What is Misahuallí? Where is Misahuallí? Why were we leaving it?

Oh. And how to pronounce Misahuallí? It’s pronounced miss-ah-wah-YEE.

This story starts in medias res, or “in the middle” for non-speakers of dead languages. We had spent four days on the Napo river in the Ecuadorian Amazon jungle, the Oriente. This was only one part of our adventure vacation, where within one country we would straddle the equator, hike a volcanic mountain to touch snow, go boating on a lake in a volcanic caldera over 10,000 feet in altitude, explore the Amazon, and be humbled by nature in the Galapagos Islands (still technically Ecuador!).

..and also where we would have a couple of near-death experiences. Sort of.

With me was my fiancée, a.k.a. future ex-wife as this adventure was in the early ’80s. Also with us most of the time were another dozen classmates of hers from university, and another half-dozen local family of one of the classmates. We were a big hungry caravan most of the time, which given the currency exchange rate did not cost much at all to feed.

Anyway, I’m starting this story from when it was time to leave the Amazon. Misahuallí is a common and convenient point-of-departure (and return) for canoe’s launching on the Napo river and going deep into the jungle. I don’t know what the town is like today, 36+ years later, but back then it was a cliché out of every Hollywood film. You know the look, where the outpost town is scary as shi… can be. Our parking area was a mud-pit. The main street was dirt. A dead dog with buzzing flies lay in the middle of one street. The town drunk (or murderer of tourists???) hung both his arms out of his jail cell overlooking what I assumed was the main intersection.

I’ve only seen Misahuallí referenced once in literature, in a short fiction story by Malcolm Bosse. Here’s how he described Misahuallí.

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…then hired a chauffeured car and headed for Oriente, a remote area of vast rain forests. When they reached their destination, a dirty river town called Misahuallí, their driver Jose unloaded their bags in front of a cement-block building with hotel in faded blue primed over its doorless entrance. He offered to arrange for a guide and supplies,

“No,” said Sheldon, “that’s my job,”

“Be careful,” warned Jose. “Many of these people are thieves and worse.”

“What do you mean, worse?”

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So, yeah, that was the vibe in Misahuallí.

Only the hardiest of our entourage had gone into the jungle, so we were using just two Jeeps. Leaving Misahuallí at the same time were a couple of Germans in their Jeep. Fun fact – one out of ten vehicles in Ecuador is a Jeep. I think in Quito it’s one in five. When Pope Francis visited in 2015, yes, he was driven in a Jeep.

You will understand the obsession with Jeeps momentarily.

We were able to drive our Jeeps out of the mud-pit, but the Germans were stuck. Not the Jeep’s fault, they simply didn’t know how to drive like the locals. One of our drivers, cousin Antonino maybe, hooked-up a cable from our Jeep to the sunken Jeep. Then, like in the scene from Jurassic Park II where they are trying to save the mobile lab from going over the cliff, he used five different gears, rocked, spun rubber and spit mud until the German’s were freed. Hooray.

We didn’t know the toll that the struggle had taken on our own Jeep.

The second Jeep in our caravan had driven ahead while we played tow-truck rescue. By the time we were on the road, they were out of walkie-talkie range. This was pre-1985, so no commercial cell phones were being sold and there were certainly no towers in the jungle, probably still aren’t.

We were tearing down the road at a pretty good clip trying to make up for lost time. The roads in and out of the Oriente are also dirt. Uneven. Stony. Rocky. Bumpy. The Jeep dealt with the conditions as good as could be expected, but were definitely bounced around a lot. And then it happened. Maybe it was the strain of towing the other Jeep out of the mud. Maybe it was the beating the Jeep had been taking for ten days all over Ecuador.

The Jeep went silent. No engine noise. We drifted to a stop.

Everyone got out and the men popped the hood. I was still a teenager (nineteen or barely twenty) so I didn’t really qualify as one of the men. I knew nothing about cars so I was just a bystander. The gas tank was not empty. The engine temperature was fine. There was no snapping or cracking noise before the engine went dead. They even removed the distributor cap and cleaned it — I actually did know that trick. There were no fluids leaking out from underneath the Jeep.

The driver turned the engine but the engine would not turn.

This, to say the least, was not good. We had probably driven 40 or 50 miles. There was no traffic passing by us. The next speck of civilization was even farther down the road ahead of us. By the time the rest of our party reached home and then waited several hours for us not to arrive, it would be dark and too dangerous to come back until the next day.

OK, not that scary you say? Anyone should be able to survive 24 hours stranded on the side of the road. But you try to stay calm when you have no food or water (hey, we were headed back home, provisions were gone), it’s 90 degrees, you’re in a foreign country, and basically still in the jungle.

Finally they found the problem. A wire had broken. No electricity could flow to the spark plugs. No spark plugs, no combustion. Now, if the wire had broken on the contact at one end or the other then that would not have been too hard to fix. Strip the insulating coating over the wire and re-wrap it around the contact. But this break was in the middle of the wire. Hanging in space.

We could strip the wire clumsily with our camping knives. And we could kinda sorta half-braid, half-wrap the bare wires together, but that would not hold. We were still stuck. Then, as if by a supernatural power, a MacGyver happened.

Chewing Gum and a foil wrapper. I swear on a stack of On the Origins of Species. Someone was a big gum chewer, and apparently we had plenty of that left. So to bridge the gap between the wires, insulate it, and make it hold for the journey ahead, they used wads of chewing gum and wrappers.

