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

Running on Empty 301When we were in the jungle and supplies were at their lowest, theFARC always seemed to be able to find something to kill and to slaughter.They always served the lousiest cuts of meat right after the kill.They said that meat rots closest to the bone first. In a lot of ways thatwas true for our mental states during our months of wandering afterthe Chess Camp. Maybe it was because we were so frequently out ofradio contact or maybe it was because the times when we did have accessto radios we missed the messages, but we began to despair overthe fact that at that point we had been gone for more than three years.In that time, each of us had received fewer than three or four messagesfrom our wives, and in Keith’s case and my case, we’d heard only oncefrom Malia and Shane respectively.Keith and I both worried and fretted over that. In the vacuum createdby an absence of information, all kinds of negative thoughts rushed in.If we looked at things realistically, we understood that the likelihood ofthem having moved on and met someone else was great. We didn’t likethat idea, but we understood. We also understood that as much as wewere starving for information from our spouses, they were likely just astorn up knowing little about what had happened to us. Fair or unfair, wethought that with all the responsibilities that had been dumped in theirlaps as a result of our absence, life in one sense was easier for them—atleast their minds were more easily occupied than ours were. They hadfewer hours in the day during which they would think about all thewhat-if scenarios we churned out with assembly-line-like frequency.For Keith, it was worse, since he had two “families” to worry about.As a father of two toddlers living in Colombia, and two other childrenin the States, his concerns were spread over continents. I continued towonder about Ingrid and the other politicals, and hoped that Clara andEmanuel were doing all right.Just as our motorcycle dreams expanded in a positive direction, ouroptimism for a return to the family life we’d left behind diminished.Getting back home likely meant discovering that our lives were going to