Amazon

Well I used to be a drummer, but it got to be bummer, so now I am a pirate on the Amazon.

— New Riders of the Purple Saga

 

I was sipping a Pisco Sour on the veranda of the Machu Picchu Hotel, watching the equatorial sun set over one of the most exotic and mysterious places on earth, the lost city of the Incas, Machu Picchu. I’d spent the day scratching and clawing my way up Huayna Piccu, the 2,000-foot spire of granite that juts from the ruins of Machu Picchu. There is an Inca stairway cut up this solid cliff, but time has eroded many sections, giving the climber great intrepidation as the Urubamba River roars 4,000 feet below his feet. I was bug-chewed and bone weary, sinking into the frothy Pisco, when I spotted him. He looked like an amoebic Rambo, shaved head, wrapped in feather headband, earrings, rumpled khakis, stained in sweat and other dribblings of life. He had a compass around his filthy neck and a huge machete tied to his waist... he looked dangerous... and he was headed straight for me. The other tourists parted like the Red Sea, till he stood at my table.

“I’ve been looking for you,” he said in butchered English.

“Really.” There are some strange types in the Peruvian jungles... sometimes it’s best to humor them... until you figure out
their game, that is.
“Mind if I join you?” He’d already sat down.
“Oh, by all means, after all, this is why we travel.., right?”
“Vut are you doingk here?” he inquired.
“Nothing.” I was not gonna tell this guy anything about myself.
“Vunderbar!! I need a partner.”
Oh, boy, Humphrey Bogart, Treasure of the Sierra Madre... I thought.
“To float the river,” he went on.
“What river?”
“The Urubamba, man!” He pointed to the boiling, muddy inferno 2,000 feet below us.
“WHAT!” I blurted, spitting Pisco in his face.
Only one guy had ever tried it, as far as I knew. A few years prior, a maniac named Jim Savage put a raft in the Urubamba below Machu Picchu. Mr. Savage was swept around the corner and never seen again. “No, thanks,” I offered and ordered another drink.
He introduced himself as “Laslo.”
God, this guy has been watching too much Humphrey Bogart, I thought to myself. “Bob Dog,” I said and shook his feverish hand.

“Well, Mr... ah... Dog...”

“Call me Bob,” I offered.

“Well, Bob, about 100 miles west of here, the Urubamba River drops out of the Andes into the Amazon Basin, at a place called The Pongo, or gateway. That’s where we put in the river.” His eyes were flashing ferret-like.

“Has anyone ever done this... Laslo?” I asked.

“A few people, including Peter Matthiessen — he wrote a book called The Cloud Forest about his trip —. but we’ll go farther than he did. We’ll float a stretch that very few if any white men have seen. We’ll float about 200 river miles, to the jungle town of Sipowa, there we radio for a plane and fly out. I have all the gear, it’ll take ten days max, absolutely nothing can go wrong.”

The sky was deep purple, being slashed by diving bats. An ominous jagged line of 15,000-foot peaks was black on the horizon. From somewhere, the haunting notes of an Indian flute drifted across the valley as the ghosts of 13,000 Virgins of the Sun were starting to waft from the ruins. The Pisco was kicking in, I felt all warm and stupid. “Okay, Laslo, let’s go,” I heard myself say...

 

Amazon: Part2

By Steve Church

 

A typical four-square-mile patch of Amazonian rainforest contains 1,500 species of flowering plant, l25species of mammal, 400 of bird, l00 of reptile, 60 of amphibian, 150 of butterfly, and tens of thousands of insects.

 

— U.S. National Academy of Sciences

 

The morning sun was inching its way down the Andes when Laslo and I leaped on the down-river train to Quillabamba. The track from Machu Picchu is a marvel of engineering hanging from granite cliffs one minute. engulfed in the blackness of a tunnel the next. South American railways have always been construction feats. In 1860, a US. contractor built a 227-mile track in the middle of the jungle to facilitate the removal of rubber sap. Named the Devil’s Railroad, it took until 1912 at the cost of 20,000 men to complete. By then, the pace of rubber had bottomed out, making it all but worthless. The train jumped its track on its inaugural run, and now 80 years later has all but disappeared back into the jungle.

