John Hopkins - The White Nile Diaries

It all began at the Oyster Bar in Grand Central Station in New York.

I was sitting at the counter with Kevin Madden filling up on cherrystones and bluefish. Kevin and I were classmates, clubmates, and good friends from Princeton. He was our class secretary at the Ivy Club.

I had just returned from half a year in South America with Joe McPhillips and Harry Rulon-Miller, investigating our romantic ambition of buying a coffee plantation in the Peruvian jungle. We had had many adventures but, in the end, the dream evaporated. There was already too much coffee in the world. To keep the price up, Brazil was throwing half its crop into the sea. The planters we met were colorful characters, but all up to their ears in debt to the banks. Harry had to head home early. In a park in Yurimaguas (Loreto Province), with the parrots screaming above our heads, Joe and I finally concluded that, at the ages of 22 and 24, we were not prepared to spend the next 25 years of our lives in the jungle.

Neither did we want to return to the U.S. with our tails between our legs, face family pressure to settle down, get jobs (and get married). After sliding down the Upper Amazon on a balsa raft, the fire for adventure was still burning in our veins. In that bar we mapped out a provisional plan to pursue our travels in Europe. The first thing we did when we got back to New York was to book passage on the Saturnia , an ancient vessel headed on her final voyage to Italy.

Kevin knew all this. He handed me the letter.

An invitation like this comes along once in a lifetime, Hoppy, Kevin said. Maybe you and Joe should take him up on it, since youre headed in that direction anyhow.

I read the letter to Joe over the phone. Write the guy, he said. Tell him were coming!

What no one knew was that for me Peru had been nearly ruined by the love I left behind.

(There is no such thing as leaving your love behind. Love clings to you more tightly than your own skin does.)

While rejoicing in the South American adventure, my longing for Lucinda Eliott imprisoned me in an agony of despair which I could not express, not even to my best friend.

I was living in two worlds. Half of me was traveling over the Andes and down the jungle rivers of Peru; the other half Id left back in New Jersey.

In Lima Joe and I had rented a room on the roof of the Pensin Americana on Carabaya, not far from Plaza San Martn. Black vultures roosted right outside the door. Each evening, after we had spent most of the day at the Ministry of Agriculture learning about coffee, I raced up the stairs to see if there was a letter.

Joe knew I was living in a delirium. He saw me taking the steps three at a time, scattering the vultures. If he was worried my passion for Lucy might derail the European project, he didnt give it away. He must have been stoically waiting for the whole thing to blow over.

After that fateful decision in Yurimaguas I went straight to the post office and sent her a cable. Then Joe and I boarded a steamboat ( vapor ) down the Maran River to Iquitos, arriving a week later. In Iquitos a goldsmith made for me a pendant from a green jade-like stone with a thread of gold running through it, which I had picked up on the bank of the Huallaga River. The chain he fashioned from a bit of Inca gold I had found on an archeological dig.

Lucy was thrilled I was coming home. She would take some time off from college so we could be together. I ran to the airline office, made a reservation and sent another telegram. She cabled back that she would meet my plane in New York. She was planning to throw a homecoming party for me at her parents home in New Jersey.

I fell in love with Lucinda Eliott when she was 18 years old. I was 21, nearly 22, and had just graduated from Princeton, or was about to graduate. I had known her, or about her, all my life because we grew up in the same small community in New Jersey. Our parents were friends, and we had both gone to the Peck School. I didnt pay any attention to her at Peck. When youre 13 or 14, a four-year gap is enormous, and she was still a child when I went away to the Hotchkiss School in Connecticut. At Peck she was the most outstanding student in her class.