El Guamo

I’m from Portugal. Before Colombia, my entire reference for heat was the Portuguese summer — dry, fierce in August, the kind you manage by staying inside until four in the afternoon and then going to the beach. I thought I understood hot.

I didn’t understand anything.

We went to El Guamo because of a drought. The land where we’d been couldn’t sustain the herd anymore — the pastures were dying, and the animals couldn’t wait for rain that might not come in time. El Guamo was in Tolima, in what’s called selva seca — dry jungle. It had water. It had pasture, abundant, more than we’d seen in months. It was the only place I could find and afford that could hold us all.

I knew it was a hot region. I thought: animals live through Portuguese summers. This can’t be so different.

I was wrong about almost everything.

What the Jungle Actually Is

The romantic idea of the jungle — the one I’d carried from Portugal without ever testing it — is green, extraordinary, teeming. And it is all of those things. It’s also, in ways I wasn’t prepared for, a system organized entirely around one principle: everything in it is either trying to eat something or trying not to be eaten, all the time, with a consistency and efficiency that no other environment I’ve ever been in comes close to matching.

Within the first few days, I understood: we were not visitors. We were inputs.

Flying ants swarmed from old wooden poles without warning — not a few, a cloud, aggressive, in seconds. African killer bees had hives everywhere, and the trick was to move near them without making any motion they’d read as a threat, which meant learning a new way of walking — slower, more deliberate, more conscious than any walking I’d done before, near insects I could have killed individually with two fingers and that could have killed me collectively with no effort. Black wasps on the fenceposts, in the trees, in the eaves of the structure we slept in. Everything overhead was potentially occupied.

At night, the bats worked. Vampire bats — I wouldn’t see them, only the evidence: every morning, checking the cows and bulls, the bites. Small, precise, bled more than you’d expect. And any wound — bat bite, scratch, wire cut, anything — could become a myiasis within hours. Flies laid eggs, the larvae hatched, and suddenly what had been a small wound was something else entirely, with a smell I can describe accurately as rotting meat on an animal that was otherwise alive and walking around, and a visual I won’t describe in detail because some things you don’t need to see to understand.

I treated myiasis cases constantly. Cypermethrin — an insecticide — became the chemical I reached for most. I used so much of it, for so long, for so many animals, that I could taste it in my mouth. Not metaphorically. The actual chemical, absorbed through skin and air, present in my saliva. I was slowly poisoning myself while trying to protect them, and I kept going because stopping wasn’t an option that existed.

What the Ground Was

The ground was never just ground. It was covered in leaves, always, a layer that could be hiding anything — and the anything was often a bothrops viper or a rattlesnake. I carried a long stick and swept it ahead of me as I walked, every single time, tapping the ground before each step, not as a ritual but as a literal mechanism for not dying before I reached whatever animal I was going to check on. I got used to this the way you get used to things that become necessary — by doing it enough times that it stopped requiring thought.

I removed six venomous snakes from the house where we lived, over the course of our time there. Different occasions, different snakes, same house. One of the six, I found in a place my wife or her mother could have found instead, and I still think about that.

A scorpion stung me. I mention this not for drama but for completeness — it happened, it hurt, I treated it, I kept going, because the herd didn’t pause for it and neither could I.

The two lagoons had caimans. I knew they were there. I managed the animals’ access to water with that in mind, which meant additional work, additional decisions, additional things to track. One morning, a young steer came back from the water with one ear bitten off. He was otherwise fine — or as fine as a calf missing an ear can be — and I treated him and added him to the list of things requiring daily attention, which by that point was already a long list.

The Heat Stroke by the Smaller Lagoon

One afternoon — I don’t remember which one, they blurred, there — I was three kilometers from the house, near the smaller lagoon, alone. No phone signal, which was normal; there was no phone signal anywhere on that farm. And the heat stroke arrived not with warning but as a fact: I was suddenly on the ground, and the ground was the right place to be.

I lay under a massive tree and ran through what I knew. No one was coming. Nothing would find me in time to matter. I was in an environment where lying still on the ground for very long invited its own problems — I checked the immediate perimeter, as carefully as I could manage in the state I was in, for snakes and spiders and anything else I needed to know about before I closed my eyes.

Then I breathed. I waited. I didn’t try to get up before I could.

