It wasn’t until my friend was bitten by a piranha that I truly began to enjoy my trip to Peru .
For the past few days, I’ve been with a group of friends on a large riverboat making daily excursions into the Amazonian rainforest. Anyone who has seen the Mississippi south of Memphis will instantly recognize the view: a big brown river makes its stately progress past exposed muddy banks, families cruise by on ramshackle skiffs, and the smell of wet, loamy earth is everywhere. Technically, it’s the “dry season” here — but to be frank, everything seems pretty soaked — and it’s the time of year when the river runs low. In the wet season, we were told, the river rises almost to the level of the treetops.
And then there are the bugs. The Amazon has all the normal insects you expect — mosquitos, flies, gigantic moths — but it also has a rich assortment of exotic and terrifying crawlies that spit acid, chew through clothing, and emit neurotoxins through various orifices. As we walk through the jungle, our guide shows us where a certain kind of insect larvae nest and incubate. He digs one out with a finger and eats it, which just goes to show you that there’s nothing so terrifying and disgusting that someone somewhere won’t put into his mouth.
Up north, we spend a lot of time and R&D money coming up with new ways to repel and kill insects. All of my traveling companions arrived with lotions and sprays of various levels of toxicity, and before each jungle hike, we spray and slather the stuff all over. Some of us even splurged for special clothing that comes preloaded with insecticide, so when we pile onto the skiff and head into a tributary, we must look like a particularly anxious hazmat team. It is a running joke that most of the clothes we bought for the Amazon we bought from Amazon .
Covering yourself with repellent is an odd strategy, of course, because part of the point of a jungle hike is to find all of these creepy things and look at them up close. On a night hike, we spend 15 minutes searching for a tarantula. We find two of them, and we all take multiple selfies with a creature that has everything you need for a nightmare: eight hairy legs, a recognizable face, and a long folk history of being deadly and terrifying. But there we are, covered in DEET, posing with a tarantula like it’s one of the king’s guards outside Buckingham Palace. If I saw a spider half that size on the kitchen floor back home, I would shriek for a few moments before killing it with a Swiffer. This one I posted on Instagram.
And then a piranha burst through our bubble. Yesterday, during an early-morning fishing expedition, the sport fisherman among us bagged about a dozen piranhas. But he was a little careless unhooking the final one, and the angry fish snapped at his fingertip and removed a healthy chunk. But he also broke through the safety barrier we had erected for ourselves and gave us a taste of what’s really out there, on the other side of our hazmat suits and insect spray. Nature has sharp teeth, and there’s only so many protective layers you can wear.
The piranha story ends this way: My friend’s finger (or what remained of it) was dipped in antibacterial cleanser and bandaged up. He was given some antibiotics to gobble and forced to pose for pictures with the rest of us. He smiled gamely as we all made “just the tip!” jokes. But the last laugh was his, at lunch, when he was presented with that very piranha, butterflied and deep fried, on a plate with some dipping sauce. My friend took a few revenge bites from the fish and offered it to the rest of us. Piranha, I’m here to tell you, is a take-it-or-leave-it experience.
What doesn’t eat you, the saying goes, you eat. It’s the same in the office, marketplace, boardroom, Amazon — sometimes it’s worth going thousands of miles to relearn that essential lesson.
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Rob Long is a television writer and producer, including as a screenwriter and executive producer on Cheers, and he is the co-founder of Ricochet.com.
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