After all, it wasn’t impossible. Ruben grabbed the pen out of my hand, the glowing lantern casting his hand’s shadow as monstrous on the blue tent’s walls. Next to the lantern, wiggling his legs and wriggling on his back, a half-fried cicada screamed in the same voice of the jungle. Soon it would be dead. We didn’t notice.
Ruben scratched out the design, as if having her on paper would prove the madness more possible. She was a beauty — 10 meters long, 8 logs abreast. He drew two paddles, two poles, and even two stick figures sitting on top. It was that simple, really. I held the blueprint in my hand, exchanging glances at the balsa and my friend’s exuberant 19-year old face. There was no decision to be made. Only the fact that it was possible was enough. I wondered what force drew me down river as a second cicada flew too close to the lantern’s flame and fell lifeless next to his friend.
The Amazon river basin is a sacred place. It is one of those precious few pockets of Earth that is pristine in every way. Engulfed in the jungle, one cannot help but think man does not belong. The insects paint the sky in black. Week-long rains turn islands to forgotten. And the jungle is so thick it swallows trails, people, and lodges.
That partially explains what landed within the largest mass of unspoiled rainforest on the planet. After a 16-hour hitch from Cusco through the Andes in the back of a chicken truck, we found ourselves in Atalaya. There was one canoe that boasted an outboard motor in the village. We found its owner. I’m not sure that he understood our request, to be dropped off downriver at the site of a long forgotten lodge, but he understood the $70 U.S. we had scrounged up between the three of us. This, and a warm beer freshly cracked, was enough to buy our fate.
Erika Lodge wasn’t exactly a lodge. It once was, maybe, rumored to have been named after somebody’s daughter who I am fairly certain never made it there to experience her namesake’s rugged splendor. The boat’s owner pointed to it ahead on the left bank, 30 minutes into our downstream puttering. It was little more than a clearing with a few weathered structures, screened windows, thatched roofs. The driver beached the canoe and muttered something we all nodded our heads to but none understood. I jumped on the muddy land. My friends I’d met on day 2 of the Inca Trail last week, a South African named Rudi and an Englishman whose name escapes me followed. Then our three backpacks. Then our 3 cases of beer, minus a second can the driver added as tax. We watched the canoe struggle against the current as we cracked three and welcomed ourselves home.
Erika wasn’t a complete shot in the dark. It started as backpacker lore in a backpacker hostile in Cusco, Peru, as backpacker a town as Peru can muster. Close by was the Manu Rainforest, said by some to be the most biodiverse patch of Earth on, well, Earth. Monkeys, jaguars, capybaras, tapirs, macaws, strangler figs, and something a backpacker eager to get off the beaten track rarely finds — a stiff dose of the unknown. But the lodges in Manu came with a $500/week price tag, a number about $450 higher than my budget would allow. Over the course of my year living on the cheap in South America, I had learned the truth of the adage pertaining to wills and ways.
I had been told of two contact people, a Brit and a local. The latter had a name, Ruben. They were rumored to be trying to get the old lodge back on its feet. It seemed they were eager for help and would trade free board for some hard labor. I focused on the first part of the deal. Free resonated with me, but there was a catch –- how to get there.
That’s where the hitching idea was born. Every country brags of having the deadliest road in the world. But when I heard that this particular road from Cusco at 11,000 feet to the Amazon basin at 600 feet, having to crest the Andes in between, was so deadly that traffic went in on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday and out on Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday, I realized there might be something to this particular claim. I made the mistake to ask what happened on Sunday. I was told something about even God needing to rest, and then, after a careful pause, a heartfelt warning not to try when God was on holiday.
