Level B2 Upper Intermediate American English
Boiling Point | Border Lines | Breaking Camp | Caught Up | Cold Crossing | Curiosity and a Cat | Dodging Locusts | Facing a Glacier | Grave Sites | Held Captive | Losing Sleep | Orangutan to the Rescue | Photo Finish | Storm Tossed | The Payout | The Sting
Andrés Ruzo, Geothermal scientist
Location: Peru
As a geothermal scientist, I knew that boiling rivers exist – but they’re always near volcanoes. You need a lot of heat to make that much water boil. We were working in the volcanic gap, a 950-mile stretch that covers most of Peru, where there hasn’t been active volcanism for the past two million years.
Yet we’d found the Shanaya, a name derived from “heated thing.” My measurements averaged 190°-195°F. The locals think it’s so hot because of the Yaoumama, or “water mother” – a spirit who gives birth to waters – represented by a serpent-head-shaped rock at the origin of the heated water.
I had to cut my way through the brush at the side of the river to take temperature readings. All the while, right next to me was this very hot, fast-flowing body of water the width of a two-lane street. The shaman at the nearest village had told me, “Use your feet like eyes.” You can’t see heat, but you can feel it when you step near it. I wore sandals.
] was at a part of the river measuring 210°F, standing on a rock the size of a sheet of paper, when the rain turned on. It was like a curtain rising: The temperature differential between the rain and the river caused a white-out. I couldn’t see, but I whistled to let my partner know I was OK.
At 1300F flesh cooks, and the water around me was nearing twice that. My eyes would have cooked in less than a minute, and I couldn’t have seen how to get out. I’d seen rats and an opossum fall in, their eyes turning milky white. I kept whistling.
After 15 minutes the rain stopped and the steam cleared. A hard rain in most situations would have been inconsequential. Here, for a matter of minutes, it thinned the line between researching and being boiled alive.
Jason De León, Cultural Anthropologist
Location: Arizona
My team studies what happens to undocumented migrants crossing the border from Mexico to the U.S. Many don’t make it. So the archaeology and anthropology we do are often unpleasant – uncovering death and physical and emotional suffering. We hope the research that we do can aid immigration law reform.
On a trip to study a four-year-old migrant site where the traffic had slowed, we found the body of a 41-year-old woman. She was just south of Tucson, Arizona, in the Sonoran Desert, only 30 miles from the Mexican border. The area is mountainous. She had been cresting a steep hill. It was July, and the temperatures there averaged 100°F or more.
Finding a person meant the team had to navigate between gathering scientific data and feeling empathy. And we had to call the police. She’d been dead about four days, and there were already birds circling over˙ head. We knew what animals did to bodies in the desert, so we needed to collect what data we could – without disturbing the body – then and there.
There were seven of us on the team, and we were all struggling. It was easier when we had seen other migrants’ bodies that were fragmented, a collection of bones. No one wanted to take this woman’s photograph because we could see her humanity. We called her Marisol.
Before we found her, we had come across some items buried under a tree nearby, including a backpack with a new, very vibrant Mexican blanket inside. When we finished logging the data – what she carried with her, her clothing, the GPS coordinates – we used the blanket to cover Marisol up and waited for the police. It was a temporary gesture.
Jørn Hurum, Arctic paleontologist
Location: Norway
Weather is a paleontologist’s biggest enemy in the Arctic. Even in summer it’s only about 400F, and we have to camp up in the mountains to avoid polar bears. The winds are very strong at those high elevations.
My team dígs for giant sea-reptile fossils in holes as big as a bus. We dig by hand; some years we move as much as 80 tons of sediment. Team members are often so exhausted they nap in the dig hole. In the good summers we can dig five or six feet before we hit permafrost, in bad years just one or two. During the midnight sun there is no difference between night and day, so we can work whenever we feel like it. We dig a lot in what would be night, because the wind isn’t as strong.
