My wife, Jenna, and our girls wanted to spend the day at the beach and by the pool.

I decided to hike alone through a tropical rainforest.

In retrospect, they made the better choice.

We were in Puerto Rico, staying near El Yunque National Forest, the only tropical rainforest in the U.S. National Forest System. I had already spent several days exploring parts of it when a local told me about a remote trail where I was unlikely to see many people, if any at all.

“How difficult?” I asked.

Moderado.

Remember that word.

I consider myself a reasonably capable outdoorsman. I’ve spent a lot of time in wild places on several continents. I’ve wandered well off the beaten path looking for artifacts, rocks, minerals, fossils, and other things more sensible people view from behind glass. I’ve encountered ticks, chiggers, snakes, coyotes, bears, poisonous plants, spiders, bees, and enough of Satan’s other handiwork to know my way around the wild.

Banjo music doesn’t frighten me.

So, while Jenna and the girls prepared for an arduous day of beach, pool, and frozen drinks, I packed 36 ounces of water, laced up a pair of basic black sneakers better suited for power walking the mall before the stores open, and headed into the rainforest.

Thirty-six ounces.

El Yunque receives enormous amounts of rain every year. Water is quite literally everywhere.

Unfortunately, very little of it comes bottled, purified, and refrigerated.

Moderado

I started on the Bisley Trail, which eventually joins a more difficult trail farther into the rainforest. The Forest Service warns of two unbridged river crossings along Bisley. Farther in, the terrain includes steep climbs, sharp elevation changes, narrow stretches, natural obstacles, and challenging surface conditions.

I would eventually experience all the above.

Moderado.

It was around 90 degrees. The humidity was oppressive. Everything was wet. The rocks. The roots. The leaves. The mud.

Within minutes, me.

The trail climbed and dropped through dense tropical forest, crossed rushing water, disappeared beneath vegetation, and occasionally vanished altogether. At other times, the crumbling, muddy edge of the mountain was the trail.

I also had the wrong shoes, no map, no cell service, and, as previously mentioned, 36 ounces of water.

But I was having a fantastic time.

That’s important because bad decisions aren’t always obvious at the beginning.

Sometimes they begin as adventures.

Several hours in, I ran out of water.

This concerned me.

Not enough to turn around immediately, apparently.

But enough to begin thinking seriously about water.

There is a peculiar psychological transformation that occurs when you become genuinely thirsty. You begin remembering every glass you’ve ever left unfinished. The half-empty bottle you threw away at the airport. The waiter you repeatedly waved off when he tried to refill your glass.

Then I started thinking about ice.

Specifically, Chick-fil-A ice.

Those magnificent little white nuggets shaped suspiciously like rabbit turds but somehow representing the absolute pinnacle of frozen water. Soft enough to chew. Crunchy enough to satisfy.

I would have traded a kidney for a cup.

Instead, I found bananas.

Sort of.

A banana tree was growing up on the side of the mountain. Near the top, a long stem reached out over the slope with a cluster of small green bananas dangling from the end.

They were small, bright green, high enough to be a problem, and clearly nowhere near ready to be eaten.

I knew this.

I also knew dehydration was no longer some future possibility. It was coming, and those bananas contained water, sugar, potassium, and several other things my body was beginning to negotiate for.

So, I climbed the tree.

“Climbed” is generous.

By then, I was slick with sweat, mud, rain, and whatever else the rainforest had applied to me. I wrapped myself around the trunk and began thrusting, grunting, and sliding upward a few inches at a time.

Nature wasn’t watching anymore.

It was mocking me.

Somewhere in that rainforest, every creature with eyes was watching a middle-aged man dry-hump a banana tree for a handful of unripe fruit.

Eventually, whether from my weight or simple mercy, the tree began to bend. Its roots started pulling and popping from the forest floor.

CRRRRACK… THUD.

Down came the tree. Down came the bananas.

Down came Will.

I ate two. They were hard, pale, starchy, and awful.

I saved six.

Some for sustenance. The others, apparently, for bartering.

With whom, I have no idea. I hadn’t seen another person in hours.

This should have been another clue.

Communion With Nature

Then I reached one of the rivers.

