Our lake: A place for high adventure, pranks, romance, and even tragedy

 

Last week I promised to tell you more awesome (and sometimes scary) stories about living in South America’s wild open territory in the middle of nowhere.

 

Today we’ll take a brief walk from our house, through a low jungle area, to el lago, the lake. (See photos below.) Countless escapades happened there. Renowned as the venue for high adventure, pranks, romance, and sometimes fear—my, oh, my, if that lake could talk, what stories it would tell!

 

El lago, the site of swimming, sailing, water skiing, and washing the dog.

 

A place of canoeing and hunting for orchids and monkeys, a place for fishermen to reel in pirañas (piranhas), dogfish, and silver dollars.

 

A backdrop for sunrises and sunsets in bronze, pink, gold, and purple.

 

A setting for skinny dipping in the moonlight.

 

At el lago, howler monkeys yowled high in palm trees and frightened little boys and girls. And full-grown boys and girls, too. Howlers let out eerie, loud calls, and their bulging eyes spooked a lot of people. For most of us, howler monkeys were unseen creatures that woke us up at sunrise. They didn’t live near our house, but we could hear their calls which, in the distance, sounded breathy, breezy, whooshy.

 

The lakeshore hosted birthday parties, picnics, campouts, school parties, baptisms, and glittering Easter sunrise services.

 

It was a place of sunburns and mud fights

and rope swings, of squawking parrots

and chirping frogs and singing birds

and palm fronds clattering in the breeze

and symphonies played by countless insects.

The lakeshore would one day witness a murder, but it would also witness a wedding for a lovely bride and one of Lomalinda’s young men, all grown up.

 

Matt, Karen, Dave, and everyone—except for me—cooled off in the lake despite the stingrays that lived there. Yes, stingrays. Big stingrays.

 

Before entering the water, swimmers slapped the lake’s surface with a board or tree branch to drive the critters away.

 

But if humans forgot and invaded their territory, those monsters defended themselves with their stingers—slashing a swimmer’s feet, leaving him writhing in pain while someone pulled out the venomous knife-like barb.

 

Deep, long gashes became infected quickly in Lomalinda’s heat and required a thorough cleaning, pain meds, and antibiotics. Sometimes patients had to fly to Bogotá for medical treatment. Recovery could take months, always painful and slow.

 

People admitted their fear of stingrays,

but they went swimming anyway.

 

I don’t understand it—

that’s just too much adventure for me—

but then again, you already know I'm a foot-dragger.

But a lot of people went swimming,

and they’re still alive to tell about it.

 

C’mon back next week for more adventure stories!

 

The joys of living among South American wild critters

 

For boys—of all ages, including grown-up boys—living in that far-flung outback, Lomalinda, was like living in paradise.

 

All kinds of wild critters lived alongside us and Matt and his friends roamed at will for hours searching for them. He was only beginning to discover the adventures of fishing, chasing iguanas, making earthworm farms, collecting exotic fish for aquariums, making walk-in cages for tropical birds, and sharing our plot of earth with ocelots and anteaters. (See a photo, below, of Tommy Gardner holding an anteater. Also, click on this link to see a fascinating video of an anteater and her baby.)

 

On one of our first afternoons, Matt came running through the screen door, sweaty and breathing hard. “Gotta put away this shield,” he said, tossing it on the porch. He and Glenny had been pretending they were natives. “We’re gonna throw rocks at the bulls.”

 

Bulls? That didn’t seem like a good idea—or even a sane idea—to me so I tagged along to investigate. In the softball field below our house stood two Brahma bulls, white-gray, with humps on their backs.

 

Glenny must have sensed my concern, so he explained that local vaqueros (cowboys) let their cattle feed off our grass, and the kids threw rocks to herd them away from homes. Matt had such fun chasing those bulls that he didn’t even notice he’d lost a loose tooth. (See photo below of one of the neighborhood Brahma bulls.)

 

Little by little, we acquainted ourselves with all things Lomalinda, sometimes through experience, other times through stories. We soon learned that Lomalindians collected pets—not just dogs and cats and aquarium fish and snakes. They also opened their homes to anteaters and naughty monkeys and tropical birds, like toucans and parrots.

 

Many pet parrots sang songs, and one of them even practiced the scales. And up at the Cromers’ house, every time their dog barked, Patt yelled, “Bonnie, shut up!” Once when they were parrot-sitting, the parrot learned to bark like Bonnie, and then holler, “Bonnie, shut up!”

 

And then there’s the story of a couple of parrots living near a chicken coop—and they started clucking. Other parrots called out, “Knock, knock!” when people arrived at the door, and some laughed like their owners. People told stories of the two parrots that talked to each other in Spanish and English, and the obnoxious ones who flew away calling, “Bad bird! Bad bird!” Another hollered “Volleyball!” at five o’clock when Lomalinda’s offices closed and people headed to the volleyball courts.

 

There’s much more I want to tell you—stories about howler monkeys, and boa constrictors, and anacondas, and about swimming with huge stingrays and pirañas (piranhas).

 

Be sure to come back next week for some awesome stories!