One year on Spitsbergen Island our excavation was an hour’s walk, all uphill, from our campsite. We could see the camp below as we excavated a pliosaur. During one night’s digging we saw a windstorm blow up quickly down below. It was moving fast toward camp. Suddenly the big yurt-shaped kitchen tent was lifted above the ground, with our food and equipment inside. The pegs were blowing away. It was too far to scream to alert the others back in camp; some of us just ran down the hill to save it. Without a tent, there’s nowhere in the Arctic to take cover from the elements. More food was an eight-hour walk away. A rescue helicopter wouldn’t have brought new tents and food; it would have just evacuated us.
Luckily two members in camp saw it too. When we got there, they were hanging on the ropes, with the wayward tent in the air. They managed to keep it from blowing away. Now we strap tents down with handmade two-foot pegs. We haven’t come close to losing any since.
Nalini Nadkarni, Forest Ecologist
Location: Costa Rica
I’ve studied the plants and animals that live in forest canopies for 30 years. It’s like climbing mountains – there’s always some danger in moving up and down a tree. When you climb day after day, though, sometimes for months on end, you forget that you’re up more than a hundred feet. Eating a sandwich and an apple up there can seem like having a picnic on the ground.
I used to wear my long hair in two braids that I kept tied up behind my head to keep them out of the way. One day l forgot to tie them back. I noticed a tugging on my rappelling gear a few feet down. Within seconds the rope was so taut that my chin was pressed against it. There is a metal clip called a whale’s tail that the rope loops through to create friction to help you control your slide. My braid was caught in it – and it was getting tighter and more painful.
I tried pulling myself up, tried yanking my braid out. It was futile. After five minutes I thought, I’m going to have to cut this thing off. I had always identified myself as someone with long hair. My father was from India, and hair is a source of beauty and honor there. Somehow my ancestral motivation wasn’t quite as strong when I was strung up.
Holding myself up with one hand, I reached into my pocket and pulled out a penknife and starting sawing. When the last hairs were cut, my weight went back into the harness and my braid dropped to the ground. I made my way back to the forest floor and snatched it up. We had a museum of odd things we’d found in the canopy. I put my braid on display as a reminder that every moment – like this one, 150 feet above the forest floor – you have to be fully aware.
Gregg Treinish, Adventurer
Location: Chile
My partner and I were walking from the Equator to the southern tip of South America, trying to learn the secrets of sustainability from people who had lived on the land for generations. Just south of Santiago, Chile, there were giant snowfields. We had to cross them if we were going to continue.
We walked for a week across the snow’s crust, often falling through because it was melting. When we came out on the other side, the snow gave way to fine ash. When a sudden wind kicked up, we had to wrap our shirts around our faces to avoid breathing it.
Finally we made it to Laguna de la Invernada. According to the map and some locals we’d met, there should’ve been walking trails circling the lake. But the water level had risen, covering them, so the lake was surrounded by cliffs. Rock climbing was too difficult. We went back to flat ground, waterproofed our gear, and jumped in.
We pulled ourselves along the cliff face in 34°F water. Within minutes numbness set in. After a blind corner we got lucky – on the other side was a rockslide that gave us some relief from the water. The wind was blowing 20 miles an hour, and the air was about 50°F. I started shivering uncontrollably – probably hypothermic. To warm up, we stayed in our sleeping bags for two hours and made tea from the lake water. All we’d had to eat was a can of tuna between us. We turned our walkie-talkies on and asked for help on every channel. No one answered.
We had to keep going. It became a pattern: in the water for five to ten minutes at a time, then out for a couple of hours to get warm on the rocks. Thirty-six hours later, we made it to the other side – a distance of less than a mile.
Steve Boyes, Conservation Biologist
Location: Botswana
Every year my team delves deeper into the Okavango Delta – a10,000-square-mile fan of channels, floodplains, lagoons, and islands. Within its maze there are more than 2,000 lions, plus leopards, hippos, crocodiles, and nearly 80,000 elephants. The local Bayei people are descendants of hippo hunters, so they have taught us to respect that animal’s natural rhythms. When we pole into the delta, we wait until nine to set out. That’s when the hippos come off the islands and go into deeper water. They return again around five. We’re off the water before they get back. Before we had the help of the Bayei, we had a steeper learning curve. One morning my brother and I heard lions calling from behind camp. They seemed to be on an island to the far right of us. We were barefoot and having our morning coffee but wanted a closer look. Soon we were hundreds of feet from camp in our underpants. We didn’t have a spear.
