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When I look back at the photographs I took along these drives, I see that they are all of the same things: rivers, boats on rivers, little multi-colored buildings in a row. I did not need to travel to take those pictures. I could have found those scenes in Missouri or New York. I realize now that they were not pictures of any specific place, really, but of a time. What drew me was that brief interlude of history when the roads were rivers, and rivers led to frontiers unknown and unimagined. And yet there is something settled about my pictures, too, something solid and domestic about those little buildings in a row. A stranger looking through my photos might conclude that I was looking for a home. I wasn’t. But I found one, in a way, in the comfort of the road, the motion of leaving and arriving, the freedom of spending all day nowhere, everywhere, in between.

Johnna Kaplan is a freelance writer whose work has appeared in Newsweek, the Christian Science Monitor, and various online travel magazines. She travels as much as she can, motivated mostly by a love of history and a congenital inability to stay in one place for more than about a month. She blogs about her conflicted relationship with Connecticut at www.thesizeofconnecticut.blogspot.com.

KATHERINE JAMIESON

Educating the Body

Lessons learned from the tropics.

MY SKIN FAILED ME THAT FIRST SUMMER IN GUYANA. I tried pasty lotions and wide-brimmed hats, long sleeves in the midday heat. Still, I turned bright red: I shone like a cherry. Miss, like ya get burn up? my students said, pressing a finger onto the red glow of my shoulder. Ya must careful! Sun hot! But there was nothing I could do. Skin peeled from the part in my hair. Light streamed through my gauzy curtains, and when I left the house it burned through my clothes. It colored my days and savaged my pores until I was red and raw, until I could no longer remember what it was to be touched without wincing.

There are no vestigial British aristocrats in Guyana, none of the prim, post-colonial garden parties you might imagine in Barbados or Jamaica. The English lost sanity in the heat, counting mosquitoes by the thousands. Eventually they gave up and sent Scottish farmers, leaving behind generations of McCurdy’s and Douglases. I was one of only a few hundred white faces in the country, and the others were ravaged like mine. Guyanese call albinos “devil-whip.” Blue-eyed and freckled, their skin is tawny and thick like a scar. The Guyanese with Portuguese ancestors have wrinkles that crumple their skin, starburst lines radiating out to their bleached hair. Every evening in my mirror I saw the day’s burnings. In their faces, I saw a lifetime’s.

Coastal life in Guyana is a temporary concession between two powerful neighbors: to the North, the Atlantic which mingles its muddy brown into the clear Caribbean Sea miles off the coast; to the South, the “Interior”—vast jungles, savannahs, riverways, and mountains, inhabited by some of the rarest flora and fauna in the world. The land is massive, thousands of tracts of virgin rainforest stretching across to Venezuela and Suriname, down to the Brazilian border. I lived, as the majority of the population does, in a narrow band of cultivation along a one-road highway, just miles from blackwater creeks that wind down to Kaieteur, one of the most powerful single-drop waterfalls in the world. Humans have created a viable habitat here, growing rice and sugar, irrigating fields, and building roads. These tasks are backbreaking and the results require constant diligence to maintain. When abandoned, the land quickly reverts to overgrowth. Life here is a constant campaign against an encroaching jungle.

There is lore that North Americans adjust over time, that their blood thins (or is it thickens?) in the constant heat. This did not happen for me. From the night of my arrival at Timehri airport, I sported small beads of moisture across my forehead and nose. My Guyanese