Into Darkness: Chapter 1, Section(s) 3 & 4

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   Years after their first visit we would be awoken one night to a God fearing sound. It came with no warning; similar to the first day they had stumbled upon us. We wondered at the far off hum of the train as it rolled on its newly minted tracks that many of our people worked and died for. And the sight upon its arrival. Oh, what a sight.

   Such a loud thunderous machine it was. It roared through the jungle with the low-hanging limbs of the trees slapping against the steel frames of the wailing monster. Animals fled for their lives sensing the impending doom this train would have for the surrounding ecosystem. We thought it thunderstorms at first but it wasn’t the right time of year. It rolled into our growing little village with an ominous air to it. It roared a lion's roar as the train came in for it's first stop, the smoke drifting out of it as the surround area became encaptured in a bubble of grey smog. How could we possibly embrace this thing into our lives when it had caused so much pain and would surely cause more?

   They told us this would be the first step to connecting us with the rest of the world. Now we could know which country we lived in and who our neighbors were. We could even take the train to go into the cities and trade. They told us these ideological dreams as if to somehow clear their conscience of what they were really doing. If we could somehow get behind the idea of the “positive benefits” this railroad would have on our lives, their brutality could somehow be wiped clean into the river as the rains did our tears and sorrows. Only their years of brainwashing techniques failed miserably and only caused more nationalistic emotions for our secluded little village. The train was just one more reason for the people to continue fighting, maybe now, with the vision finally becoming real, even more so.     

   Although I hated those men who came to destroy my begrudged home I was impressed with the coal powered engine of that winding tar-black centipede. On the hottest days you could see the paint glisten under the suns soul crushing rays. It was a delightful sight the train was. It looked like it belonged in the area just as snow does in a desert, though. The train was the unsightly graffiti to an otherwise perfect slice of the world. The way the tracks cut through the village almost created a two-sided mentality amongst our people, soon the connectedness we had once thrived on to survive was beginning to crumble in our hands with each particle dripping from our fingertips as we tried desperately to keep it hard and compact. Soon, the children who played with each other would rarely get together and play the games we used to before they came, the families who used to eat dinner together every week were separated by the constantly running train that nudged itself in between our homes and our stream. The fish died out eventually and the birds fled to another part of the jungle. We foolishly stayed though. In a way the railroad brought together a weakly unified community. It created a newfound sense of pride for our village but by then the damage had already been done and our mentalities had already been raped clean and our spirits crushed. We were weak and we knew they were, it was just a matter of who would abandon Qurituba first.    

    There were constantly problems building this cathartic machine. First it was the soil causing the tracks to sink three feet in the ground in three hours. Then it was the rain causing the spikes and tracks to rust over. Then it was the workers who refused to continue building unless their demands of days off were met. Ultimately it would take 12 years to finish a project that was only supposed to take a few months. It's almost as if something was trying to tell them that this couldn't work, each mishap only adding one more check mark against even having it here. But they relented. They tried to find ways to keep it running, to avoid the rusting of the tracks, even getting materials here was an adventure in itself. 

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   I half expected my drunken father to fall over into his grave when he saw it that night. It was the one time he was allowed to be a child and let his imagination run wild, no matter how inebriated he was at that moment. I can faintly remember hearing him mumble to himself something like, “So I see you’ve finally come to my home Radamel! Now you know why I never left.” But I’m not completely sure. To this day I’m almost certain he believed it was an alien spaceship. Only this one would stay, not leave. And he wasn’t the one they were searching for. He woke up the next day completely oblivious to the fact that the railroad had finally arrived. He must have thought it a dream until we brought it up later that night.

   None of us quite knew how to approach the topic of the train and the people who had come to bring it to our village. It was finally done but we knew this was only a smaller step on the road of forced expansion. Soon, other companies would begin to arrive in droves to pillage our natural resources that so defined where we lived. We had seen what we could do and what we couldn’t in our strikes and small displays of anarchy against the railroad company. In a way my brothers and my mother all knew we would likely die fighting there or wind up fleeing.

   Soon after its arrival we began to walk around each other with a fragility of a funeral home on its darkest day. We hardly smiled and my mother would stare at each of us for uncomfortably long amounts of time. In her mind it was too late for her to leave; she was going to die here. And go down fighting. She, among all the members of our village had struggled the most and lost the most at the hands of these barbaric men who promised us prosperity in one hand and attempted to smoke us out with bullets and bombs in the other. It was the end of our village and our time on this cookie-cutter piece of the Amazon in Ecuador.

   There would be no one to mourn the loss of our home, the loss of our village. There would be no mention of us in public record. There would be no speeches for the desecration of another Amazonian village. No tear shed for the dead who piled up at night and disappeared by dawn. There would only be ribbon cutting ceremonies for the completion of another building or railroad track, we believed. We would only be remembered by the animals that stayed and the river which kept everything buried beneath its surface. I still mourn my home but I have no one to talk to. It’s partially the reason why I’m writing this to you. I want to let you know that your father isn’t how he is for no reason. My life has been transformed from that experience with those men and that company and the ensuing war we would fight. I can’t function like normal human beings in this country because I’ve experienced more than most of them could ever even imagine. Just think, how would you feel if your home was completely forgotten and you were the only person in the world who remembered that home? After so many years you begin to question yourself and start to think that maybe that was all a dream knowing damn well it wasn’t, but you can’t prove it either way so you go on telling yourself it was all a drunken haze. But then to prove it to yourself at least, you lift up your shirt and look at the scars on your stomach and chest. That’s all the proof you need. It’s never been easy holding these unfinished thoughts and quizzical feelings inside me. Again, that’s why I’m writing this to you, as a sort of therapy for me and an explanation for why I wasn’t as good a father as I should have been. 

   I still struggle with what happened there. I lost my brothers and my mother and my friends. I hated it, being there at the time, but after being away for so long I long for it. Maybe it’s not the village I miss but the faceless people. When I go to sleep I hope to have another dream where I’m lying next to the river with my brothers; when I’m near the fire pit eating dinner with my family; or running around the rainforest hopping and skipping amongst the snakes. Those truly were the most cherished moments of my life. If only I had realized that then and not now. After they’ve all passed and I’m all alone with no one but myself to lament for being too shallow about my situation.

My real dream is to go back. I want to go back but I don’t know how.

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