Portable Hammocks care is fairly simple. It's no sin to leave it out all summer, said Frisch, but when it's taken down for the winter it should be stored in a cool, dry place away from chemicals, oil, mice, squirrels, insects or pets, or any other thing that could damage the cording. If it needs washing, mild soap and water in the bathtub should do it, but it must be dried completely before being stored.

If you're fortunate enough to be able to hang your hammock from a pair of trees, the distance between the hanging points should be about one foot longer than the stretched length of a rope hammock from one metal ring to the other. The tree hooks should be mounted about 4 1/2 to 5 1/2 feet from the ground.

Getting in and out, Frisch said, usually is no problem. Sitting down and backing in, derriere first, is a good method, he said. And after a while, it should become as natural as, well, sleeping.

Just don't stand up, especially while listening to jazz. You might be able to get away with "Shiny Stockings," but "Salt Peanuts" would be sure death. And if you happen to be Elmer Fudd, don't even think about it.

The Creole Petroleum Corp. map given to me in 1970 as part of a "welcome to the Peace Corps" packet shows a great blank space for that vast region of Venezuela extending down toward the Equator between the borders of Colombia and Brazil. Territoria Amazonas, it says. A black dotted line indicates the Venezuelan boundary; tiny blue squiggles indicate a ganglia of tributary streams eventually feeding into the mighty Orinoco River.

Beyond that, the map says nothing -- as in "nothing," empty space, unknown territory, nobody home, don't even think about it. In truth, there are a lot of people home in the dense rain forest of the Territorio Amazonas, nearly 10,000 Yanomama to be exact, a cultural assemblage whose paleo-Indian ancestors probably drifted down from North America anywhere from 12,000 to 20,000 years ago.

According to distinguished anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon (whose book, "The Fierce People," first introduced this strange culture to the world), the Yanomama are a band of murderous primitives, seminomadic, engaged in perpetual internecine warfare, with no written language, no system of numbers, no calendar, no material goods other than what they carry on their backs, no clothes, no knowledge of technology, and no knowledge of the outside world.

Though small in stature and equipped only with bows and arrows, they are innate killers, uncorrupted by modern civilization.

Or at least that was the take on the Yanomama until Kenneth Good came along. Good was a student at Pennsylvania State University in 1969 when he read about the tribe in an undergraduate anthropology course. Six years later, as a graduate student beginning field work for his doctoral dissertation (under Chagnon), he found himself heading for the Amazon to begin what he expected to be 15 months of research among the Hasupuweteri Yanomama, a village community miles above the confluence of the Mavaca and Orinoco Rivers. He was to study their diet in an attempt to disprove Chagnon critics who argued that ecological factors, not genetics, were responsible for their horrible temperament.