My traveling partner “Laslo,” is a mad Hungarian. He claims to have spent the last eight years wandering about the Amazon, alone. From the looks of his physical condition I have no reason to doubt him.

We reached Quillabamba that afternoon. The end of the railway line. It is the jump off point to Peru’s section of the Amazon Basin. We checked into a pile of loose boards and bedbugs that called itself the Urubamba Hotel, left the gear and headed for the marketplace. In any Peruvian town this is where it’s happening this is where one secures transportation to the outlying regions in the form of ancient trucks. We were looking to get to a jungle outpost called Consequences, the end of the road; from there It was travel by dugout canoe alone. While Laslo went from one archaic vehicle to the next, I popped into the marketplace.

A huge government-built warehouse, it was sensory overload of sights and smells. Puss of cacao and coffee beans, bundles of tobacco and cocas leaves, skins of animals (crocodiles and ocolots lined the floor). Cages of exotic bins and huge snakes were piled high. I noted an Anaconda skin that measured 20 feet (the reputed largest ever found was 62 feet; they say you could smell its breath long before you saw It). There were macaws and brilliant parrots squawking and speaking Indian dialects. (Macaws live to be so old that some have been known to speak extinct Indian languages.) Twenty varieties of corn, potatoes, bananas and numerous unrecognizable fruits rotted in the stifling heat. The meat department was a picture of the macabre. Each stall had the head of whatever beast it was offering impaled on a pole above it. A gruesome advertising scheme, it also served to keep the flies from the carcasses below. An Indian delicacy, “qui,” or guinea pigs, line done stall. Guinea pigs run like housecats on the dirt floors of Indian huts. When a special occasion arises, they simply grab one, peel the skin off, skewer and roast it. Not being big on presentation, they leave the feet, nose, whiskers, ears and eyes attached.

A skinned guinea pig looks exactly like a rat. Rat on a stick. I’ve tried a few times and find it tastes a lot like... well... a rat on a stick. However, there is one Indian repast which, for shock value, beats any main course I know and that  is skinned monkey. I rounded a booth piled in pig parts to come face toface with 50 peeled monkeys. Their skinless faces frozen in terror, eyes and mouths wide in silent screams, their scrawny bodies resembling POWs.

I’d about had enough “shopping” for the day and was stumbling past a giant armadillo being roasted alive in his own shell, when a sweating Laslo approached.

“Ya Bob!! I found a truck, it’s leaving first thing tomorrow. Hey, let’s pick up some food for the trip, what looks good?”

I stared at him in horror. “What looks good, Laslo??” My stomach was slowly rolling over.

“Oh, I don’t know, you go ahead and pick something up for us, I believe I’ll get a little air!!” I bolted for the door.

I woke with a hangover next morn, hanging over both ends of a five-foot, four-inch cot that the Urubamba Hotel called a bed.

HUT HUT HUT.

What the... HUT HUT HUT... I stumbled to the window and looked down on the town square... My heart stopped.. for there below me, filling the entire square, was the Peruvian Army. At least 200 heavily-armed soldiers, all staring direccty at me. I dropped to my knees and crawled to Laslo’s cot.

WAKEUPLASLO!! FOR GOD’S SAKE...IT’S A REVOLUTION!! WAKE UP!!”

He came up swinging, missing my front teeth by inches, then sprung to the window. “No worries, Bob...” I joined him...“that’s only the cocaine patrol. They’re here to bust cocaine operations.”

I looked beyond the square to the hills surrounding Quillabamba. They were literally covered with tidy rows of coca bushes. Hundreds and hundreds of a were planted in coca.

“And a fine job they’re doing, too,” I pointed out.

“Well, of course, they only bust the operations that don’t pay their monthly bribes. This is Peru, remember Bob?”

“My name isn’t Bob, it’s Steve.”

“I know,” said Laslo. “I checked the registry at the Machu Picchu Hotel, no Bob Dog. That’s cool, you can’t be too careful, after all, it’s a jungle out there, eh... Steve?”

