Free Phenomenal: A Hesitant Adventurer's Search for Wonder in the Natural World by Leigh Ann Henion

from everywhere.”
     • • • 
    In the village of Puerto Concha we find men sitting in dusty jungle clearings, playing cards. We’ll travel by boat from here, tracing a dark river into the lake. Our group clusters on a cement pier that has a large hole in the middle. I can see water sloshing below us, shining through exposed rebar. Ferns grow around rough cement.
    In the flurry of e-mails exchanged when planning this trip, Alan told me that he was going to hire three boats, though we needed only two. He thought it would be safer. Bandits roam these waters, and they’ve been known to rob fishermen in the middle of the lake.
    One of the small boats Alan has secured features a motor covered with a large red T-shirt. It might be intended to block out the fading sun, Alan explains, or it might be to make the new motor look less desirable, you know, to
pirates.
“Don’t worry,” he says, “nobody’s ever stolen a motor from a tourist boat.” In classic form, he adds, “Not a lot of tourists go out here, though. They get nervous because of guerrillas and drug trafficking, but that’s on the Colombian side of the river.” This offers little comfort since there’s nothing but lawless jungle and open water between us and the border.
    Loaded in our vessels of peeling paint and webbed fiberglass, we move away from the fish-scale-littered streets of Puerto Concha onto a narrow river swathed by jungle. The sun, the air itself, is so hot it hurts. I adjust my weight on the boat’s seat, which has been padded with broken down cardboard boxes reading “Country Club Brand Whisky.” We begin to move at a steady clip.
    Romo looks at me and puts his fingers to his mouth and kisses their tips. “
¡Delicioso!
” he says of the breeze. And it is tasty. My skin begins to cool. I lean back and scan the trees for monkey tails that hang from low branches like strange, coiled fruits.
    In the distance, a boat approaches with a driver wearing a long-sleeved shirt tied around his head to obscure his face, like a mask. All three of our boats’ motors start kicking exhaust as we slow to move through an area of the waterway that’s nearly overgrown with hyacinth. The motor fumes are thick. I begin to cough.
    “That’s a black-tailed hawk,” Alan shouts, pointing to a bird soaring through the haze.
    I don’t follow his gaze. I’m a little more interested in the motivations of the
bandito
who’s barreling toward us. I gesture toward him and Alan says, “The sun is brutal to the guys out here. They wear shirts over their faces to protect themselves.” The masked man speeds past us, and all around, the river screams with life, thousands of insects appearing as shadows on the undersides of leaves.
    “Near the horizon line,” Alan says, “you can see a few storms beginning to form. It’s rare to see a storm in the Catatumbo Delta during the day.” This is a place that saves its secrets for after dusk.
    We follow the Puerto Concha River to its mouth, where we bound over waves into an ocean-size lake. There is no pleasant zipping. We’re wave hopping and my less-than-swashbuckling attitude is experiencing even more of a setback. The boat moves
zoom-boom-boom-boom
across the water. I grip the side of the boat and Matt’s leg, crouching down as if to make myself more aerodynamic. It doesn’t work.
    I have two hours to go, and I’m losing my mind. I know this for certain when I hear strange music tingeing the whipping static of wind. Classical opera. It’s coming from behind me. I have feared kidnapping bandits. Instead, I got Romo.
    He’s pulled his chest-length white hair back with a bit of leather twine, and he’s wearing a wide-brim straw sun hat tied under his chin in a neat little bow. His voice is strong and dramatic. I laugh through clouds of my tangling hair. This rough, butt-bumping, pirate-braving voyage has turned into one of the finest, oddest, most refined moments of my life.
    When Romo stops singing, Matt