Reader T writes:
“Where is the most interesting place you have visited, and will you go back?”
Matthew’s response:
Dear Reader T,
Thanks for writing.
My longest running penpal died on January 5, 2021. His name was Scott Humfeld and he was born seventy-four years ago today, on October 11, 1949.
After meeting in the Peruvian Amazon, we emailed back-and-forth several times a week for the better part of two decades.
Back when I was working at Haddonfield Memorial High School, a fellow teacher asked Alicia and me to chaperone summer trips to South America. We ended up going to Ecuador and the Galápagos Islands once and to Peru twice.
(This is how underpaid teachers get to see the world for free.)
The first half of the Peru trip was a boat voyage from the jungle city of Iquitos to a small town on the Amazon River called Pevas, where our students were matched up with local teens—many of whom lived in thatched-roof huts—for a cultural exchange.
The teacher who set these trips up had previously worked with our Amazon River guide and warned me that he was a character. That guide turned out to be Scott.
When we landed in Iquitos that summer, burned out hulls of ill-fated planes dotted the end of the runway and workers unloaded crates of live chickens from the belly of our aircraft. The airport was open-air and chaotic. And standing tall over a sea of locals was an American ex-pat with a devilish glint in his eye.
“Did you bring the donuts?” he asked.
The lead chaperone handed Scott the box. He smiled like a little boy holding a sack of Halloween candy, as he explained that Iquitos had a limited selection of sweet treats.
On the way to the hotel, he shared his life story with our group of teenagers.
Years before, he had uprooted mid-life and moved to the Amazon jungle to start a free medical clinic, but getting the donated supplies into the country required more bribery and political currency than he could sustain, so he joined the local tourist industry. He proudly announced that he had taught his assistants—two indigenous Peruvians—English so that they too could work in the tourist industry, which radically changed their lives and provided them access to the rest of the world.
Scott was smart and self-assured. He didn’t seem to have a single worry. He appeared to be free in a way that the men who had raised me were not.
“Most people in the jungle don’t have a lot of stuff,” he’d say, “and yet they are not poor.”
Scott also didn’t appear to have many possessions and seemed just as content as everyone else we met in the Peruvian Amazon. He was genuinely excited about showing my students a new world. He wanted to share his freedom.
At night on the riverboat, after we’d sent the students to their rooms, Scott and I would sit up drinking beer and rum under a billion stars. I asked how he had made the big jump from being a psychiatric nurse in the USA to running tours on the Amazon River. He mostly deflected with clever one-liners and laughed out cigarette smoke. In all the years I knew him, he never would fully answer any of my more probing inquiries about his personal life. But I liked being around this older man who seemed to like being around me. In a nonjudgmental way—which made me feel less tense—everything about him said, Please take life a little less seriously.
It wasn’t long before I was telling him my big secret: I wanted to be a novelist.
“Then be a novelist,” he immediately said. “Leap and the net will appear.”
I was aware that he didn’t coin the phrase, but—at the time—I desperately needed an older man to say those words to me. For a quarter century, the men who had raised me did their best to instill a there-is-no-net-so-never-ever-leap mind frame. That worldview had made me anxious and mistrustful.
When I came home from the first Peru trip, I wasn't sure that Scott would keep in touch like he had promised. I figured he met many tourists and couldn’t possibly befriend all of them. I emailed him thinking he wouldn’t write back. But he did, and we fell into a rhythm.
I didn’t really understand what was happening at the time, but looking back now, I can see that our emails became a safe space for me. I told Scott about pretty much everything that was going on in my life. He never failed to send back a few optimistic and encouraging lines. For every few thousand words I wrote him, I’d be lucky to receive a hundred in response, but those hundred were enough. He was wickedly funny and full of life. And he was rooting hard for me.
When I left teaching to pursue writing, he cheered me on. When I started a mailing list, he was the first to subscribe. If I posted something on Facebook, he liked it, albeit from an account he was ghost running for the Peruvian painter Francisco Grippa. When I started a blog, Scott was the first to comment on every post. He read my short stories and essays. He read all of my novels. He read Alicia’s first novel. He listened to her music. He made well-timed jokes. Via email he showed up more consistently than just about anyone. We could rely on him, and we did. For many years, he gave what he had to give and never failed to respond to an email Alicia or I sent.
Scott didn’t like to talk about his emotions or feelings. I learned that parts of his past were off limits to me. He seldom answered any of my questions without sarcasm. Over time, I began to sense that he had regrets and secret hurts, but he was too stoic, stubborn, and old school to talk about those things with me. There were times when I resented his being so closed off, especially since I was always so open.
But being in Jungian analysis these past three years has taught me that we often need someone to contain our emotional energy without them requiring us to do the same. It’s what a mentally healthy parent does. In many ways and for many years, Scott did that for me.
In 2018, I had to get selfish to get sober. And in early sobriety I became what some people call a dry drunk, meaning I wasn’t drinking, but I also wasn’t yet dealing with the psychological problems that led me to drink. In my case, my behavior got worse when I got sober, because I was forced to deal with internal realities that alcohol had been numbing for decades. Young parts of me woke up and began screaming. I didn’t have the emotional bandwidth to consider the needs of other people. I’m not proud of that, but I do believe it was a necessary phase of my recovery.