Suddenly a pair of lions popped up. The lioness stilled and stared us down. I knew that we had to give her a reason for us to be there that didn’t involve her. We didn’t want her to perceive us as a threat. My eyes latched on to an extremely large piece of elephant dung. I took a few steps toward her, trying to move purposefully, and picked up the dung. l fixed all my attention on it to indicate that this was a very special piece of elephant dung – a very good reason for being there indeed.
Somehow it worked. The lioness let me walk back to camp with my prize. We kept that piece of dung in camp for the rest of the season to remind us about consequences. Now we aren’t so reckless.
Iain Couzin, Swarm behaviorist
Location: Mauritania
Locust swarms eat all the vegetation in their path, seeking protein, salt, and water. When that runs out – sometimes even before – they turn cannibal. Locusts hate to be around each other. They change color and behavior when in groups, and start to form swarms. They’re the Jekyll and Hyde of the insect world. Imagine hopping masses of millions of bugs, each trying to eat the ones in front of it.
Mauritania suffers countrywide outbreaks of these swarms. My team and I, studying the outbreaks there, wanted to know more. When I picked up one locust to examine it more closely, my hands swelled up. Toxic chemicals on the insect had reacted in sunlight when they touched my skin. To make matters worse, we were a two-day drive outside Mauritania’s capital, in the middle of the desert, and had just run out of food. Across Mauritania there was a shortage, because the locusts were eating the crops. We couldn’t eat the locusts, normally a great source of protein, because they were toxic. We got desperate after a day or two. We tried to buy food from the nomads who stopped to drink tea, and managed to get our hands on some camel entrails. My decade of vegetarianism prior to the trip went out the window.
We dried the entrails in a tree outside camp. After I ate them, cramps and vomiting set in and I started hallucinating. I was in a dream world, and not a good one. We were very short of water, had no medical equipment except some antibiotics, and had no way of getting out of the sun other than to bake in our airless tents. It was a waiting game. After I started feeling better a few days later and we got some supplies in, a massive sandstorm kept us in the tents for an extra day and a half. We just had to ride it out.
Shafqat Hussain, Snow leopard conservationist
Location: Banak La, Pakistan
We were on the scent of snow leopards. But first my team and I had to cross a glacier. On the other side was a 16,000-foot Karakoram pass, and beyond that, we suspected, a snow leopard trail. Before setting out, we had asked the locals if we needed crampons or other climbing gear. They assured us we didn’t, so we took only a rope for this walk across the side of a mountain covered in ice. There were also chunks of ice in a crevasse lake below – the air temperature was hovering around 14°F.
The three of us looped the rope around our stomachs to bind ourselves to each other – if one slipped, the others could stop his fall. Our local guide followed, gripping the rope in his hands. If we’d had a longer rope, we could have sent one man across, and the other three could have stabilized him. But our rope was 60 feet, and the ice field was three times that. Midway across, one of us slipped. He could have taken all of us down into the lake but jammed his walking stick in the ice and arrested about ten feet down. We pulled him up and walked on. Already halfway, it was useless to go back. Somehow we made it across.
I later thought how stupid it was to have tied ourselves together. If one had gone all the way down, we all would have. This is one of the most popular mountaineering regions in the world, and trained climbers have suffered worse on the five 8,000-meter peaks that surrounded us. Villagers underestimate these risks, because they don’t have access to equipment anyway. Our guide had figured a way around our recklessness. When I asked why he’d led us up under such treacherous conditions, he said, “That’s why I didn’t tie myself in. I just held on to the rope.” What would he have done if we fell? He replied: “I would have let go.”