On the way to our truck rendezvous, Laslo told me some facts about this often-heard-of drug, cocaine. “Most of the eastern slope of the Andes is now planted in coca, what the Indians have been doing since Inca times has become quite fashionable [I’d heard that also]. It’s legal to chew the leaves here, of course,” he went on, “because nothing would get done without them.”

I had heard that these coca leaves would give one quite the littIe burst of energy and had witnessed barefoot, stoned Indians running pell-mell up 15,000-foot mountains with 150 pounds of Alpaca rugs on their backs. The stuff obviously worked; however, after 10 years of chewing coca, your teeth fall out. After another 10 years of eating non-chewed food... you’re dead. It’s an old Indian at 45.

We jumped in the back of an already-crowded truck, then 28 more Indians piled in and off we went, headed to a place called Consequences, the last outpost of civilization.

to be continued...

 

Amazon: part3

by Steve Church

 

The Quechua Indian is indigenous to the mountains of Peru. Their huge chest cavities, for gulping thin air, and tree trunk legs make them perfect for this vertical land. They wear bowler hats and smile with coca-blackened gums. They are a quiet, shy people, quick to giggle. There were 28 of them sitting on my lap. We were carreening down a cliff-hanging dusty road, 100 feet above the roaring Urubamba River, descending rapidly into the Amazon Basin and a fly-spot called Consequences. Gunnysacks of guinea pigs and chickens squirmed under my pummeled backside. Great clouds of dust engulfed us as the ancient truck threatened to roll at every turn.

“Exotic, isn’t it!!” yelled Laslo from his cab roof perch.

“My exact words!” I mumbled back...

For eight painful hours we bounced along, stopping in each settlement to discharge passengers, human and otherwise. Finally it was just Laslo, myself, a 55-gallon drum of gas and two cases of old damp dynamite. Old damp dynamite is extremely unstable, as was my mood by the time we bumped into Consequences at sunset.

Dismal is too good a word for this collection of tin and bamboo shacks hanging on the muddy bank of this steaming jungle river. The occupants of Consequences stumbled from their shacks, not wanting to miss the new arrivals. Never had I seen such an inbred, diseased, cutthroat group of renegades in my life. Greasy sombreros pulled down over missing eyes, nasty scars and nastier gun belts. In fact, everyone was armed. The Amazon is basically lawless after all... and everyone was drunk. It looked like a dangerous Mel Brooks movie. Being somewhat committed at this point... we jumped stiffly from the truck, stumbled into the first shack and bought our new “friends” the first round... of hot beers.

Leaving Laslo to negotiate with this motley crew for a down-river dugout, I ambled down to the water, hoping to freshen up. The last rays of evening sun were filtering through the jungle and illuminating the leaping rapids, lighting spray and clouds of evening insects. The silence, occasionally shattered by a bird or howler monkey, was not silent at all now that I listened. There was a powerful hum, the OMMM of the forest, a million insects harmonizing, a gigantic ecological machine... a... Evenrude?

Yes! The drone of an outboard motor, pushing a loaded dugout upriver, weaving and bobbing through the rapids, clawing for inches. I looked again... What was wrong with this picture?? I had it!! A blond head!! The sun was reflecting off gleaming blond hair. Well, this had my attention now, and finally, just before darkness fell, the canoe pulled into the bank below me. The blond was a small boy, maybe five years old; what had me frozen in my tracks was his mother. She sat atop a bundle of cocoa leaves, as regal as Cleopatra. She was the most beautiful girl I’d ever seen. High cheek bones, finely-chiseled nose, flashing dark eyes in a cascade of waist-length hair. She wore long skirts, bracelets from her wrists to her elbows and a golden ring in her nose.

I stood like an imbecile, jaw hanging open; was I dreaming? My feet shot out from under me and ran toward the boat. I waded out, carried the kid ashore then went back for the girl. She slipped into my quaking arms and I started off. I suddenly stopped... it hit me like a train, I was standing in the middle of the Amazon River with a beautiful girl in my arms, while huge fruit bats dove around us and monkeys howled in the darkness.

“Oh Lord, freeze this moment, oh please, oh please

She was starting to squirm; I suddenly realized I was leering down at her like a dog might at pork roast. I stumbled to the bank and sadly released her.