I was hungover Sunday anyway. Monday came slowly, finding me still recovering as I lay on my backpack looking up at the mountainside graffiti that loomed above, Viva Peru. With great effort, I had found the soccer field that doubled as a truck depot, a ragtag collection of various vehicles and their few dozen drivers. I was half-asleep, feeling a bit guilty for dragging two other foolish travelers into this crapshoot. Between the three of us, we could probably muster up enough Spanish to get ourselves into a fair bit of trouble in well-greased bar. But we were armed with a name, Atalaya, and whatever relevance came with it. Hours passed and more than a few handfuls of no’s before we happened upon one driver that recognized the name and pointed to the back of his haggard dumptruck. There was some haggling, there always is, and after the right handful of colorful Monopoly money (called soles since the last border crossing), we had found ourselves a ride.
The drive was spectacular and scary -– two adjectives that are often found together when discussing South American ground transport. We drove up, through, and around the most rugged of the Andes. We alternatively sat, sprawled, and laid in the back of an open-aired truck, scattered amongst twenty villagers and their vegetables, sleeping children, barnyard pets, kerosene drums, chicken feed, and other myriad necessities of life in the jungle. Outside, the 18,000 foot peaks scrolled by like a movie, only colder and more nauseating. This is the kind of experience few travelers appreciate, I told myself. In the 13th hour, our truck drove under a waterfall in the dead of night. Luckily, our fellow travelers knew well each bend and curve of this road, their lifeline. Without a word, a man in a grey Fedora gathered me in, grabbing me by the shoulders and pulling me backwards against the peeling metal wall as a tarp swallowed us and the water thudded down as thunder from above. After a second waterfall and more hours than I care to remember, the truck stopped and the motor quit. “Donde estamos?” I asked to nobody and everyone at once. A woman with dark skin and darker eyes answered, her curious river-nosed toddler strapped to her back in one of the expertly-folded multi-colored cloth of the Altiplano answered in a mouthful of vowels. I unfolded the soggy piece of paper in my right pocket and read the name, adding an inflection of question on the fourth syllable. Atalaya? She nodded her head, bucking her cargo up and down in a faceful of the silken black hair of natives.
But that was the past. Fast-forward a good night’s sleep, a warm breakfast, one more truck, a motorboat, an investment of $70 U.S., and we find ourselves here, a dead end. The trip was never billed as anything but a one-way ride, and this was it, the legendary Erika, perfect in every way. It’s the kind of place that makes me feel good just knowing it still exists. To describe it would do an injustice to both those few who have seen it and those fewer who ever will. Simply perfect, in the rawest and most humble sense of the word. We finished our beers and pitched our tents on a beautiful clearing under a huge shower tree. In front was the ever-flowing River Madre de Dios. Who could have foreseen what she held in store. This was a now that portended no future. An arduous past has that quality upon arrival. We were present in every way. Squatter’s rights. Our new home.
Tina and Ruben, our unsuspecting hosts, emerged later that afternoon. We showed them our tents. Then we showed them the stash of beer we brought as an offering. They agreed, which is to say they didn’t resist, thus proving true the two greatest rules of freeload vagabonding: always bear gifts, preferably booze, and it’s easier to ask forgiveness than permission. As easy as that, we were delivered to heaven.
The sky was insane that night. It seemed there were more stars than space in between. Same with the insects. With the fall of night emerged the world of bugs, which to me meant ear-screeching deafness and, after three weeks, an unbelievable itch in places better not mentioned. But in the beginning there was no downside, just presence and perfection, staring up at the thick universe, the world we knew melting to dreams, then to morning.
Mornings were the best. Crisp and clean, still cool enough to move without breaking out in a ceaseless sweat that would endure the day. I found my routine in walking the three-minute trail to a side stream upriver, quebrada was the word Ruben taught me. Still groggy from sleep, I’d sit in the crystal water as its currents eddied around. Time was relative, slow and gelatinous. On the walk back I’d usually pass some breakfasting monkeys or a lazy sloth. Hunger as my only timepiece, I would eventually find the kitchen, or more exactly, a roof that covered a table, a makeshift cinder block stove, and some pots, where some driftwood and kerosene would transform river water into a hot cup of tea and a liberally-sugared bowl of oatmeal. From there, the day kind of unfolded in its own unhurried way.
