Jungle Romanticism

I love a good overgrown backyard - plenty of tangled vines to trip over and prickly brambles to draw blood. No, I'm no masochist. But danger adds to the appeal, right? There's a mystique to dense foliage making one wonder 'What's all back there?'. It stirs the imagination and gets the blood pumpin'.

I used to daydream about living in a jungle - surrounded by wild tropical flora. Those fantasies had me in a fancy-schmancy plantation house with fields of either cacao or coffee. Blame it on Elephant Walk and The Naked Jungle. At the time, I couldn't understand why Elizabeth Taylor chose drippy Peter Finch over hunky Dana Andrews. And I never got over how Charlton Heston burst into Eleanor Parker's bedroom, grabbed her, and drenched her nightgown with perfume (#sexualawakening). Hoo-boy!* What can I say? I was a hormonal teenager. Don't judge.

The point is, my initial fascination with all things jungly was at least partly tied to sex.

Of course, another culprit was Edgar Rice Burroughs. Tarzan** was in books, movies, TV series, and cartoons - you couldn't get away from him. It was a muscled collage of Weissmuller, Ely, O'Keeffe, Lambert, et al. The skimpy loincloths and swaths of exposed male flesh really did a number on this impressionable girl. But, these days, Lord Greystoke's animalism in Jane's bedroom is more amusing than erotic no matter how sexy Andie MacDowell's hair is. One day in the Congo and those locks would be a mass of dirt, bugs, and toucan droppings.

I don't daydream about living in the jungle, anymore. It might have something to do with sexual maturity. But I think it's more about coming to terms with the reality of icky bugs, snarly predators, and having to answer the 'call of nature' out in, well... nature. Realizing that Eleanor Parker likely had to wipe her ass with rubber tree leaves kinda strips the romance from the jungle.

That doesn't mean I won't ask my partner to reenact the bug repellant scene with me. 😉

(* That was not how I imagined 'Leiningen vs the Ants' at all.)

(** Not my favorite Burroughs hero, but that's a topic for another day.)

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