Jungle Diary: Bad Water

Torture Journal

We move today. I’m sitting up in bed, finally, surrounded by boxes. Anxious. I’ve moved house/home endlessly throughout my life, but I never get better at it—practically or spiritually. Somehow this most material and profane of activities always dredges up the existential angst. Where is home? 

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I’ve been completely dysfunctional for over a week, and I have so many pressing issues, projects, and commitments to attend to, but I had to write this out, just for the sake of my sanity. 

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The new place is great—an ocean view, a pool, a lawn for soccer practice, and rooms for everyone. It’s a lovely, rambling, scruffy house, perfect for us. 

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Today is also the first day in almost a week that I’ve been able to walk a little, though not without extreme discomfort. My hands are still swollen and pock-marked, with new ulcers erupting between my fingers, but the sores on my abdomen have scabbed over, and the main wound has diminished dramatically. This partial recovery is almost ecstatic, given the kicking and screaming I did to move through it, sad and lost, my system so eloquently mirroring the inner world. This entire passage has been an orchestration of exquisite pain and resistance, two things which are, of course, always synergetic. 

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No one wants to hear about anyone else’s afflictions, Yo, except you. Oh well.

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It wasn’t a sunburn at all. It was a poisoning. An envenomation. What are the chances? (Statistically, probably less than one percent, said Horus, who has studied these things). Really, it’s just weather—out there, in here.  Climate and conditions, written on the body. Flora and fauna. 

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I struggle with transitions at the best of times. 

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Looking back, I think it began with the reek of putrefaction. Not just in town, where the melange of human and animal and industry is concentrated, but even more thickly in the jungle, away from the starving street dogs and impromptu garbage dumps. At first I was annoyed and disgusted, as I often am, but then I realized that the sick sweet smell tinged with rotting onions—terroir—was the perfume of mango season.  

Knowing the source was helpful. Mangoes! My disgust immediately turned to romance and I loved Nicaragua again. This is the life! Mangoes are rampant. No one can keep up, not with all the smoothies and juices and chutneys in the world. At the height of it, mangoes rain down from above, hitting the sidewalks, exploding, tropical hail splattering the patios with boozy jam. The racket of mangoes hitting roofs draws the monkeys in, who highwire into town on the electrical lines to feast.

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During our recent phone conversation, my mother told me about having her house, my childhood home, painted after 20 years of entropy. She then announced to me that she has decided that she won’t be selling it after all, and that she’ll happily die there, as though that were ever really in question…I have dreams and nightmares about that house. The highest calling of a mother is to make a home in the world. 

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This was the backdrop.

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Ecdysis is a word that refers to the process by which a reptile or insect sheds its skin during a period of growth, casting aside the lifeless exuviae. 

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What happened? Well, I was basically burned alive. It was very traumatic.

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Amid the seasonal fragrance of decomposing fruit mixed with diesel fumes Lee stopped the truck behind Alfredo with his horse and carriage and plastic buckets full of milk and a line of taxis and scooters trailing him, to behold a body lying on the tarmac, the head was split open, coagulating blood staining the pavement. Off to one side, there was a fallen moto and a mangled bicycle, folded in half. 

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A moment later, an ox-cart appeared at the side road. Four men jumped out, and matter-of-factly hauled the body up, limp but twitching, and dumped it on to the wooden platform of the cart before it lumbered out of sight. I cried. 

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The flow of traffic resumed. 

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Three days later, the man died in hospital. Everyone was talking about it. I was shocked to discover he had lived that long. The guy on the moto spent two weeks in prison while his family came up with a settlement acceptable to the grieving mother. 

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Occasionally there are things I miss about our old life. Sitting in the grass, I recall now as a luxury. All through my old life I took picnics for granted. Here, unfolding a blanket and letting it billow before it falls on the lawn in the park doesn’t exist as a code for summer or safety or contentment. 

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Tropical grass is not only coarse and stabby, but it harbours an array of hostile and predatory insects, and a multitude of harmless snakes that resemble the less common venomous varieties closely enough to make the experience of encountering them at least momentarily terrifying (although the coral snake and fer-de-lance are actually quite rare). Rolling around in the foliage just isn’t done here. We go to the beach.

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The morning after we witnessed the dead man being carted off the carretera, Lee took that turn too fast again, and I was petrified. But instead of weeping, gnashing my teeth, or launching into a hysterical rant about the ripple effect that would ensue if we damaged a Nicaraguan’s car, or, God, forbid, killed or injured someone, and the extended ramifications of that already-terrible potentiality in a country where there is no insurance, no safety net, and where the least injured person in a crash is considered guilty until proven innocent, I simply said calmly and with a terrible quietude, Please let me out now.

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Lee, sensing a shift in the atmosphere, not to mention in the balance of our marriage, obliged. He pulled over, and I calmly disembarked, and continued into town on foot, weaving between the piles of pig dung and refuse, basking in the power and virtue of sweet submission to reality. 

