End of the dirt road. You brake to a stop, swing your leg over the scooter, and kick the stand into place.

The effort makes your head throb. The scooter wobbles. Your sunglasses slide down the mixture of sweat and sunscreen on your nose. You adjust them, look up tentatively at the fiery orb in the deep blue sky, and flinch. You chide yourself for staying out so late the night before, for not getting an earlier start this morning. The sun already feels too hot. But this is your only chance to surf Emerald Cove. It’s gonna be OK, you tell yourself. You’re in good shape. You’ve got the stamina to hike the five miles over the ridge and down to the beach before the tide comes in.

That glaring sun, of course, is essential for life on this planet. But its thermal energy, which we feel as heat, is a force both benevolent and cruel. The human body employs a spectrum of physiological tricks to maintain the steady internal temperature—98.6 Fahrenheit—at which it thrives. There is about eight degrees of difference between an optimal level of internal heat and the limit the body can endure. This threshold is referred to as the . Exactly when one reaches it depends on individual physiology, exertion, hydration, acclimation, and other factors. Estimates place it at an internal temperature between 105 and 107 degrees. Heat is a giver of life, but when the human body gets this hot—or hotter—­terrible things occur.

How to Prevent and Treat Heat Stroke

Exertional heatstroke can cause devastating damage, but it can also be treated quickly

Read More

Emerald Cove is on an island off the coast of South America. You’d flown over a couple of days ago, after a trek in the mainland’s cool interior highlands. You wanted to take in those thousand-year-old stone statues you’d heard so much about, plus you figured you could cap off your vacation with a couple days of surfing. You’re just a beginner, and already you’re hooked, but it’s hard being a newbie. The locals are reluctant to let you into the lineup. What you need is that perfect undiscovered break, no people, no pressure.

Last night you walked into a popular surf bar and pulled up a stool next to two guys you’d seen in the water that day. If you wanted to find a secret spot along this spectacular wave-battered coast, you figured these guys would be the ones to know. They gave you a cursory nod and continued their conversation.

“HłÜ±đ±čĂłČÔ,” one was saying to his pal (or at least that’s what you think he said). Your Spanish is OK, but you’re not catching all the slang. He was talking about a point break.

“QuĂ© bacĂĄn!” Rad! “And there’s nobody there. Nobody. You have to try it.”

“Nobody where?” you asked quietly, leaning in.

“La Cala Esmeralda.” He barely turned his head to look at you.

“Emerald Cove?” you repeated.

It had taken a long time, a lot of patience, and too many piscolas—pisco and Cokes—to pry out where it was, but the effort was worth it. It’d be the perfect end to a perfect trip, something to talk about to your well-traveled friends back home. “Seriously, you’ve never been there?” you’ll say to them, acting surprised. “You should definitely check it out. But it’s kinda hard to get to, and the trail’s a secret.”

You had to ask the surfers to repeat themselves, just to be sure you understood. They’d finally turned and looked at you full on.

“Dude,” one said, “I’m not sure I’d try it if I were you.”

Heat-related illnesses in the U.S. annually than hurricanes, lightning, earthquakes, tornadoes, and floods; there were heat-related deaths between 1979 and 2014. The fatalities tend to peak during heat waves and hotter-than-average years, and they’re expected to rise as climate change affects global temperatures. One of the deadliest heat waves in modern times swept Europe in 2003, killing over 30,000 people as temperatures soared to 100 degrees for days on end.

The human body is much less tolerant of rises in internal temperature than drops. The lowest body temperature a human has been known to survive is 56.7 degrees, nearly 42 degrees below normal. Anna Bagenholm, a 29-year-old Swedish woman, was backcountry skiing when she broke through eight inches of ice into a frozen stream. Her upper body was sucked down, leaving only her feet and skis visible, but she managed to find an air pocket and was able to breathe. After 80 minutes, she was finally rescued. Bagenholm remained in a coma for about ten days and was in intensive care for two months but ultimately suffered . On the other end of the spectrum, the highest body temperature measured was only 17 degrees above normal. Willie Jones, a 52-year-old Atlanta man, was rescued from his apartment during a heat wave in 1980. His internal temperature was 115.7. He spent 24 days in the hospital before being released.

While there is some debate, studies on women in the military have shown that they to heat illness than men due to their higher body-fat content and lower sweat output. Whether the heatstroke victim is male or female, the odds of surviving depend on the duration of overheating and, once their condition is discovered, how quickly they can be cooled down—most effectively by immersion in ice water within 30 minutes. Survival, moreover, doesn’t guarantee full recovery. A powerful heat wave in Chicago in 1995 caused 739 deaths and 3,300 emergency-room visits. A study reviewing 58 of the severe heatstroke victims found that 21 percent died in the hospital soon after admission, , and all the remaining subjects experienced organ dysfunction and neurological impairments.

An average-size male at rest generates about as much heat as a 100-watt light bulb simply through metabolism. During moderate exercise, temperature increases nearly ten degrees every hour unless you cool yourself by sweating or some other means. You risk a variety of illnesses, starting with , which entails swelling of the hands and feet and can begin at body temperatures close to normal. No precise temperature marks the onset of the various other heat illnesses, and the order of symptoms varies between individuals, but they may include heat syncope (dizziness and fainting from the dilation of blood vessels), heat cramps (muscular clenching due to low salt), and heat exhaustion (identified by muscular weakness, rapid heartbeat, nausea, headache, and possible vomiting and diarrhea). Finally, an internal temperature of 105 marks the lower boundary of heatstroke territory, with outward symptoms of extreme irritability, delirium, and convulsion. Because of individual variation in how these symptoms appear, and because some may not appear at all, athletes in particular can be overcome quickly and with little warning.

There are two kinds of heatstroke: . Classic heatstroke hits the very young, the elderly, the overweight, and people suffering from chronic conditions like uncontrolled diabetes, hypertension, and cardiovascular disease. Alcohol and certain medications (diuretics, tricyclic antidepressants, antipsychotics, and some cold and allergy remedies) can increase susceptibility as well. Classic heatstroke can strike in the quiet of upper-floor apartments with no air-conditioning.

Exertional heatstroke, on the other hand, pounces on the young and fit. Exercise drastically accelerates temperature rise. Marathon runners, cyclists, and other athletes sometimes push into what used to be known as the fever of exercise and is now called exercise-induced hyperthermia, where internal temperatures typically hit 100 to 104 degrees. Usually, there’s no lasting damage. But as body temperature climbs higher, the physiological response becomes more dramatic and the complications more profound. The higher temperature can ultimately trigger a cascading disaster of events as the metabolism, like a runaway nuclear reactor, races so fast and so hot that the body can’t cool itself down. A person careens toward organ failure, brain damage, and death.

It’s February, the height of summer in the Southern Hemisphere. You’d planned to get up early but didn’t hear your alarm after the late night at the bar. Now the sun is well into its arc. The temperature is supposed to hit 93 degrees by midday.

Pulling the keys from your scooter, you sling your rented surfboard onto your back, thread your arms through your chest pack, and hear the reassuring slosh of the water bottle inside. You have a seat on the twice-weekly plane that leaves tomorrow, returning you to the mainland. If you’re going to do this, the moment is now. You launch up the trail, a faint unmarked path on the gentle, grassy slope. You’re not surprised you’re the only one around. The surfers said to follow the volcano’s right flank until you gain the ridge, then drop down a cleft in the rocks to the sea. Good luck finding the cleft, they seemed to say. Maybe they were just trying to deter you. You see the slope steepen as it rises toward the sharp crest, where chunks of volcanic rock protrude like broken dinosaur scales through velvety green nap. No trees, not a wisp of wind. Ancient cultures deforested this island centuries ago and mysteriously disappeared, leaving not a sliver of shade under the tropical sun.

You feel the quick flex of your quads, the push of your glutes, the spring of your calves propelling you up the winding path, and hear the steady mantra of your breathing. You have to make time. The guys at the bar said the shore bristles with stone dientes, teeth—get there at low tide. That gives you just under two hours.

Within only a few steps, your body begins to respond to the sun’s radiation, the moist air pressing against your skin, and the heat generated by your own rising metabolism. Blood coursing through your arteries begins to grow warmer. At less than one degree Fahrenheit above your normal internal temperature, receptors in your brain’s hypothalamus start to fire, signaling the circulatory system to shunt more blood toward your skin’s surface for cooling. Other messages tell peripheral blood vessels to dilate, opening up to allow greater blood flow. Still other signals activate millions of tiny coils and tubes embedded in your skin—your sweat glands. Concentrated within your head, palms, soles, and trunk, the glands pump water from a tiny reservoir at the base, pushing the salty liquid up a long tube through layers of skin to erupt in a miniature gusher at the surface.

Several hundred yards up the grassy slope, sweat is popping onto your face. You feel the slick, dark blue fabric of your shirt sticking to your back, despite its breathability. You wish it was looser, and a lighter color that didn’t so readily absorb the sun’s rays. A trickle of sweat runs down your forehead and into one eye, stinging with dissolved salts, blurring your vision.

The air is smothering, thick with moisture, like a greenhouse. The dripping sweat should bring some relief. Usually, the body’s cooling system operates remarkably efficiently; blood rushes to carry the excess heat from your core out to your sweat glands, which squeeze warm fluids to the surface, where air moving past your skin evaporates the moisture. Your excess heat literally blows away in the wind. But for this to work properly, the sweat must evaporate. When the air lies close and unmoving, heavy with humidity, sweat evaporates more slowly. If the air is saturated enough, or if impermeable fabric—or, in your case, a surfboard and a chest pack—trap the sweat against your skin, the moisture won’t evaporate at all.

High school athletes are often , which ranks as one of the among that demographic. And according to an investigation done by the HBO show Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel, since the year 2000, at least 30 college football players have died of heatstroke during practice, when remedies as simple as immersing the overheated player in ice water were available. Minnesota Vikings offensive lineman died of heatstroke during a preseason practice in 2001, and now the University of Connecticut’s , established in 2010, specializes in sudden-death prevention in athletes, soldiers, and laborers.

