Change in Latitude

    “March eleventh two thousand and eight,” I am recording the date.  Why, I don’t know.  Maybe it is so when this is found there will be a time reference.  Anyways, I have always been told that truth is stranger than fiction.  I never did actually believe them, but yet here I am standing on the edge of the lot with my mouth hanging open thinking to myself, “Tony, this has been one hell of a mistake.”  My name is Nick, Tony is what I call myself in my head, which may be part of how I got to this end; which is where we begin.  I am twenty five and completely clueless of what I am going to do with my life…or at least what I was going to do with my life.  I am recording this now so in case something happens to me people will know what was going on.  I guess the best way to understand how I got here is to tell you where I have been, so let me start at the beginning.
    My parents met in college and, according to them, there comes a time in every man’s life when he starts having thoughts…no wait, maybe that’s too far back.  We’ll start at the beginning of the end.  That will be better, or at least not as long and meaningless.
    I had finally gotten the gumption, and reason, to move out of the little town that I had lived in for the better part of a decade.  Usually when someone spends as long as I had in a college town they leave with a bunch of letters added to their name.  My name is the same length as when I showed up.  I, like most that come to Vermillion South Dakota, came here for school with the high aspirations of someone who is moving out from his parents’ place and going off on their own.  I did what most college students do, drank, skipped class, copied from the smart kids, and got by.  After graduation I started working at a job of convenience and then moved on to another.  Once there was a thought of going back to school, but that was ultimately given up with the lack of funds and chances given.  It always seems that you have to count on someone else to be able to make it on your own.  The irony is unbelievable.  So needless to say the opportunity to leave the constant thanklessness of student services work was one to jump at.
    I woke up on yet another dark freezing cold morning to my cell ringing and a terrible hangover, again.  I answered in that voice that you have after a long night in a smoke filled bar while looking for answers at the bottom of several bottles.  The voice I heard was not one I recognized.
    “Is this Nick Williams?”
    “Yeah….Who’s this?” I heard a dry, groaning voice that I knew would be was going to come from me for the rest of the day.  “Where did I put that bottle of Gatorade,” was the actual thought going through my head. 
    “This is Mike from Adventures Unlimited.  We received your resume that you submitted online and I wanted to talk to you about it.  Do you have a little time?”
    “Yeah, yeah sure I do,” I heard my detached and distant voice say again.  As I looked up at the clock I realized that it was only six in the a.m., but that wasn’t a big deal to me because my brain wasn’t quite working yet.  If I had only known then I would have hung up the phone and gotten a different number.  After an hour on the phone with Mike I was feeling a little better, or maybe I was still drunk.  I am still not quite sure now, but if I had been in a functional state then maybe things would have ended up differently.
    “Well, we’d love to have you join us,” Mike said at the end of the conversation.  “Don’t worry about the transportation, or the language barrier.  We’ll get you trained up when we get you out here.  You have a plane ticket waiting for you at the Sioux City airport.  You take off in two hours.  I’d hurry if I were you.  And don’t worry about your stuff; we have everything you need here.”
    “O-OK,” was the best I could muster, still not entirely sure what had just transpired over the last hour.  I was still lying in bed.  What the hell just happened?  Where was I going and what language was I supposed to learn when I get there?  I guess I should have been hung over for the rest of my phone interviews; maybe I would have ended up in Oregon or something.
    I hauled my sore, stiff body out of bed and stepped down not so gingerly on the source of my misery, an empty bottle of eighteen year old Jameson Irish Whiskey.  It had still been sealed the night before.  I drank just as much as when I had come to Vermillion, but now it was just more expensive to acquire and more pleasing to my seasoned pallet.  I got dressed and brushed my teeth, thinking I should try to use bleach to get that dead animal taste out of my mouth.  It dawned on me that I should get a bag packed because of the last statement Mike had made had taken residence in my noggin, “The plane leaves in two hours.”  So I had grabbed a few changes of clothes, toothbrush and paste, money and ID and had taken off.  I mean it wasn’t like I had much more than that job to keep me here, and I wasn’t entirely sure at the time who it was that I had woken up next to.  Maybe I should have found out.  I had just figured that I would call when I got there, wherever there was, request two weeks off and give my notice at the same time.  Little did I know, two more weeks would be a stretch.