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José the Russian cheese-maker was waiting for me on the stairs when I arrived at my office, so I bought the fifth carton of yogurt from him that week. If it were’t for José—whose original name is Igor—I wouldn’t buy or consume nearly as much yogurt, but his dedication moves me. Every day, he walks all the way from el Oro into San Juan, carrying the little cooler full of his wares, the fermented dairy products made by his Russian wife, and somehow I can’t resist. Would he even exist if it weren’t for me, buying more cheese than I know what to do with? José doesn’t even have to be here. He could just go home to the motherland. But could he, at this point? Of course not.

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Lee showed up then, contrite, and suggested that after my meeting, we go to Remanso for a couple of hours, he to surf, me to sunbathe with the babies. He promised to drive with exceptional conscientiousness. Again, I surrendered, and we returned to the house to pick up Margaret, Helio, Iggy, and the big kids who already had their boards ready.

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Lee and the teenagers and almost-teenagers enjoyed some decent waves, and I spent a blissful two hours basking in the shallow water with the little ones—Margaret bouncing and giggling, Helio and Iggy organizing pebbles. As we were packing up to leave, I noticed some sensitivity on my upper thigh, and figured I must have gotten slightly sunburned, which was surprising, given that I haven’t experienced that in years (despite being in the sun constantly, and not ever wearing any “protection,” either in the form of creams and sunscreens, or clothing.)

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But it wasn’t a sunburn at all. That evening (this was Monday) a stunning wine-coloured blossom-shaped pattern emerged on my backside—the shape of an iris or the the tentacles of a venomous sea-creature, which, it turned out, is exactly what it was. 

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A couple of years previously at the same beach, I had been stung by a live jellyfish on my breast, which immediately sent a searing knifewound pain through my body, and resulted in a blaze that persisted for several days, along with a sordid degree of itching and blistering. 

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This was similar, but different. In this case, based on the symptoms and the trajectory of my body’s response, it became clear that I had had a run-in not with a jellyfish (which is already profoundly unpleasant) but with the tentacles of a man-o-war. 

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The man-o-war, as Horus (our in-house natural historian) informed us, is similar to a jellyfish in its method of predation, but it’s also quite a different entity. In fact, the man-o-war isn’t a jellyfish at all, nor even an *animal* per se, but a coalition of many small organisms, a colony of sorts, made up of many single-cell beings, united for success. 

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I was shocked to discover that man-o-war are quite beautiful—lustrous, pearly, iridescent things, with a gelatinous shell-shaped central mass that tends to float insouciantly near the surface of the water, allowing its deadly tentacles, which are dotted with microscopic toxin-loaded barbed capsules, to dangle down up to a hundred feet into the deep, ready to casually paralyze and kill any small fish or arthropods unfortunate enough to be caught up in its veil. 

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I also learned that man-o-war can often become mauled by the waves and then wash up on-shore, and that even dead, their tentacles can leave severe welts, scars, blistering, and in some cases, significant adverse reactions that include neurological symptoms. The pain, according to most victims, is otherworldly—incomparable to anything else. 

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All jellyfish are called “medusa” in Nicaragua, but this—what I had the misfortune of drifting through is known as “aguamala”—bad water. 

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My skin, where the mark appeared, was somewhat painful initially—irritating, certainly—but over the hours following our time at the beach, the large blemish became a welt, raised and angry, and by the next morning, it burned like I’d been branded. 

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I (stupidly) posted on an expat Facebook group about it, curious to know if anyone else had had similar experiences wth man-o-war while out on the water at Remanso, but instead of sea-faring advice, I received a flood of well-meaning offers of homeopathic remedies, salves, teas, and potions, all of which I kindly declined, along with some angry admonitions from strangers who felt very strongly that I should immediately go to the hospital to receive antihistamines, antibiotics, and painkillers, none of which I would even consider. 

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On the contrary, I had a gym workout and a pickeleball game and I went to both, limping and making self-deprecating jokes, convinced that this would pass quickly. My Pickleball friends were both concerned and disgusted, and they too offered various natural remedies, (including the suggestion that I pee on myself, which really isn’t my thing, and which I have learned doesn’t nearly offer the benefits it’s purported to, which are apparently a myth, in the case of jellyfish encounters, anyway). By the end of the game (I lost) I felt horrendous, and ashamed instead of triumphant, for having so stubbornly insisted on coming. I immediately drove home, my body throbbing, and gingerly crawled back into bed.

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Despite the initial pain, I was confident that this rash would heal eventually, all on its own, and I was determined, at the very least, to see how interesting this could be—and to once again observe the unadulterated process of healing unfold. 

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What I know unerringly, is that our bodies are perfectly designed, and are always oriented to healing. Once the injury or the impact or the incident has occurred, every cell in the body is recruited to effectuate the healing process immediately, which is the purpose of inflammation, pustulation, scabbing, and cellular growth and loss. The symptom itself is the evidence of healing already set in motion. 

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“But why not try something, if it could actually help you feel better?” One friend asked, baffled by my refusal to make use of the apothecary on offer. “Or is it that you actually enjoy suffering?” No, it’s really not that.