run through the jungle

The whereabouts of a long-missing Dutch woman have been confirmed. The woman, who was raised in a wealthy family in Holland, had moved to Colombia in her early twenties to teach and volunteer among the poor. She was last seen by relatives four years ago, ,when she told her family she was moving to the jungle to teach indigent children. It now turns out that she is fighting with a Colombian rebel group called FARC. Fragments of her diary were found when the Colombian army overran a rebel camp.

I love this story. It is the story of a woman who broke all bonds of conformity and dared to live big and crazy.

I come from a well-off family too, but unlike my Dutch heroine I chose the life expected of me. When danger called me, I shrank from it and turned my face away.

I was twenty-two and living in Prague when the first bombs lit the sky over Croatia. At that time, I was used to rootlessness and all-night trainrides across the continent, so it felt like all Europe was my neighborhood and my stomping ground. When the first fissures appeared in Yugoslavia that summer -- when I heard the blood-pulse of rising war, of drums and thunder on the horizon -- my blood rose up in answer and an electric thrill ran along my nerves. Think of it: only a trainride away, a mighty storm was gathering. I was drawn to Yugoslavia like a moth to flame.

I had an apartment in Praha 2 -- Prague section 2 -- on Plavetska ulice by the river Vltava. Almost every day that summer I'd cross the river on Charles Bridge and mount the hill to the American embassy. The second floor of the embassy was always crowded with expats, standing in line to pick up packages. Next to the mail pickup counter stood a bulletin board where travel advisories were posted. Neat rows of index cards warned American travelers about hotspots around the world. Recent rash of carjackings on the highways of Spain, said one card. Another read, Caution urged for travelers in eastern Turkey -- British professor kidnapped by Kurdish insurgents and held for ransom. My eyes sought out the latest travel advisories concerning the Balkans. These were updated frequently, and grew more ominous day by day. Unrest in the region. Travelers advised to use caution and stay on main roads. A week later the card read: Sporadic violence; roadblocks, security of civilians declining. All unnecessary travel in Yugoslavia should be avoided. Later it changed to: Strongly urge no pleasure travel to the Balkan peninsula at this time. Additionally, all Americans in the region on business are urged to leave as soon as possible.

Finally that card too came down. In its place this notice ran: The US has closed its embassy in Yugoslavia and all nonessential personnel have been evacuated. Any Americans remaining in the area do so at their own risk and should expect no assistance from the U.S. government.

Reading those words, I got chills.

I used to go to the train station late at night and check the trains heading southeast: the times, the prices. I would imagine myself boarding one of those trains. There was nothing to hold me in Prague. Everything I owned, I could pack in less than an hour. I could walk up to the window and push a few bills across the counter and get msyelf a ticket. I could climb aboard, settle myself in a car, ride all night to Zagreb and get off there. Then I could look around and wait to find out what would happen next.

But I never did buy the ticket. People like me -- Barbie-girls from the suburbs -- just didn't go to wars. We had worried mothers and fathers who would never understand, who would call us selfish and foolish, who would pace the floor, who would never forgive us if we got hurt or killed. We had guilt. We had liberal antiwar politics. We had friends and brothers who would make shocked faces and say, What the hell do you think you're doing?

It was years later when I heard a story about a boy I'd gone to high school with. He was an aspiring photojournalist (I remembered him only as a gawky kid with big ears) and when war came to the Balkans, he dared what I did not. He took his camera and went to the war, carved out a life as a stringer there, made a name for himself and launched his career. I still wonder what his mother and father thought of him going. Didn't they worry? Didn't he care? And why didn't that stop him?

Here is what I think: We are all born with our feet in cement, stuck to the ground before our first breath is drawn, by the expectations of our families and class background. We grow up in cages with clear plexiglass walls we barely take note of. A few of us stretch the walls a bit. A very few of us break them down and walk free.

Me, I was meant from birth to go to college and keep my hands soft -- become a professional something and marry a professional someone like myself. I was never meant to be a cop or a carpenter, a soldier or an adventurer. In the summers I made money as a babysitter, then later as a Kelly Girl, typing for six-fifty an hour. I never considered that I could have made more money on a construction crew. After college I knocked around Europe for a while but in the end I came home, driven by a sense that I was being left out, left behind in a strange backwater while everyone I knew was moving ahead into the Real World without me. I got a small-time job, but still I felt left behind. So I went to med school. Something was still missing, so I got married. That wasn't enough, so I had a kid. Then I got into the habit of pregnancy, so I had a couple more of them. At last I felt like I had caught up. And here I am. It's a fine life -- a routine one, comfortable. It fits me well. After all, it's exactly the life I was raised for.


Here: I have another secret, a secret kinship with the Dutch woman. No one knows this part. At thirteen I fell in love with Eden Pastora. He was called Commander Zero at that time -- a wild Nicaraguan rebel who took half the government hostage in Managua and lived to brag about it. I saw his picture in a magazine in the early eighties: all windblown black beard and fiery gaze. I never told anyone what I felt for him -- who would I tell? But the first man I ever looked at twice was him, and the first thing I ever wanted to be was a freedom fighter in the jungles of Nicaragua. I was never too serious about it, though. I always thought, girls like me don't actually do stuff like that.

Except, now I find out that some of us do -- the brave ones, the ones who crash through the walls and move out into the world, away from the path they were born to.

That is what the Dutch woman is to me: a living monument to all the possibilities that open to those who dare and who fear no borders of geography, or mind, or class, or anyone's expectations.