The book that never will be...

A writing project that never got off the ground was going to be about Sumatra and would have involved my old friend Nick and I tackling the island from tip to tip. Here is a flashback scene from the last time we were there together, way back in the last few days before I turned 21:

“Oh my God!” Nick said, with enough of a quaver for me to take him seriously.
“What?!” I asked, treading water, clinging to the upturned kayak that the current was trying to tug from my grasp.
“Oh! My! God!” Nick shouted. He was facing upstream, his back blocking my view of what was causing his panic. There were tigers in this part of the world, bears too, but it was neither of these that worried me. A day earlier we’d met a researcher who had told us that just a week before he’d seen a four meter python floating down the same river that we had just capsized in. But it wasn’t pythons that bothered me. The python he’d seen was dead anyway, a bite taken out of it by the only animal I feared. There were saltwater crocodiles here, the largest of that malicious family, and one of the very few creatures on earth that viewed humans as snacks.
Nick flinched, and I saw movement in the water, coming towards us, with irrefutable purpose.
“Oh my God,” this time I said it. It was coming right for us, ready to feed. I cursed Nick, my oldest friend, my best friend, for it was he that I blamed for capsizing us and dumping us in the river, the name of which we didn’t even know.
“Oh my God!” we said in unison, and it drew closer, to my enormous chagrin skirting the endlessly lucky Nick and bee-lining towards me.