Who knows what got into me? What it is that climbs in, sets up residence? What is the word I’m searching for?

Imagine this: Darkness set in three hours ago. Sister (A) is bent over, scouting out frogs in a sort of isolated curiosity she gets into (butt in the air, the intensity of “if you’re coming, then come, but don’t mess with the mojo and don’t ask for a slow down”). She has a flashlight in hand. We are both in sandals for the first time all day and our feet are screaming with the pleasure of being out of ancient rubber boots. Mother is in bed. The other girls on the tour are in bed. The crickets (sreeeeep) and the bats (shreee-chchchch) and the birds (cree-cree) and the frogs (chee-chee) are definitely not in bed. We are hunting in radii, rotating area and then sweeping around us. Two brown toads emerge out of the camouflaging leaves and I pick one up, very hard to do as it races the pace of a gladiola (there are trees out here that move faster, “walking trees,” as our guide tells us, which can move approximately 10 centimeters a year give or take, by getting fidgety, sending out new roots on one side, planting them, shifting the balance of its home—one might think of that slow move with boxes carried carload by carload—before erasing the roots tying it to the place it was before). The toad sits yellow-eyed and bumpy in my hands, a dry sponge on the palm, before we release it.

A goes to the bathroom, we have to find our way out of the garden through the dark, and I get the flashlight and look at what seems to be a yellow leech creeping through the bushes. The guide, E, comes and tells me that it is a slug, and I look at its slender flat body, pointed tips, and think how it doesn’t look like what I’d ever recognize as a slug. E moves a log for me and underneath is a 6-inch millipede brown-black and roaming. A comes back out of the bathroom, and E asks us if we’d like to go down the path and we would, because all day we’ve been running up and down paths in a row, toting backpacks, sliding on mud, swimming, everything but pause and look-see. And my head is full to the busting with words (canola tree, buttress roots, two- and three-toed sloths, yu-yung trees, avejas cortapelos, “cual es la palabra” no “que es la palabra,” termites, leaf-cutting ants, bromeliads, orchids, porno-trees, blood-tree, puyo, quecha, etc.).

We are in the jungle. Ecuador. Puyo which is the quecha word for mist, and while the day is clear, the night middle-temperatured, I am a in a form of puyo because something has crawled inside me. I’ll try to explain.

Starting on day two, we get up early are take a jeep to the river. E gets the jeep to take us because he has been marching Mother up and down slopes and her shorts are slathered in brown and she is sore and I am sore and the whole world of muscles feels good to have been let out of their city-sheaths. My head begs me never to let it go back to the city. Something clicks out there in the mud and rubber boots and rivers. But tired, yes, and we walk down a path, lifting our legs over the chain of leaf-cutter ants (they work 24 hours when there is no rain, because when the rain comes, it washes away the formic acid they use to mark their path and they get lost… one could thing of the Hansel and Gretal world of ants… so they run thousands left and thousands right, up trees, cut snippets of leaves and carry them back to their enormous cities, where they mix the leaves with their feces and create a mulch to grow underground mushrooms—one per different type of ant… queen mushrooms, soldier mushrooms, worker mushrooms—which makes up their diet. One should think not only of fairy tales, but of underground castles with white fungus food and the smell of fermenting greenery). We walk to the river and climb into a canoe with the head of a caiman (mini-alligator) carved into its bow, and our guide and his canoe-buddy pole us straight down under the eaves of the Sanguay volcano.

There are three volcanoes in the near distance – Sanguay, Tsungurawa (misspelled but close), and a small chain. They are all active with little mists floating off the top. But on the shores are waterfalls, and the river water collects to join the Puyo river, which collects to join the Amazon thousands of kilometers away, but we are floating and orchids line the banks and mother is behind me.

After this, we climb an incredible slope. Straight up, and I know that this is it for mother for the day. It is incredibly vertical with stretches of tall stairs that take me mini-steps to climb and I am happy for the exercises, sweating, panting, enjoying the way my sister screams up the slope like someone shot her from a rubber-band. At the top, I breathe, swing in a hammock and look at the incredible swaths of trees and rivers and mud and vines and flowers and bushes and mountains and everything sprawled out in front of me in a way that will never happen again. I breathe. Mother breathes, we all do.

When I have sucked it in for awhile, I wander around looking at the plants that spill out of the branches of trees. Epiphytes, some parasites, some symbiotes, but mostly one growing on one growing on one to rise higher. E comes and leads me around. Have you seen this one? Or this? He speaks to me in Spanish when he can, even though his English is better than my Spanish. His voice gets softer in Spanish. I could say there is a connection between E and me. Let’s explain that one this way:

He grew up in the jungle of Ecuador; I grew up in the jungle of Alaska. There is a strange parallelism in the way these two worlds work. The roads dusty and rutted, the rain and dirt, the trees and wide swaths, the hunters, something. E and I understand each other and it surprises both of us since we grew so many miles away from each other. When he marches down the path and points with his machete, I see myself doing the same. I feel like a guide watching a guide, smile to myself and think of that psychic who told me that in one of my early lives I was a sherpa. In another, a shaman. I would like to believe this, but what I believe the strongest is that I can imagine growing up here in the jungle, living a life not being scared of anything this lushness has to offer.