Runners, cyclists, and hikers routinely succumb to heatstroke. If properly acclimated, trained, and managed carefully, the human body can endure grueling events in high temperatures, like the Badwater—a 135-mile running race in California that begins in Death Valley, traverses three mountain ranges, and ends at Mount Whitney—and the six-day Marathon des Sables in the Sahara. However, experts say that due to the high intensity of the pace on shorter courses, heatstroke is more common in races of 30 to 90 minutes than in longer events. Three years ago at the annual Falmouth Road Race, a 12K running event in Massachusetts in August, 48 out of more than 10,000 finishers suffered from heatstroke and another 55 from heat exhaustion. (All of them survived without incident due to the extensive cooling procedures available at the race’s finish.)

The National Weather Service now issues warnings when excessive temperatures are expected and gives predictions of the heat index, which takes into account both temperature and humidity as experienced by a five-foot-seven, 147-pound person walking at a speed of about three miles per hour in a six-mile-per-hour breeze. Like the windchill index, the heat index conveys what it feels like outside. For instance, at the Hot Trot Half Marathon, which is held in Dallas in August, the day is often 97 degrees but can have a heat index of 116 degrees because of the 60 percent humidity.

You pull your water bottle from your pack—a full liter shimmering inside a translucent blue Nalgene—take a warm swig, and strike upward again toward the broken scales of the ridge. For the next hour you push at a fast walk, pausing only occasionally to drink. You know the importance of hydration. What you don’t know is how remarkably fast the human body can expel water to cool itself—one and a half liters or more per hour. (Highly efficient, heat-acclimated marathoners can lose close to four liters per hour while they run.) The human gut, however, can absorb only a little over one liter of water per hour. That means that during maximum rates of water loss, it’s possible to drink steadily and still become dehydrated.

Your core temperature has now climbed to 101.5—three degrees above normal—but you’re still in the exercise-induced hyperthermia zone. Your head throbs. You wish you hadn’t drunk quite so many piscolas last night. In doing so, you unwittingly tricked your body’s water controls. Alcohol is a small molecule that slides easily through the walls of the gut, into the bloodstream, and up into the brain, where it , or ADH. This is the hormone that inhibits urination, in effect closing your dam’s spillway in order to keep your reservoir full. Typically, when you become dehydrated, the percentage of salt in your blood rises, triggering your pituitary gland to release ADH. But under the sabotaging influence of alcohol, your body may sense that your water stores are being depleted but blithely ignore the warning. Thanks to those piscolas, rather than prehydrating for today’s climb, you started the day in the red.

The incline grows steeper. The grass gives way to a light, loose volcanic rock called tuff. The scrappy path has now completely disappeared, but still you labor toward the ridgetop—two steps up, slide, one step down. You’re panting now. The rocks crunch under your feet. Each footstep produces a gritty dust that crusts your bare legs, which are coated in a paste of sweat and sunscreen. The arteries protruding on your forearms look like grapevines wrapped around a post. Your blood vessels are dilating, trying to move as much overheated blood to the surface as possible. Your heart pumps madly, trying to keep the vessels full, but it can’t keep up. Not enough blood—and the oxygen it carries—reaches your brain. You pause to rest. You feel lightheaded and faint. Your vision dims and narrows. You feel wobbly and strange—the onset of heat syncope (or orthostatic hypotension), a temporary loss of consciousness from falling blood pressure.

Fainting from orthostatic hypotension poses a distinct problem for those whose sworn duty requires standing still for hours in the sun, as it does for Britain’s royal guards. In their bearskin hats and thickly layered uniforms, which are designed to hide sweat, they topple with surprising regularity flat onto their faces, breaking teeth and smashing noses, with their arms and rifles still rigidly glued to their sides.

But you decide to sit on the rocks, and so you do not topple. You finish your water. You feel limp, like a wrung-out rag. You have a single thought: make it to the ridge and descend to the cool of Emerald Cove. Thirty minutes to go.

At one hundred three degrees internally, you’re pushing into the upper limits of exercise-induced hyperthermia and into heat exhaustion. Your brain is no longer able to deal with large numbers.

One hundred four. Get over the ridge, you tell yourself. Get over the ridge.

Above you the jagged lava rocks begin to distort, reshaping into those ancient giant stone statues erected along the island’s shore. They face you, their enormous heads silhouetted against the blue sky, as if to say, Go back!

But you don’t.

Over millennia, people exerting themselves in hot environments, like the nomadic Maasai of Kenya, have , selecting for tall, slender, long-limbed body types that offer the maximum ratio of cooling surface area to heat-generating body mass. You are not Maasai.

When you finally crest the ridge, your core temperature is pushing 105. You are weak, hot, and thirsty, and you are confused but don’t know it. Gazing back down the way you came, you see the dropping sweep of green. It seems surreal, removed and stylized, like an old hand-painted postcard. Just ahead, the cliff’s edge drops away to crashing ocean far below.

The guy at the bar had said that the top of the trail was marked by a divot where the rock is worn like a V. You walk carefully along the broken ridgetop, afraid to peek over the airy drop. Where’s the guardrail? Your body feels unwieldy.

Maybe it was a mistake to come here straight from the interior highlands, with their evening breezes and cool air. You’d heard that the human body needs time to fully adjust to heat. What you didn’t know is that it generally needs about 7 to 14 days. By gradually building your exercise time outdoors in heat and humidity, . It learns to increase the rate of sweat production and to trigger a mechanism to conserve sodium, which, along with potassium, is essential for fluid regulation and transmission of nerve signals. (The evolution of this mechanism was honed by our , who struggled to consume enough sodium in their diets.) Acclimation would have slowed your heartbeat but boosted the volume of blood circulated with each contraction to help maintain your blood pressure as your vessels dilated.

But you didn’t acclimate. You relied on the fact that you exercise five days a week at home—also a hot, humid place in the summer. Your heat-addled mind drifts back to those summer days. Instead of this blazing light, you see the tinted windows of your SUV. Instead of this heat smothering your skin, you remember the hair-tingling chill of your car’s air-conditioning, the dim, dank spaces of a parking garage, the cold blasts washing over the treadmill in the climate-controlled gym. It begins to dawn on you that all your life you have relied on artificial sources to keep you cool. You’ve never had to change your behavior or alter your ambitious schedule to accommodate the natural diurnal cycle. You’ve always carried your bubble with you. You’ve never had to truly confront the punishing heat of the midday sun.

And then: you’ve found it! You see a scuffed notch on the ridgetop and, far below, the glint of water. This is why you came! Delirious, you begin to scramble down. You slip, skid on your side, dragging and scraping your hands. You regain your feet and steady yourself against smooth boulders, leaving a bloody handprint. The blood stain looks like a bird, you think, in acrylic paint, textured and thick—another effect of dehydration. Suddenly you notice that a bird (does it have four wings or six?) is swooping toward you, its talons reaching for your face. You try to swat the heat-induced hallucination away, first with your hands, then with your board, but it keeps coming back. You toss aside your board and stumble downward to get out of range.

You come to a ledge. Beyond it is pure drop and yes, there’s the beach, several hundred feet below. You just need to fly, you think foggily, but sense that you have no choice but to climb back up. Your chest pack feels impossibly heavy, as if you’re hauling the 13-ton head of one of those ancient statues. Irritated, you shimmy clumsily out of the straps and watch, mesmerized, as your pack tumbles over the edge and drops into the ocean.

Free at last, you begin to crawl back up. But you feel yourself sliding down the loose tuff. It’s so much easier than climbing. You give into the sensation of increasing speed, like a plane accelerating down a runway. You always loved that. You spread your wings and topple backward down the slope. As your head hits the tuff, you feel the coarse lava grit stick to the drying saliva of your lips and mouth. The ledge stops your descent. And then you feel no more.

It could be a small measure of good fortune that confusion, semiconsciousness, or coma overcome victims as they succumb to severe heatstroke. The damage about to ensue wreaks so much havoc that almost no major organ escapes untouched. At 105, your metabolism accelerates, so your cells generate heat at a rate that is 50 percent faster than normal. In other words, as your internal temperature rises, rather than cranking your air conditioner, you fire up your furnace. The only effective remedy is to douse the fires with immediate and extensive cooling.

Each heatstroke victim responds differently to these extreme internal temperatures, but a sequence of events might go like this: at 105 to 106 degrees, your limbs and core are convulsed by seizures. From 107 to 109, you begin vomiting and your sphincter releases. At 110 to 111, your cells begin to break down. Proteins distort. Liver cells die; the tiny tubes in your kidneys are grilled. The large Purkinje neurons in your cerebellum vanish. Your muscle tissues disintegrate. The sheaths of your blood vessels begin to leak, causing hemorrhaging throughout your body, including your lungs and heart. There is now blood in your vomit. You develop holes in your intestines, and toxins from your digestive tract enter your bloodstream. In a last-ditch effort, your circulatory system responds to all the damage by clotting your blood, thinking your vessels have been severed. This triggers what physicians call a clotting cascade.

As your insides melt and disintegrate, purple hemorrhagic spots appear on your skin. Those, the bloody vomit, and your convulsions are the only external hints of total internal annihilation.

“Is that a person down there?” the surfer from the bar asks his friend, skidding to a halt in their quick descent through the rocks.

Following the line of a pointing finger, the friend peers at a dark splotch on a ledge far below and a bit to the left, off the winding path and down through the steep rocks.

“Looks like that dude from the bar last night,” he continues.

They continue scrambling down toward the cove, their wide-brimmed hats flapping, surfboards strapped to their backs. As they get closer, they see it is you. They drop their boards and clamber across the rocky slope. When they reach you, you look dead—limbs askew, eyes staring. One of them touches your bare arm. The skin is clammy. He feels for a pulse. It’s faint and quick, like the heartbeat of a bird.

“He’s still alive,” he says. “But he’s way too hot,” he adds, shaking his head. “Let’s get him to the agua dulce.”

Lifting you carefully, they drape you over the stouter surfer’s back and shoulders. You’re several pounds lighter than your normal weight due to dehydration. They scramble down the precipitous path, kicking free tuff that bounces ahead. Ignoring the shimmering water and the sculpted waves curling off the point, they haul you across the beach to a grove of palms against the foot of a cliff. A spring spills from a crevice in the rocks into a clear, quiet pool. Agua dulce. Sweet water.