Her name was Marie Angel, she was a gypsy ( a real gypsy, mind you), she had spent the past three months living with a tribe of Indians deep in the jungle — she and her son, whom the Indians called “Son of the Sun” due to his golden locks. She was headed to the annual gypsy convention, this year to be held in Pisac Peru. Seems that gypsies world-wide gather annually for a month of dancing, story telling, magic tricks and whatever else gypsies do.

Marie Angel grew up a wealthy Chileano, private schools, married a doctor, when she suddenly realized her life was mapped out for her. Now, a lot of people wake up one day and realize this, but few drop everything and become gypsies. Marie Angel did.

She had been traveling for three years, with no money.

“Money is the greatest wall between people,” she explained. “If you have money and need something, you simply buy it, but if you need something and have no money you are forced to get to know the person who has what you want. You have to leave him better off than he was, you have to give something of yourself, a song or dance perhaps.” Easy for her to say, I was fully prepared to give Marie Angel every cent I had, but as far as the song and dance bit, I just didn’t see myself getting far on that... not far at all.

I asked Marie Angel if she ever worried about her safety, traveling through snake pits like Consequences. After all, whether she recognized it or not, every blood-shot, shifty eye in that town was glued on Marie Angel... including my own.

“Not if you’re honest with people. If you’re pure of heart and look people in the eye, it’s like you’re a sister to them... right?”

Marie Angel was looking me right in the eye, as I felt the wind go out of my sails.

Well, I considered myself a fairly honest guy and I could be pure of heart, if the situation called for it... for a short period.., but I also knew that I’d met 15 people in the last hour alone that would have cheerfully killed me for my Timex. But whatever it was Marie Angel was talking about, she had it. The Flower of the Gypsies had that dismal den of cutthroat reprobates eating out of her hand that night. The Virgin Mary wouldn’t have been as safe in that crowd, and when morning exploded, Marie Angel and the Son of the Sun jumped on the same truck we’d rode in on and none of us ever saw them again. Wow... a gypsy in the jungle.

Laslo had been negotiating for a canoe and it turned out there was a “supply” boat leaving the next morning. We were in luck (as far as I knew). We spent the day helping load this “supply” boat. A huge mahogany canoe it was, 20 feet long, three feet wide; it was carved and hollowed (using fire) all from one log and it must have weighed 2,000 pounds. We loaded in the 55-gallon drum of gas, the dynamite, sacks of rice and beans, coca and coffee plants. We had a load in this thing and it was still sitting high and dry 10 feet from the water. How they planned to move it was still baffling me next morning when we prepared to shove off.

The entire town turned out as an eerie fog was lifting from the river. Forty people lined the boat, heaved and pushed it into the water where it immediately started to sink. The thing was leaking like a sieve, when a toothless urchin leapt in and started bailing furiously. Then the helmsman, then the armed bowsman. Laslo and I climbed aboard as the freeboard sank to about four inches above the raging current.

“Boy oh boy, this baby is loaded, eh?” I grinned at the one-eyed captain who had been up all night drinking and still gripped a quart of rum. I realized then we were about to die when suddenly the townsfolk started heaping more sacks of rice, coca, ducks and chickens onboard, then two plump women and two scrawny dogs climbed on.

“HEY, HOLD THE PHONE!!” I was screaming as they pushed us into the current. It snatched us up like a cork in a hurricane and into the rapids we hurtled.

 

-to be continued

 

Amazon: part4

by Steve Church

 

Deep in the Amazon forest grows a tree called the cinchona. In its highest branches, small pineappie-shaped plants called bromelaids catch and hold rainwater, which harbors anopheles, mosquito larvae. The female anopheles transmit malaria, the most widespread of all deadly infectious diseases. The bark of the cinchona is the source of quinine, the cure for malaria.

Well known facts:

The world’s largest river, the Amazon, drains 20% of the earth’s fresh water. It is 280 miles wide at its mouth (Colorado is 270 miles from northern border to southern). Ocean-going ships can navigate 3,000 miles up the river, where it is still 12 miles across. The Amazon drains a huge basin which encompasses seven countries and a land mass the size of the continental United States. It gets its water from the Andes snowmelt and an annual jungle rainfall of 200 inches (that’s almost 17 feet of rain a year or 1/2 inch per day).

