The Story of Panama Jones (Part 2)

When my senior year of high school began Amigos announced that they were considering opening a program in Brazil. For some reason that really struck me, and suddenly I was fascinated with Brazil, even taking time during a free period to try and learn Portuguese.

I was also fortunate enough to be accepted into the Honors English class. I enjoyed the discussions with the other students and appreciated the latitude Mr. Wood, our teacher, gave us to be creative. So when he assigned an essay on wisdom, I knew I wanted to do something more.

I decided that instead of writing an essay I would instead write a short story to illustrate the topic. The Adventures of Panamá Jones was born! What started out as a short story soon blossomed into a full-blown 40+ page novella! I still think of submitting it to a publisher some day, although lengthened and with quite a bit of revision.

The title makes it sound like an Indiana Jones knock-off, but that's really the only similarity. The story is about an American teenager (pretty much me, and written in first-person) who decides to travel up the Amazon River, starting at Belém (Portuguese for Bethlehem) at the mouth, then visiting the gold mines at Serra Pelada ("Naked Mountain") and onward, finally finishing high in the Andes Mountains. As I wrote, the symbolism of the names of these real places stood out to me. For example, I used Serra Pelada as a metaphor of the depravity man is capable of. I also (very) loosely based the novella on Dante's Divine Comedy (Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso) as Panamá journeys on. In the course of the story Panamá learns wisdom and comes to understand his place in the world and beyond.

The night before I was supposed to turn in the first draft (really only the first two chapters) I managed to click on the wrong command and successfully deleted my entire story. I stared at the screen in utter disbelief. But it was indeed gone. So, the next day I did something I had never done before--I cut school! (Oh, the horror!) I spent all day re-writing it, finishing barely in time to turn it in and feeling that the first draft now forever lost to mankind had been better.

In the end I got an "A" but Mr. Wood felt I had taken too many liberties, including having Panamá visit a city of over a million people on the banks of the Amazon River. He felt that was too much to be believed. But Manaus is a real place, founded during the rubber boom of the late 19th century, and today the cultural and economic center of the Amazon Basin. Sometimes the truth really is stranger than fiction!

Amigos ended up not going to Brazil that summer, but in the end I wasn't able to do Amigos a third summer since my family was moving to Oregon. But I never lost my fascination with Brazil, and eventually I spent two months there during college doing a study abroad. But that's another story.

And now you know the true story of Panamá Jones.