For a time, I decided that I would only do for others exactly what they had done for me. Kind of a twisted take on the golden rule. So if someone wished me happy birthday, I made a note in my calendar, and—when their special day came around—I wished them happy birthday. But if someone missed my birthday, I intentionally did the same. If you called me on the phone and took an interest in my life, I called you on the phone and took an interest in your life. If you asked me out to lunch, I asked you out to lunch. And on and on. It was a sort of test to see whom I could count on in early sobriety, which, again, might have been necessary for a time. But it was a small way to live and it made my world dreary.
Instead of the regular long emails I used to send Scott, I started writing him a hundred words at a time. In response, he started writing back only a sentence or two. So I did the same. Tit for tat. And then—after corresponding regularly for the better part of two decades—we weren’t writing at all.
In my dry drunk phase, I took Scott’s withdrawal to mean that our entire friendship was fraudulent. I imagined that, in my alcoholic days, I was too drunk to see that I was doing the lion’s share of the friendship work. Now that I was sober, those days were over. I started to reduce Scott’s and my relationship to a math equation, both sides of which needed to be balanced.
The problem was this: I was only measuring the things that put me squarely in the aggrieved category, while ignoring the many ways he had held me up. In early sobriety, I did this with a lot of people. It was a defense mechanism that did not serve my best interests.
I remember getting a brief and highly unusual email from Scott in the late spring or early summer of 2020. He said he had been burned in a cooking fire. He assured me that he was okay, before writing that he loved both Alicia and me.
I didn’t write the three words back.
And—even worse—after briefly replying to the email, I took another subconscious step away from him. I wasn’t ready to accept love.
I did write him on his last birthday, October 11, 2020, when he turned 71. He replied briefly in a way that felt—to me at the time—distant. I remember him grumbling about politics. I wrote back something neutral a week later. He didn’t reply. At the end of the month, on my birthday, he sent me a sentence or two, which I acknowledged. Then I sent him a Christmas card, on which I barely scribbled my name.
Five days into the new year, I received a gutting, perception-changing email from Scott’s friend.
Scott had passed away.
I wrote back asking for more details and was informed that my penpal had most likely suffered a series of small strokes that he hid from everyone over a long period of time. Because of the pandemic, he was able to suffer alone in his house without drawing much attention. Based on what I learned, I believe Scott’s I love you to Alicia and me arrived shortly after he had his first ministroke. A half-year later, colleagues finally caught on and forced him to seek medical attention, but it was too late. I was told that Scott died in his bed surrounded by friends.
The news shook me out of a bad trance. It was like an evil magic spell had been broken. And then a monstrous regret began to gnaw on all my internal organs.
Losing a beloved penpal who lived on a different continent was a new experience.
How do you properly mourn?
We didn’t know.
Alicia and I put a lit candle in the window for Scott. She performed a symbolic ritual on the ocean-side beach for him and I did one in Nags Head Woods, right by the Albemarle Sound. I wrote his name in the sand and talked to him until the waves gently washed away all the letters.
Sometimes when I am on my daily run/walk, I’ll stop at this same spot and talk to my old friend. I tell him I’m sorry for that dry drunk spell and let him know what’s going on in my life, just like I used to. Almost three years after his death, I still get emotional.
Shortly after losing Scott for good, I stopped implementing my twisted version of the golden rule. I started reaching out to people, reconnecting. My analyst told me to fight through my loud defenses so I could listen to my soul and see what it really wants. He taught me that human relationships are not math equations. If your soul wants to ask someone out to lunch, then you ask them out to lunch, regardless of whether they have invited you anywhere. And if your soul is uninterested in talking to someone, well then, you don’t go out of your way to speak with them. I started listening to my soul and found that it wanted to connect with many people. When I began taking chances on others again, my world began to slowly open up.
“Where is the most interesting place you have visited, and will you go back?” Reader T asks.
Well, I met an older man in the Peruvian jungle, drank with him every night for a week, and then allowed him to be my confidant. That took me to a place of unfamiliar male intimacy. Eventually, that man told me he loved me. He said the words, but he also refused to burden me with his very serious problem at a time when I was struggling with my own mental health. That’s a warped pigheaded form of love, but it is love. And now I tell Scott that I love him all the time, because I do.
This journey has been painful, especially in the past couple of years.
But I’d go there again.
In a heartbeat.
Happy Birthday, Scott Humfeld. I love you. The healthy parts of me always did.
Thanks for reading, Reader T.
Your man in Coastal NC,
Do you have a question you’d like me to answer here? If so, please find my email address on the CONTACT PAGE of my website. Feel free to email me your question in a brief paragraph or less.
I can’t answer every question submitted, but I’ll do my best to eventually answer many.
Dear Mattheew, I’m glad that you finally developed insight about relationships and love between men and have an understanding of your life and flaws and development. I shared this with a friend because I think he will learn a lot from your experience and wisdom. Thank you so much naomi shapiro.
I never thought something called a "substack" would ever make me tear up but here we are. That was beautiful. I continue to play the math game a bit with my relationships and I see how unhealthy that can be. Thanks for sharing your blood and bones so that I can grow through your experiences.