    As I became more coherent I started to piece things together about the morning, not really caring any more about the night before.  I realized part way to the airport that I had not actually applied to anywhere called Adventures Unlimited.  That should have been my first sign.  Oh well, I remember thinking they must have seen my resume posted on one of the half-dozen sights on the net.  Who cared, I was leaving.  Once I arrived in Sioux City I parked my truck not knowing when exactly I was going to see it again and walked into the terminal.  This was one of those airports you saw in movies.  Ten people standing around for a plane and one person who worked the ticket counter, baggage and the air traffic control tower.  Jack of all trades I guess.  I walked over and picked up my ticket from the aging brunette with the name tag that read “Flo.”  All that ran through my mind was the diner scene from Dumb and Dumber.  I remember chuckling to myself and pointing to the ticket saying, “That sounds, I’ll have that.”  She was not impressed. 
    I still remember the feeling of excitement when I Flo handed me the pre-paid ticket that had a final destination of Brazil.  Sioux City to Minneapolis to Atlanta (shit) to Rio then a puddle jumper to some place I still can’t pronounce.  It had sounded like a long flight, but hey, it was something new in some place I had never been.  Not entirely sure, but guessing I would be doing something I had never done before.
    By the time I had gotten to Atlanta I realized I should try to call Mike and sort out what was exactly going on.  I turned my phone back on and checked the incoming calls, but it showed up as undeliverable.  “That’s alright.  I’m sure someone will meet me when I get there, wherever there is,” I said to myself.  The TSA agent at the gate looked at me with suspicion that I didn’t really appreciate but had grown accustom to while flying.  Post 9/11 air travel in and out of the U.S. was the worst kind of terrible joke.  Not better, just slower, ruder, and more invasive.  I was waiting for the day when the stripped down body cavity search became mandatory.  Thinking back on it now I would almost have requested that instead of this.
    In Rio I got off the 757 and saw my name scrawled across a small white sign that an elderly Brazilian man held.  He looked like the cab drive I had the last time I was in the Dominican; hair scattered with white, frail, and leathery.  He grabbed my carry-on and threw it over his shoulder.  I figured he didn’t speak a word of English and immediately named him Bob in my head.  I had thought it was funny.  He brought me over to another gate where we walked across the tarmac to a mid 60’s Cessna Caravan that had a roll of duct tape wrapped around one of the propellers.  That should have been my second sign. 
    The third sign came when Bob had fitted me with a parachute.  “Just in case,” was his explanation in a thick Portuguese accent.  I was surprised he spoke this much English.  A third man in a parachute joined us and we boarded the broke down aircraft.  The plane took off at half past three in the afternoon local time headed south.  I can still remember nearly filling my pants as we took off and I knew the time since I checked it to be able to have an accurate time of death for us three.  Maybe I should check it again….  We flew for about an hour at ten thousand feet and then the door next to me opened. 
    “Tchau,” was all I heard before I had found myself out of the plane with the ground rushing up at me. 
    Again, “What the hell?” was all that I could get into my head, which had suddenly had the ache removed, probably from the sudden fear and surprise that had taken its place.  I reached around for anything that felt like a handle.  Frantically I struggled against the roar of the wind that blasted me as I fell.  I remember the ground from the plane being a lush green, but as I fell freely toward it I realized it was the canopy of the rainforest.  I found something that I assumed was a handle and pulled.  Just as suddenly as the fall had begun, there was a halting sensation that started at my navel and worked up.  The chute had opened, thankfully.  I was trying to find where to hold on to and wipe my eyes at the same time as I saw my bag still falling downward and disappear into the trees below.