Cold mountain water. Beautiful, clear, rushing water.

I was filthy, overheated, exhausted, and alone. There was nobody around.

So, I did what any mature, responsible 46-year-old husband and father would do.

I took off all my clothes.

All of them.

I waded into the river and wedged myself between two enormous boulders, letting the current rush over my shoulders and around my body.

It was glorious.

Majestic, I dare say.

Cold water, pounding against aching muscles. Tropical birds moving through the canopy. Dense green rainforest in every direction. Blue sky above it all.

For several minutes, I experienced what I can only describe as complete communion with nature.

Nature then attached something to my ass.

I don’t know what it was. El Yunque’s rivers contain native fish adapted to fast-moving mountain streams, including climbing gobies. Whether one was responsible for what happened next, I cannot say.

I can only say that something either bit me, attached itself to me, or attempted to establish some other relationship for which I had not given consent.

I levitated.

The sound that came out of me was not human.

El Yunque is famous for the tiny coquí frog and is home to parrots, bats, boas, lizards, and all manner of other wildlife.

For several seconds that afternoon, the loudest animal in the rainforest was a naked man from Georgia.

Communion with nature had concluded.

I got dressed.

Not long afterward, back on the trail, I heard something above me.

This wasn’t the soft rustling of a bird hopping between branches. This was substantial.

Palm leaves began moving. Then part of the greater tree canopy.

Then came the hiss.

Deep. Angry. Somewhere above my head.

I should mention that I spent part of my younger life raising, keeping, and trading reptiles, including large constrictors. I know the hiss of an irritated boa about as well as I know the sound of an irritated wife.

Both are unmistakable.

Both should be taken seriously.

I looked up. Nothing.

Then something moved again.

More leaves. Another hiss.

“Okay,” I said.

I don’t remember everything I said after that, but we had a brief discussion about our respective intentions.

Mine were peaceful.

Hers remained unclear.

Puerto Rico is home to the Puerto Rican boa, a large native constrictor found in El Yunque that is perfectly comfortable in trees. I never saw enough of whatever was above me to positively identify it.

But I conducted a quick tactical assessment.

Whatever was up there had the high ground, excellent concealment, home-field advantage, and considerably more energy than I did.

I wished her well and continued down the trail.

Things Get Worse

By the time I started back, dehydration was taking over.

My legs were cramping. I was losing strength. My mouth was dry. My head was beginning to feel strange, and every climb seemed steeper than I remembered it.

I wasn’t just thirsty anymore.

I was in trouble.

One stretch of trail wrapped around the side of the mountain and narrowed to perhaps a foot across.

Mountain on one side. A considerable amount of gravity on the other.

My foot slipped.

I started sliding and grabbed the nearest tree with everything my left hand had.

This was an excellent decision right until I discovered what kind of tree I had grabbed.

Its trunk was covered in enormous thorns. Not little rosebush thorns. Thick, hard, meaty spikes.

My hand closed around them at precisely the same moment my body weight pulled against them.

They worked beautifully.

I stopped sliding.

My hand, however, was now bleeding.

Several thorns had broken off beneath the skin. I pulled out what I could with my fingers and left about a dozen embedded for later, when I had access to something more appropriate than my fingernails.

I’ve tried to identify that tree. My best candidate is Martinique prickly ash, found in Puerto Rico and armed with thick, conical spines.

Whatever it was, I remain grateful for its assistance.

Our relationship was brief but consequential.

A little further along, I sat down because I needed to stop moving.

I found a moss-draped rock, sat on it, leaned my aching back against the mountain, and apparently fell asleep almost immediately.

The mosquitoes woke me.

Not one mosquito. A squadron.

I opened my eyes to a swarm helping themselves to parts of me I had not authorized for public use.

I stood up and kept moving.

By then, there was no pretending otherwise.

I was in trouble.

And this is where another story entered mine.

Bravo

A few weeks earlier, I had watched a 60 Minutes interview with a U.S. Air Force colonel identified publicly only as Bravo.

Bravo was the weapons systems officer aboard Dude 44, an F-15E Strike Eagle shot down over Iran.

