Editor With Machete; or, Surinamese Self-Promotion

After what seems a lifetime, my article about my trip to Suriname with my dad (to net bats, naturally) has hit the newsstands and the electronic page at Outside magazine. I pass this along partly as self-promotion, partly as an opportunity to set a couple of records straight. The opening paragraph, inexplicably, has been rendered as a pull-quote, and the photographs by Jason Florio (who also shot pix for VQR’s Cuba stories by Lygia Navarro and Paul Reyes) are incorrectly attributed to Tim Flach. That’s an injustice, because my dad and I put Jason through holy hell. The poor guy survived a series of flight debacles (including unexpected stints in Trinidad and Guyana), lost a BlackBerry to a sudden downpour, and was subjected to the single most unpleasant “day-hike” in human history—off Brownsberg plateau and back up in ungodly heat and humidity. All good training for Cuba in July and August. And, last but not least, the print article acknowledges the assistance of the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, but the web page does not. So please be aware if you read that this is yet another project made possible through the vision and generosity of the folks at Pulitzer.

The essay, for all interested, properly begins:

Near dusk on our first night in the Surinamese capital of Paramaribo, my dad stood outside our hotel watching the sky fill with bats. I took this as a sign that they were generally thriving, even amid the throng and crush of the city. Dad shook his head.

“Look around,” he said. “What do you see?”

This is our familiar dynamic—the dim but diligent seeker and the beleaguered but bemused scientist.

I studied the scene hard. I saw the whitewashed cinder-block buildings of our hotel lined up like boxcars. I saw a rum distillery, a bike-rental stand, half-collapsed homes held together by plywood and scavenged fencing. “What am I looking for?”

More here.