    I eventually landed and found my bag.  The rest was a blur of bugs, undergrowth, and darkness.  I had been on the ground for what had seemed like hours, but who really knew with how dark it was.  I heard a familiar voice from behind me, “Nick?”
    “Mike?  What is going on?” was all I could spit out, thankful to see another human.
    “Welcome to Adventures Unlimited.  I trust you had a nice flight.  Let’s get moving before they figure out we’re here.”  It was that last sentence that had struck me as odd.  Looking back at it now, that wasn’t the odd part at all.  It should have been the way he was dressed and the fact that he spoke with that damned southern drawl.  As though I hadn’t hated the southern drawl enough to begin with.  Can’t trust it.  But at that time he seemed nice enough, helping me with the chute and my bag.  Handing me a Browning .45 as it were.  I should have shot him right there.  I hate him for getting me into this. 
    We trekked for an hour before we made it to his camp.  A dozen men and a satellite hookup in a clearing in the middle of the largest rainforest in the world.  The same clearing I am standing at right now as a matter of fact. 
    “Well, here we are Nick.  Let’s go meet everyone,” Mike said to me with a glimmer of excitement that a child has on Christmas after opening his new Red Rider BB Gun. 
I remember meeting the other men and asking to write an email.  I sent one to my old job telling them I had left, and one to my landlord saying the same.  When I was done we all sat down to eat a meal that had been prepared.  It was not the best food I had ever eaten, and now thinking about it I bet the rest of the group would have liked to have a better meal last night. 
    When the meal was finished Mike looked up at me and said, finally, what I was there for.  “We are down here setting up our adventure course.  It begins just as your flight did, parachuting into the jungle.  We brought you in because our last new addition didn’t fair all that well.  He went in to the trees to survey the best starting point and didn’t come back.  We have decided that nobody goes into the trees alone now,” he said as his eyes drifted back in to the darkness surrounding the clearing where we made camp.  I remember having the feeling that I had seen a movie about this before, or heard an urban legend or something horrible like that.  I was wrong; this had not been a fictional depiction of any sort.
    Mike described the point of Adventures Unlimited in depth through the night.  He had put to rest any fear of the others hunting me or anything like that.  The initial attraction, besides the entrance, was a zip course over ten miles in length.  Other items were to follow, in time, but that was what we were going to be doing now.  After a few hours of swatting bugs and shooting the shit we had turned in.  That night, last night, I had slept fitfully with a dream of tribal men sneaking out of the forest to kill us.  Then turning into weird Predator-like aliens and destroying us.  I had been having weird dreams for years.  That was part of the reason I drank so much, because it was dreamless sleep when I was passed out.
    As dawn broke we began work climbing the tree that was to be the beginning of the zip course.  A giant, nearly as tall as a football field is long.  We made progress that day setting up an anchor to the giant at the perimeter of the clearing and connecting it to another giant fifty yards away.  This seemingly small project took over twelve hours.  Planning had apparently not been the groups strong point.  By the end of the day we had completed construction on the first two platforms and ladders up to them.  We had secured the cable between the two trees by the time the sun had begun to set.  Then as night fell we all stepped down to earth and headed back to camp.  I walked out in to the clearing to make back to camp when it happened. 
    The trees creaked and groaned even though the breeze was slight.  Then there was the screaming.  Screaming of grown men as they were being broken.  But broken by what?  Was it a man, several men, something else?  I heard gunfire, shouting, and cries for help.  I turned around but the darkness in the trees was too thick, so I ran back to camp for a lantern.  By the time I had returned the silence was so prominent it swallowed my calls for the others in its clutches.  This brings you up to speed and is where we are now.  Standing here with my mouth open, calling myself Tony in my head and asking what kind of a mistake I had made.  Maybe I should be paying more attention to my surroundings and less to recording my thoughts.  I think I should leave it running though to record what happens now.
    “Mike?  Guys?  MIIIIKE!  HEY YOU GUYS!  Wha’? Oh shit what’s that on my le-ugh?”