An Amazon Tale
By
Valerie L. Egar
Jock, my neighbor,
sailed the seas as a merchant marine for thirty years. At first, all I heard were
tales of hurricanes, steamy ports near the equator with spiders big as cats, deadly
icebergs in the far north. Then he started telling me about river ports he’d
seen. He’d delivered bulldozers to Nile ports in Egypt and grain to a port on
the Ganges in India, and once, construction supplies to a port far enough up
the Amazon River to be surrounded by jungle.
“We
had to navigate the Amazon slowly,” Jock said. “It’s a treacherous river and though
the captain had maps of the sand bars, they change with the rains and floods.
Imagine: thick jungle on both sides. Wooden canoes paddled beside our ship,
keeping a good distance away. Every now and then we’d see a raft moving goods.
The first time I saw a truck on a raft, I took a picture. I’d never seen such a
thing!”
Jock
fished around in a box and pulled out a photo of a blue pick-up lashed to a
wooden raft.
“What
if it fell in the water?”
Jock shrugged.
“Guess they do, sometimes.” He sipped his iced tea. “Then, we saw pink
dolphins. They followed the ship, stayed beside it all the way up the river,
leading the way.”
He explained that
pink dolphins dwell in the Amazon and are rare. “They’re sacred to people who
live along the river, who insist the dolphins can turn into humans and back
again. I don’t believe it for a minute, except—”
“Except what?”
Jock shook his
head. “I’ve learned there’s reasonable
explanation for almost everything and I’m not going to fill your head with
nonsense.”
That made me a
little mad. I’m old enough to know what nonsense is, and I wanted to hear the
story, which is exactly what I told Jock.
It’s not fair to get right up to the good part and then stop.
“All right! The
Captain warned us to leave the pink dolphins alone. ‘They’re rare, they’re
beautiful, respect them,’ he said. But, there’s always somebody who doesn’t
listen. One of my crewmates, Marley, started taking pot shots at them from the
deck one afternoon. The captain was furious and stopped him, but not before Marley had hit one. Hard to tell what damage it did, but a pall settled over the whole
ship. What he’d done was wrong and we didn’t think that was the end of it.
“Later that day,
we pulled into port. Not much of a town, but enough to explore after being on
the ship for so many days. There was a festival and in the center square, a band played. People
danced. Everyone was friendly and soon, all of us were dancing, laughing and
having fun.
“Hours into the
festivities, a tall girl appeared, dressed in white. She was unlike anyone I’d
ever seen. Mysterious. Long black hair, blue eyes. Unlike the other girls, she
was alone. Her parents weren’t with her.
No one knew who she was.
“She was the
dolphin turned into a human, wasn’t she?”
“I told you I
don’t believe that nonsense.”
“Then who was
she?”
“A girl from another
village is my guess.”
“What happened?”
“She walked up to Marley and they started to dance.”
“She walked up to Marley and they started to dance.”
Before I could
protest, Jock stopped me. “Marley was a handsome guy. He stood out. When I left, they were still
dancing.
“Early the next
morning, the First Mate pounded on my door to wake me. He was organizing a
search party for Marley. He’d disappeared.”
“And?”
“We never found
him. But there’s no mystery in that. It was the jungle. Quicksand. Wild
animals. Bandits. Poisonous snakes.
Anything could have happened.”
“But,” Jock added, “I saw the girl once more
before I left. She walked through town and I followed her at a distance to see
where she went. She took a jungle path
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Copyright 2018 by Valerie L. Egar. May not be copied, distributed or reproduced without permission from the author.
Published August 19, 2018 Biddeford Journal Tribune (Biddeford, ME).
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