It’s much cooler than the tepid ocean—­almost cold. They slide your body in and hold you there, immersed, cradling your head above the surface. Two minutes pass, five minutes, ten.

“Está muerto,” says the stouter one.

“No,” says the other, carefully scooping handfuls of cooling water over your head.

Your eyes show a flicker of movement.

You hear splashing, faint at first, from somewhere far away. It comes closer, growing louder, until you realize that it’s right around your ears. You feel the sensation of cold all over your body. When you open your eyes, you can’t make sense of what you see—two faces framed by drooping palm fronds and deep blue sky.

â€Æà±đČőłŠČčČÔČőČč,” one says. Rest.

You close your eyes again. A hand brings water to your lips. You drink. You are lucky. With an internal temperature of 106, you peaked within your critical thermal maximum. It’s not yet clear what lasting damage you may have sustained, but you are alive.

Right now, however, all you know is that you’re so very tired. You’ll have to be carried out of here, by stretcher or helicopter or boat. Your thirst feels like a cavernous hollow at your core. You don’t know where you are or where you have been. You remember leaving the scooter and starting up a long grassy slope toward a volcanic ridge. After that there was only the relentless weight of the sun overhead, the heat-blasted lava rock underfoot, and the sense that you were being crushed between them with nowhere to run or hide, a fragile creature of flesh and bone, blood and water, trying to escape the enormity of this force that gives life but, you now understand, can so easily destroy it.

Amy RagsdaleÌęand longtime șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű correspondent Peter Stark () live in Missoula, Montana. Ragsdale is the author of . In 1997, Stark wrote an article about what it feels like to freeze to death, which led to his book, (Ballantine), in which he first wrote about heatstroke.

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“É nossa, Ă© nossa,” “It’s ours,” our son Skyler shouted in Portuguese, laughing as he danced across the tiny plaza rolling the soccer ball forward, back, kicking it into the steps to ricochet into the goal delineated by two flip flops against the concrete retaining wall.

“Goooool!” he and Italo shouted, fists raised triumphantly in the air.

His old friend Victor gave him a friendly shove on the back; a good-to-see-you but how-did-you-get-another-goal type of shove.

We had finally arrived in Penedo, the town in the tiny state of Alagoas in Brazil, where we’d lived for a year, four years before.

Skyler was back at the Praça do Convento (the Plaza of the Convent), the site where he and Victor—the boy who had become Skyler’s best friend—first met, four years earlier when they were 12. The first night we’d arrived in Penedo, back in 2010, Skyler and our daughter Molly had joined a pick-up game of futsal, the lightening-fast version of soccer played on small, hard courts. This “court” was a favorite in the neighborhood. The Praça do Convento is a tiered plaza rising up from an 18th-century, white-plaster and carved-stone church. On the lowest tier of the plaza, the “court” is squeezed in between a set of steps, a couple of retaining walls, and a stone cross, leaving a patch of brick the size of a stamp. There’s a reason Brazilians are so good at footwork. They’ll kick a ball anywhere, regardless of the obstacles.

Here they were, same people, same place as four years before, doing just what they’d done then, but at a whole different skill level. Now they deftly use the stairs, the stone cross, the retaining walls to ricochet the ball around their opponents to their partner. Victor has grown to more than six feet tall and is filling out into a man. He’s as patient and quick as ever; his darting movement stopping a foot from the ball, waiting like a panther for the moment to swivel his feet and block his opponent’s shot or shoot in a foot and suck the ball away. They were playing two against two, Skyler, Victor, his older brother Italo, and whoever else happened by.

Though we’d arrived late, after dark, the night before, the first thing Skyler wanted to do was to run up the cobbled street to Vito’s blue plaster house. The rest of us, tired after an eight-hour day of bus and van travel from Salvador, had retreated to Oratorio, the airy restaurant cantilevered out over the Rio SĂŁo Francisco. We’d happily installed ourselves on the hard wooden seats, ordered beans and rice, fried fish, beer, and caipirinhas. Skyler showed up 30 minutes later; despite all the challenges of his year in Brazil as a budding teenager, now at 16, he seemed thrilled to be back.

I’m a firm believer in living abroad with kids, as I had as a child myself. I’m convinced those experiences gave me the best parts of myself; the ability to adapt, the ability to connect to people unlike myself, and a wide-ranging curiosity about the world. But my experience living abroad at the age of 12 in the cosmopolitan, English-speaking city of Cairo was very different from Skyler’s experience, at 12, of living in the small town of Penedo. His experience was of total language immersion; of trying to fit into a highly competitive, macho soccer culture and navigate the mysteries of teen social life when he didn’t understand the cues and couldn’t speak the language.

As one of the parents in charge I’d been shaken. I had wondered whether the year was going to be worth all the frustration our kids were experiencing at times. In some ways this return felt like a test. So far it appeared my prediction had come true, that the hard parts would recede and the excitement of learning to live in a new place and acquire a new language would remain.

In the three years since we’d left, nothing had changed and everything had changed. The town appeared and felt much the same: strings of brightly colored, 19th-century houses, some newly painted, other’s faded, still climb up the ridge away from the wide, ambling river; brightly striped lanchas moored at its sandy banks still wait to ferry people across; music blaring from speakers mounted on motorcycles still bounces off plaster walls; the outdoor market, tented over with sheets of flimsy black plastic, is still covered in black plastic, although the renovation of the 19th-century market building next to it has been completed. The town has the same sluggish ease.

But in the meantime, the lives of our friends, the people who had so generously taken us in, have undergone lots of changes: marriages, divorces, births, deaths and imprisonment. Mostly, these are the changes that happen in the lives of people anywhere.

The friends of our daughter, Molly, at 19 and 20, are of the age to move to bigger cities, either to attend universities or live with relatives in search of better employment. Those who haven’t moved have started having babies. The week we showed up, her main crew returned in force to find her at the Pousada Colonial where we were staying.

“We missed you so much!” they exclaimed in Portuguese at high volume, proceeding to lure her out to passear (stroll) around town.

Each of the four of us immediately reconnected with our particular groups and the language we struggled so hard to acquire is flooding back in. My husband, Peter, is sliding seamlessly back into his pick-up soccer crowd on the tattered field, with the net-less goals by the river; and I am back in the roda, the sparring ring in Capoeira—an acrobatic Brazilian martial art/dance form—where I dodge the sweeping kicks of the Capoeiristas just as nervously as I did before.

There’s no question in my mind that these people will be our friends for life. They’re not necessarily the friends we would choose at home, where I, at least, mostly choose friends because of mutual interests. Though I guess here you could say we chose each other through mutual interest as well, but not an occupational or recreational interest, rather the interest in meeting the “other.” The people who befriended us were the ones who were interested in meeting someone different. We’d chosen to live abroad for the same reason. When I asked Skyler if he was happy to be back he said, “Yeah, I’m really happy,” or as a Brazilian would say, “Com certeza!” “Absolutely!”

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“This is why our families work so well together. I don’t know how many moms would be so cool about seeing their kids go off on motorcycles—in Brazil!” exclaimed Martha Newell, my friend from our hometown of Missoula, Montana.

She and her family—husband Mike and sons Carson, 14, and Bowen, 17—had just arrived for a visit to Penedo, the small town in Brazil where we were living for the year. Wanting to treat our guests to something special, we’d waited for their arrival to explore the inland part of our state of Alagoas. Our town of Penedo was near the mouth of the Rio SĂŁo Francisco, where it empties into the Atlantic amid sand dunes and palm trees. We'd been to those beaches but never upriver.Ìę

So, with Martha's family, we set off on a three-day excursion up the Rio SĂŁo Francisco. In the tropics, you don't need much for clothes. We got away with a daypack each. We caught a van to the bigger town of Arapiraca, then jammed into the back of a pickup truck, the only conveyance available for transport to the smallest towns. An hour and a half later, we spilled out in the riverside town of Piranhas. Picturesque, it's strung like beads up and down a couple of hillsides. This was when my husband, Peter, spontaneously contracted with eight moto-taxis, motorcycles, to take us to view the Xingo Dam.Ìę

I’ve often thought an important requirement for good traveling companions is a matching tolerance for risk, discomfort and unpredictability, which may be one reason Peter and I manage so well. We've both spent plenty of nights sacked out on hard ground, sweating through humid, mosquito-ridden nights… and we have both imagined our child stuck in the outback, bitten by a snake, too far from the anti-venom; envisioned the dengue fever, typhoid, cholera, malaria, hepatitis A, B, and C. And together, we redrew our plans accordingly, but went ahead.

This time, Peter, a long-time canoeist, decided it would be fun to float home, downriver from the town of Piranhas to Penedo—100 miles. Few locals seemed to have done it. Before the advent of dams and cars, this once Mississippi-like river had been a main route, thick with sailboats transporting their wares from town to town. Now, it was almost empty, save for occasional fishermen in their canoes. Asking around in Piranhas, Peter found Ugo, a fisherman. A football player of a man with soft brown eyes under thick black brows, Ugo said we should leave at 5:30 in the morning if we wanted to get to Penedo before dark. He showed up at 6:00. We stepped carefully into his motorized, double-wide canoe with its canopy top. There would be nine of us, plus daypacks, squeezed in like peas in a pod. We would be there for the next nine hours, or so Ugo had said. This could be a challenge.

Ugo clearly knew the river, stone by stone. We slid past dry, knuckled hills, river water boiling around us. He steered the green and yellow craft, with its tiny propeller the size of my hand, close into steep-sided sand banks, out into the boiling middle, around copper rocks, sprouting black cormorants; going wherever he needed to make maximum use of the current.

Our 12-year-old son Skyler and Carson promptly stretched out on cushions in the bow to go back to sleep. Our 16-year-old daughter Molly read, and Bowen wove backpack pulls out of strands of plastic. We listened with a mixture of delight and distaste as Ugo imparted local lore. Such as the bit about a black snake who crawls into houses at night and finds the nipples of nursing women to suck out the milk.

“E verdade.” “It’s true.” He nodded seriously. “It happened to my wife’s mother. They killed the snake and when they cut it open it was full of milk.” I shivered.

