The 42nd Parallel

The Camera Eye (23)

this friend of mother’s was a very lovely woman with lovely blond hair and she had two lovely daughters the blond one married an oil man who was bald as the palm of your hand and went to live in Sumatra the dark one married a man from Bogota and it was a long trip in a dugout canoe up the Magdalena River and the natives were Indians and slept in hammocks and had such horrible diseases and when the woman had a baby it was the husband who went to bed and used poisoned arrows and if you got a wound in that country it never healed but festered white and maturated and the dugout tipped over so easily into the warm steamy water full of ravenous fish that if you had a scratch on you or an unhealed wound it was the smell of blood attracted them sometimes they tore people to pieces

it was eight weeks up the Magdalena River in dugout canoes and then you got to Bogota

poor Jonas Fenimore came home from Bogota a very sick man and they said it was elephantiasis he was a good fellow and told stories about the steamy jungle and the thunderstorms and the crocodiles and the horrible diseases and the ravenous fish and he drank up all the whisky in the sideboard and when he went in swimming you could see that there were brown thick blotches on his legs like the scale on an apple and he liked to drink whisky and he talked about Colombia becoming one of the richest countries in the world and oil and rare woods for veneering and tropical butterflies

but the trip up the Magdalena River was too long and too hot and too dangerous and he died

they said it was whisky and elephantiasis

and the Magdalena River