Two gringos almost sink!

     Two nights ago, I was in a very dangerous situation. Nate and I got stuck on a log. We were trying to keep our canoe from tipping and getting sucked under water by the raging current. It was night and we didnt have a flashlight and our motor just broke! But first i've got to take it back to the beginning. We had dropped off our friend Ananias at his weekley soccer game in the neighboring town. We thought we had just enough gas to get back to our house, and enough time to get there before the sun set, but we were wrong. We started up the stream, and got halfway before it got dark and hard to see. It also became difficult to control the boat because of the current. We started to run into some small trees on the sides of the stream and we got pinned on a fallen tree in the water. Luckily, we managed to get out of it. We kept going and got ourselves pinned again. This time we couldnt get ourselves out and in the struggle, the motor fell off its base into the boat and started smoking. It turned itself off, and we were left motorless. I had some of the most morbid thoughts of my life at that moment, and I imagined the headline back in the states, "Two Americans died in the Peruvian Amazon". We only had one paddle, but it would have to get us out of there. By pulling on the branches around us, we manuevered ourselves off the log and began to paddle back downstream. This was already a scary situation, made scarrier because our only light were some faint stars, there may have been caimen or any number of animals in the water, and we were about 75% of the way to our house, so we had at least an hour of floating in the dark before reaching any other people. We started down the stream and our nerves had calmed a bit after freeing ourselves from the log, but we were still worried. About fifteen minutes had passed when we hear another boat comming our way. We yelled for help. The voice that yelled back made us so happy. It was the voice of Ananias. He said he had bad feeling and knew that we had left the game without a flashlight, so he had come up the stream to make sure we made it. What a relief! We left our canoe and he took us up to our house. I would have kissed the ground if it wasn't so muddy.