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Bonampák, of the famous wall paintings, but I wasn’t going that far. To reach Ektún and the Tabí River, you turned off to the left, or east, on a still more primitive track. I did so, and the trees closed in on me. Limbs whacked against my windows. I moved forward at a creep, but even so my poor truck was twisted and jolted about by rocks and bony roots. The glove compartment door flew open. Screws were backing out of their holes and nuts off their bolts. I had to hold my hand on the gearstick to keep it from popping out of gear. I saw a wild pig, a black squirrel as big as a house cat, darting green parrots. You don’t expect parrots to be accomplished fliers, but they go like bullets.
    I saw nothing human until I reached the fording place on the Tabí. There was a flash of yellow through the foliage. As I turned the bend, I made out a car stranded in midstream. It was a bright yellow Checker Marathon, towing a pop-top tent trailer. The trailer had been knocked sideways by the current.
    Rudy Kurle. What was he doing out here? No use asking. How did he get this far in that rig? I honked my horn.
    He was in the back seat, where he must have been asleep. He stuck his head out the window and shouted. “Hey, Burns! Great! This is great! Did you copy my Mayday?”
    â€œWhat? No!” I could barely hear him over the rush of water.
    â€œI need a jump start!”
    He needed more than that.
    He had been sitting there all night, dead in the water, trying to start the thing and calling for help on his CB radio, on one channel after another, until he had run his battery down. His DieHard had done died. I seldom turned on my own CB, and in any case there were no signals to pick up out here. The water was about knee deep, but with deeper potholes. He had dropped his right front wheel into one of these. I drove around him and positioned my truck on the hard ground of the opposite bank. I pieced together a chain, a nylon rope, and a nylon tow-strap.
    Rudy wouldn’t get out of the car to help. The water was too rough, or he didn’t want to get his lace-up explorer boots wet, or something. Useless to ask why. Usually he wasn’t such a delicate traveler. How long would he have sat there? The river was a tributary of the Usumacinta, tea-colored from dead leaves, only moderately swift at this time of year, and only about sixty feet wide at this ford. A bit more maybe. I’m a poor judge of distance over water.
    I went out into the stream with my tow-line, jumping from rock to rock. Another of man’s farcical attempts at flight. We keep trying but none of us, not even the high-jumper slithering backwards over his crossbar, ever gets very far off the earth. And yet we come down hard. My bad knee gave way on one of these landings, and I went head-first into the water and tumbled a ways downstream. I didn’t matter, getting soaked, as I had to bob all the way under anyway to hook the strap to a frame member.
    All the while Rudy was making suggestions. “No, no,” I said. “Listen to me. Put it in neutral and just keep the wheels straight. Don’t do anything else. Stay off the brakes. Stop talking.”
    First the chain came loose from my trailer ball, and then the nylon rope, twanging like a banjo string, snapped. The line parted, as the sailors say. Pound for pound stronger than steel! Such is the claim made for these wonder fibers, but I’ll take steel. Third time lucky. I removed some rocks in front of his tires and then, in low-range four-wheel drive, in doble tracción, I yanked him loose and got him up on the bank, trailer and all, without stopping.
    Rudy didn’t thank me but he did offer me some food. He had brown cans of meat and crackers he had taken from his National Guard unit in Pennsylvania. All I wanted was a long pull on my water jug. I checked my tires for rock cuts. Wet rubber is easily sliced. Rudy showed me a nick in his bumper. “That’s