Christine Lee, Bioarchaeologist
Location: Mongolia
My team drove four days west from Ulaanbaatar toward the western border, near Kazakhstan, to work at an ancient burial site – almost a thousand miles through Mongolia’s central steppes, the Gobi, and the Altay Mountains. When we stopped in a village to ask for directions, we were told the site was cursed. it was a cemetery for royals from the Xiongnu Empire. The Great Wall of China had been built to keep the Xiongnu out.
As we drove up to the site, we had a feeling something was wrong. It was eerily quiet. Usually after a day of excavation, everyone is sitting around a bonfire socializing. Not here. The site was in the middle of the desert, yet it was swarming with mosquitoes. Some of the local team had been bitten so many times their skin was infected from scratching.
Another team had excavated the site decades before and had left huge craters behind. Over the years people have been injured and livestock and wildlife killed by falling into them. As l stood on the edge of one of these deep pits, I felt anxious, like someone was watching us. It was as if the place were angry we were there. l told the dig team we could study the skeletons when they brought them to the museum in Ulaanbaatar. Then we left.
Most people are uncomfortable being surrounded by the dead. My father, a scientist, has expressed concern that ghosts from excavated skeletons may follow me around. My response to him is that I am not disturbing these skeletons but remembering the ones who have long been forgotten. Besides, I told him, if I ever felt the skeletons did not want me there, I would leave. This one time I did.
Trevor Price, Ornithologist
Location: Kashmir
My team was studying the bird species of the Himalaya when ten people with machine guns entered our camp and said, “You’re coming with us.” We usually work 11,000 feet up in the mountains, but we had dropped down to monitor the birds living at the lower elevations. At 8,000 feet there’s a road. If we’d been higher up, they wouldn’t have found us.
The Indian Army was everywhere – it was the early ’90s and the region was in the middle of an insurgency. Our captors were Kashmiri rebels. They marched us toward the nearest village and put us on a small bus.
To keep covert, our captors kept changing our transport. They pistol-whipped a rickshaw driver for not giving up his vehicle quickly enough, took us about 15 miles, then commandeered another bus. Then they forced us to hike.
We stopped at a pasture that looked like a rebel outpost from a movie. The rebels wanted Amnesty International to come to Kashmir to document atrocities they claimed the Indian Army had committed. We – an Englishman and two Americans – were the bait.
Our captors were nice to us. They let us stay together. They would clean the seats for us to sit on while balancing AK-475 in their other hands. They challenged us to a tug-of-war, using an AK-47 as the line we shouldn’t cross. We very judiciously lost.
On the fifth night one of our team noticed there was no guard at the door. ln stocking feet, boots in our hands, we raced up the hill. We ran until dawn, passing surprised shepherds. When we finally found a road, we took all our money – only 500 rupees – and got on a passing bus to start on our journey back home.
Amy Dickman, Wildlife Biologist
Location: Tanzania
It was my first night in the Tanzanian bush, and I was near Ruaha, a region known for its abundance of lions. The camp owner welcomed me and said, “Your tent is over that way,” indicating the thick bushes next to the river, past the tents on raised platforms. I came across a clearing on the river’s edge. l paused to watch hippos meandering into the water and noticed a pup tent perched on what appeared to be the main hippo trail down to the water. This tiny structure was to be where I slept.
Not wanting to be dragged down by a lumbering hippo to drown in the river in a heap of multicolored nylon, I moved my tent off the trail.
I lay there listening to the bush sounds: nightjars and owls and screeching baboons and rushing water. Then l heard the unmistakable roar of a lion on the other side of the river. Then another – this time on my side. Then a third, deafening roar that split the night, followed by the crackle of nearby twigs as he stepped into the clearing and sniffed. I could smell him, so likely he could smell me too.
After circling, he stopped and stretched his body against the length of my tent, presumably to enjoy its warmth. As it buckled against him,
I was pushed into the tiny space left against the opposite side – except for my left hand, which was under his bulk. After a few minutes he fell asleep. I didn’t dare move my hand or risk startling him, so I lay there unmoving, trying to keep panic at bay.
