they get grouchy they bite and scratch. And when they do that, you get cut and bruised. Understand? You will get clawed, you will get bitten. These are not house cats. They are not tame. Do not try to force them, and do not break routine. Understand?”

I stood watching Rachel and Gato try to out-will one another. Two minutes, five, eight…and finally gato relaxed, turned his back to me, hissed once at Rachel, and padded away down the trail.

I was alone but surrounded by teeming life. Leaf cutter ants, red bodies, long legs, carried their chunks of leaf above them like green sails or protest signs, a single file freeway coming from invisible leading into invisible. Inexorable. Birds coughed and fluted in the trees. Giant leaves rustled in places where the breeze above could sneak down toward the ground. Vines hung in tangles. Bushes and ferns clogged the floor. Rotting leaves everywhere, covering muddy ground in the rare bare patches of ground. I smiled huge. I was in a real jungle, I could feel all that life around me, all that scurrying for food and light, for safety and shelter.

I hacked the branches away from the bridge, used the machete to carve a tunnel through the upside down tree’s canopy. Got to the other side, cleared away more branches, found which of them were supporting the now-swaying trunk’s weight. Chose which to cut, wanted the tree to fall parallel with the trail.

Cracks, lurches, groans. Each hack with axe trembling the tree. I stopped, made sure I could get away from the falling trunk. Practiced it once, twice, three times. Went back, another swing of the axe. Another. A pause. CRACK! Time to run.

I turned, pushed off with my left foot, and there was nothing to push off on, my left foot flying out behind me…I was slipping.

Down.

Belly on the ground.

Panic-rush.

Scramble.

Pushing to stand, a glance up and over my right shoulder.

Movement there, heavy, fast.

I got to my feet, my hands still on the rotten leaves, pushing into the mud, head down.

And just like that I was back on the ground, an explosion of force so hard and so sudden it seemed like it almost hadn’t happened at all. no air in my lungs, the world white, white, white, and hissing like a broken TV, something warm running out of my nose. Blood…just pouring. Then it stopped, like a faucet turned off. No pain. The white noise gone. Calmness. Lucidity.

I’m broken. I’m really fucking broken. Wow. Remember this, Ian…if you last long enough. Remember that this is and was the very moment when your life forever changed. You’re broken. It was so clear, so obvious. In those 10 or 20 seconds, I felt no fear, no pain, no worry…just an absolute and surprised surety of a turning point.

Then came the throbbing in my back, like being pinched in a giant vice, hard to breathe, head rushing and swirling. Panic again. Oh, shit, the tree’s on me! The fucking tree is still on me! I’m trapped here! Oh my god…no. I had to move just had to get out from under the tree. I pulled with my arms, clawed at the debris-strewn jungle floor. And I moved; I slithered along with no resistance. Relief, I’d sigh if I could get a deep enough breath. I wasn’t under the tree, after all. I gotta get up! Gotta get out of here, get help. Shocky, shivering, I started to push myself to my feet. My back tensed in crazy spasms. I lay back down, chanted to myself. Relax Ian. just relax, man…relax, Ian, relax Ian.

I lay there, shallow breaths, my mouth in contact with the bits of bark, dirt, leaf, twig on the ground. I could smell the rot, musty fungus, I saw an ant crawl by inches from my eye. Relax, Ian. I moved my fingers, my wrists, my elbows, shrugged my shoulders, gently tensed the muscles in my neck, expecting sharp pains, felt none. I switched to my toes. Just like Kill Bill, Ian…wiggle your toes. Flexed my ankles, slightly bent my knees, some pain in my right leg, but dampened by the red-hot glow in my back. Ok, so far so good…now the back…but very carefully. I swiveled my hips an inch to the right, an inch to the left…no increase in pain, no sharpness, no numbness. I lifted my hips off the ground, arched my back. More pain, so stiff, like a permanent cramp…but again no stab of new pain, no inside-the-body sound of grinding bone. Breathing still short, hard to take in air. 10 minutes passed, maybe 10 days. If I get up, and my back is broken, I might actually paralyze myself by moving. But if I stay here, who will come to get me? How long will I have to wait? It’s gotta be, what, 10am now? The girls will have lunch with Gato at around 1, wait for me, think nothing of the fact that I don’t show up, leave around 2. They’ll finish up with the cat around 5, head down to the house, have a beer, eat some empanadas, talk about the day. Then they’ll shower, come back for another beer, and dinner. When it gets dark one of ‘em might ask if anyone has seen me. Maybe then they’ll start to worry, might try to find Annabelle or Stuart, ask them what to do. Then maybe they’ll come for me, fearing the worst. It’ll be dark, pitch black dark. It’ll take ‘em a couple hours to get here. Then it’ll be, let’s see, around 10-11 at night. Hmm…