We got back on our way, it was so unbelievable it was hard not to laugh. The gum solution lasted the whole way home, but there was another slightly exaggerated near-death experience waiting for us in the mountains that stood between us and home.

Read the exciting conclusion coming soon in Leaving Misahuallí Part II, or How not to be Thrown Over a Cliff or be Chopped-Up by Machetes.

It was early 1985. Long after Star Wars but well before the “Comicon” convention, entertainment and merchandise mega-industry mutated — like a super villain bitten by a radioactive capitalist — into what it is today. I was 20 and an SF and fantasy fan, but not quite a fanboy. Somehow I had managed to get “on the board” of a comic book, Dr. Who and Fantasy/SF convention in Miami, Fl — Omnicon VI. I wasn’t really on the board in the sense of making decisions, but I attended some board meetings and was given a key role. For no reason that I could tell other than no one else wanted the job that required endless hours of prep and time away from the convention floor during the convention, I was put in charge of pre-registration, registration and guest check-in at the door of the convention.

It all began, as all real stories do, with a chance event. A new graphic artist in my family’s business and I had become good friends. After Tiki-Al was hired, we quickly realized that we had a shared obsession of everything science-fiction. I have a few stories about Tiki-Al, but this story is about Omnicon VI in 1985. Tiki-Al was on the board of Omnicon VI, thus my connection to the convention started with them ordering the official convention t-shirts through my family’s business, thanks to Tiki-Al.

[While writing this story I did some googling to check my memory on a few things and found a link to the actual t-shirt on eBay that my company made, that Tiki-Al himself illustrated, but it had been sold. Oh, the humanity!! If anyone knows the owner of this shirt, please contact me! You can even see Tiki-Al’s signature (Al Zequirea) below the “Blakes7” art.]

So, somehow, getting paid to supply t-shirts morphed into me having fun with box after box of pre-registered attendee letters (1985, real mail!!) I had to make a master pre-registration guest list and hundreds of frakin’ badges. FOR FREE. Maybe I was a fanboy after all, who else would do that? That’s right, boys and girls, I had to open hundreds of envelopes by hand, and then hand-write the hundreds of name badges. I would not own my first computer, a Commodore 128 with a dot-matrix printer, until 1986. Timing is everything.

Looking back it was a fantastic guest list for a Con our size. Oh! those innocent days. I don’t have the program or a good-enough memory to list half the guests, but we had amazing guests. We had Tiki-Al of course, but this was before he was famous. We had guests from Dr. Who (Nicholas Cortney, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicholas_Courtney) Blakes7, the incomparable SF Book Cover and Rock Album artist Michael Whalen (https://www.michaelwhelan.com/home/), the SF author and Symphonic Composer Somtow Sucharitkul, (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S._P._Somtow), so many more, and the guest of honor and cause for our great and lasting shame, Theodore Sturgeon (seriously? google him, I’m not giving you a link), whose Star Trek scripts were the least of his achievements, such is his lasting impact on SF.

Theodore was a confirmed guest, but he was in ill health and had become bed-ridden after a long battle with lung disease. He was unable to endure the flight from the west coast to Miami; he was literally on his death bed. Yet, even though he had to cancel his appearance, he recorded his keynote speech and sent it to us.

His last public thoughts, recorded and spoken by himself.

Sent to us.

AND WE LOST THE CASSETTE.

As I said at the beginning, these were innocent times, and this was a convention on a budget. We didn’t have our own security, or a process to record chain-of-custody for the various artifacts we were entrusted to protect. Someone placed the cassette in a boom-box and set it backstage in preparation to play it for the convention. And walked away. Enter stage right, a sticky-fingered fan scoring a fifteen-dollar tape player. Thus, Theodore Sturgeon’s final grain of sand on his wide beach of works, simply walked away. He passed away 90 days later.

But wait, there’s more. Not as tragic a sub-plot, but what it lacks in gravitas, it makes up for with salaciousness.

One of our top-draw guests (I will be discreet until 50 years after his or her passing) was young and, of course, famous, at least famous in this crowd. Now, we (the convention / board of directors “we”) had rented rooms at the Marriot for our guests. It never occurred to us to do things like, I don’t know, have a babysitter for the single guests, put a cap on room service charges, or print or even think of a code of conduct (#MeToo).

You can see where this is going, right? We got notification of a thousand dollar room service charge (ok, maybe it was less, this was the Biscayne Bay Marriott in ’85, not a South Beach boutique hotel in 2020) for the guest-whose-name-I-will-not-speak. Apparently he or she had one or more young groupies in and out of the room, and much alcohol, adult movies, and food was ordered.

Not only was it a more innocent time but I was more innocent than I should have been at my age. At the very beginning of the convention, this randy guest made a pass at me. I don’t know if I was more shocked or flattered, but it never occurred to me to warn anyone to be on the lookout. For the record, I took a pass — but I do believe room service was thrown in as an incentive!

But even with the cultural tragedy and mini-scandal, it will always be the best convention that I will ever attend. As a “board member” I was seated at the luncheon table with Michael Whalen, mixed with all the stars, saw a lot of cool merch, and met…. EVERY. SINGLE. ATTENDEE.

In charge of registration and check-in? Never again.