The Amazon Basin is practically flat, leading scientists to believe that during the great polar ice cap molt, the seas rose and flooded the entire area. This would explain the variety of species normally found in oceans, now fresh water adapted.

Dolphins, sharks and stingrays, their skin pigment gone, their eyes practically blind from the murky waters, inhabit the river. Strange creatures also inhabit the shores, like the giant sloth, almost as big as a human, its metabolism incredibly slow. It comes down from its treetop abode once a week... to defecate. The harpy eagle, which has a wingspan of six feet, talons the size of bear claws and attacks at 50 m.p.h. The tapir, a cross between a horse and a rhinoceros. It sports-a elephantine trunk and enjoys the company of humans, often joining Indian children for a swim. There are brilliant morpho butterflies with eight-inch wingspans, frogs with poisonous skin and fish that spit water at passing insects. There are tarantulas the size of your head, water bugs so big they catch fish for dinner, and insects so small entire colonies live in one jungle thorn. In 2 1/2 acres of forest you can find 283 species of trees alone. You can also find cures for headaches, glaucoma and muscle relaxants in the same acreage. There are gresses that grow six inches in a single day. It is 82 degrees (and up) with 80% humidity during the day, dropping to the 60s at night. It rains up to four times a day.

Countless expeditions have been launched into the interior, including Gouzalo Pizarro, who left Quito, Equador, in 1541 with 150 mounted Spaniards, 190 foot soldiers, 4,000 Indians, thousands of llamas, fighting dogs, horses and hogs. In 300 days, they had gone 100 miles and were seduced to eating dogs, then horses, then each other, trapped In the world’s densest vegetation. Eighteen months later Pizarro and a few bedraggled survivors staggered back to Quito.

The greatest adventurer in my book, however, was John Schultz, an 18-year-old college student from Chicago. In 1947, Schultz left Quito with a backpack and $21. He hiked over the Andes, bought an $11 canoe on the Rio Napo and proceeded to float almost 7,000 river miles to the Amazon’s mouth, where he was caught in tidal currents for four days and practically starved. He then rigged a sail and headed north, finally coming to the Caribbean, then on to Miami. The entire trip took the intrepid Schultz 14 months.

Our adventure had begun six days earlier and 6,000 feet higher in Machu Picchu. For six days we had been descending by train, truck and now canoe into the Amazon Basin — my partner Laslo, myself and six Mixtos, or people of mixed Spanish and Indian heritage. We were in a 20-foot mahogany dugout with a 50-horse Evenrude and a drunk, one-eyed captain. I called Cyclops. We were extremely overloaded, keeping a toothless urchin bailing furiously as we plummetted through the rapids. For three days we had careened down river stopping to drop supplies and passengers at various outposts. Some stops were burned out sections of jungle where settlers had destroyed literally thousands of species to plant a few coffee or coca plants.

Tin shacks stood in these decimated plots with names like Conception, Exaltation, Perseverance and Thought painted on their shabby walls. We dropped rice and gas to smugglers, their bamboo huts stacked with cheap radios, clothing and pornography coming in from Brazil and huge piles of coca and refined coca called pasta heading downstream. At first these pirates were nervous about our gringo-ness, but soon relaxed around us. This came as a great relief to me, as they all were armed and they all resembled the worst serial killers. These mixtos are a dangerous people, having neither the fear of the jungle found in Spaniards, nor the respect found in the Indians. We passed merging streams, dead fish and dying vegetation lining thebanks. “Cocaine kitchen upriver,” points out Laslo. “The chemicals kill everything. Or mining operation — they use mercury to separate the gold; kills everything.”

During the day, we floated serenely along, the bowsmen shooting everything that moved on the bank. At night we put to shore, whereupon Cyclops pitched a stick of dynamite into the water then retrieved one of the hundreds of fish that floated belly up. There was little doubt about it, these people were extremely rough on the environment. But there was beauty, too.