“Cliffs,” Skyler said, scanning the riverbank a few hours later. “Look at those cliffs. They’re perfect for jumping. Can we stop? Can we?” He pointed eagerly at the sheaves of rock rising above us.Ìę

Shortly after, Ugo pulled into a prainha. This little beach was tucked behind a set of rocks, under a tree. I threw my legs over the canoe's side and unexpectedly dropped into water up to my ribs. It turns out the river reaches depths of 90 meters in places. Skyler and Carson clambered out, shedding their shirts. Molly joined them, then Peter, then Mike, all flying off the 15-foot high rocks in ecstatic shapes—tucked, splayed, arched—before splashing into the warm current and drifting down to a landing spot.Ìę Ìę Ìę Ìę Ìę Ìę

When we re-gathered at the canoe, Ugo was whacking at a brown coconut with a large machete. It sounds ridiculous in retrospect, but we'd packed nothing for lunch and had no snacks. We'd broken rule number one for traveling with kids. Amazingly, no one had complained. Ugo drained the water, chipped off the shell, and broke the moist, white meat into pieces, which he handed to us with chunks of rapadura, dark brown, raw cane sugar. He mimed one bite of coconut, one bite of sugar, and gave it the thumbs-up. “A comida dos pescadores.” “The food of fishermen.” It was fabulous—sweet, moist, and crunchy.Ìę

This was hour five, theoretically more than halfway.

We’d left the rocks and roiling currents behind. The small wattle and daub farms in their desiccated draws were starting to be replaced by towns. Colorful houses lined the bank like a parade leading to the ubiquitous church with flanking towers. A clutch of boys tossed a volleyball over a line strung above the water.Ìę

By hour 10, the rolling land was subsiding and greening meadows swept away to the horizon; weeping green trees replaced scratchy scrub. Black cormorants yielded to white egrets lazily grazing with cattle. This was an hour after our projected arrival, and we wondered if we would really make it home before dark. Peter and Mike examined a map, measuring distances and calculating time passed. It looked unlikely. While our kids continued to be remarkably patient, with nothing but a few pieces of coconut and some brown sugar in their bellies and no dinner on the horizon, it was beginning to feel urgent.

“Maybe we should pull over in Propria, since there’s a bridge there and a road, and take stock of where we are,” I suggested an hour later. It was now five and it gets dark here at six, like the curtain closing on a play. And, as Bowen sensibly pointed out, we had no running lights.

Propria loomed larger, its city lights beginning to sparkle as it got dark. It was by far the biggest town we’d come across, and the first bridge we’d seen in 12 hours. Ugo headed toward shore.

There was a surprise—the Maravilhosa moored at the bank. I’d seen this double-decker, Mississippi-paddle-wheeler-like boat next to the ferry slip in Penedo. The captain, it turned out, was a friend of Ugo's. Before we knew it, Ugo was lifting our backpacks out of the canoe and handing them over to the crew of the larger boat. Told we’d be traveling the rest of the way with them, we obediently filed up the gangplank.

There was no one on board but the crew and their kids. They’d tow Ugo’s canoe behind. Inside they put out rolls and cheese, a thermos of sweet, black coffee, and beer. Our kids ran up to the top deck to watch as we passed under the bridge, then retired below decks to the hammock room to play Uno. The rest of us stayed above, surveying the oily dark river under a full moon.

We slowly zigzagged our way downriver. “How do you know where to go?” I asked the captain.

“Pratica,” he said. Practice? They were steering this huge boat, around shifting sandbars in the dark, from memory?

Peter, Mike, Martha, and I stood at the top rail, faces to the wind, and peered lazily into the dark water and shadows of overhanging trees. I marveled at the fortuitous turn of events and how often this kind of thing happens to us. A month earlier, we’d taken a similar covered canoe to the Foz, the mouth of the Rio São Francisco. There, the canoe had broken down out at the ocean, and it looked like we’d get home long after dark. We’d been saved that time by a high-tech catamaran and invited to join them for a gourmet buffet on deck. It felt like we’d jumped from backwoods Mississippi to the Riviera.

The trip to Penedo took not nine but thirteen hours. We gratefully lumbered down the gangplank and headed for an outdoor restaurant, hungry but pleased by our adventure.

There are lots of ways to travel. My mother prefers advance planning and lots of preparatory reading. My father preferred wandering on whim. There’s something to be said for both. But either way, things inevitably go awry, especially when traveling in the third world. It helps to believe; believe things will turn out all right. I think that not only changes one’s perception of the experience, but maybe what actually happens. Fred, an acquaintance, a Uruguayan professor teaching in the U.S., comes to Brazil to write because he finds there’s more inspiration in the unpredictable. I understand that. There’s something magical in not knowing. We’ve been surprised and delighted by what gets pulled out of the hat.

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It was an hour before dawn. We were scrambling in the dark, on hands and feet, our headlamps dimly lighting the dusty, crumbling rock in front of us; our metal crampons slipping on stone. I was second on our rope string behind our friend, an experienced Everest climber. Behind me was our 14-year-old son, Skyler; our 17-year-old daughter, Molly; and my husband, Peter. We’d made it to what is known as the Cleaver. Our Missoula neighbor, an emergency room doc and search-and-rescue team member, had grinned knowingly as we packed our car on our way to Mount Rainier. “Say hi to the Cleaver,” he said forbiddingly.

I grew up looking across Puget Sound at the white hulk of Mount Rainier, that primordial volcano that stands like a king among mountains in western Washington and that just claimed six lives, racking up a total of 95 during the past 117 years. My father reached its summit at age 18, in 1929. He claimed to have done it “with a little jute and tennis shoes.” But I knew his nonchalance belied the size of the feat, and that, in fact, it had meant a lot to him. It had been a sort of coming-of-age test.

One summer, Peter, standing on the deck of our Puget Sound cabin, was looking for an exciting challenge for young and active Skyler while Molly and I were off on a trip. He gazed across the water at the white hulk. “What about that?” he said. “Let’s climb Mount Rainier.”

Enter the risk assessment. Although Peter is not an ice and snow mountaineer or a technical rock climber, he has done lots of planning for trips into the wilderness. With approximately 11,000 people climbing Mount Rainier each year, the mountain is hardly a wilderness, at least not if you define wilderness as a place without people. But it has the unpredictability of wilderness in spades.

Luckily for us, we know several highly experienced mountaineers, including a veteran Everest climber who was willing to let us tag along. We would be climbing in July and taking the most standard route: Camp Muir to Ingraham Glacier to Disappointment Cleaver to the summit. Of course, 11 climbers died on Ingraham Glacier in 1981, so we weren’t taking anything for granted.

Come July, we hucked our 50-pound packs onto our backs in the parking lot of Paradise Inn and eagerly greeted the motley crew who would be our climbing companions: a preschool teacher from England with her party-time-all-the-time childhood girlfriend; a laconic East Indian computer tech guy from Virginia, back for a second try at the summit; another Brit, jovial and grizzled, who’d been a mountaineering guide on Mount Kenya; a boy we’d known since he was born, now in his 20s, with his fiance, both avid converts to CrossFit; and some enthusiastic Seattle friends of ours with their 15-year-old son, Max, and 11-year-old daughter, Flannery. (Less excited by the prospect of a lugging a pack 9,000 feet up the side of a mountain, she would return with her mom to the parking lot after the first night.)

The plan was to camp two nights at Nisqually Glacier at 9,200 feet, where we’d acclimatize and practice self-arrests with our ice axes. Then we’d climb to Camp Muir at 10,000 feet, spend a day practicing crevasse rescues, try to sleep for a few hours, and begin the standard ascent to the 14,410-foot summit in the middle of the following night. We were being conservative, taking it slow.

Now, after all of our preparation and nights at lower elevations, the summit climb was on. It was 10 p.m., time to wake up, assuming we’d actually gone to sleep. We quietly crept out of our tent at Camp Muir and began the meticulous process of donning helmets, headlamps, and climbing harnesses and strapping on safety lines, carabiners, crampons, and ice axes. Our hands were already cold. Our eyes strained in the dark. Other hushed climbers rustled in their tents, which were lighting up like Japanese lanterns. The kids were excited. Our rope line was the first to clip in and step out onto Cowlitz Glacier. Crisp snow crunched underfoot. We looked back. Other strings, like glittering diamond necklaces, were stretching out behind us.

We reached the first ridge of rock, jutting out of the mountainside like a stiff mohawk. Crampons perfectly designed to grip snow were less than ideal on loose, volcanic rock. Dust stung our eyes. Our children, unperturbed, chatted with Max on the rope behind about the Dark KnightÌęuntil our lead climber told them to be quiet and focus. We stopped so I could adjust my crampons. I took off a mitten and laid it on the rock.

“Don’t ever do that!” our normally laid-back leader admonished. “It could be the difference between life and death to lose a glove.” I snatched up my mitten and stuffed it into my jacket. I’d never heard him so clipped.

We slid down onto Ingraham Glacier, where the silk cocoons of tents at a distant camp were beginning to light up.

“Stop until I tell you to come,” our leader said to me. “Okay, jump.”

I felt a tug at my harness and jumped as far as I could across the yawning crack of a crevasse, my headlamp catching a drop into blackness, my back foot just dragging over its lip. I pulled in the slack in our rope and turned and did the same for Skyler.

“Whoa, that was huge!” he said, easily making it to the other side but clearly impressed.

Seven hours after our departure from Muir, our lungs grasping at ever-thinning wisps of air, we crawled through the dark, pulling ourselves over boulders by our hands, ice axes banging against rock, headlamps slipping. We made it to the top of the Cleaver. Another long, vertical ridge of rock, the Cleaver’s sides dropped away into darkness—we’d find out just how far on the return trip in the daylight. We stopped to take a rest, drink one of our canteens of water, dig out gorp and Power Bars. Our kids were tired, cold, silent. A thin orange line of predawn light appeared in a curve on the horizon, separating the edge of our planet from space. A rumble sounded, throaty and deep. The great mountain twitched and shed its skin of rock and ice.

I’d always heard this route up Rainier was not particularly technical, just a long walk. But it was becoming clear this was the air-sucking, glute-gripping, muscle-sapping, energy-draining variety of walk. This was the variety of walk that begins to test one’s determination and perseverance. While it had its share of adrenaline-pumping excitement in the beginning, by the end it just demanded grit.