I must have eventually fallen asleep in the aftermath of the adrenaline rush. The next thing l knew, sunlight was streaming in, and the tent was unbowed, with lion tracks in the sand outside. After that the pup tent was nicknamed the “death tent,” and I was allocated a pitch on a raised platform.
Agustin Fuentes, Primatologist
Location: Borneo
This kind of getting lost doesn’t happen anymore; I would have a GPS with me now. But two decades ago at Camp Leakey, an orangutan research camp on Borneo inside Tanjung Puting, the rain forest was an unknowable place. I was trying to find the maroon leaf monkey. One day, after four hours of following marked trails, I thought I saw one. I risked it and went off the trail. Forty-five minutes later, I was still wandering, no maroon leaf monkey in sight. I assumed the trail had to pick up somewhere near where I was, so I used my compass to make a guess. Another 30 minutes later, I wasn’t panicked, but I was definitely a little nervous. I had a headlamp, so I was somewhat prepared, but darkness was coming on quickly and finding my way back was only going to get more difficult.
There was much to admire off-trail – passing humans hadn’t disturbed these parts of the rain forest yet. At one point I saw a shimmering metallic blue pool in an opening. I moved closer, and it vibrated, and hundreds of butterflies took wing. What I saw in their place was the sea of pig feces that had so interested them moments before.
I picked south on the compass. I figured I’d eventually hit the river, if not a trail first. It paid off. After about 20 minutes I saw an unmarked trail. Seconds later, I heard a rustling. I was thinking it was feral pigs or a small wildcat. I shone my headlamp where I thought the sound was coming from. It was an orangutan. The face was familiar: one of the tribe being rehabilitated at camp. The orangutan and I looked at each other, and she held out her hand to me. Then she led me, hand clasped in hand, to camp. Just like me, she was heading back for the evening.
Corey Jaskolski, Engineer
Location: Mexico
In 2011 we were in Mexico shooting a 360-degree composite photo in the Hoyo Negro cenote, a deep sinkhole that has filled with groundwater. There were human remains inside – more than 9,000 years old, among the oldest in the Americas. It was a forbidding dive; the government had put up a sign outside the caves that said, If you go past this point, you will likely die.
We had tested our camera system in a scuba pool, but that was ten feet of water. Now we were diving up to 200 feet deep. It was dark down there, so we took a SunSphere, a beach ball-size glass sphere full of batteries and LEDs. The plan was to tether the SunSphere and let it float above to light the whole cave.
When we turned the thing on, it was like we’d cut the roof off and seen the sun. We hid behind stalactites and stalagmites to keep from being blinded. The sphere would get too hot to stay on for long periods of time, so we arranged for the camera to turn the sphere on, take a picture, turn it off, then start again. It was a dance they were supposed to do. But we were having trouble getting them to do it.
We did four dives, adjusting the camera on dry ground each time. The jungle is a horrible place to take a machine apart. It’s intensely humid, and one bug – they were everywhere – inside could have wrecked the camera.
We were running out of time and out of spare electronics. If we didn’t get the picture, it would be like we were never there. The synchronized system ended up working only one time. It took 12 and a half minutes to get the whole thing: what we believe is the highest resolution underwater image in the world.
John Tennent, Butterfly taxonomist
Location: Papua New Guinea
I was making a census of Pacific butterflies and was on the lookout for new species on the remote Lusancay Islands. There were five of us on a 23-foot dinghy l hired to move between islands – an operator, his two assistants, me, and a local Kawa chief who wanted a lift – when we were hit by a squall. Then the engine stopped. The storm was raging, and we started taking on water. We bailed out using the only thing at hand: coconut husk halves.
A dinghy is hard to maneuver. lt tends to tum broadside to the waves, making it dangerously unstable. We had only two oars, and the assistants were rowing furiously to keep the bow into the wind, but as soon as they stopped, the dinghy would drift sideways again. The pilot’s attempts to restart the engine weren’t working.