Sheer slate cliffs lined the river, thousands of waterfalls hurtled over these walls to turn into mist, then rainbows, that arched across the canyon walls. Brilliant blue morphos butterflies, the size of frisbees, floated in and out of these rainbows and cascades of brilliant flowers blanketed the cliffs. It was like a journey to the lost world, or Eden.

One night, as the others were blasting for dinner, I hiked along the river, coming to a hundred-foot-long beach that was brilliant yellow and quivering. Upon closer inspection, I found it to be literally covered in butterflies. A wall-to-wall carpet of Julia butterflies. One scientist reported seeing a migrating horde of these insects literally black out the sun, being 300 yards wide and eight miles long. I very slowly waded into the middle of them and lay down. They rose, then settled back on me, thousands covered me like a crawling, shimmering second skin. I walked very carefully back to camp, arms outstretched like a quivering Frankenstein. The two plump females took one look and ran screaming into the bush. The bowsmen grabbed his gun and would have shot me on the spot had I not squealed like a stuck pig. I never tried anything like that around him again.

This little party was soon reduced to Laslo, myself and the crew, as we had unloaded all other passengers and cargo during the three-day float. We came to a white sand beach at the foot of a jungle cliff on that third afternoon and set up camp in a rainstorm so thick that without a hat you would have drowned. I crawled into a soaked tent, wrapped into a soaked blanket, and shivered off to sleep. Ever since we’d started camping in the jungle three days ago I’d had this recurring nightmare. I was being pursued by a relentless eight-foot zombie, and it was the most real dream I could remember. Well, this overgrown slime bucket was practically on me when I was shaken awake... by the ground. There was a deafening roaring and crashing, the earth was shaking... it was pitch dark and pouring rain.

“TERREMOTO!!” screamed Cyclops from his visqueen shelter.

“EARTHQUAKE!!” screamed Laslo from his tent.

My tent was leaping about; I could hear giant trees snapping like twigs. The noise was everywhere, all-consuming. I felt like a bug on a busy sidewalk, ready to be smashed any moment.

You could hear the earth ripping apart only yards away but could see nothing. Then suddenly it was over in an ominous gurgling. We yelled at each other to confirm life, then lay there wide-eyed till dawn.

Suddenly, I heard the Evenrude start up; I peered from the tent, as Cyclops and the crew loaded the last of their gear on the canoe. They were visibly shaken from what I now saw was a giant landslide, caused by the earthquake. The opposite cliff, 400 foot

high, 400 yards long, had slid into the river, taking its beach with it. That we had chosen to sleep on this side of the river is what you call a lucky break. I ran down to the departing canoe and had this roughly translated conversation with Cyclops... “WHERE THE HELL ARE YOU GOING???”

“HOME!!” he yelled back. “This is far as we go, nobody goes past here, besides we have just enough gas to get home!”

“YOU CAN’T LEAVE US HERE!!” I bawled.

“THE INDIANS WILL HELP YOU!!” he screamed back.

“WHAT INDIANS!!” But they were gone, disappearing round the bend.

I raced to Laslo’s tent. “LASLO, WE’RE STRANDED!!”

Then I saw his flap was open and he was nowhere to be seen.

I stood there hyperventilating as the jungle silence closed around me. I was alone in the middIe of the Amazon, I had no boat, no weapon, no food, no MTV... I started mumbling to myself over and over.

“I’m on vacation... I’m on vacation... I’m...”

 

Amazon: Part 5

by Steve Church

 

There are more missionaries in the Amazon than scientists. A disturbing fact.

I stood alone on the misty banks of the Urabumba River, lobotomized by my situation. The supply boat that had brought us this far had returned upriver, panicked by the previous night’s earthquake. My partner, Laslo, seemed to have disappeared also. He had mentioned that his one desire was to hang glide into the last uncontacted tribe of Indians and never be seen again. I’d told Laslo that my greatest desire, at that time, was a cold beer. Laslo and I had definitely different priorities.

The stillness of the jungle morning was unnerving. It was a gloomy, mysterious quiet, shattered occasionally by a spine-straightening scream of some reptile’s prey, or startled bird.

Many of these un-godly howls emitted from the forest are written of as spirits by the Indians. My mouth felt like the bottom of a bird cage. The place was giving me the willies.

