Five months after he came to convalesce at the Moras’ house, and just as he was starting to feel that he was fully regaining his strength, Andy became ill after dinner. He had a high fever, sweats, and a stomachache. He had all the signs of a bad flu. But then a rash formed on his chest and his legs. Skin eruptions broke out in his armpits. His wrists started to ache. Andy had never felt so sick in his life. Darci Mora recognized it immediately: “It’s the break bone.”
Andy turned his head to look at Darci and asked, “What? How could a broken bone cause this?”
“No, no, no. Not your broken leg. Nothing to do with that. This is a fever, breakbone fever, the dengue fever. The people call it breakbone fever because it gives you such pain in the joints.”
Andy was very ill. His feverish periods would last for ten hours or more, and he became delirious. The pain in his muscles and joints became intense. Tylenol kept the pain just barely manageable. A few times he was given Tylenol with codeine. He had three days of diarrhea and vomiting.
During one of his lucid periods, Mora explained that dengue fever was caused by a virus transmitted from person to person by the
Andy asked Darci, “Should I go back to the hospital?”
“No. Unless you get much worse and need an IV, the treatment would be the same there: fluids and rest. I’ll just keep checking your vitals. There is something called dengue shock syndrome. That’s the real killer, but it is not very common. You just have to let your immune system fight this.”
After ten days, the worst of the illness had passed, but Andy still felt miserable. Following Darci’s advice, he drank lots of water. He complained of an odd taste in his mouth, almost as if he were sucking on a zinc lozenge.
His recovery from dengue fever was slow. He spent many hours in bed, feeling weak. He read his Bible a lot. Whenever he felt depressed, he read the book of Job, just to put his own minor troubles in perspective. To improve his limited command of Spanish, Andy would often do parallel readings, verse by verse, from his King James Bible and Mora’s “Santa Biblia” Spanish edition.
Andy would often read his favorite verses aloud, such as a portion of Psalm 119: “Thou
The Moras’ pet green parrot, named Payasito, kept Andy entertained as he recovered. Andy asked for the bird to be brought to his room so frequently that Gabe eventually moved his cage to Andy’s bedside, saying simply, “You two can keep each other company from now on.”
Laine joked that Payasito was teaching him his Spanish vocabulary: “When I go to restaurants, people will wonder why I always order peanuts.” He added in an imitation of a parrot voice,
Eventually, Andy was able to return to his exercise regimen, and began helping Gabe with his work. Gabe still hunted frequently, both to supply his own household with meat and for extra meat to barter. Andy became his skinning and butchering assistant.
Mora mostly hunted the native
Mora owned two .22 rimfire rifles, a Taurus .22 revolver, a .303 Lee-Enfield rifle that had been “sporterized,” and two shotguns. His better .22 rifle was a scoped Marlin. All of this gun’s metal parts and its scope had been spray-painted green to help protect it from rust in the unrelenting humidity. The paint often flaked and it showed signs of being touched up. This was Mora’s gibnut gun. When Andy asked if his guns were registered, Gabe chortled, and said, “No. No way! I think only about half the guns in the country are in the registry. That registry is a big joke, especially out in the bush. Some of those guys have full-on AKs and old submachineguns from the Second World War that aren’t registered.”
Andy began going on hunts with Mora. On these hikes Gabe tried to teach him the names of the local tree species, but they soon became a confusing blur. The old logger mentioned that there were more than seven hundred species in Belize and that that he knew the names of only half of them. Andy finally said, “Well, it is more important that I know how to buy food and ask directions in Spanish than it is to know the name of every tree.”
Andy often quoted the Bible to Gabe, who had been raised as a Catholic but who was relatively ignorant of the scriptures. He once told Andy, “I haven’t gone to Mass or confessed in years. I worked so much in those back- country camps that I got out of the habit. God wouldn’t want me.” But Andy reassured him, saying, “All you need is faith in Christ Jesus. That’s the way, the
On one of their longer hunting excursions, Gabe showed Andy his secret stash of gasoline, buried in the side of a small ridge at his uncle’s wooded property, three miles west of Sarawiwa. Mora described his fuel storage technique to Laine. When he was working as a back-country logger, he had discovered that gasoline stored in thirty-three-gallon plastic drums with the bungs sealed tight was still usable for up to four years, even without the addition of a stabilizer. Stored the same way, diesel would last much longer if it was treated with an antimicrobial.
The food-grade blue drums that Gabe used for his gasoline had white gaskets in the bungs that swelled slightly but did not deteriorate. These blue plastic drums were stored inside fifty-five-gallon steel drums and shaded from direct sunlight. A dark green tarp was draped over the pair of drums. Mora found that the plastic drums expanded and contracted with the fuel as the temperature changed. With no air venting, the problems of water condensation, evaporation, and other contaminants were solved. And, he surmised, in the event that the thirty- three-gallon drum ever burst unexpectedly, the fuel would be contained within the larger steel drum.
It was on that same trip that Mora bagged the first iguana that Andy had ever seen in the wild. Mora stopped the big lizard with just one shot to the back of its head from his Marlin .22 rifle. This iguana was more than three feet long. It had a fat tail, which Mora said was a sign of good health. Iguana, called “bamboo chicken” by the Mora family, was a favored delicacy. Gabe said that to get his daughter and son-in-law to come visit, all he had to do was tell them that he planned to serve iguana.
During his recovery, Andy continued with his weekly HF radio contacts. More than half of them were successful. It was those Morse code conversations with his brother and fiancee that kept his spirits up.
Gabe Mora had cut back drastically on his driving after the Crunch began. But he would often ride his bicycle to Sarawiwa or even as far away as Dangriga to buy groceries. He would carry his Taurus .22 revolver on those shopping trips. Gabe would frequently spot wild game near the road and bring home some bonus protein.
Lars and Lisbeth Laine spent a lot of time in their “ham shack”—a corner of their bedroom—on more than just Tuesday nights. They became avid shortwave listeners, doing their best to keep track of current events by scanning through the international broadcast bands mainly in the high 9 MHz and high 11 MHz ranges, listening to radio stations such as the BBC, Radio Netherlands, Radio Havana Cuba, Channel Africa, HCJB in Ecuador, and NHK in Japan. They also tuned up to 17.795 MHz to hear Radio Australia. It was disconcerting to hear the litany of very bad economic news, refugee movements, terrorist attacks, and massive riots. It was even more disturbing to notice when some of these radio stations dropped off the air.
The Laines also picked up valuable news listening to amateur radio operators from all over the United States. They had the most success listening to hams in the Rocky Mountain region and just east of the Rockies. But they found that it was more difficult for them to hear hams in the Northeast. At first Lars assumed this was because of