In my world, there are few coming-of-age tests—no lions to kill, no isolating menstrual huts—few ways of marking the seriousness of the transition into adulthood.

When I was 12, my father suggested I swim the mile and a half from the mainland to the island in Puget Sound where we had a cabin. After calculating the tide, we set out from the island one morning to row across in our little wooden boat. Reaching the other side an hour later, I climbed out. With a wetsuit top and legs slathered in Crisco, I waded into the 60-degree water. The swim home felt long and cold, and I wondered what was lurking in the 200-foot depths. I felt small and vulnerable. But I as I stumbled out onto the beach on the other side, I was exhilarated that I had made it, and that triumph has fed into my overall confidence.

Despite the fact that many jobs no longer require physical prowess, physical confidence still plays an important part in our children’s feelings that they can cope in a sometimes-threatening world. Physical confidence is one more bolster against vulnerability. Likewise, there’s a place for facing a big test, physical or not. I’ve wished my children had something like the demands of a bar or bat mitzvah, where they’d have to prepare for a year to speak before their family’s adult community. Our kids need some of these tests along the way to reassure them that they’ll be able to rise to life’s challenges, as unpredictable and varied as they will be.

Five hours later, in the early morning sunlight, my kids and Max stood on top of Mount Rainier. They were elated and tired, and they knew the day was not yet over. But it was good. That night, at 10:00, after a full 24 hours of nonstop climbing and descent, they stumbled through a thick fog into the Paradise parking lot. They had tackled something really big—that unpredictable, sometimes irascible king of mountains.

Now they look across the water, see the volcano’s crest, and say, “We were there.”

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We shuffled off the plane in Miami at 6:30 in the morning, our stream of passengers merging with other streams of passengers all flowing toward Baggage Claim and Customs. We entered a wider portion of the hall where large armed men held their ground in the middle of the crowd, scanning for people to pull aside and question.

“Wow, not too warm; not even a smile,” our daughter Molly noted.

“Pick up the ball! Pick up the BALL! PICK. UP. THE. BALL!” It took our son Skyler a minute to realize the uniformed man with the rearing German shepard was talking to him. Chagrinned he snatched up the soccer ball he’d been dribbling with his feet.

“Don’t worry Skyler. The dog just wanted your ball,” I said, pulling him closer.

We were returning home to the U.S. after a year living in Brazil. These returns are always an eye-opening jolt and, for me, a long, slow adjustment. It usually takes me a full year to reintegrate into life at home.

We managed to find all our bags, make it through Customs, recheck the bags and enter Security. There we stood one-by-one in the beam-me-up-scotty Imaging Station, our hands raised over our heads, while our bodies were stripped to their bones.

I wondered what our Brazilian friends from the small, rural town where we’d been living—a town where for many people the luxury of running water was erratic—would make of all this and the self-flushing toilets, and automatic paper towel dispensers.

As we were repacking and redressing (the TSA agents had even scrutinized our flip flops) we were put through not one but two episodes of shouted, “Halt! Everybody, Don’t Move
. Okay, you can go, just a drill.”

We were definitely not in Brazil.

“Whew, this is intense,” Skyler said. “Let’s get out of here, before they do another one.”

Things had gone smoothly, until we hit the First World. Then things began to go awry. Our flight out of Miami was delayed for maintenance, which was okay. We happily rounded up a breakfast of things we hadn’t eaten for a year.

“That’s what they don’t have in Brazil: muffins, whipped cream, and vending machines,” Skyler exclaimed seeing one for the first time in 12 months.

This is why it’s worth all the trouble of leaving one’s job, renting one’s house, learning other languages, uprooting one’s kids, and struggling through cultural adjustment: for this chance to pull back. And especially so our kids can get that perspective at young ages. But the return is hard.

What do you say to all your old friends asking, “How was it? I bet it was so fun.” I don’t know if I could really say living abroad is fun. Certainly it can be exhilarating. It’s definitely stimulating, but it’s also painful and hard. It’s more like giving birth to a child. Not fun, but so worth it. Worth if for the connections we’ve made with people so different from ourselves, culturally, racially, economically, socially; and the pride, and I hope the increased confidence for our kids, because of the obstacles we had to overcome.

So what’s the sound bite that will somehow encapsulate our hearts cradling the people of Penedo (our small town in Brazil), the quilt of sherbert colors, palms clacking in the breeze, horse hooves on cobblestones?

I settled on, “Well, it was really rich, and well, really hard, so I feel relieved to be back and—sad, too.” It was lame, but the best I could do. Then I’d flip the conversation.

There was still too much to say. It would take months to boil it down. So it seemed simpler to say nothing. Besides no one really wanted more than that ten-second sound bite anyway. We’d warned our kids not to expect lots of interest from their friends. It’s both disheartening and understandable.

Home was so familiar, too familiar. Had we ever left? I resented it a little. I wasn’t ready for this huge experience that my family and I had just had to be reduced to a dream. As I rode my bike and drove around our Montana town in my car, I realized we couldn’t have chosen a foreign town more the opposite of home. Penedo’s hard surfaces and chute-like streets were met with Missoula’s sprawling-wide, leafy-soft avenues; Penedo’s bright oranges and pinks with Missoula’s muted greens; Penedo’s constant scraps of ricocheting sound with the quiet, steady susurration of Missoula’s water.

I kept finding myself thinking “here, there, here, there.”

In my next life, I dream of lobbying Congress to create a program to send every American teenager abroad, preferably to a developing country. It would change our relationship to the world, as individuals and as a nation, completely. Those kids would come back with a visceral understanding of why they’re so lucky to have been born in the U.S.—recognizing how precious is their ability to speak out without risking their lives; seeing how well the law works, mostly. But they’d see, too, that we’re not so different, nor are we “ahead”; that our breakneck speed might be breaking us down; that our touted 24/7 access to work might be sapping our energy and stealing time, time we could be spending with others, face to face, as families do every Sunday in Brazil. Those U.S. kids would learn that maybe we need to look a little farther afield before we claim the bragging rights some of us seem to cherish as Americans. They would be shocked, as I was, that we have Congressional leaders who have never left our shores, have never been issued a passport, but make our foreign policy.

Some of those kids would decide they never want to leave the U.S. again, that they’re in the place they love. Others might decide, like me, that the world is their home, and it’s both inexhaustibly big and very small; that it’s full of people just like them, trying to find their place, their role, their identities; trying to take care of people they love. Then together they could change the world.

I hope that my children will be able to see how they can fit into that larger world—one bigger than nations, broader than race—and feel comfortable enough in it to know they can jump and then look, because they’ll know they can cope when they land.

I think they will and when they do I hope they take me with them.

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“Whoah! Did you hear that?!” our 12-year-old son, Skyler, exclaimed.

“Yeah. Sounds like a 250-pound man doing a cannonball,” my husband, Peter, guessed.

We were taking a rest inside our floating cabin at the in the Brazilian Amazon. Connected by a boardwalk were five thatched bungalows, a two-story central house, and some outbuildings, each on their own raft, floating on a tributary of the Rio Solimoes. In front of the main house a square hole had been cut through the deck to create a pool. A netted pool. That was a good thing. We’d soon find out what we could have been swimming with. It was rapidly becoming clear that we were in territory where the wildlife ruled.

Great “ka-thunk” sounds were happening all around us. Hurrying out onto the porch, we saw a finned tail curl and whiplash the surface of the water. It belonged to a Pirarucu, a ten-foot-long fish that we’d seen in the market in Manaus, the one whose scales are sold for fingernail files. It was coming up to breathe. In addition to gills, Pirarucu have a swim bladder allowing them to extract oxygen from the air. This unusual adaptation to oxygen-poor water in the Amazonian floodplains would seem to be an advantage, but instead it required, every few minutes, what appeared to be a thrashingly desperate act of survival.

But the “ka-thunks” weren’t the only strange sound here in the Mamiraua Eco Reserve (the first of its kind in the state of Amazonas). There was that low otherworldly roar, like an icy wind howling through cavernous medieval halls; Red Howler Monkeys marking their territories, constantly it seemed.

We didn’t see the Caimin until the next day, when they surrounded our shallow-sided canoe. The semi-submersion—revealing only two nostrils, followed a foot or more away by two glassy eyes and a strip of scaly back—is part of what gives them their stealthy quality, but really I think it’s their glide; that pulse-less swimming, the skimming silence of it.

We went out again in a motorboat that night. In the dark, Eduardo—one of two English-speaking, biology students from Southern Brazil who were our main guides—scanned the river with a powerful flashlight, looking for obstacles in the water. The eyes of the Caimin, those trench-coated undercover agents, glowed red.

“I counted 13 that time,” whispered Skyler.

Despite this, the reserve is a tranquil place. A place where there is a lot of hunting going on, quiet, focused hunting. A lot of stalking, a lot of stillness. It’s surprising to see how fast the Caimin can cruise because more often they seem to be stopped, probably knowing it’s the motion that gives them away. But they’re not the only ones on the prowl. The Anhinga, an underwater diving bird, paddles silently with webbed feet, then unexpectedly slides backwards under the water, to emerge somewhere else, neck first, actually only the neck, a pulsing, snake-like periscope. The elegant Egrets ride, tall and white, on electric- green floating meadows, still lives on a conveyor belt of tall grass, waiting, watching.

Between the hulking, carnivorous Pirarucu, the diving Anhinga, plummeting Kingfishers, strafing Large-billed Terns, and stealthily cruising Caimin, being a small fish in the Amazon must be risky business. I wondered where we fit in. I felt pleased our kids were seeing a world where we were, as humans, so clearly not in charge.

I yearned to sit in the hammocks on our porch and immerse myself in the quiet, but we had a schedule. Up at six, out by seven, back by twelve, lunch, out at three, back by seven, dinner, after-dinner activity.

When Bianca, our other guide, said the purpose of the night walk was “to experience the night life” I laughed. Sounds like a party in Salvador. I love walking in woods at night, eyes wide, ears open, antennae alert. At least I had until here, when I heard the guide urgently hissing, “muito venenoso, venenoso.” It doesn’t take any language skill to figure out what that means when it’s attached to “Cobra!” I was in the front, behind the local guide, when he spotted the snake by the side of the path with his flashlight. I couldn’t really tell you what it looked like since I was mostly backing up, “rapidamente” as I’d been instructed to. He had that excited, tight sound in his voice that you don’t question. “Sirucucu, sirucucu!” Funny, that was the snake, the Fer-de-lance, also known as a Pit Viper, also known as the most venomous snake in the Amazon, that we’d just been talking about, our 16-year-old daughter, Molly, and I.

