Out of Captivity : Surviving 1,967 Days in the Colombian Jungle

120 OUT OF CAPTIVITYfirst days at the New Camp, he seemed to be spending a lot of time inhis hooch alone. His note let me know that if he was weaker physicallythan he’d ever been, he was probably more mentally strong.Seeing Keith’s note, I realized that we all had different and necessaryskills to succeed. Figuring out how to use those skills to survive captivitywas what we now needed to concentrate on. We were applying oldskills in a new environment. That was going to take time and trial anderror. I had never been a very patient guy and my walking around infurious circles was proof of that.I learned something about patience and how to get through the dayfrom Marc. I’d always been a guy who liked a set routine. That was onereason why each morning I walked the camp. I was also very meticulousabout caring for the few possessions I had—part of my pilot’straining specifically and my temperament generally. I liked to do thingsas quickly and efficiently as possible. The FARC did not. There seemedto be very little in the way of orderliness to what they did. While I wasimpressed with their construction abilities, even though the structuresthey built were hastily erected and somewhat slipshod. I knew that inmost cases what they built was temporary, but I was always a believerthat if you were going to do something, it was worth doing it right andmaking it last.Though Marc didn’t realize it at the time, he turned into my teacher.Each morning he would wake up and scrub clean all his possessionswith an old toothbrush. What we had didn’t amount to much. Theclothes we wore, our spare clothes, our boots, the plastic lawn chairswe’d sat on in the back of the pickup truck, and a few other odds andends. In our other life, we probably could have scrubbed all that spotlesswith that toothbrush in an hour, but Marc could occupy himself foran hour just getting the mud out of the treads on the sole of his boots.He’d sit there with a look of deep concentration on his face, rarely evenlooking up from his work.I began to copy him. I thought that if I could just slow down like