The Amazon rainforest is not a quiet place. It is full of sound — insects, birds, the movement of animals through vegetation, the rain when it comes, the creaks and drops of the canopy. The sound is continuous and enveloping. It does not feel like the sound of company. She was surrounded by the noise of living things and utterly alone among them.
She has described, in her accounts, the specific quality of having to keep herself moving. Not the dramatic, motivational version of this — the inner voice that demands survival, the will to live that overcomes every obstacle — but the quieter, more practical version: she walked because walking was what she could do, and when she stopped walking she was in the forest without moving, and that was worse than walking. She rested when she had to. She walked when she could. The combination, repeated across ten days, was what produced the distance.
The loneliness of those days was inseparable from the grief she was carrying. Her mother was somewhere in the same forest. Her father was somewhere in Peru, not knowing whether his wife or his daughter had survived. The ordinary human connections that make difficult situations bearable — the presence of another person, the knowledge of being witnessed, the possibility of saying out loud what is happening — were absent. She was entirely on her own.
She did not have the psychological vocabulary, in 1971, that fifty years of subsequent development in trauma therapy would have given her. She processed what she could in the moment — which was what the moment required, which was to keep moving — and left the rest for later. The later, as it turned out, took decades. But it came.