“Well,” said I, jumping at the sound of my own voice. “Maybe a swim will snap me out of this,” I now mumbled, afraid to break this sanctuary of silence. I disrobed and waded into the murky water.

“HEY, WATCH IT!!” yelled a voice from the forest, splitting the stillness like a dynamite charge, sending my heart through the top of my head. I spun around to see Laslo descending the bank.

“You better be careful out there, you stupid cowboy!” he yelled.

“Why’s that?? Pirhanas?” I was relieved to see him but concerned about his concern about me.

“Water’s too fast for pirhanas, I think; however, there are caimans (crocodiles), anacondas, armored catfish so big they could swallow a man. Electric eels that could stop your heart, and stingrays. You step on a stingray, its barbed tail swings up and... well it’s kinda like someone took a wood chisel tO your shin bone.”

Well, maybe he had a point, I was thinking to myself. He went on.

“But the worst thing, in my book anyway, is the candiru, or toothpick fish. It swims up any bodily orifice, secures itself with spines and is impossible to remove,” he grinned from the bank.

I looked down at myself, waist deep in water. “Any orifice??” I squeaked. “Like even ‘Lil Johnson’??”

“That’s right, cowboy, resulting in sure amputation and...”

I didn’t wait for him to finish, but rushed to shore like an electrocuted hippo... yes, the swim had revived me. I would never look at a toothpick the same again.

“Hey, Laslo, where’ve you been?” My voice was still an octave too high.

“I went up to the Indian village to see about a canoe.”

“And...”

“Well, they don’t want to take us down river, ‘cause then they’d just have to paddle back up-river to get home. Too much work.”

“WHAT!! THAT’S CRAZY!! You mean these people wouldn’t like to take a little vacation now and again? Do a little shopping??”

“But,” Laslo went on, “there’s a mission up there, only the missionary is gone right now, but he’ll sell us a canoe.

‘When’s he coming back?” seemed like the natural question.

“Hard to say. See, the Indians don’t keep track of time, not even their own birthdays,” Laslo explained.

“WHAT?? How do they know when to get up, how can they be sure of their wives’ age??” I was shocked. “Okay, Laslo, how far away did this missionary go?”

“That’s kinda hard to say also. See, Indians measure distance by bends of the river.”

“So how many bends of the river has he gone?”

“That’s the problem; he didn’t go by river,” Laslo shrugged.

“Okay, Laslo, I’m starting to get the picture. We sit here till this missionary returns from wherever it is he went... so in the meantime, just what kind of ‘gear’ do we have.., what kind of supplies?” All I had seen were the two nylon tents.

“I supply the tents and the food.” “Which is?”

“Rice, we have a 10-pound sack of rice; we’ll drink iodined river water.”

“This cruise is not exactly the Love Boat, is it, Laslo?”

“Look here, cowboy, the sooner you realize that one doesn’t need all that civilized crap to survive, the better. Strip yourself of America, everything we need is in this jungle; it’s like

we’re the first and only people on earth, like Adam and Steve!!” He wore a demented grin that was making me nervous. “Enjoy... just always keep the river in sight, or you’ll get hopelessly lost, and watch out for the Fer-delance.” He picked up his machete and disappeared into the bush.

Being too mature to cry, I stamped my feet and whimpered a bit, then resigned myself to the fact that Laslo was probably right. I spent the day rediscovering my senses. Growing up in America, being bombarded by traffic and rock ‘n roll, our hearing is somewhat dulled to sounds as diminutive as, say, a beetle enjoying lunch.

Except for blowing it, my nose had become an obsolete organ in the frozen sterility of a Crested Butte winter. It quivered like an investigating puppy now. I found my eyes had to stare for long periods of time before they actually digested the sights I was seeing.

I’d come upon a crystal clear stream (too shallow to harbor the horrors of the river), stripped and lay down in the cool water.

The cares of my life were being swept away. What mortgage payment? What deadline? What girlfriend? What if I just never came back? Just disappeared into the jungle, never to be seen...