I could feel myself already starting to stiffen up, the shock settling in. Even though it was in the seventies, I was cold. I pictured army ants coming across me, sending news to their minions, picking me apart pinch by little pinch. I pictured swarms of mosquitoes settling in for a feast, I pictured those tenacious, badger like Tejones finding me, messing me up just for the hell of it. I pictured a jaguar smelling me out in the night, coming in for the easy dinner, I didn’t even know if there were jaguars in this particular fold of the jungle, but like a castaway floating in the sea not knowing what lurked in the depths below him, I had no clue what might even then be watching me from the dense green horizontal abyss surrounding me. Fuck, no. If I lay here any longer, I’ll be stiff as a board, won’t be able to move even if I wanted to. I gotta get out of here.

I pushed myself to my hands and knees, then slowly stood up. I felt like a bad imitation of Frankenstein, or of a corpse emerging from a grave in a B movie. Then I smiled. I was standing, I wasn’t going to die. I couldn’t sense any weird internal scariness like ruptured organs, and my back, while hurting like hell, didn’t feel unstable.

But when I stepped out with my right leg and planted it I heard the disconcerting feel-sound of bone scraping against bone. Fuck! My right fibula was broken. How? The tree hadn’t hit it, I was sure of that. I’d broken both the tibia and fibula of my right leg before. Well, at least the fib is a non weight-bearing bone, if I’m careful, I can walk without doing too much extra damage down there. I was a bit surprised that my leg didn’t hurt more. It just felt wrong or unnatural, but it didn’t hurt. “Disconcerting” that’s what my leg felt like.

I hobbled over to my camera bag. I was going to take some pictures of the puma and of the process of clearing the tree away. Instead I took a few pictures of myself next to the tree, so I’d never be able to forget how fucking unlucky and at the same time absurdly lucky I seem to be. I found the point where my boot had slipped in the mud, took a picture of that, too. That little brown smudge on the ground, that tiny scar, was evidence of how random and fragile life really is. If my boot catches a stone there, or the leaves don’t slip away, I’m away from the tree and patting myself on the back instead of wondering whether it’s snapped in half. Then I start thinking about the angle and force of the tree, how it hit me. If I’d just stayed prone on the ground the tree would probably have missed me, maybe hit my left arm, if it was stuck out to the side. If I would have lifted my head up when I was scrambling to my feet, the trunk would have clipped me skull before smashing into my back. I’m positive I’d be dead if I’d have done that. And if I had somehow gotten all the way to my feet, the tree would have caught me full on in the abdomen, made a pudding out of my organs, crushed my ribs, pinned me to the ground…I’m sure I would have died in that scenario, too. Later that week, when I’d lay awake on my back on the over-hard mattress in the volunteer house, I’d replay those possible endings out in my head over and over again and every time I’d cry from the knowing of how intimately I’d caressed against Death. Such a humbling thing an encounter like that.