The attack damaged his parachute. After ejecting, Bravo looked up and saw no functioning canopy.

He prayed.

Then he went to work.

He pulled at whatever pieces of the parachute he could reach, trying to get something above him that might slow his fall. Military professionals later estimated that he struck the ground somewhere between 70 and 100 miles per hour.

He broke his back, arm, and shoulder.

Then he found himself badly injured, alone, deep inside Iran, and with people looking for him. Bravo would spend roughly two days behind enemy lines evading capture before U.S. forces reached him.

At this point, some of you may be concerned that I’m about to compare myself to this man.

I’m not.

Nothing that happened to me in El Yunque belongs in the same universe as what Bravo endured.

He was badly injured, alone in enemy territory, with people actively trying to capture him.

I was badly dehydrated, alone in a rainforest, with nobody trying to kill me but me.

But I remembered something Bravo had said.

Asked about falling toward the earth, he explained that he wasn’t thinking about how fast he was going. After a quick prayer, he focused instead on:

“…trying to correct the problems that were in front of me.”

Bravo had been trained for this.

SERE: Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape.

He explained that his instructors had taught him to set priorities. Not only what needed to be done, but when it needed to be done.

He had trained for the day he hoped would never come.

Then it came.

After a great deal of self-reflection, some of it strongly encouraged by my wife, I realized that I, too, had received years of training.

Just not the military-sanctioned kind.

DAD: Decades of Accumulated Dumbassery.

The curriculum consisted mostly of wandering into wild places, taking unnecessary risks, getting myself into situations I probably should have avoided, getting myself back out, and gradually mistaking that track record for expertise.

SERE is better.

But I knew the principle that Bravo was describing.

You don’t solve everything at once.

You solve what’s in front of you.

Shrink the Horizon

By then, one thought had taken over completely.

I gotta get back.

Back to the car. Back to air conditioning. Back to cold water. Back to my family.

But “back” felt impossibly far away.

Every time I thought about it, I saw everything still between me and there. Every climb. Every river crossing. Every miserable stretch of trail I had already crossed and would have to cross again.

I knew where I needed to be.

I couldn’t fathom how I was going to get there.

So, I stopped trying to get out of the rainforest.

Get to the next tree.

That became the entire assignment.

I got to the tree.

Now climb the hill. Get around the bend. Down to the water. Reach the boulder.

Stop. One minute.

Up.

Next objective.

Nothing about my physical circumstances improved. Quite the opposite. More dehydrated. More exhausted. Cramping harder. Getting weaker. Still bleeding.

Still carrying six ridiculous green bananas.

But something had changed.

Getting out of the rainforest was overwhelming.

Getting to the next tree was doable.

So, I kept shrinking the horizon.

Get to the tree.

Then figure out what came next.

Civilization

Eventually, I stumbled around another punishing bend and saw the most beautiful thing I had seen all day.

Maybe ever.

The car.

I would like to tell you I emerged from the rainforest triumphantly, one soiled mall-walking shoe proudly perched atop the tire of my chariot, striking a victorious Captain Morgan pose.

I did not.

I staggered out looking like someone who had recently lost a territorial dispute with Central America.

I was muddy, bleeding, drenched in sweat, and approaching the limits of what my body was willing to negotiate.

Even getting into the car became a problem. My vision was blurry. My hands were weak. I stood there fumbling with the key fob until, either through persistence or statistical probability, I managed to unlock the door.

I fell into the driver’s seat.

Air conditioning. Full blast. Seat back.

I lay there while freezing air poured over my soaking wet body until my nipples hurt.

Beautifully magnificent.

The cold air. The reclined seat.

Those nipples.

Then I remembered the more immediate problem.

I still desperately needed fluids.

The nearest place selling anything to drink was about 15 minutes away.

I made it in 10.

Not my finest decision that day. And there was considerable competition.

I pulled into the first available parking space.

Handicapped.

Technically, I was.

I got out, crossed the parking lot, and pushed through the door.

Water. Coconut water. Pond water with a nutrition label. I wasn’t picky.

Then I saw it.

Gatorade.

Sweet mother of electrolytes.

I grabbed as many bottles as I could carry.