I can imagine and see E’s life, see how he sleeps on the ground one night when he is twelve – next to his brother and his indigenous friend—and has a boa constrictor pass over his leg slowly, licking and licking. So, E’s voice softens in Spanish towards me, and he likes to grab my hand and move me over to the trees, with his hand on my shoulder or waist, and tell me about the flowers.

When we walk at night, he tells me that you need four things to be a good jungle-walker. One: balance; Two: clear vision; Three: sense of direction; and Four: no fear of what the jungle holds. It only takes me three seconds to realize that he has pegged something larger than the jungle. Some karmic understanding of the four elements of earth, air, fire, and water that we should carry in our feet and head and skin. Am I moving there?

After the viewpoint, we go to an indigenous house and watch a woman make pottery. We buy some stuff, go back, and then eat lunch. After lunch, we climb to our second night’s encampment, which is on the top of a hill way high looking at the volcanoes and trees. Mother and an Aussie chick stop there and decide to swing in the hammocks and feel the air and learn to play a flute-like instrument, while E is taking us to the second falls we are climbing to (yesterday he took us to the Hola Vida falls). Although A and I didn’t sign on to an “Xtreme Jungle Tour,” the other girls with us (twenty-one year old interns, young, one is a little whiny) did, and so Ali and I reap the benefit by being shoved crazy through three hours of jungle. We descend an incredibly steep slope and then walk up a riverbed, crossing and re-crossing it until an hour later, we get to a place where the water comes up to our thighs or waists and there is nothing for it, but to strip into our swimsuits and fill our boots with water. I am sore and tired but so happy I feel like something is swelling in me, I can’t quite peg it, but it never wants to leave and always wants to be just this sore and tired.

So, we wade for another twenty minutes and get to a place where we have to discard our backpacks and swim up a little stream-river, and there when we are through, is Hidden Falls, a pool to swim and dive in, a log for A and E to climb and jump off, a mini-cave behind the falls to sit under, and cold water cold water to shiver.

I ask my sister about this later, and she knows exactly what I’m talking about, so I know I’m not completely crazy. I’ve heard the term “natural high,” but I don’t like it, it seems so trite and High-School Health Class. It doesn’t explain the enlightening.

But when you hike for hours, get sore in an incredible landscape like and unlike any other place you’ve been to, and then dive into cold water and holler and fall around, and then climb a clay slope to dry off and change clothes, afterwards something happens. The vision is funky – for me, almost microscopic, focusing 10X magnified on everything around me – and my skin is absolutely the most perfect temperature known, my body glazes and glazes, and something inside blends and blends into the trees and flowers. That’s how I felt. Pushed up, like something crawled in.

Walking back, I find a rhinoceros beetle and we talk about trees and I grab roots and the jungle closes in tight and something holds and E smiles and A gets excited and laughs and… then we are back.

After that, I had no choice but to go out into the jungle at night with E and A, spotlighting the bushes, looking sharp-eyed and no-feared into the canopy as thing crash around us. What stands out is that there are thousands of spiders. This place is an entomologist’s dreamscape and an arachnophobe’s nightmare. We run into a white-bulbed spider with fur legs that E tells us is the spider in the Ecuadorian jungle that “hurts the most when it bites.” Apparently, if it bites you multiple times, or if you are a child, you can die. It creeps even me out and I have no huge fear of spiders. There are at least 50 other types of spider that E points out with his flashlight—my favorite is one that looks like an upside-down V with the devil’s face on its back. On a lighter note, there are also tree frogs, sizes of which A and I are still debating, cocoons, and thousands of stick-bugs.

As we get farther out, we hit a flat spot and E wants to turn out the flashlights. We do, and inch along slowly, holding hands. A has no night vision, so she decides to stop, but E and I walk along the path in the pitch-black for a while. There are glowing trees and fallen palm leaves, apparently emitting a gas that fluoresces. It is amazing… I grab a stick and carry it with me to light a way. E tells me that sometimes it is necessary to walk in the dark when a flashlight goes out or something happens; he’s sometimes crawled along a path to find his way home. He asks me if I’ve ever walked in the forest in the dark, and seems disappointed when I tell him that I have (I have, many times… Alaska!). But he also seems happier when I tell him that this is the first time I’ve done so in the jungle.

There is something light in the air, something incredulous at the idea that the world could be a dark place. Everything is cycle and food and spiders and walking sandal-footed with a stranger in the dark. I know for certain walking here that while I have plenty of fear, I am still a fearless person. I am happy as the night churns and spins its noise.

When we get back to the camp, I fall completely solidly asleep, but wake up several times in the night amazed even in my dreams.