Eventually I could. I walked back to the house slowly, which took a long time, and when I got there I didn’t tell anyone the full story of it until much later, because telling it in the moment would have meant someone worrying, and worrying was a resource none of us could afford to spend.

My primary thought, lying under that tree, wasn’t about myself. It was: if something happens to me here, what happens to them? The animals. My wife. Her mother. The whole fragile system that was holding together because I was the one holding it together. That thought was more useful than fear. It got me up when I was ready to get up, and it got me home.

The Edge of the Dense Jungle

At some point, Banjo, the steer who’d lost his ear escaped into the densest part of the farm — the area where the jungle thickened into something I hadn’t entered and didn’t fully understand. I went in after him.

I got maybe one hundred meters in before I stopped.

Not because I was afraid, exactly. Because I did a calculation, standing there in the dark green, the heat completely different inside the canopy, the noise different, the scale of it pressing in from all sides — and the calculation was: he’s faster than I am. The more I chase him, the deeper he goes. And if anything happens to me in here, he’s gone, and so is everything else that depends on me being able to walk out.

I turned around and walked back out of the jungle. It was one of the cleaner decisions I’ve made — no drama, no second-guessing, just a read on the situation that said the right move was retreat, and retreat.

He came back on his own the next day. I found him with the herd, caught him, brought him in, treated him. That’s how it went, out there. Not every problem required going after it. Some problems, if you were patient, solved themselves in the time it would have taken you to die trying to solve them directly.

Luna

I couldn’t find one of the heifers one afternoon. Looked where she should have been, then widened out, then wider. Eventually found her below a dense patch of pasture — on the ground, alive, but barely. She weighed maybe 250 kilos. Anemia, I’d learn later, from the bats and the ticks working on her night after night until there wasn’t enough left.

What I knew in that moment was that she would die there that night if I couldn’t get her up and back to the house, and that I was alone, and that this was a problem that shouldn’t have been solvable by one person.

She got up. I don’t know exactly how — I helped, and she helped, and at some point the combination of both was enough. Then we walked. It was nearly 5:30pm and I knew the math: we had about forty-five minutes of light and a forty-five minute walk, and she was moving at the pace of an animal that was spending everything she had just to stay upright.

We made it back at 6:15, in the last of the light. I don’t think about what that walk would have been like in the dark with her and without sight. I started treating her that night.

She improved. Fifteen days of treatment, and she was better — not well, but better, on the right side of it. And then one morning she was dead. Woke up dead, as I say, which means she died in the night without warning, without a final crisis I could have caught, without anything I could have done differently in those last hours.

That farm had taken another one of mine.

I didn’t stop. There wasn’t time to stop. There were so many other animals who needed what that day required of me, and the day didn’t know she was gone, and neither did they. I did the day. I’ve thought about Luna many times since, and I think about her still. But I did the day, and then the next one, and then the next.

How We Got Out

I want to say this clearly, because I think the full picture of El Guamo requires it: it wasn’t only the wildlife. We were in the territory of former paramilitaries, and they made it known, in the way such things are made known, that we were there on their terms and not our own, and they wanted us out of there.  That threat moved in a different register than the snakes and the bats, but it moved alongside them, every day, as part of the same constant background of things that could end something.

We got out. I say this with a kind of reverence I don’t use for much else: the animals who left El Guamo alive, my wife, her mother, and me — we left. We are here. There is no clean explanation for how that happened, given everything that was trying to prevent it. I am not a man who uses the word “miracle” loosely, or really at all. But I don’t have another word for the margin by which we cleared that place intact, and I’m not going to pretend I do.

I’ve never thought about a jungle the same way since. The beauty is real — I saw it, I lived in it, I understand why people romanticize it from the outside. But the beauty and the lethality are not opposites in a jungle. They are exactly the same thing, expressed simultaneously, without any apparent awareness that they’re supposed to be in conflict.

I respect that now. I didn’t before I went there. I couldn’t have.

You don’t know what a jungle is until you’ve walked through it with a stick, tasting poison in your mouth, looking for a heifer who’s running out of time, with the light failing and forty-five minutes to go.

And then you get out. If you’re lucky. If something’s on your side that you can’t name.

We were. We did.

I don’t take that for granted for a single day.