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We walk with machetes and cameras and cut our way into the rainforest, and with every chop Mother Nature giggles and says “Do that again,” because she knows the scar she intends to cut into my heart is worth every scratch I make into her hirsute skin, where roots grow instead of follicles. She is tickled by our busy explorations through her wild hair, unbrushed.

And at some point I lie down to have a heart attack in 120 degree heat, utterly wasted, lying on my back, on top of the camera, caked with mud, hanging onto a vine above my head to prevent falling downhill into the brush. There is a stream, a river, a tinkling, and I am smiling in the emerald shadows of the jungle, squinting at spots of canary-colored sunshine, hopeful candles in nature’s dark cathedral.

Cesar the Contra offers me a hand up and I tell him I have laid down to have a heart attack and die in this impenetrable forest, where the seeds and nuts can sprout from my body in a wild shout in this jungle, bragging about the city where once they sat for sale on the shelf, packaged in plastic as “Trail Mix”. Cesar yanks me to my feet anyway, saying: “I had a heart attack five minutes ago, but the water is right here, and you never felt water like this, untouched by humans for years, as chilly as a dagger.”

And into this water I collapse without care for my stupid slippery-soled $27 boots from Target, and the tiny cold daggers dance into my muscles, into my bones, into the lava cooking in my hot engine. I sit in the stream and watch a leaf sail by, and when it occurs to me to do so I stoop to the water to sip and end up splashing into my own drink, face first, gulping the essence I am made of with pulsing fishy lips, until I surface for muggy air. Cesar has stripped me at least of my camera, and this picture is evidence, shot between submergences.

I grew up in this, a water baby, on the rocks or beach of a shore, and I can’t remember the first time I touched concrete but I swear to you it was a mistake.

* * * * *

A few days later I ask the controversial oceanographer what he would do if he wasn’t able to pursue his profession. What do you fantasize about, Dr. Maslowski, in these moments when you actually see the actual ice at the North Pole disappearing? If this garden of yours was taken away, would you become a locomotive engineer, collect stamps of falcons and lizards?

He’s got a retirement plan, says the oceanographer. He is famous for saying there will be no arctic ice in five years. He plans to sail across big oceans, across the Pacific. But the way things are going, maybe he will sail across the arctic summer.

And then he will be like me, now, remembering the chilly stream in the hot jungle where no humans walked for years. Sailing into the hot future, burdened by a fierce thirst in the endless frictions of human ambition, burnt by memory.