Fear Itself By Erica Ferencik

I’d finished a first draft of my new novel Into the Jungle, but as soon as the euphoria from reaching this milestone faded, dread crept in. Dread that I’d reached for something in the manuscript I hadn’t yet achieved, terror about diving back in. Luckily, I had a distraction. A BIG one. It was time to get ready for my month-long research trip to the Peruvian Amazon. I thought nothing would be more frightening then plunging into my hot mess of a first draft, but I was wrong.

Like I wasn’t freaked out enough about heading into the jungle by myself, Lonely Planet thought it prudent to learn a few of these key phrases in Spanish before my trip:
“I have been attacked and robbed.”
“My passport and all my money have been stolen.”
“I have missed my plane…”
“A snake is eating my face.”

Kidding about that last one, but still.

When the day of departure arrived, I could only bear to face the needed steps one by one: the big picture overwhelmed me. One: Say goodbye to my husband at Boston’s Logan airport. Well, that sucked. Then: land the first leg, Boston to Miami. Still alive. Miami to Lima, Peru. Check. Go to your hotel. Breathe.

It was strange, but by morning, something had shifted. I was calmer, and couldn’t wait to get the plane to Iquitos, a landlocked town on the Amazon River. By the time I arrived at my lodge, 100 miles up the Amazon, I finally felt gone from my usual world.
Still, a general queasiness lingered. I’d read too much about the jungle to feel otherwise.

I was never even totally relaxed in my room, a cabin on thirty-foot stilts, where only plywood, screens and thatch separated me from the jungle. The ceiling was just an enormous screen; above that loomed a thatch roof. Insects lived in that thatch; insects draw snakes, bats, and lizards. By the end of my time there, I had named the three vampire bats hanging from the ceiling of my bathroom, who liked to sing their squeaky songs every time I took my river-water-from-the-spigot shower. At this place, you always kept your door shut. Anything might wander in. You check your boots each and every time before putting them on.

In the jungle, I found myself living each moment – including the time I spent in my room – at a heightened state of awareness. In the woods of the Northeast where I live, I’m relaxed on a hike; I know what precautions to take. Except for ticks and mosquitos, I’m pretty blissed out and confident.

In the jungle, you can’t let yourself go like that. Here the rules are different. Multiply any anxiety you might have exploring the woods by a thousand, and you have a trek through the jungle. You are walking food for countless predators: insects, snakes – even the plants wouldn’t mind slicing off a piece of flesh with their spines. Everything is either hunting, or hiding, or both.

It was the nighttime canoe trips that were the most terrifying for me. I tried to buck up and say yes to everything – Come on, don’t hide in your room – where it isn’t safe anyway and – when will I ever be here again? My patient and knowledgeable guide, Adrian, who grew up in a nearby river town and began hunting to feed his family at age nine, asked me each evening, so what is it tonight? The river or the forest?…to my credit I only bagged the night trip once; I huddled in the lodge happily drinking lukewarm beers and listening to the crazy chorus of frogs and insects outside. But the next evening and every other one I couldn’t say no.

One night we set out in a small canoe under blazing stars set deep in a velvet black sky. With only headlamps for illumination, we paddled along narrow and narrower tributaries in 360 degrees of danger. Above us, poisonous snakes lounged on tangled tree limbs; beneath us the dark water ran thick with its own perils. Just as we navigated a tight bend, an electric eel – disturbed by our boat – leapt from the water.

Six feet long, thick as truck tire, it twisted in the air before splashing down in the brown soup. These things pack enough electricity to stun a horse. Moments later, beneath us, the seven-foot shadow of a pirarucu, the largest freshwater fish in the world, slid under our canoe.

Adrian sat back a bit in awe at the eel, but other than that he remained calm and preternaturally aware; his entire body listening to his surroundings. He carried a machete and a spearfishing pole – that was it. I’d never seen him apply mosquito repellant or seem the least bit nervous anywhere in the jungle. One day I asked him what – if anything – put actual fear in him. He said, how in the world do you live through a snowstorm? That terrifies me.

I stuttered through my answer but as I did so, realized that living day-to-day with my reality in the Northeastern United States was almost as incomprehensible to him as living in his world – beyond my visit – seemed to me. Still, with each day that passed, I became more and more at ease – never completely free of fear – but with a slowly blooming confidence in my ability to adapt to any new world I might encounter.
By the time I stepped on the plane, I was mosquito-ravaged and exhausted, but enthralled with everything I had seen and experienced. Attacking the first draft of my novel seemed the least frightening thing I’d done in weeks…

—

Follow Erica on Twitter  @EricaFerencik

Find about more about her on her Website https://ericaferencik.com

INTO THE JUNGLE

Featured in the New York Times Book Review Summer Reading Guide * A Crime by the Book “Most Anticipated” Novel * Featured in the New York Post Summer Round Up * Starred Publishers Weekly Review * A Publishers Weekly “Big Summer Books” * A Kirkus Reviews“Creepy Thrillers” Pick

In this pulse-pounding thriller from the author of the “haunting, twisting thrill ride” (Megan Miranda, New York Times bestselling author) The River at Night, a young woman leaves behind everything she knows to take on the Bolivian jungle, but her excursion abroad quickly turns into a fight for her life.

Lily Bushwold thought she’d found the antidote to endless foster care and group homes: a teaching job in Cochabamba, Bolivia. As soon as she could steal enough cash for the plane, she was on it.

When the gig falls through and Lily stays in Bolivia, she finds bonding with other broke, rudderless girls at the local hostel isn’t the life she wants either. Tired of hustling and already world-weary, crazy love finds her in the form she least expected: Omar, a savvy, handsome local man who’d abandoned his life as a hunter in Ayachero—a remote jungle village—to try his hand at city life.

When Omar learns that a jaguar has killed his four-year-old nephew in Ayachero, he gives Lily a choice: Stay alone in the unforgiving city, or travel to the last in a string of ever-more-isolated river towns in the jungles of Bolivia. Thirty-foot anaconda? Puppy-sized spiders? Vengeful shamans with unspeakable powers? Love-struck Lily is oblivious. She follows Omar to this ruthless new world of lawless poachers, bullheaded missionaries, and desperate indigenous tribes driven to the brink of extinction. To survive, Lily must navigate the jungle–its wonders as well as its terrors—using only her wits and resilience.

Primal, gripping, and terrifying, Into the Jungle features Erica Ferencik’s signature “visceral, white-knuckle” (Entertainment Weekly) prose that will sink its fangs into you and not let go.

Tags: featured, women writers

Category: Contemporary Women Writers, On Writing