Up and up and up…straight into the sky. He guns the straining engine as we ride the edge of the precipice; empty air filled to bursting with thick, dripping foliage…the mangoes, avocados and coconuts hang heavily…weighting down the branches and I can almost touch them as we sail by on this green, damp laden stretch of black tar called ‘Road 53’.

‘It’s mountainous here’ he explains. ‘I’m not exactly sure where we are; it’s changed so much since then’. A band of warm fog shudders slightly, revealing a tribe of ruffled roosters crossing the road ahead. They are not concerned with us. They are peckish with the dirt by the side of the ruined roads and they’ve seen us before; these humans climbing to the top of the world with an engine.

He stops to ask directions of a lone man standing outside a house which clings to air and thickly poured cement. ‘Where is the house of Daniel?’ Apparently we have missed the crucial neck wrenching turn midway down the hill. We reverse and retrace. And then suddenly…a driveway widens at the edge of the air and earth, shooting straight up into the rainforest foothills and there are two people watching us ascend from their perch on an enormous porch. He exits the vehicle and yells, ‘I’m here! It’s me!’ We climb a number of steep stairs which rest in the clouds above dozens of potted pepper plants with shiny leaves and the avocado tree with a ladder perched at a perilous angle dropping off into nothing. ‘He tells me he’s careful’ when I inquire about picking avocados at that angled height. ‘Oh well then…’ I respond and clutch the porch railing a bit more tightly.

After decades, the conversation begins again where it once left off. Who has died, who still resides nearby, whose children now live on the mainland braving cold winters…which business has gone under. The rainforest watches us silently. It is busy with plans for another thousand years of growth and water and it does not care much for our presence; letting out a steady roll of rumbling thunder. Then the rains fall again and far, far in the distance, I see a man running down the road with a multi colored blanket over his head. He is trying to beat the rain.

If wishes were horses and beggars could ride…upon my word I would never leave this porch. There is cold water in crackly bottles, old powerful friendships, bright red peppers and we are hanging in the sky where nothing bothers…except for the rain, and thunder and the avocado tree where life and death hang on the ladder’s edge and the eye of the rainforest…