Paddling our canoe earlier that afternoon, Molly’s and my Portuguese-speaking, local-village guide, Almir, said off-handedly that he’d been bitten by a Pit Viper twice that year. Then he went on to describe its behavior. Could it really swim? Jump into a canoe?! Climb trees, do double back flips
.? We weren’t really sure we understood, but that’s what we thought he’d said. Later, talking to Bianca, we sorted it out. It’s the Anaconda, another friendly local, that can climb trees and hop into your canoe. This one, the Sirucucu, just kills you. Almir had got the anti-venom in time, but was still unable to walk, for a month; its venom had paralyzed his legs. So that night, when we were invited to come forward for a look, I declined; unlike Molly, Skyler and Peter.

That morning, we’d visited a village down the river. A woman there had told us how she’d seen an Anaconda, at the edge of the water, already fully wrapped around a calf, starting to constrict it. She’d dashed into the river to free it. Now would that be your first instinct?! The Anaconda had bitten her (she showed us the marks) and then had been unable to extract its curved teeth from her arm. Her husband seeing that she was in trouble dashed into the water, too, and having no knife, bit the snake. I know, it’s starting to sound like a tall tale. The calf lived.

They all have stories like that. You start to believe them when you walk back to your bungalow after lunch and find a baby Caimin—a mere four-feet long—sunning itself on the flotation logs of your cabin.

Now, our night guide was shining his light into a tree trunk. I’d dropped back safely into the middle of the pack. Something like “Carangeira” was whispered along the line. “Tem muitos nomes.” “It has lots of names.” It turned out “Tarantula” was the one I recognized. By the time I got up to the tree, she had slid back into her white pocket of a house, only a few of her long, furry black legs still stuck out, yellow on the tips. She’d done her nails.

Given that I grew up with a father who had a phobia for snakes and a mother with a phobia for spiders, this was not shaping up to be my kind of a stroll. I can’t tell you much about the canopy at night, or the symphonic sounds of insects, as my eyes and ears were pretty solidly focused, okay glued, to the ground.

We did stop once, however, to listen. And the plethora of sounds were amazing. Like a percussion section, the cicadas played a steady blanket of 16th notes on high-pitched triangles; frogs, the washboard quarter notes, and toads, the low belching whole note. An occasional rapid-fire rattle skimmed the surface. Here was a little of Salvador after all. Soon afterward, we spotted the lights of the lodge through the trees. I was happy to return to our floating boardwalk. I’d take the “ka-thunks” in the night any day. My kids, however, had been unperturbed.

I was, nevertheless, pleased to have ventured into that other world; that Halloween night world of spiders and snakes, and to have had a small taste of what it might be like to live on a more even playing field with those creatures who are after all mostly just defending themselves against those out to get them—the likes of us. I felt glad that my kids could experience a world so unlike our Western one where we humans “monitor” and “control” the wildlife. I was grateful to be admitted as a guest in their house.

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My husband, Peter, opened his eyes. An old man stared down at him.

“°żŸ±,” Peter said in Portuguese. The man’s face crinkled into a delighted smile.

The man had the textbook Yanomami haircut—short bangs cut straight across, black hair neatly sculpted around the ears.

When planning this trip to the Amazon, where we were staying in an open-sided, thatched pavillion, Peter, our kids, and I had had a meeting. We discussed what each of us was hoping for. Peter was clear. He wanted to find the Yanomami. He had majored in anthropology in college and one of the classes that stuck with him, 40 years later, was the one about this tribe. It had stunned the world that there existed a people living totally detached from modern life as late as the 1960s, when these people, upriver in the Amazon, came into the public eye. Peter had read a book he still remembered, by a French anthropologist, titled , which described the ritualized violence they used to settle disputes.

“In my youth, it was a benchmark tribe for exoticism,” he’d told me.

“Do you think they have blow guns?” our son, Skyler, had asked.

“Do you think we could really stay in a village?” our daughter, Molly, wanted to know.

I was eager for the kids to see a way of life that was really different from ours in the U.S. It seemed the Yanomami would offer that. I had to sheepishly admit we really just wanted to watch them. But so far they were mostly watching us.

Far from fierce, this man curiously staring at Peter looked gentle, kindly, old.Ìę

The day before, we’d left the town of SĂŁo Gabriel da Cachoeira with Valdi, our hired guide. After two hours sucking our way through orange gumbo in a claptrap truck, we’d arrived at a clearing in the jungle. Waiting there in a tiny slough, was a 30-foot-long, motorized, aluminum canoe. It was getting dark. For the next eight hours, we wound through ever-braiding, ever-narrowing waterways between walls of impenetrable blackness. The kids finally fell asleep on the bottom of the boat, squeezed between the barrels, 1,040 pounds of oil and gas, our payment for being let into these Yanomamis’ lives. We finally arrived in this man’s village of perched high on a ridge, at 3 in the morning.

We were not exactly being held prisoner, but it was clear that we were not free to leave our “hotel.” The tribe was being careful. On their first contact with outsiders, many had died from imported diseases.

Our lodgings consisted of an octagonal concrete pad, a thatch roof, a central pole and eight posts around its circumference. We lounged in our hammocks, awaiting further notice, wondering about things like where to go to the bathroom. It felt as though we were floating in an eddy, that currentless pool at the sides of a river where fish wait and watch for passing food. We were waiting for things, people, to drift by, and they did; they were coming to look at us, the animals in the zoo.

The rest of the day passed in suspended animation. The old man, as well as the chief of the neighboring village, a woman with a baby, a woman selling baskets—all drifted into our eddy. Eventually, we were summoned to lunch with Julio, the head of the village and Adelidegee, his wife. She’d grown up traveling with a German missionary—cooking his food, washing his clothes—so knew how to prepare meat the way white folks like it and had cooked what we’d brought. We sat in their outdoor kitchen, on plastic stools at a long, green-painted table.

The floor was concrete, the roof corrugated tin. Adelidegee washed dishes with funneled rainwater. Then there was the washing machine. I had another one of those double-take moments, as when I had learned their son Berto was studying to be a dentist back in SĂŁo Gabriel, 10 hours away. Their grandkids tumbled underfoot with a gaggle of ducklings. Their daughter-in-law, an almond-eyed beauty, flitted around the edges. It was homey. We sat. They sat. We were all trying to feel our way through this. Why were we there?Ìę

The next day Julio showed up at our eddy pond with a teacher of indigenous arts from the neighboring village. We’d been trying to figure out how to connect and had asked about crafts.

“Marcelino can teach your son to make an arrow,” Julio said in Portuguese, “and his daughter can teach your daughter to weave baskets.”

We jumped up.

“Włó±đČÔ?”

“LČčłÙ±đ°ù.”

We sat back down.

Eventually the moment came. As we wound down the ridge on a narrow path, a man and his two daughters caught up and followed us. A hundred-foot-wide river separated the two villages. We arrived at its bank. On our side, there was no boat. In seconds, the daughters enthusiastically jumped in, swam across and dragged back a large aluminum canoe. It had, however, no motor and no paddles. Valdi was shaking his head.

“How we goin’ to cross?”

The man waved at us to get in. Climbing in last, he dangled his legs into the water where the motor would be and started to kick. Valdi’s eyes sparkled.

“An Indian motor,” he laughed, proudly I thought.

We climbed the opposite bank and followed the path into Marcelino’s village, a collection of mud and thatch huts around a packed-dirt opening hacked out of the jungle. It was baking in the midday sun. Marcelino was lounging in the shade under a shed roof with his daughter and a clot of milling kids. He had the same gentle, kindly smile. Hanging on his bare, mahogany chest was a sky blue, beaded square in geometric designs.

“You want to make an arrow?” he asked Skyler in Portuguese.

“Sim,” Skyler responded.

Marcelino proceeded to walk Skyler through the meticulous steps: First, he chose the right wood for each of the arrow’s three parts—the tip, the shaft, the tail; then he inserted one into the other, wrapping the joint with string dredged in glue made of tree sap and beeswax. And so it went, both quietly concentrating; Marcelino putting an arm around Skyler’s shoulders to show him how to hold a knife or wrap the hard shaft of a Curacao feather; Skyler intently hunched over the arrow, oblivious to the naked boy at his shoulder, clutching a tattered kitten to his bare belly. I could see Skyler’s interest was sparked; perhaps he subconsciously understood the significance of such a moment, of learning to make something that would enable him to provide food; that this was one of the skills, one of those markers, needed to move into manhood. Markers we seem to have fewer and fewer of in the States.

Marcelino’s daughter, seated with Molly under the same shed roof, might have been in her 30s and had the same worn look I’ve seen on working mothers in the U.S. She showed Molly how to build up the side of a basket, sewing together the coiled fibers. Marcelino’s daughter spoke with that slow, cotton-headed sound of a person with a cold. A runny-nosed toddler clung to one of her knees. She looked less enthused to be “engaging” with the visitors. The number of curious kids leaning against the shed’s poles and squatting in the dirt grew. Who were these blonde kids? Why were they trying to make arrows and weave baskets?

It made me wonder what we pass down to our kids. In our circles at home, we don’t pass down this kind of hands-on skill so much as we pass down ideas: ways of approaching the world, of handling problems, of dealing with people. Peter and I were trying to hand down experience, global experience, from our childhoods to theirs; hand down the idea that there are lots of ways to live and one is not inherently superior to another. We were trying to hand down our curiosity, our enthusiasm for trying different things. At the moment it seemed to be working.

When we left Julio’s village three days later, we left our UNO cards with a child who lived in the hut next to our hammock pad. We left our blankets with Adelidegee and I gave my rubber boots to her son. I realized it was impossible for us to visit such a place and leave no trace. Even if we’d left nothing, the picture of us in our yellow rubber boots and zip-off pants, reading paperbacks and toting high-tech backpacks would still be there, along, perhaps, with a new germ of desire, and then maybe discontent. Or perhaps I flatter myself. Nevertheless, I felt guilty, greedy, for buying my way in to look at these people.

