Ah, To Pee From a Tree: The View From Above

You're Too Old to Spend the Rest of Your Life on the Couch: Let's Adventure!

May 16, 2024

My guide, paddling up front on the Amazon

The first indication that I was in trouble came as we were pushing off from the lodge. The lodge, in this case, was the Tahuayo River Lodge, owned by Paul Beaver and his wife Dolly, some four hours up the river from Iquitos, Peru.

You know how it feels. That urgency, damn it, I JUST PEED. I gotta go again, now?

Really?

My guide, a local woman we’ll call Angela, grinned at me as she handed me a paddle for our wooden canoe. It was wet season, 2015. The combination of torrential rains and Andes snow runoff had raised the water levels to its annual high, some six feet above dry season levels.

Before it got so hot I had to strip down

That means paddling everywhere, which is part of the fun. It's also part of the challenge as you're constantly surrounded by water. At least you're at the same height as many of the creatures you came to see.

Some, like the big boas, maybe a bit too close.

Anaconda, from a canoe, part of a Lodge trip (Trip Advisor review)

Others, like the voracious piranhas, are always lurking in the water ready to sink their razor-sharp teeth into any flesh close enough to bite, most particularly if the hunting hasn’t been good for them lately.

They aren’t the only things in the water that bite.

You don't want to splash in the water here if you can help it.

As my guide and I paddled quietly away from the lodge, we slipped instantly into the forest. My paddling was too noisy so Angela corrected my form until I was nearly silent. Still, the soft drip of light rain and sight of water everywhere just made things worse.

I started the trip feeling urgent. The more we paddled, the worse it got.

I whispered my dilemma to Angela. She looked at me over her shoulder, not without mercy, and said there was nowhere to stop. Either we’d have to go back to the Lodge or continue to the Research Center, which was some ways away.

By this time I had an emergency. I convinced her that it would be wise to let me find a place, so we started scanning our options.

After a few minutes of desperate scanning on my part, I realized that the only option I had was to climb up a tree, drop trou and do an air drop.

Angela grinned at me again, amused that I didn’t much care, and soon we were on the hunt for a Pee Tree.

We found one, with good strong branches down low, part of a dense intertwining of multiple trees with their leaves laying a pretty pattern on the water.

Angela pulled up to the trunk, and I hauled myself up the tree until I could unzip. I planted my feet in the fork and tried to relax.

Okay. YOU try to relax with your guide, someone you’ve only just met, laughing both at and with you as you try to find a comfortable position so that you can pee.

And she’s taking photos, right?

Piranha-infested waters below. Who knows what in the branches above.

Right? YOU try.

What I didn’t know was that I had created human-sized havoc in multiple supply lines.

You see, when the waters rise every year, all living things which inhabit the ground have to head into the trees. That’s every single creepy-crawly-bitey thing imaginable, of which there are billions and billions.

I guaran-damn-tee you these busy ants don’t appreciate it when some hulking human slaps both hands and feet right across a major thoroughfare.

Think about how pissed off all those drivers were when that big cargo ship busted the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore, and there went their major highway.

That, times billions, times biting jaws and venom. All over exposed flesh.

In seconds, while I was busy trying to relax, battalions of ants were trying to reconnoiter. I honestly was far too busy trying to keep my balance while my butt waved in the air, trying to coax out some relief.

Didn’t even notice.

I don’t recall precisely the moment that something to set them off, but set them off I did. Suddenly every damned one of them was biting the holy crap out of me, and they were EVERYWHERE.

So there I was, naked ass hanging out in the damp air, covered with biting ants head to toe, hanging on to this stupid tree for dear life, trying not to become piranha sushi, and I STILL HAD TO PEE.

All I could do was laugh. What choices are there?

The more they bit, the harder I laughed. Angela could see from the canoe what was happening. She suggested, with some urgency, that I hurry the hell up, do my business and get out of the tree.

NOW.

There’s nothing like hilarity to loosen the bladder, so while I hung one-armed, I used the other to swipe the ants off other parts of me, which only inflamed the troops more.

You could see them heading down the branch towards me, jaws gleaming.

WAIT ‘TIL THE QUEEN SEES THIS ONE FOR DINNER WE’RE ALL GONNA GET PROMOTED

Finally I’d released enough. I jerked my shorts back up, zipped in a hurry and shimmied down to the boat as fast as I could manage.

Angela was laughing as hard as I was by that point. We pushed off, mindless of the splash, putting distance between myself and my tormentors.

No sooner did we get two minutes out from the tree, all hell broke loose in my crotch.

Seems that one platoon of intrepids had decided to go forest bathing, and they apparently didn’t care for the suddenly very tight quarters.

So THEY started biting.

Mayhem ensued.

I nearly sent Angela into the water trying to unzip my shorts and locate the Navy SEAL ants. They went airborne and landed, one by one, in the turgid waters made messy by my thrashing around.

Whatever was lurking in the water made short work of the ants.

Better them than me.

It was a while before we stopped laughing. I hurt all over. Worse, in parts that really shouldn’t get ant-bit, but there you are.

Worse still, I had to pee again.

As it turned out, I had developed a full-scale urinary tract infection (UTI), which meant that Angela and I developed an extraordinary skill set until she could get me to a clinic up the river.