“Franz is a good man, but he has a lot of fears. One of them is flying.”

Beneath us, jagged brown peaks rose up, the canyons between gaping into eternity. There were no trees, no roads, just emptiness on a scale I had never before witnessed. Glacial lakes turned dull green, then black, then silver each time the sun broke through the clouds. The immensity of the world, for thousands of miles around, dwarfed us in our tiny, sputtering plane.

“So, he didn’t get the tapir. Instead a shushupe, a pit viper, bit him on the calf. Very, very poisonous. The silent carrier of death, it’s called. You take medicine or you die. You have maybe three minutes. He only had his machete, so he cut off his leg, chopped it off, see? Took off his belt and tied it around his thigh, tight, and crawled three kilometers back to the village.”

I gaped at the jagged scar. Suddenly my childish dustups felt absurd. Would I cut my own leg off if I had to? I prayed I wouldn’t have to find out.

“Maybe sleep a little, Lily. We have four hours, you know.”

A silly proposition considering the rattling plane, diesel reek, and Omar’s story, but also hard to keep talking over the roar of the engine, so I put my head back and closed my eyes and, maybe because he suggested it, fell asleep.

I woke to the pilot and Omar shouting. We had begun to drop down between mountainsides that felt too massive to be real. Static lightning danced across a bruised sky. Panchito gripped my seat as he maneuvered himself back into his; cursing, he scrambled with one hand to strap his leg back on. Turbulence lifted and slammed us down; our heads smacked on the ceiling as the wings jerked and shuddered. I vowed to be full of joy the next time gravity glued me to the earth; I pinched my eyes shut, picturing my dull routine cleaning toilets and making beds, in an attempt to calm myself with banality. We dropped. My eyes banged open. Some prevailing wind had changed its mind and abandoned us; only to buffet us up again as we soared over the final ridge.

Another sudden plunge—I might have screamed. When we evened out, I opened my eyes as bile rose in my throat.

As we steadily lost altitude, the valleys turned green and the drab, brown landscape of the mountains loomed behind us. Glacial rivers tumbled over rocky escarpments, their waters spiraled by ghostly mist. Sunlight flashed on a hidden stream or pond.

Seconds later, a total whiteout as we flew through low, thick clouds. Omar barked a command to the pilot. We rattled on, flying blind. The cloud smelled like sulfur, spitting on our skin through the broken window; the pilot, bouncing, jabbered on in Portuguese to Omar as he twisted the knobs and smacked at the dash.

In seconds, we broke through the dense wad of cloud. An ocean of green stretched from horizon to horizon beneath us; only the subtle smile of the earth holding it in. Banks of fog drifted among the treetops, evaporating and re-forming according to some unknown purpose or design. Brown, serpentine rivers coiled below, reflecting the light in gold or blue or green, depending on the slant of sun or whim of shadow.