Black dot, you will always be a sloth to me.

We'd been in the Amazon rain forest for a couple days. We pretty much knew the score. Hammocks, howler monkeys, poisonous everything, fresh water dolphins... trees that can walk... yeah, we got this. But then one morning, on a pre-breakfast canoe trip, something happened.  Something of such mystifying importance occured and I'm still struggling to comprehend its meaning.

The day started as most mornings. We woke up in our thatch-roofed lodge-on-stilts. It's located somewhere deep in the Cuyabeno National Reserve in the badlands along the Ecuador/Colombia border. We grabbed some coffee with the 8 others in our group, put on our ponchos, and hopped into the motorized canoe. We cruised up some tributaries of tributaries of tributaries of the Amazon River and took in the sights and sounds of the jungle waking up.

As we rounded one bend in particular, our guide started. He jumped to his feet was pointing at the jungle. He looked back at us with such a child-like wonder I thought his only logical next move was to scream "cannonball" and jump in the water. But no, he girlishly screamed to the driver to turn the boat around and hold the position.  While the boat maneuvered, he continued his open-mouthed grinning and pointing while looking back and forth between us and the jungle.

We followed suit, squinting to see what he was looking at. The excitement was mounting. On the edges of our seats we peered into the impermeable jungle. We looked back at our guide. He was on his knees, rocking back and forth mumbling something. He appeared to be crying. We let him be for a few minutes and soon he began to compose himself. 

Breathing heavily, he stood, wiped his eyes, pointed to the horizon and with an air of triumph declared, "two-toed sloth." The boat nearly tipped as we lunged to the edge to get a better look. "See there," said our guide, "the tallest tree, furthest away? There's a fork in it and on the right fork there's a bushy branch, see it? There on that branch, you see that black dot? That's the sloth.  See it?"  Oh yes, see it we did.

It was as though the dot was accelerating towards me.  It rapidy grew and expanded in my minds-eye. The moment before it became all encompassing blackness, it kicked me square in the soul and I had to sit. My head hurt. My chest hurt.

As if we needed further convincing of our fortune, the guide was raving about how rare this was and how lucky we all were, himself included. He continued to gesticulate and spew crazy-talk about the infrequency of "dot-, err sloth-sightings."  "Shut up, man! You'll get a tip!" Did I say that out loud? Things were getting hazy. I could barely breathe. Nothing was clear to to me... except... wait... yes, the black dot. It was remarkably clear. In fact, it had morphed into the only point of visibility on an otherwise dark and meaningless world.

Transfixed on the dot I had ceased to breathe entirely. I began to swoon and just before passing out, I looked to Tara and heard her say, "That black dot is the period on the sentence of my life."

I woke some time later to find the boat in a state of panic. Tara was gone and several others were in the water. The guide, seemingly unable to free himself from his shtick was lying on his side and speaking rapidly in French. Scared and confused I demanded answers. The driver, obviously some sort of nihilist, was sitting at his post, looking bored. I grabbed him by his fat head and began screaming in his face. He calmly pulled out his camera. He had managed to take a picture of Tara, mid-transformation, just prior to her grabbing a tree branch and climbing slowly and accurately into the canopy.