But I wasn’t just carrying Gatorade.

I was protecting it.

The woman behind the counter looked at me. Then the Gatorade. Then back at me.

Her expression suggested that perhaps the FBI had captured the wrong man and Ted Kaczynski was presently standing in her convenience store.

She motioned toward the bottles, asking if that was everything.

I tightened my grip and nodded.

Nobody was getting my precious.

She rang them up, thanked me, and wished me a good evening in Spanish.

I tried to say, “Thank you.”

Nothing came out.

I tried again.

Nothing.

I hadn’t exactly been talking my voice away. In the previous six hours, the only meaningful conversations I’d had were with a hissing boa and whatever had attached itself to my backside.

Neither had been particularly chatty.

But somewhere along the way, my voice had simply disappeared.

I gathered up my Gatorade and walked back to the car. I opened one before I even sat down.

Drank it.

Opened another.

Then another.

I kept drinking until there was nothing left to drink.

Then I sat there.

Alive. Filthy.

Six ridiculous green bananas in the passenger seat.

The Conquering Hero

By the time I reached the resort, I had lost about ten pounds of water weight.

The driver’s seat of the rental car had absorbed an amount of sweat I did not believe automotive upholstery was engineered to accommodate.

I handed the keys to the valet.

Then I handed him twenty dollars.

“Sorry,” I tried to say.

My voice had begun returning, but only barely. What came out sounded less like an apology and more like the Godfather telling some poor schmuck that what was about to happen was unfortunate, but necessary.

The valet looked inside the car.

Twenty dollars suddenly seemed inadequate.

I entered the resort.

White marble floors. High ceilings. A grand lobby. Restaurant. Casino. Well-dressed people enjoying their vacations.

And then me.

I stumbled through the entrance, swaying slightly, still soaked, filthy, and bleeding, dragging those muddy mall-walkers across the pristine marble.

The whole scene had begun to resemble the Puerto Rican remake of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

People noticed. Conversations softened as I passed.

Then I passed a woman mopping the white marble floor.

She looked at me. Then behind me.

Her already defeated demeanor somehow sank another three inches.

I kept walking.

It wasn’t until the elevator doors began closing that I turned around.

There it was.

A continuous trail of mud, water, leaves, and rainforest debris stretching across the lobby.

I had marked my entire migration through the resort.

Like a wounded animal.

Or a Roomba filled with potting soil.

The elevator doors closed.

I went upstairs, turned the air conditioning as low as it would go, and lost consciousness.

Hours later, I heard the door open.

Jenna and the girls were back.

I carefully cracked open one eye to assess the situation.

Sometime after I had fallen asleep, Jenna had valeted the rental car.

She immediately began complaining about her clothes. They were “soaked with some man’s disgusting sweat. Gross.” She couldn’t wait to get them off and take a shower.

There are moments in a marriage when wisdom consists entirely of knowing what not to say.

This was one of them.

I closed my eye and imagined the same young valet seeing the Mitsubishi coming up the drive, recognizing it, and slowly shaking his head.

No.

As it got closer:

No, no, no.

And when Jenna pulled up:

Por favor. No más.

The Horizon

It’s easy to laugh about it now.

But I made mistakes that day, and some of them weren’t particularly funny.

I underestimated the environment. I didn’t carry enough water. I didn’t have an offline map. I went alone. I kept going when turning around sooner would have been smarter.

And those shoes.

I did set out to do something difficult, and I accomplished it. But there is no virtue in creating an unnecessary problem simply because you eventually manage to survive it.

Once the problem existed, though, I still had to solve it.

For most of the return hike, I desperately wanted out. But every time I thought about the destination, I was reminded of how far away it was.

Then I stopped trying to get out of the rainforest.

I tried to get to the next tree.

“Keep your eyes on the horizon.” Usually, that’s good advice.

Know where you’re going. Remember what you’re working toward.

But sometimes the horizon is too far away to help.

Sometimes looking at it only reminds you how far you still must go.

So, shrink it.

Not forever. Just long enough to make the enormous manageable.

What’s the next thing that needs to happen?

Do that. Then ask again.

Get to the tree.

Then the next one.

And bring more water.