I found myself horizontal in a hammock most of the days. Just watching the river — the only way in and the only way out. It was the lifeline, really, not the road I’d mistaken as such weeks earlier, the only reason this world existed. Without it, there would be nothing. In this way, the river was God. I imagined transmigrating outside of myself, rising above, looking down at my body and this hammock that clung to the river’s edge. I imagined dozens of Erika’s downriver, some swollen to villages, clinging to the riverbank, humble and miniscule enclaves carved out of the endless jungle all around, the endless jungle that would swallow us human animals whole were luck to frown on us. I was in paradise, swinging with the faintest of breezes the river breathed as the land warmed. On one occasion, a toucan perched so close I could reach out and touch it were I to disturb the moment. I had found heaven, and, importantly to a young man with less remaining $100 traveler’s checks than weeks left on my year sojourn stolen from the distant river of medical school, this heaven was free. In one sense, I could hang in this hammock forever. But in another very real way, there was a reason I had escaped beyond the farthest reaches of civilization. I was, in a sense, running away. And the skeletons from which I was currently absconded were sure to find me if I allowed my solace to slow the accumulation of miles between myself and my past. I was, after all, a backpacker, a mochillero. As such, my destiny was not to sway in a hammock but to shoulder my pack and continue along my trail. Soon even heaven grew boring. And, heaven notwithstanding, this mochillero’s dream soon filled with of yet-unknown heavens that await downriver.
Weeks passed. The days became routine. I’d grown sick of the vine-ripened bananas and the avocados, and my stash of sanity-protecting chocolate was quickly waning. Once I passed some Howler monkeys at play without stopping to look up. And the nail in the coffin were the bugs and this terrible itch that grew more intensely with each passing night, nights that crept by in the sluggish pace of the river, this place.
Slowly, I mentally readied myself to go back. But I loathed to retread the same path, the twisting nausea, the winding hell the yang of this hammock’s yin. Erika was, after all, a dead end. Thus, my dream of the unknown heavens downriver would remain as mere dreams.
Unless.
I first approached Ruben with my scheme while digging for earthworms. I liked Ruben. He was only 19, but his 19 years seemed slower, his experience thus longer, wiser. That’s what I figured, of course, since where I come from 14 year olds aren’t in the army, mouthful of coca leaves, taking aim at monkeys as targets to stay practiced for the inevitable Shining Path guerrillas from Colombia. But there was something about him I respected — he loved life in a way that is rare, thriving on the day’s potential for adventure, fun always the goal. The earthworms were for these Tom Sawyer-style bamboo fishing rods we would use in the streams behind Erika to catch sardines. Then we’d get the heavy line and hooks to fish for the real fish in the real river. All it took was one and we’d have food for the day. Of course, as anyone who fishes knows, its not about the fish. It’s about the fishing. And fishing is always better when you have a friend to fish with.
“Ever been down river?” I asked.
I made up his responses, as I feel I always do anyway, only with more freedom when forced to translate.
“No? How could we go downriver now?”
I understood the word balsa. I used to make glider planes out of it as a kid. It’s the lightest wood there is.
“We got balsa here?” I asked.
He pointed to a tree above us. It looked like every other tree above us. “Balsa,” he said.
We didn’t catch any fish.
I thought he’d forgotten about it. But that night, late, he came running from wherever it was he slept, his eyes possessed. The sudden appearance of his crazed brown face in my tent stole a beat from my heart, the shadow of his giant hand cast horror before recognition. As quickly, the adrenaline receded. But something wild now raced through Ruben. Whatever fires now boiled his blood would not go away so easily. I should have recognized it for what it was, the impulsive insanity of youth’s hubris unchecked and energy unbridled. But my own hubris and energies too ran free, and the winds of excitement lifted us both. I had been working on my book when the tempest hit, my back to the ground and the electric jungle all around. My journal rested on my knees. I felt the pen as Ruben ripped it from my hand.
I looked again at the design Ruben had scratched out. I’m not sure I would call it a good idea. But it was an idea nonetheless. I scratched myself subconsciously, fucking bugs, fucking jungle. Ruben’s timing certainly was good. Why not, I asked, both question and decision. Anything is possible. I realize now the porous logic of such rationale.
