Turn Right at MacHu Picchu 12-Copy Floor Display - Mark Adams [61]
“You’re going to lead for a while. Remember to cut with short, sharp strokes. And watch your feet—always make sure you’re on solid ground. When in doubt, follow the higher trail.”
Any trail that existed was invisible to me, but John, who saw corridors where most people would see impenetrable walls of bush, patiently nudged me in the right direction each time I got stumped. It will perhaps not come as a complete shock that I was not a natural with the machete. Mostly, I hacked branches four or five times before the sticks finally snapped under their own weight. Those times that I did hit the branch squarely, though, the feeling was electric—like hitting a perfect tee shot.
For about ten minutes we advanced a few feet at a time, Luke and Yoda slicing through the wilds of Dagobah. We reached a point where the trail seemed to fork higher in two directions. I chose left, stepped confidently onto what I quickly realized was not earth but three feet of grass-covered air, and did a perfect banana-peel pratfall onto my butt. The machete spun upward like a juggler’s bowling pin and landed about six inches from my thigh.
“Well done, Mark,” John said, holding my shoulder firmly with one gloved hand and retrieving his machete with the other. “Think I’ll take over now.”
The foliage thickened as we moved lower. The grass was waist high and ferns towered a foot over my head. Bamboo had crept into every free inch of ground space. Vines reached out and grabbed me around the neck and ankles. After falling down for the eighth time, I stopped counting. Solid ground was still difficult to recognize, and I had to poke the earth with my walking stick ahead of each step. John stopped every few seconds to cut trail, switching hands with the machete occasionally. “Otherwise your arm gets tired,” he said.
Visibility may have been limited, but the cloud forest smelled wonderful. Herbal odors drifted through the air: wild mint, sage and thyme. At a brief clearing, John pointed out a waterfall across the valley, a thin stripe of white water cascading hundreds of feet down a hillside crammed with what looked like a million heads of broccoli. I wondered where all that water could possibly come fr—
Thwack.
“AHHHGHHH!”
Uh-oh.
John dropped his machete, covered one eye with his hand and rocked back and forth, moaning. He’d sliced through a skinny branch that whiplashed back at him. Between deep breaths he exhaled two words: “Sloppy work.”
John turned and brought his face close to mine, one eye clamped shut. His other eye had welled up with tears, and clear mucus was pouring out of his nose; he looked like he’d just been teargassed. He tilted his head back slightly and pried his eyelid open with two fingers. “How does it look? Any bleeding?”
The gash looked like the kind a kid gets on his elbow when he falls hard on the sidewalk, and then runs to his mother, who turns white and wonders if her son needs stitches. Like that—except it was in John’s eye. Just looking at it, a nauseating Swiss-cheese taste crept up the back of my throat.
“Well, it’s definitely scratched,” I said, gulping. “There’s some blood.”
“Shit.”
Had it been me who had walked into the branch—which two minutes earlier would have seemed to both of us an infinitely more likely scenario—I suspect that I’d have been forcibly immobilized like a papoose and given an injection of morphine that William Burroughs might have waved off as too risky. John removed his backpack and rooted around for a moment. He pulled out a vintage black Guns N’ Roses bandanna and wrapped it over one eye, pirate-style.
For the first time on our trip, I considered the precariousness of the venture. We were still at least five hundred feet above the road, which was who knew how many miles—twenty? forty?—of hard walking from the nearest town in either direction. The trail down was steep and, from my perspective, utterly impenetrable. Dark clouds were rolling