On the other hand, the gate had already been opened. The signs were everywhere: in the bras and T-shirts; in the new form of Mandioca root, introduced by missionaries; in the TV and the telephone, the generator that brought recorded music and movies, the washing machine and tether ball poles in front of every home. Some were probably improvements, others not. But who defines an “improvement?”

I was glad that the Yanomami were able to exert some control over who gets in and at what price. I thought it was probably important for both sides that Molly and Skyler should continue on in the world, knowing there were people like this living so differently; important that our kids should get a taste of what skill and knowledge these people have; important that they learn that these people don’t always need help, at least not ours, and if they do, to listen carefully and respect what they’re asking for.

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“I said, ‘Okay one.’” She brandished her index finger. “One quick one. Then he stuck his tongue down my throat.”

“Oooh, yuck. What did you do then?”

“I retreated into the kitchen. They were really nice to me. Everyone was so nice to me.”

It was 3:30 in the morning. I was looking blearily at my 16-year-old daughter, Molly, who had just returned from her first party in Penedo, the small, upriver town in northeastern Brazil where we'd come to live for a year.Ìę

Before leaving the U.S., I’d had my share of anxious visions about what could happen to our kids in a small town in Brazil. This wasn’t new. My husband, Peter, and I had thought through our worst nightmares before every trip abroad. But when it was just the two of us, our perception of the risks was different. We put ourselves pretty far out into the “bush”—hiking across China for our honeymoon, crossing borders into small African countries on the brink of revolution. We had that youthful sense of invincibility. But then we had kids.

When we were choosing where to go after our second child, Skyler, was born, we'd said no malaria; so we chose malaria-free Spain. When the kids were six and 10, we chose the capital city of Mozambique. It had malaria, but wasn’t far from Johannesburg and good medical care. But they were young then. Now we had teens.Ìę

So Brazil. Would our beautiful blonde daughter’s celebrity status protect her from predatory men, or would she be seen as a special prize, a conquest, a target? We’d been warned by Brazilian friends at home that it was common practice at parties to be asked by someone you’d just met if you wanted to make out. “Quer ficar comigo?” No strings attached.

So when Molly had come home from school earlier that day jubilantly announcing that she’d been invited to her new friend Keyla’s 15th birthday party, we thought we were prepared. She’d been told to keep her eyes on her drink and stick with friends. Molly barely spoke Portuguese and so far only one person we'd met spoke English. But Molly can dance and at a party, in Brazil dancing well will get you a long way.

“Mom, what should I wear?”

“What do you have?” (We'd moved to Brazil with one duffle bag each.)

At 10 that night, another new friend, Leyla, came to pick Molly up. Molly was wearing jeans, a T-shirt, and her favorite multicolored flat sandals. She opened the door. There was Leyla—in a satin minidress and four-inch heels. Molly rushed back into her room.

“Mom, what can I wear?!”

She re-emerged in a short black dress and the only heels she owned, two-inches high with a tame strap.

“Have fun,” I called as she slipped out the door. I doubted she’d heard me, or the trepidation in my tone.

Parties in Penedo start at 10 or 11, after our bedtime. We had no car. We’d considered finding a taxi driver to bring Molly home in the wee hours, but thought better of it. After midnight, if they were willing to work, chances are they would be doing it under the influence. So she'd be stranded at the party with no way to bail. We kept our cell phones by our bed, figuring maybe we could call Zeca, the young lawyer who spoke English and was fast becoming a friend. It turned out Zeca was often at the same parties.

That first time, I woke up at three a.m. It was still dark. No sign of our 16 year old. Though I wished she were home, I was less anxious than I would have been in the U.S. Perhaps this was because, abroad, I was too in the dark to know what to worry about. And in this small town, the big U.S. bogeyman, drunk driving, didn’t exist. Lots of people were drunk but almost no one was driving. Kids didn't have cars. In Brazil, the parties are also intergenerational, so I knew Leyla’s mom was there and would bring them home.

I went to lie down on the living room couch. Not long after, Molly quietly opened the front door.

“How was it?” I asked sleepily.

“Oh, Mom, it was really fun, but
It was kind of overwhelming, too. There was lots of dancing. But these guys, they made a big circle around me and were shouting, “Mohly, Mohly, I love you,ÌęI love you.”

“In English?”

“Yeah. In English. For a long time. And they kept asking me to fica (to make out) with them. My friends were trying to protect me. But finally, I gave in. I told Felipe, you know, the guy who worked at the desk at the pousada, that I would, cuz at least I kinda knew him.”

That first introduction was an eye opener. You can hear about a custom in another culture but what do you do when it's actually dropped in your lap. Do as the Romans do? Some things are easier to try on than others, like sampling new food. But making out with strangers…?

Well, we’d been warned this would happen to Molly. But to our son Skyler? It turned out that at age 12, our tan, blond, blue-eyed son had an impassioned female following, both his age and older, acquaintances and total strangers. They’d regularly ask him to kiss them, at school or on the street. Anywhere would do.

“Mom, what do I do? I want to go play tennis but there’re all those girls out there!” And there were; a little, tittering clutch eagerly watching our front door from the concrete benches in the plaza.

“Can you just say we don’t do this in the U.S.? That we don’t kiss strangers?”

“I’ve tried that. They just say, 'But this is Brazil'.”

In Skyler’s first few months in school, we received several love notes a week, surreptitiously slipped under our front door. Once I heard it happen and whipped the door open, mischievously hoping to catch the author. She’d vanished. On purple or pink paper, with heart or rainbow stickers, in a combination of Portuguese and broken English, they ranged from the fairly innocent (and somewhat inscrutable), “Never get out of Brazil that is a rock. I’ll die” to the racier “Just want your baby well,” or “I’am Prostitute and you is my Bum” or better yet “Fuck! Te Amo!”

One Saturday, Skyler took part in a Capoeira demonstration at a neighboring school. We'd recently begun to take lessons in this Brazilian martial art/dance form. As soon as his Capoeira group arrived, he was surrounded by girls wanting to pose for pictures with him. ÌęOur “California surfer,” with his shaggy blond hair and clear blue eyes, stood dutifully for one selfie after another, a big white smile, frozen painfully on his face. Theoretically, this should be a boy’s dream, but it wasn’t.

This is what we began to realize about cultural immersion. It's not just about language, which was where most of our focus had been. Certainly that plays a part. But there are all those other things. All that body language; what seems suggestive in one culture might be casual in another. All that learned understanding of what's acceptable and what's not; a curt response to a social advance that feels rude in one culture might be routine in another.

Months later, I asked Molly about the men at another party during —this one an all-nighter, with bands and huge crowds—she said, “Oh the men are fine. I just pry them off my face.”

Okay she's in, I thought, she's immersed. And then I thought: she'll be able to handle anything.

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Still jet-lagged, I was wakened from my nap by someone pounding on the door of our third-floor room in an old colonial mansion. The person’s weight shifted restlessly on the foot-wide floorboards.

â€Ôš±đČő? Oi?” I couldn’t pick apart the rat’s nest of Portuguese coming through the door, but I instantly understood that it was urgent and something about my son.

Our family of four had arrived three days earlier in Penedo, in northeastern Brazil, whereÌębrightly colored nineteenth-century row houses, sunny plazas, and flame trees line an expansive stretch of the Rio Sao Francisco. We would be living here, in theÌęPousadaÌęColonial,Ìęfor a year as part of our on-going effort to raise global children. We had lived five years earlier in the capital city of Mozambique, but as a result of that experience, this time our kids requested that we live in a small town. They wanted total cultural immersion—no foreigners, no English.

ÌęI swung the door open to find Breno, our 12-year-old-son Skyler’s newfound friend. Fumbling into my flip-flops, I hurried after him as he lumbered down the wood stairs.

Our first night in town, Skyler, and his 15-year-old sister, Molly, had managed to join a game of soccer. They played barefoot on paving stones. That night Skyler made two friends, Breno and Vito. But now Breno was here and Skyler was nowhere to be seen.

As we spilled out the door of our B&B into a blast of sunshine, I saw the long crumbling balustrade across the plaza, bordering the wide river, then Vito, standing by a small, unmarked car. Skyler’s orange Crocs dangled from one hand. Flip-flops slapping cobblestone, we panted up to him. Vito’s eyes looked worried. I peered into the car. There was Skyler, sitting in front. His blonde hair was dark with blood.

“I was flipping,” he choked out shakily, “off a stone wall.”

Vito and I scrambled into the backseat as the car started up a steep hill. I had no idea where we were going. I had said nothing to the driver, nor he to me.

I find when traveling in new places, in a different language, I frequently trust people I might not as readily at home, as though, subconsciously, I recognize I’m not in position to be in control. As a result, I find it easier to let go of my normal inclination to question and assess.

I reached forward, putting a hand on Skyler’s shoulder.

“It won’t stop bleeding.” His voice began to crack.

We’d noticed that, new to town, knowing no one, and bereft of language, Skyler was pulling out every trick he knew with his newfound friends: juggling oranges, solving Rubik’s Cubes, flipping off the stone walls that surround the plaza into the sand of the riverbank below.

“I did two back flips”—he took a big breath—“no problem. Then I decided”—his voice began to sound squeezed—“to try a side flip.”

The car skidded under the carport of the tiny hospital’s Emergencia. Luckily, early on a Sunday it wasn’t busy. Skyler was whisked onto a gurney, surrounded by what seemed to be the entire staff of ten. They rolled him through the open entrance of a low concrete building, into a simple room. Standing at his feet, I watched as a nurse began squeezing water out of a plastic bottle into his wound, cleaning out sand and blood. A deep gash began to emerge, arcing from the crown of his head down to his left ear.

Perhaps I looked more aghast than I realized, because I was suddenly ushered out into the hall, where I was asked to “fica um pouco.” “Wait a little.” I sat down in one of the few white plastic chairs scattered along the empty hallway, too dazed to think. I felt as though the little boat cradling our family of four had suddenly been sucked off a calm sea into a whirlpool.

Before long, an older doctor in a long white coat pushed open the door of Skyler’s room and walked over to me.