The next day we set off, machetes in hands, scouring the jungle for 8 balsa trees. And while this might sound an easy task from the comfort of one’s couch, cool drink condensing rings on wood, words falling from somewhere unseen, finding and falling a balsa in an involved task. First, you have to come to terms with the fact that you are directly contributing to the deforestation for which you stopped eating cows back in college. This becomes easier when staring down the barrel of 24 hours of nightmare travel in the back of a frozen and brain-rattling truck, if you could find it. Then there’s the economics of it, the principal of parting with another $70 to get just ten miles upriver. Beyond the psychology of it, it’s not easy to find a balsa in the Amazon’s thickness — a pale grey bark, brown-white splotches on the trunk, with flat, broad-based leaves that spread out like a fan. Next is the task of cutting a trail through the groundcover to get to the beast. And all of that foreplay leads you face to face with the balsa itself. All balsas, not unlike men, are not created equal. And for the task at hand, Ruben and I needed the perfect balsa — not too big to be hauled to the river, not so small it wouldn’t hold our weight, and certainly not too bent or twisted or in any other way unstraight. And then, and only then, does the fun begin. Over and over, that persistently intrusive tootsie roll owl came to mind as we hacked blisters in first our right and then our left hands, “how many machete hacks does it take to get to the center of a Manu Rainforest Peruvian balsa tree? The world may never know.” Humidity and sanity mix like oil and water. I came to hate that owl.
And then she’d fall with a magnificent thunder, giving voice to this land. I would seek solace in remembering the live Christmas trees I’d reused over the last 3 holidays as my guilt runs deep. But it was hate that trumped guilt, hatred of this damn tree, this damn forest, as I hacked and hacked and hacked without end. The final cut delivered something akin to resolution, an exhausted exhale, but was chased quickly by the specter of needing to do it again, through the same trunk, 5 meters up. The first tree we had made our second cut at 10 meters as planned, but we couldn’t even roll the behemoth.
Peeling the bastard felt like the scalping after the kill, deserved and celebratory if not primal and sinister, by now the guilt long gone. When naked, the balsa is beautiful. Virgin white. Gorgeous.
Then we’d drag the thing to the beach, not sand but an infinite collection of round smooth rocks that rolled and shifted in ways ankles don’t bend. We would assemble our craft there. And while balsa may be the lightest wood that exists, there’s nothing light about dragging a 5 meter tree trunk through a jungle. It only took four more experiences similar to this one until three days had passed and we decided that 5 trunks by 5 meters was a design far superior to the original 8 by 10.
Phase two was to find a good palm. A palm is the grandfather of the Amazon, a living keeper of time like children. One can estimate the age of a rainforest by how many palms she has, though the exact details of the formula remain a bit sketchy. Regardless, palm is a good hard wood, and we needed to build some claves or stakes. The palm was easy to find, but getting the wood from its trunk was like cutting concrete with a machete. Fortunately for our hand’s sakes, we had a hacksaw back at the lodge. And while this most certainly was the jungle, so too was it 1996.
Thirty stakes later, we hammered our raft together. She was a beaut, virgin white with beautiful dark stakes shot through her in diagonal X’s. She had a bit of a concavity to her with her outermost logs riding a bit higher than the central 3, and we had done our best to add a slight rocker by aligning the subtle curves in the tree and then carving out the front section like a spoon. As an afterthought, we hacked two oars out of some wooden planks harvested from a hut nobody was living in, chopped down some good pushing polls from some poll-looking bush, and fashioned a rope out of the husk of the peeled balsa skin we’d left behind. Huck Finn could not have made a more beautiful balsa. I have no idea why, but we named her Paco and broke a liter bottle of cheap beer over her bow.
