danger
This just in from my sister Misty, who's been backpacking around South America for the last three months. She just emerged from a two-week stint deep in the Amazon, among the Cofan.
"Soon after we got there we heard that an 11 year old girl had been bitten by a snake and almost died. And a couple of dogs had been bitten by snake too. The longer we stayed, the more dangerous it seemed. One night a moth flew into the house and everyone came around to see it. After getting a closer look, Bolivar said something in Cofan and a dozen people immediately stepped back. Once Bolivar had killed the moth, he explained that if it stings you, you die, and then he laughed.
There are also fish here that stick you with their spines, electric eels, spiders, alligators, bats (carnivores), jaguars, sting rays, ect. And we were bathing in the river that whole time. By the end, walking through deep puddles didn't seem so fun anymore. And the 20 roaches crawling on our things when we came into our cabin at night didn't seem so grand either, or the mouse that ate my bra and kept us awake at night in the thatch roof. But, I'm glad I went."
Misty's a pretty intrepid traveler. About a month before this happened, she was bitten by a strange dog in a rural area and had to spend two weeks in Quito getting rabies shots. She was also mugged at knifepoint, had her passport and money stolen, lost her luggage. And she kept going. But I think the killer moth marked the end of this trip for her.
the exercise:
Living the middle class life in America, many of us tend to get complacent about physical danger. That complancency is occasionally shaken by some unanticipated event: a mugging, the violent death of someone we know, a natural disaster such as an earthquake or hurricane. 9/11 reminded us all just how imminent and unannounced death can be.
memoir: Write about a time when you or someone you know was in grave physical danger.
fiction: Write a story about a character whose confrontation with physical danger changes him or her in some fundamental way.
11:03:23 AM 
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