“É profundo,” he said softly. I didn’t need a dictionary to understand that. “ł§Ă©°ùŸ±ŽÇ. Go get your husband,” he gently suggested in Portuguese.

They would bandage Skyler’s head and prepare him for the ambulance trip to the trauma center in Arapiraca, an hour away. He needed a neurosurgeon and a CAT scan.

I hustled out the front door to go find my husband, Peter, and Molly. Vito was still waiting outside. Piling into a taxi, we sped back to the Pousada Colonial, tires vibrating over cobblestones, and were halfway back when I realized I hadn’t even told Skyler I was leaving. I was stricken, imagining him unable to understand what anyone was saying, wondering why they were loading him into an ambulance, and then, why he was all alone.

Back at the pousada, I found both Peter and Molly were out. Peter had gone for a run, and Molly was passeando around town with new friends. I threw passports and clothes into a bag and, most importantly, scrambled to find the English-Portuguese dictionary. This idea of living abroad every few years wasn’t going quite as planned. My parents had done that with me, but it had never turned out like this! Peter returned just as I was leaving—someone in the plaza had intercepted him to tell him something had happened to his son. We agreed that he and Molly would follow in a taxi after Vito had found her.

By ambulance the hour-long trip took 30 minutes, even over the bucking, shoulderless, two-lane road. I sat in the windowless back of the little van with Skyler stretched on a gurney in front of me, and Cassia, the nurse from Penedo, poised over his head. I would later realize we’d passed ambling villages with plaster houses rimmed in cool verandas, surrounded by the eye-popping green of rolling sugarcane fields. But at the time, I barely looked up from Skyler’s face. Initially, he was talking a lot, frustrated with himself for getting hurt, peeved that he was missing the World Cup soccer finals, which we had planned to watch that afternoon. Portuguese was the first reason we’d decided to spend a year in Brazil. Soccer was the second, at least for Peter and Skyler.

But now Skyler’s eyes were beginning to close and his speech to drift. Cassia had been deftly changing his blood-soaked head bandage as we jounced through the potholes. She shook her head as he drifted toward sleep, looking worried.

“Skyler, let’s do some math problems!” I said urgently. He’d always been good at calculating numbers in his head. “What’s, uh, what’s 36 times, times 412? No, would two digits be better? How about 36 times 52?”

He seemed to think. “One thousand… eight hundred
and seventy-two?”

“Great. That’s great,” I said, having no idea what the answer was myself. I just wanted to keep him talking, awake, alive.

We were dipping into a gully when the pavement turned to dirt, and we were suddenly caught in a twisting knot of cars slowly picking their way through water-filled ruts. Are we going to put on the siren, flash some lights? But we just slowed down, patiently waiting our turn.

“Está perto agora.” “It’s close now,” Cassia whispered under her breath, sensing my alarm.

Within minutes the ambulance slid into the carport at the trauma center, another nondescript white concrete building. The back door was ripped open. Skyler was slid out and whisked through an opening without a door, past rows of chairs with a few waiting people, and through a heavy, metal floor-to-ceiling accordion gate. It clanged shut. He was in. I was out? The gate was manned by men in khaki, their pants tucked into leather boots, machine guns slung casually over their shoulders. One put his arm out and softly motioned me to the side. I watched as Skyler was rolled away.

The receptionist was asking me something.

“Skyler Stark-Ragsdale?” I hazarded, hopefully.

He smiled and tried again. I finally managed to give my name and relationship, Skyler’s name, age, and nationality, and a mimed description of a side flip, of his accident. They let me through.

An armed guard led me to a small white room down the hall. An intensely bright light was being trained on Skyler’s head. As always in Brazil there was a crowd, most in scrubs, some in masks, some focused on Skyler, others just chatting with their neighbor. Two flies buzzed through the circle of light.

By the time Peter and Molly got there, 45 minutes later, Skyler had been given seven Novocaine shots and a Frankenstinian stripe of nineteen stitches arcing from the top back of his head down to his left ear. His CAT scan had checked out normal, and I’d been able to give him the running score on the World Cup finals, which, of course, the CAT scan technicians had been watching.

But it wasn’t over. They wanted to keep Skyler for observation. As the evening wore on, Skyler and I were transferred from room to room, as space was needed. We watched as the gate clanged open and an increasing number of cases, each more gruesome than the last, were wheeled through. We shared rooms with men who appeared to have been shot, knifed, and beaten. We listened to them wheezing into respirators, watched blood clotting their bandages. Privacy was not an option.

We met a lot of people at the trauma center, which serves the surrounding 52 towns. They came to help, to interpret, or just to check in on the Americanos. Cassia, the ambulance nurse from Penedo, who’d hugged me when my eyes teared on hearing Skyler’s CAT scan was normal, stayed with us for the next four hours when she could have gone home.

I’ve always dreaded the possibility of ending up in one of these hospitals, with their mildewed walls, gaping entrances, and flies in the operating room. I now know, however, that they can be full of smart, competent, and kind people. And they’re sanitary enough.

Released too late to go back to Penedo, we spent the night in a small hotel and delivered flowers to the trauma center staff the next day before returning home. Thanks to , the entire event, ambulance and all, was free.

When we got back to Penedo everyone seemed to know what we’d been through.

“Seu filho?” “Your son?” strangers stopped to ask.

I knew they were wondering who we were; how, like aliens, we had landed in their town. But no one addressed that now. This was more important. I was a mother with a son, and he had been hurt.

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“One need never leave the confines of New York City to get all the greenery one could wish…”

Well, that’s arrogant, more than a little myopic (have New Yorkers ever been accused of that?). These words are welded into the railing surrounding the World Financial Center harbor in lower Manhattan.Ìę

Recently, I found myself in New York City, the city where I was born, though not raised, and to which I returned in my twenties. I found myself thinking about several earlier trips to the city with our kids and, oddly, I found myself trying to define adventure.Ìę

Oddly, because I tend to think of adventure as heading into the wilderness, but maybe that’s because of where I came from. New York is closer to the environment I was used to as a child than is the vast outdoor childhood of my kids. Maybe adventuring just means exploring an environment that’s unknown to you. As it turned out, for my Montana-based kids—kids for whom a half-mile-high mountain was a familiar playground by the time they were ten, who could paddle rivers, and hike forests—heading into the urban tangle, navigating subways, streets and avenues, was an adventure. But when we first took our kids to New York City we were worried.

To New York’s credit, to make sure leafy, open spaces are available to people all across the city (not just for those living near Central Park). And they’re succeeding. The spaces are beautiful. The adventure is finding them.

When I’m alone in the city, I just wander, look at the architecture, visit museums, find my old haunts. But ambling walks were not going to cut it with our kids. Unless…we could make it a game.

In my twenties, I discovered mostly in midtown Manhattan. So on one of our first trips, my husband, Peter, and our kids, Molly and Skyler, and I set off on a scavenger hunt. Our goal: to find as many pocket parks as possible. Like coming on a secret glade in a tangled rainforest, these tiny parks tucked into concrete canyons are magical refuges; several have walls of water, effectively replacing the sound of car horns with a steady, soothing whoosh. Our kids were enchanted. We found four before we retired to the Plaza Hotel in search of food and the mischievous, .

The bellhop looked regretfully at Molly. “She’s just stepped out,” he said, absolutely straight faced.

For our kids, everything about that trip was new and exciting, from staring out the front window of the lead subway car—watching the tracks curve and straighten, the subterranean stop lights change from red to green—to riding the elevators up to the observation deck of one of the original World Trade Towers to peer down at the tiny toy cars one hundred and ten floors below.

From the World Trade Center, we headed a few blocks west to the Hudson River and our favorite park, the , a 36-acre complex of riverside gardens. (It’s also a popular site for Saturday afternoon wedding photos. On our very first trip when Molly was one, she got scooped into the arms of an Asian couple, posing in white gown and tux. Nothing like a strange blonde toddler in your wedding photos for a conversation starter.)

She was too young that first time to do more than walk or ride piggy back, but with older kids , a skate board, or a fold-up scooter (which also serves as camouflage if your child wants to pass for a Manhattan school kid) you can keep your children occupied for hours, winding through open lawns, past fountain-sprayed ponds, whimsical sculpture parks, beach-volleyball courts, skate parks and mini-golf greens. And now, if you don’t want to pack your own wheels, you can rent a from ubiquitous rows of blue bike stands. Strolling along the esplanade you’ll pass a floating origami-like glass pavilion, the New Jersey-bound ferry terminal.

It reminded me of taking the ferry to , which you can catch at Manhattan’s southern tip. One of the five boroughs of New York City, Staten Island is a 25-minute, boat trip away. I used to go with my father when I was the kid visiting the city, just for the fun of the ride. It’s easy to forget, amid the skyscrapers, that New York is a city of islands and waterways, on the brink of an ocean. But looking out over the river, at the widening harbor, at freighters and barges, tugboats and ferries, one can really feel it.

Returning to the Battery Park City Esplanade this time, I discovered something new, lodged at the end of Vesey St.: the . It commemorates the potato famine that first sent the Irish to our shores and urges us, today, to consider modern issues of hunger. Probably doesn’t sound like a prime destination for kids. But it would be for mine. It’s a “wild” hill, built on a frame of glass and limestone. Embedded at its foot are the remains of a nineteenth-century, Irish, stone cottage. From there paths meander upward through an overgrown-grass-and-rock landscape, a “fallow field.” At the top, one hovers over New York Harbor, where, still thrusting her torch in the air, is the Statue of Liberty, as commanding a presence as ever. Beyond her are the immigrant-clearing houses of Ellis Island. You can’t get a much more visceral connection to the metaphor of America.

Turning around, one’s eyes follow the sleek, faceted sides of the new World Trade Tower rising up to its sky-piercing spire at the top. The is still under construction at its base. At this point, had my kids been there, at that cusp of past and future, it would have been a provocative moment for a conversation.

New York is fabulous for this—for provoking the conversation. The conversation about the relationship between man and nature, between man and man; the conversation about what man can create—you’re surrounded by it and it’s magnificent—but also what man can destroy. These are the conversations we often have with our kids, but for “wilderness” kids, the city gives these discussions a whole new spin.

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