You’d think leaving would be the easiest part. But shooting downriver on a boat that may or may not float is a bit of a mind-fuck. In all of those weeks spent by her banks, nestled in all of the life she offered us, I had the utmost respect for the her power. She is every-bit alive, and as such ever-changing, unpredictable. Within a day, she could well rise or drop 5 feet, transforming downstream sections to unthinkable rapids or unpassably shallow. And the crazy thing about the rainforest and its microclimates is that while Erika may be sun-drenched, some spot upriver may be dumping an inch an hour for weeks. We woke up early every morning to check the river. Too much silt one day. She rose over 2 feet another day. That night something with a stinger jockeyed for my sleeping bag and won the contest. When Ruben told me the next morning the river looked good, the tent was down in five minutes flat.
I packed my worldly belongings for the year into my mochilla and then wrapped it in a plastic garbage bag. No Gore-Tex tree in Manu, apparently. I was particularly concerned as I had completed 3 months work on my book Nazca and now carried it sprawled in longhand across 5 journals packed inside. I triple wrapped those. Then we tied our bags to Paco with so many knots even we couldn’t get them out if we tried, a mistake. We grabbed some supplies from the shed (5 days worth of pasta, porridge, and rice, no beer), and said goodbye to Erika. Our plan was simple: head downriver.
We made it about 5 minutes before the first rapid. In the interest of good storytelling, I would like to say we charged it. In the interest of truth, I will tell you we beached poor Paco and checked it out on foot. Though this was no class V, it looked a bit sketchy. It bounced and broiled the way rapids do but my real concern was the hard right the river took at its end section, banking off of a 100 foot vertical wall of siena-red soil that was eroding with such rapidity that life seemed to be sped up to time-lapse. If Paco hit the wall, we figured, she’d splinter into 5 balsa logs and 30 palm stakes. But if we paddled with every ounce of fear and confidence, we figured, we had a chance. We jumped in Paco and paddled faster than two men have ever paddled in the history of humankind.
Looking back, that was the moment of truth. There is a moment that congeals to slow motion and then stops. It was when Ruben and I realized there was no paddling out of this rapid, that the wall of mud and rocks was our fate, and that human will is no match for the river’s might. We dropped our paddles and held on, fully aware our lives were at stake. Thank God for Ruben. It was the look in his eyes that mirrored my own. Having him there transformed the stupidity and shortsightedness of adolescence into exhilaration and adventure. It’s for moments like this that we were put here on this wild planet.
Paco made it, and I glad we hadn’t set downriver on a Sunday. She took a heavy thrashing, but there’s nothing more sturdy, I can now say, than 5 balsa logs and 30 palm stakes hammered together on the rocky shores of the Amazon. After we shot the rapids with all the grace of a hunk of driftwood, we laughed at the Amazon as if we had beaten her. Our celebration would prove premature.
Day one passed unremarkably, save for maybe the fact that it lasted a day’s entirety. An equatorial day with an equatorial sun filled with all of the insects of the jungle is a triad impossible to understand. We paddled on-and-off for 10 hours. It was the off that I now remember the most — floating silently through the heart of the Amazon, not another soul in sight, riding the lazy current atop what last week were 5 trees, laughing out loud as the jungle spun in circles all around us. I have never felt more alive than in those gentle moments.
Night began to fall and an Amazon sunset is unmatched. Unfortunately, clouds had moved in from the Northwest and portended rain. Now we faced an interesting challenge — to find a bank high enough to keep Pato safe and make camp. There is a unique problem with camping in the Amazon river basin that is one of extremity: rains bring floods. We searched the banks as we floated by as night’s heavy blanket encroached, finally satisfied with a particular bank of rocks no different from the last thirty odd banks, time changing all things. It might have been high enough to keep us dry for a single night of rain, we hoped, and dared not consider our fate should the deluge last longer. Sometimes you hit the lottery, I figured, and sometimes good people die young. Hell, maybe someone would find my nearly-completed book and the fame of the artist would serve as my dying’s afterglow. But life is an odds game. And it was too dark to continue on our journey downriver.
