Nichols Uncle Bob's Big Book of Happy

1. Auflage 2017
ISBN: 978-0-9861050-8-1
Verlag: BookBaby
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 200 Seiten

I should make this clear from the start. None of this is easy. The first chapter of this work starts out saying exactly that: This will not be easy. I tell some hard truths. Don't be misled by the mirthful lilt of my title. Uncle Bob here will do his best to help you be happy, but none of this means diddly-squat if you can't face harsher aspects of our everyday journey. I write this book in hopes that my stories, theories, blathering bilge and sublime prayers may be of help to you in avoiding the burden, the curse of bitterness. It's no fun living in a world of bitchy whiners, angry jerks, and cranky bastards. You know what I mean.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Nichols, Robert

Leseproben

Fear

(Laughter, Hope, Beauty)

The night jungle screamed and howled and rustled. Deep in moon shadow, beasts crept through the lush deadly rainforest. I hung in my hammock, listening. We kept the fire burning all night. I knew there were snakes out there that ate men. I had seen the photos.

Earlier, in the last hour of good light, on a short trek, Sampaio tapped a log with a stick and a spider as large as my hand and fingers rushed aggressively out of its hole and right into whatever lobe of the brain stores the stuff of nightmares. We whacked great leaves with our machetes and made our passageway back toward camp where Marcus was cooking dinner. Sampaio motioned for me to stop and he pointed to a mass of bloody fur and bone. “Jaguar,” he said. I nodded at the great cat’s recent feast and was glad when we pressed on. What had been dense became nearly impassible. There were webs and draping mosses in the trees. There was, ever in the intense heat and moisture, a tinge of rot to the air. I couldn’t see the birds. They did not sing, they screeched. I glanced behind and saw the vegetation had folded upon itself and erased all sign of our passing. When I looked back, Sampaio was gone.

I stood perfectly still, listening for my guide. I didn’t want to start calling out his name. Somehow, likely only in my mind, this all seemed like a test of the American tourist and I dearly did not want to fail. It was only moments, I know. But, my God, was I alone.

I have a decent sense of direction—in all my world travels I have only been truly lost in two cities: Brussels, Belgium, where logic and landmarks failed me in the labyrinthine turn of lanes and alleys; and Salinas, Kansas, where…Oh, never mind, I used to drink. A disquieting sense of disorientation had begun hours earlier when the three of us—Sampaio, the guide, Marcus, the boatman, and I, the damned fool who had paid a hundred dollars for an overnighter in the jungle—left the Amazonian eco-resort of Ariau in a power canoe and headed for solid ground. Ariau is built on pilings supporting platforms in the treetops. It was July, right at the end of rainy season and the catwalks between units were only a few feet off the river’s surface. In low water, we were told, it can be 50 or 60 feet down to water level. The Rio Negro is seven miles wide during high season. We were at least an hour, maybe two, crossing open channels and cutting through breaks in the flooded treetops and then up narrower and narrower watercourses where sometimes we would have to dislodge the canoe from the tangle. I had not the slightest notion of where we were. I was completely at the mercy of these strangers to whom I had been introduced at dockside. Stepping onto dry land did little to allay a sense of absolute dependence upon the skill and kindness of my new best friends. I couldn’t even ask for reassurance. Neither of them spoke English.

So there I was, so deep in the Brazilian Amazon that my karma couldn’t even find me and the little Ecuadorian Indian who had hewn a tunnel into this bio-diverse madness, pissed off a major arachnid, and rung the bell at the counter of the Jaguar Café, had disappeared into the fronds. I was right on the verge of failing this man-test for country, clan, and gender—not with just a howl for help but with a sit down, sob like a sister, cry for my mama—when Sampaio called my name.

“Robert!” he shouted.

I guessed he had just stepped behind the great green curtain of the Amazon to take a leak. Man, was it good to see him when he reappeared. I wondered, “Do guys in this culture hug each other?” But, then I noticed, he wasn’t smiling. He looked grave as he spoke the only English sentence I would ever hear him utter.

“Robert, we are lost.”

So, what is fear? What speaks fleetingly to the nerves? What deeply grips the soul?

The nerves adjust to the moment; the soul bends the course of our existence.

Out there, alone in the South American wilds, I was afraid as in “uh-oh...what should I do?” But, also, I knew fear as in the archetypal, child-lost, vast cold void of humanity’s sense of the abandonment of the Gods.

Do you know what I mean? Sure you do.

