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Back Jungle Up Save as PDF
Chapters (63)
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  63. Author’s Note

After dinner, we were led to two small huts. Carlos, Juan Pablo, Diego, and Camila slept in one hut. Vern and I slept in the other.

Vern pulled a lantern out of his pack and flipped it on. The hut was ten feet wide, with a hammock strung on one side. Next to the hammock was a stack of books. The top book was The Hunger Games.

One of her favorites.

“This must have been Gina’s hut,” I said to Vern.

He nodded toward a picture on the wall and said, “Who is that ugly mug?”

I took two steps toward the wall and squinted at the picture of a man sitting on the toilet, his pants around his ankles and a blue Game Boy in his hands. There was a look of surprise on the man’s face, like he’d just been caught with his pants down.

“I had a great game of Tetris going,” I said to Vern. “I think I broke my high score. When I got off the toilet an hour later, both of my legs were completely numb.”

Vern laughed.

I pulled the photo off the wall. “Gina took this picture. She loved it. It was the screensaver on her phone and her computer.” She must have printed it out at some point.

I folded up the picture and put it in my pocket.

Vern pulled off his hiking boots, then flopped into the hammock. “You’re on the ground, buddy,” he said, then put his hat over his face.

It was warm in the hut, still well into the seventies. I laid on the packed earth and used my extra shirt as a pillow.

Tomorrow we would start the search.

14

14

base camp
august 14, 7:16 p.m.
expedition: day 1

If Andy were in a better mood, he might have laughed. Here he was, over four thousand miles from home, in one of the most isolated places in the world, in the middle of the Amazon freaking jungle, and he was about to eat, of all things, macaroni and cheese.

There were several different flavors of Mountain House freeze-dried pouches: Chicken and Dumplings, Lasagna, Beef Stew, Homestyle Turkey Dinner, Sweet and Sour Pork, as well as a few others. But Andy went for an old favorite, the meal he had subsisted on almost entirely when he was living in Los Angeles and which he still ate at least twice a week.

Of course, normally when he ate macaroni and cheese, he was sitting on his couch playing video games; he wasn’t standing around a Coleman lantern and listening to Jonathan Roth give a detailed account of the guest list at Reese Witherspoon’s wedding.