We beached Paco and anchored her to another log. It started to rain. We set up our tent and boiled some water. We had pasta flavored with chicken soup mix — funny how camping trips are remembered by their food. Then we went to sleep. It rained all night. We woke up every hour to check on Paco. I learned how to say the river is rising in Spanish. I had a recurrent nightmare that seemed real as these words in which I was hugging a tree 20 feet above a rushing river in the black of night. I had another vision of waking in which Paco had wrestled from her anchor log before daybreak and Ruben and I remained stranded, 4 days of pasta and then the cannabilism play. I had another nightmare I was stuck in the middle of the Amazon with some half-cocked idea of going downriver on a bunch of tied-together logs.
We woke up and went fishing while the tent dried. Amazing how quickly forgotten the light of day chases the terror that drives a man to negotiate with God. It reminded me of all the times I told Him I would never drink again if He just helped me through this night, the toilet seat as my cold sweet pillow. In both cases, I had only myself to blame.
Day 2 bore the breakpoint. The day was pretty uneventful. Ruben and I took a liking to arguing over which way we should go. The river twists and turns its way through the forest. Sometimes it branches into 2, 3, even 4 arms and one must choose wisely. Underlying such a precarious escapade runs a current of voodoo, and to us such spontaneous decisions weighed critically. Looking back, perhaps it didn’t matter at all and the choices were merely a mirage of human control. “Right.” “Left.” “No, right.” “Left you idiot!” I was learning the curse words of the region, and the proof of Ruben’s and my friendship galvanizing so quickly in this time-warp was in the frequency in which I used them on him. On one turn, a big sweeping right, we went too close to the left bank and we had to duck to avoid the overhanging caña brava. I closed my eyes, I will admit only now, with oar held stiffly in front to protect me from the caña’s beating. Having survive the flogging, I opened my eyes before turning to check on Ruben. The caña had stolen his oar. I still remember Ruben’s breathless cursing as we parked Pato and I watched him bushwhack his way back to reclaim what the jungle had stolen. My gut-bending laughter came at his expense.
What happened next was humor’s opposite. The day’s arc was bending toward dusk, and we were hugging the bank in reconnaissance as we had learned in our tenure so far. A bank even 2 feet above the water line would have excited us, such were the paucity of high-water squatting options. Sticking up out of the water up ahead we saw a small branch, perhaps an inch thick. There was nothing particularly concerning about this branch, only that the water seemed to push around it without the usual vibrating hum I was learning to recognize. It was too late to avoid it, anyway, and Paco had plowed through such detritus before. The problem, we would soon find out, was that this particular branch was still attached to the tree that birthed it. Submerged unseen was a great tree that dwarfed our tiny craft.
Paco hit the tree dead center. We were stuck now. Motionless, the current gained pace all around. Whereas once we were one with the inertia of the Amazon, now we were at odds with the mass behind such a thing. After a moment of indecision, we instinctively ran to the front. Paco spun, but we were still stuck. We ran to the back with the same result. Then we both moved to left of center which proved our terminal error. The first log submerged u and the ripping current turned Paco on its side, swirling all around. We scurried up to stand on what was now the top, the fifth log, still freshly scarred from those long days of hacking. She shifted again, further impaled, deeper submerged. Paco was now 3 logs deep and the resistance that churned and boiled all around made for a thunderous tension. I threw my arms underwater to untie the bags. Too many knots. I reached for my knife but had forgotten the river had already claimed it during lunch. The bags would have to go down with the ship.
Paco wouldn’t budge. There was a house we had passed upriver. Maybe they would help. “Let’s swim,” I screamed. Ruben looked up at me with utter fear. Only now did I realize that my brave native jungle survivor never learned to swim. This figured. Then in a flash I thought back to myself at 19. I was invincible, beer and girls and adventure were my passions, confidence my strength. Unfortunately, every year thereafter I have realized a decline in how much I know, peaking at that cock-assured age at having known it all. I quickly realized that of the two of us helpless souls perched atop a staked together half-submerged balsa in the middle of the jungle 2 days from hope, I was the fool. What kind of an asshole would set off downriver in a questionable craft with 5 days of food and a 19-year old Peruvian as a guide, into the biggest jungle in the world, completely unprepared, only half-sure there was a village 100 kilometers downstream where a 10-year old map showed a picture of an airplane and, thus, maybe(?), an airport? I sat down on my sinking perch and held my head with my hands. Resistance offered no solution. It was resistance that now swirled and pulled all around. I looked up into the orange glow of sunset as optimism chased the sun and darkness filled the eddies behind.