We’d been stranded for about two hours before visibility increased and the chief recognized two rocks jutting out of the water. The chief and I grabbed a tarpaulin, tied each side to an oar, and held the rudimentary sail up to catch the wind. Using the 20-foot stick for poling around atolls as a rudder, the operator steered us toward Kawa Island. The chief knew where it was in relation to the rocks.
With difficulty we headed to the windless side of the island so the weather wouldn’t dash us against the coral island’s edge. We gripped surrounding coral to pull ourselves hand over hand to shore. Freezing and with little food, we walked the mile to the nearest village to spend the night. It turned into a week, due to continuing storms. Later we learned that a passenger ferry carrying hundreds of people had been out in the same weather. A wave came over the stern, and many were lost. Thanks to a quick-thinking Kawa chief named Nelson – a good omen for any Englishman on board a ship – we were still five.
Jeff Rose, Human migration archaeologist
Location: Oman
My team members are from across the world – Ukraine. Germany, Italy, the U.S. – but often we don’t have anyone from the Arabian Peninsula, where we dig for evidence of ancient humans. So during our first year in the field, before I’d learned Arabic and there was Google Earth to help, I took on a local Bedouin guide. When I asked his fee, he responded, “We are brothers. It is my joy to take you around these places.” With a field budget of about 812,000 that had to cover equipment, car rental, and fuel, plus food and housing for eight men, I was more than happy to believe him.
Three days later, when it came time to part ways, he asked how much I was planning to pay him. I had no clue what he expected or what was considered fair, so I hesitantly offered the equivalent of around 350 a day.
I’ll never forget the look on his face – something between crestfallen and furious. l hadn’t factored in that we work in the heart of Oman’s petroleum industry, so the locals are used to being paid by oil companies, not tiny archaeological survey projects. I saw the whole summer of fieldwork at risk. To make matters more complicated, we had found incredible archaeology at the site he’d taken us to. He thought it was worth some money.
What alternatives did I have? Perhaps I would be put in prison for not paying. He ushered us into the car and began driving full speed back to his village. There his father, the sheikh, ordered me to pay 8100 & day and buy & goat for 3100 to celebrate the success of our project. I paid, they slaughtered, all feasted. We got out of there. These days we are mostly looking for caves, where sediments and stone tools are best preserved. The locals avoid the caves at all costs: They think jinn, or demon spirits, live in there. Fine by us.
Sarah Parcak, Egyptologist
Location: South Sinai Peninsula, Egypt
We were working on the west coast of the Sinai Peninsula, where ancient Egyptians once processed copper (important for their finery). They smelted it in little pits, and we were trolling for evidence – ash, bits of copper slag – in foot-and-a-half-wide holes.
Scorpions like holes. We had to put our arms in the holes to dig out the smelting residues. We always performed critter checks before an excavation, but one morning I put an arm in and felt a sharp pierce. When I brought my hand out, it was red and already swelling. Here yellow-colored scorpions’ stings mean more or less instant death; about eight other local scorpion species’ stings are somewhat less lethal but excruciatingly painful. I’d just been stung, and there was no way to tell by what. I knew I had to keep my heart rate low so that any injected poison wouldn’t course through my blood. I tried staying calm.
Our Bedouin site monitor had an interesting way to treat bites: He coughed up phlegm, spit it on my arm, and rubbed it in. Then he took out a lighter to cauterize the wound. I stopped him just in time. Then the ambulance arrived. When I told the driver I needed to go to the hospital, he started in on a love poem to me instead. At the hospital the doctor looked disdainfully at my wrist and said, “It is nothing.” After I persuaded him to hook me up to a precautionary IV, a nurse brought some antivenom. I rolled up my sleeve, but she pointed to my bottom and said, “This is where shots go in Egypt.” The IV’s morphine left me limp.
When our site inspector heard I’d possibly been stung by a scorpion, he rushed to the hospital. Finding me motionless, he thought I’d died. I hadn’t, obviously. But I still don’t know what got me – I never saw it coming in that sandy pit.