When the City was brought down with the fallen towers of 9/11, the mayor, Rudolph Giuliani, stepped up and told us what to do with the fight-or-flight panic of our nation. He helped with the nation’s nerves.

When the rubble and the clouds of choking dust settled, the President told us to go shopping while the shadowy Machiavellians who actually ran the country began an ongoing manipulation of our primal fears to capitalize upon horror and chaos as assets of their power.

And, on the other end of the spectrum, Chicken-Little environmentalist have so exaggerated every man-made threat that now that the real thing is here with global warming nobody is listening.

And, of course, there is always the threat of either going to church or burning in Hell.

Regardless of motive, wielding fear as a political or religious bludgeon is obscene and, oh, so dangerous.

You see, fear is a real obstacle to joy.

But, we must accept that fear is crucial to our survival as fragile little creatures afoot upon a frightfully large and dangerous plane of existence. We are mortal and we are weaker than the average monkey; we taste delicious to bears, sharks, and ants—stripped of the artificial security of guns and insecticides and USDA-approved meat, we are fur-less, claw-less, fang-less animals with naught but our much-overrated intelligence to protect us from the hunger and territorial instincts of a plethora of much more able and well-adapted fellow beasts. Fear is the psycho-mechanism that exaggerates imagined threats and thereby keeps us alert to real dangers. It has a concrete purpose, even though, easily, ninety-percent baseless.

Children know about fear. Remember the ‘boogie man’? Closet monsters? Dust dragons under the bed? Remember how readily we can poke our eyes out with sticks and scissors? Fear is mighty in our mortal lives and, as children, we knew terror in shadow and myth by the loving and sadistic chiding of discipline. Think of baby’s first little prayer...and if I die before I wake... “Good night, sleep tight; don’t let the bed bugs bite.” Death? Insects? “Sleep well my child. And, speaking of bugs, look both ways before you cross the street or you’ll end up crushed like a cockroach.”

So, how do we handle a reasonable amount of fear without becoming paralyzed by it?

I have no idea.

But, I do have elements to add to my true story of fear in the jungle.

Elements of survival in the face of fear.

“Robert, we are lost,” my guide, Sampaio, had said to me out there in the dusky final moments of light. I was speechless. What could I say? Who would understand anyway?

Lost.

Then, a gleam of light sparked from his deep brown eyes and he grinned. I feigned rage and then such a wonderful laugh we had. No common language or common culture but a universal understanding of fear, and Sampaio’s joke broke down barriers and made us friends in that understanding. Though, clearly, I had fallen fully for the standard tourist-in-the-jungle joke likely inflicted by guides since the first tour (“Adam,” spoke the voice of God as he showed his mud-and-blood creation around the Garden. “Adam, we are lost.”), I didn’t feel the least bit foolish.

It’s part of the package of curiosity and fear that is the perspective of humankind. We seek the jungle; we fear its lush danger. We seek discovery; we fear being lost. We crave the Love of Gods; we fear the rejection of Gods. It is a fragile balance we maintain between daring and dread: Fragile.

So, back to the jungle. We returned to camp where, upon a rotisserie fashioned from branches and twigs, Marcus cooked the juicy essence of meat to perfection. No, it wasn’t some eye-popped, victual of Amazonian rodent skewered a-writhe o’er the white heat of the campfire. It was chicken brought from the ample larder of the resort. Man, was it good, too. All a-drip and flavorful upon my chin and fingers. And there was plenty. We three human males gathered in ancient rite about the smoking core of light and heat as twilight faltered and failed and night engulfed us. Somehow, though we knew no bond of language, we managed to know together the joy of good food and easy laughter. I had joined whole-heartedly in setting up camp, carrying my share of the equipment and provisions, gathering firewood and hanging hammocks from trees. I hadn’t been some pampered white-guy bwana sitting back as the natives did all the work. And I had laughed at Sampaio’s terrible joke—a laugh of camaraderie and shameless admission of honest fear. It was a wonderful evening out there where nature, in all its vicious truth, suspended us in webs of primal danger and beauty. With machetes we had chopped an ample pile of dead wood, armed ourselves with powerful six-volt lanterns, and, after thorough dousings with DEET insect repellant, swung into hammocks and let the night have us.

I had dwelled in run-down apartments in the cacophonous heart of the city where car horns and sirens and gunshots and raging screams of violence and insanity were the song of the night. I had camped in stone canyons beside the roar of glacier-fed mountain rivers. I had...