That should be the end. Pato should have sunk. Ruben and I should have scratched our ways to shore with our tales tucked high, hopefully rescuing a machete between the two of us to cut through the underbrush by land, upriver, downriver, beating our way into the bush until coldness or hunger or some wild-eyed jaguar stamps the epitath THE END across my hammock-drunk dream of heavens downriver. But luck is more kind.
There, from upstream, like a mirage, a single silhouette appeared against the colorful sky. He stood tall and paddled a great canoe toward us. As he approached, I could see his face. He was old, sun-cooked and weathered, years etched in deep fissures around his sunken eyes. He paddled up behind Paco without words. And then the old man jumped into the current leaving his own canoe to float free, grabbing Paco like a greased hog at a country fair. The two wrestled like this for more time than my comfort allowed from the river’s edge, soaking and shamed. More than once the old man would be held down for too long. Then he would resurface, panting but calm, demonstrating the meditative approach of wisdom within the storm, both at odds and as one with the mighty river herself. And then, in a blink, Paco was free.
The old man floated on his back downriver, toes and palms and the top half of his beautiful face were all that were visible as he floated within the rolling skin of the Rio Madre de Dios, toward his canoe that drifted freely and then around a twist in the river’s bend, gone. I’m still not sure if he was real. I waded back in and recovered Paco, spread out a yard sale to dry our belongings. My books survived, some water stained to tell the tale. We lit a fire and stared like children at the dancing flames. Paco rested quietly on the riverbank. We skipped dinner and fell asleep near midnight.
The rest of the trip is trivial but for one strange tragedy. Day 3 brought us to our first real arrival point. Boca Manu is a small village on the fork of the Rio Madre de Dios and Rio Manu. The village was on the other side, where “our” river T’ed into the much wider one. Our energies refreshed but robbed of our confidence, the Manu’s 100-yard width proved an arduous paddle, but we managed to tie Paco up on the opposite bank and enter the village for some hot food at the riverfront hut that seemed to house a public eatery, 2 tables on the cleanly swept dirt floor.
Boca Manu was a tiny village of perhaps 10 huts, each built behind the last like an arrow shot from the river’s bank and into the Amazon’s belly. The huts were round structures, perhaps 10 meters across, built of vertically-stacked sticks, each with a door and a single window. The roofs were great peaking stacks of dried grass, three times as tall as they were wide. It looked as if a great wizard here kept his great pointed hats made of straw, his giant hand reaching down on occasion to fancy a new style. Seen from above, each hut might look like stepping-stones from the river’s edge, proximity to one’s neighbor here assuring survival, safety in numbers. And repetition of design here demonstrated not a lack of creative uniqueness but realized proof of concept, form following function. This village was too small to be on any maps but hand-drawn ones, this nook of Earth too unnoticed or forgotten once discovered.
At the home with the extra tables, no more than a family’s extension of their own kitchen, we learned of another great error. That distant village we had seen on our map, the one with the picture of the airplane, was 300 kilometers downriver, not the 100 we had estimated with the accuracy of a thumb and index finger held just so. And unlike the Madre de Dios, the Manu was wide and slow. Ruben and I figured Pato would need another 14 days to make the journey. That night I had one nightmare that recurred over and over. I was sitting on a flat platform of five trees spinning in a great sea, water-traced horizons all around, holding an oar carved plank of wood. The sun a pinpoint exactly above, casting a solitary existence without even shadow to share the space, quiet strokes chasing growing circles across the sheet glass, hacking at the surface, hacking and hacking and hacking.