It took me almost four hours to walk the five miles to the volunteer house and that road full of semi trucks. Up hill and down, over root and under fallen tree, across creek and up ravine. I moved methodically, a robot programmed to plant right foot, make sure it wouldn’t roll or flex, slowly shift weight, swing left leg and hip around, back clenched to the side, in an all-day spasm of dull pains and shifting bone. I passed it thinking about how amazing life is, how much I missed my family, how stupid I’m being when I worry about this or that or the other, how badly I wanted to be walking, letting the road and the world stretch before and behind me. I passed it wondering if I was going to be ok, if my back was really broken, if I was endangering myself with every step. I passed it feeling incredibly lonely, sometimes scared. I passed it chuckling at the “reader’s digest-esqueness” of it all. “TREE FALLS ON MAN IN JUNGLE, HE CRAWLS TO SAFETY ON ALL FOURS.”

Three hours pass. Ahead I hear the thwack of machete on branch, footsteps. I call out “Hey! Who is that?” No answer. I hobble forward a bit longer, come to a steep-sided ravine. A creek tumbles at the bottom. I yell again. “Hey, who is that?” This time an answer. “It’s Karen. Is that you Ian?”

“Yes. Could I get some help.” A pause.

“Um. I’m on the other side of the ravine.”

I didn’t know how to respond. For some reason felt silly shouting out “But I’m broken goddamn it!” So I said nothing, slid on my ass down to the creek, spent five minutes scrambling up the other side. There was Karen, about 30 feet away, in profile, chopping at bushes encroaching on the trail. “Rachel’s up with Gato at the lookout, just thought I’d clean the trail up some. You ready?” And without looking at me she started up the path.

Again, I said nothing, tried to follow. Time passed. A big tree trunk across the trail. Crazy pain as I tried to fling my leg over it without moving my back. I must have groaned because Karen turned around to look at me. “Are you…holy shit! Ian, what happened?” She moved toward me. I must have been a sight, shock-white face, twigs and bark stuck to m cheeks and lips, blood crusted on nose and upper lip, shirt stained from mud and water and tree trunk impact.

For some reason, the concern on her face hit me like a brick, tears jumped into my eyes, my voice broke as I told her in short sentences what had happened. “Cutting tree, slipped, it fell on me. Broke my leg. Back is killing me.”

“Do you want me to go ahead and get more people?” She asked me, guilt showing from not having noticed my state before.

“No. I can walk. Maybe just a shoulder now and then going down hill…that part is no fun.”

A while later, the lookout, Rachel already gone with the cat. Then near the monkey park, Karen yelling down to the volunteers there. Up come Robert and Tor. More shoulders to lean on. Joking with Robert as we finally get down to the river. My leg finally starting to hurt on the wobbly river rock. Rob so positive, encouraging. Then the house, the road, a VW bug, the village clinic.

A non-doctor looking at my back, not touching it, not asking me questions, just looking. The nurse with her back turned to me, reading a romance novel. Details: the rusty blood stains on the feet of the tables, the smell of ammonia and bleach, the broken windows, flickering fluorescent lights, the staring quiet of whole families in the hall, the ancient machinery and tools. Then the 17 year-old x-ray tech. The x-ray machine older than her grandparents, her lack of knowledge, the Refuge’s veterinarian having to hold the photo plate against the wall behind my back, his head exposed to the zap of radiation. The results from the back x-ray…like a cloudy day, no details. Tech girl saying nonchalantly “Yeah, figured as much. That machine’s too weak for back x-rays” Then why in hell did you take it in the first place, little girl? The leg x-ray worked. Ruptured bone in five little pieces, a mini jigsaw puzzle.

I stayed there for a month, healing. My back curing faster than my leg. Then a flight back to the States. Family. Friends. Warmth of loved ones. A back x-ray there shows three broken lumbar vertebrae. Me surprised because my back feels fine now. The doctor, “So, Ian, do you feel any pain in your back?” Me, “Nope, what’ll you do?”

“Nothing.” A couple minutes later, the secretary, “That’ll be 290 dollars, Mr. Reeves.”

Ah, yes, the States.

I’m alive, I’m well. Life is short, maybe shorter than you know. I know what I’m going to do with it now…