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sea breeze. We pitched our yellow two-person tent in the backyard of a budget hotel for a week, striking a deal with the manager to use the bathrooms, paying under half the regular room rate. With the money we saved, we ate shark sandwiches and drank cheap rum at lunchtime.
    We became friendly with the local girl at the front desk who collected our rent money every afternoon, stashed our passports in the hotel safe, and sold us bottles of water and golden empanadas filled with tangy cheese that she’d brought in a paper sack from her village. She was about twenty, like me. Peggy was her name. She had round cheeks and a shy smile and stuffed herself into low-cut tops and long skirts. She spoke a stunted but versatile English. Her village was about ten kilometers away. “Why don’t you come there?” Peggy said one evening as I was trekking through the lobby with my toothbrush and contact lens case. “You can meet my family. We’ll cook you food.”
    In retrospect, it was a small thing to do—taking a taxi to Peggy’s town, meeting her vast family of tíos and tías and little barefoot brothers and cousins, allowing her to show us to a nearby beach, a five-minute walk along a brushy path, where we could pitch our tent for free. At the time, though, it felt large. The beach was a stunning half-moon of white sand rimmed by arching palm trees at the mouth of a sheltered cove. There were no signs of human trespass—no bottlecaps shipwrecked in the sand, no yachts drifting offshore. Peggy brought us a batch of doughy empanadas and sliced pineapple at dinnertime, and with the sky starting to go purple and the evening breeze lifting, she left us. Our isolation was freakish and exciting. Jamie and I waded around in the warm water, watching schools of small bluish fish flick through the shallows. If we’d zoomed upward and looked back down, we’d have been half recognizable to ourselves—a young woman, a young man, caught in a textbook paradise, aimless and happy and utterly alone.
    It occurred to me that we were also unfindable, that without giving it a thought, we’d stepped off the travelers’ grid. Peggy’s village wasn’t listed in the guidebook. We’d told no one where we were going. My joy dissolved quickly, my mind tracking through our inevitable disappearance. The police would find their way to the hotel we’d leftand to our taxi driver. The taxi driver would lead them to the village. The villagers would point them to Peggy, and she would walk them to the beach. And there they’d discover us splayed and long-dead in the sand, our tent in weathered tatters, Jamie and I having been struck by lightning simultaneously, or drowned in the strong undertow and washed back ashore. Probably, though, it would be bandits, and the bandits would have been smart enough to march us off the beach before robbing us and killing us and burying our bodies where they’d never be found.
    I fell asleep that night petrified and uncertain, clinging to Jamie’s back as he dozed in the tent, bolting upright every time the wind luffed the trees or a frog urped from the woods. This, I supposed, was what a frontier felt like, a knifepoint between elation and terror.
    We woke to the early sun blasting through our tent, the air inside steamy and suffocating. Jamie kissed my forehead.
    We’d survived. Of course.
    *
    Something was unfolding for me, especially as one long bus ride led to a second and a third and we floated ever deeper into Venezuela, following a loose plan but not a schedule. The effect was narcotic. I watched the countryside stream by in tangles of brush and dense cloud forest, punctuated every so often by the sight of a scarlet macaw or a small village built near a cacao plantation.
    The last bus dropped us at a town called Santa Elena de Uairén, near the border of Brazil. We found a hostel and slept under a tent of mosquito netting in a room painted a jarring shade of turquoise. The next morning, after some haggling, we