That night I awoke with heart racing, the acrid taste of adrenaline on my tongue. The jungle was aglow in the ghostly orange of flame. Crackling splinters split the electric drone of the night, the glassy stillness shattered and sharp. Ruben emerged next, fire cast fear on his face, question marks as eyes. We ran to the source of it all to find a fist of flames tearing upwards through the night, 100 feet in the air. Embers poured out by the hundreds, riding the warm currents upwards and spilling sideways, time racing fuses that would blend to night before alighting on the dry roofs all around. A bucket brigade of villagers had formed, at its terminus a single gallon of water tossed again and again at the towering inferno. The fire raged until all that remained was a smoldering circle of ash and a family and the cloths that covered their sweat covered skin.
The next morning, during breakfast, I heard a noise I hadn’t heard in weeks. We had seen many things in the last 3 days — toucans, monkeys, a few-hundred scarlet macaws feeding at one salt lick, and some catlike animal I know today only as a minka, perhaps the mirage, perhaps a man — but nothing like this. I ran to the river’s edge where Pato waited patiently and witnessed a long canoe stacked with cages and nylon bags putter away, a 4 horsepower outboard motor behind the outstretched arm of a wide-brimmed hat and the man attached. He had passed, but I whistled anyway. He turned around.
It was not hard to convince Ruben. There was little choice in the matter. We had minimal food, minimal energy, a half-beaten Pato, and a confidence and will that had been beaten beyond that. Besides, the thought had crossed my mind that the newcomers from the night before may be castigated for the tragedy that had struck that night. My imagination did not have to work hard to conjure up what grief-stricken Amazonian natives might do to the devils in such a place. Humans are not so different, and blame makes a worthy chaser. Day 4 was 200 kilometers with an engine in my ear. Beautiful, but noisy.
We made camp in an old gold-mining town called Colorado that had been rich for 5 years before it was mostly deserted. That night there was an eclipse as the moon rose over the river. Most of the townspeople were watching Baywatch instead, huddled around the town’s only television on its single street, a handful of children chasing a tire with their sticks. At 4 a.m. we woke early and fell in and out of sleep with our backs planted firmly on the motor-canoe. This was our lifeline, our rip cord, our only way out. Stranded downriver once, shame on me. Stranded twice… We were cargo amongst cages of chickens and pigs and a free-range goat that stood partly upright, hooves on the bow, a homely figurehead appropriate for our adventure’s denouement. The oily smell of a two-stroke mixing the jungle’s splendor with nausea, the obnoxious din of propulsion, Man dirtied Eden for a second day no different than the first. Ego man’s leviathan, to have dreamed of carving an escape with such simplistic ease. When all was said and done, five days landed us in Puerto Maldonado, a welcome sight. No five days of my life will ever match the five spent in that jungle on those rivers.
It turned out that Puerto Maldonado had the two things we needed — a bar and an airport.
I still think of Paco often. I used to think of her tied up in her final resting place, on the river bank at the fork of two splendid rivers, in front of a humble home turned eatery, in a town with 9 thatch roofed huts that peak up toward the canopy like wizard hats. I liked to imagine some kids commandeering it, with all the pride of youth but without such grandiose visions that would land them in trouble. But my fantasy has evolved over the years, and now I imagine Paco breaking free, floating effortlessly across the wide and slow waters of the Rio Manu. She’s still floating there now, spinning and weightless as the jungle streams by. Eventually, I’m confident, she makes it all the way downriver, to Puerto Maldonado. And then on to greater heavens beyond, braving the jungle on her own to paradises unimagined. Ruben and I only sullied her beauty, anyway. Our destiny was to birth her, put water under her belly and set her bow downstream. For all our mistakes, our one success was letting her go, ejecting from our self-centered fantasies and let the jungle just be, Paco and the Rio and the great Amazon herself. Unsullied by man, only Nature in the end.
A tree that falls in the forest unheard makes one hell of a sound. Of this I am sure.
As sure as I am that heavens exist downriver without needing the voice of man to name them.