Suddenly I felt someone, or something, watching me. I opened my eyes carefully. There on the bank, squatting on their heels, were five naked Indian boys. Their shiny black hair was cut into bangs and secured by feather headbands, their

brown bodies were painted in black symmetrical lines that blended them into the forest shadows. They each carried tiny quivers and bows on their backs, and each held out a different jungle fruit towards me.

I sat up. They leaped to their feet, dropping the fruit, and ran screaming with horrified glee into the bushes, disappearing like ghosts. It seemed a lot of people were running screaming into the jungle lately after seeing me. This might have shaken a weaker ego.

I gathered the fruit in my shirt and started back to camp. Walking silently through this cathedral of green, I suddenly realized I wasn’t alone. These half-pint noble savages had appeared again. Just materializing alongside me, one took the fruit and two others held my hands affectionately. Thus we strolled along, the boys chattering like monkeys in a tongue that sounded almost Oriental. I chatted back in Spanglish. None of us understood a word and little did it matter. We eventually found camp as Laslo was preparing the evening meal... rice. I gestured for the boys to join us.

“What are they speaking, Laslo?”

“Machiguenga — beautiful, isn’t it?”

“Yes, it is, but what are they saying?” I inquired.

“They’re asking you what the world looks like through blue eyes.”

My first reaction was to say something smart-ass; that’s the kind of guy I am. But their faces were so open, the question so honest, I stumbled and told Laslo, “Tell them it looks the same as they see it.”

Laslo disclosed this to them; they nodded wisely and rose to go.

“Ask them their names,” I begged Laslo.

“It’s not polite to exchange names, not yet, anyway”

The sun sank into the jungle, the insects descended, the rain commenced, as a jaguar coughed in the muggy blackness. I zipped myself in the tent and prepared for the dream-zombie attack.

Next morning during breakfast... rice... the boys reappeared, this time carrying a tiny dugout canoe. It was about 12 inches long and decorated intricately. They handed it to me, eyes shining with pride. I accepted graciously and asked Laslo what it meant.

“They heard we wanted a dugout; they sat up all night making us one,” Laslo translated.

“Now that is cool, how do you say ‘thank you’?” I asked.

“There is no ‘thank you’ or ‘please’ to an Indian. There is no ‘right’ or ‘wrong’. If an Indian kid does something wrong, he is simply shown the right way. Indians respect and love their children as you would a very good friend. In fact, the first time an Indian child will ever be reprimanded will be in a Mission School.”

I spent the next four days with my Machiguenga munchkins, taking long hikes through this organic kaleidoscope. They taught me how to put my ear to a log and listen for a burrowing grub, whereupon discovering, they’d yelp in delight and pop the squirming beast in their mouths. They showed me how to trap a cock-of-the-rock brilliant bird that performs his mating dance on the jungle floor.

The munchkins would sprinkle resin-soaked twigs on this dancefloor, sticking to the bird’s feet and inhibiting flight. These kids could knock a monkey or a parrot, sitting 60 feet up in a tree, to the ground with a blunt-tipped arrow, not injuring the creature and eventually taming it. They showed me how to drink from the elephant ear plant and make poisonous arrows with curare.

For four timeless days, we ran naked through a psychodelic Eden.

Then one morning. they failed to appear. A few hours later an elderly Indian vaporized with the news; the missionary had returned. I wasn’t too sure how 1 felt about this as we set off for the village. Here was our  ticket out...but did I want to go?

The first missionaries descended on the Amazon in the 1600s. At the time there were nine million Indians living there. Today them are about 100,000 left. mostly decimated by white man’s diseases, many brought in by missionaries. They may have saved the soul but they lost the Indian. It is my misguided opinion that our culture, 220 years old, has little to offer a culture 20,000 years old. In fact, I see it the other way around. The knowledge that was lost is... well... incomprehensible... obviously. It will be a sad day for this world when we finally get everyone in it to think, act and believe as we do. Pretty darn boring.

The missions feed the Indians, for better or worse; it destroys their self-reliance. They clothe these “savages,” which in turn creates skin disease in the humid climate. Luckily, most Indians believe it’s the missionary, not necesarily God that has a problem with nakedness and shed their clothing immeadiately upon his departure.

The mission teaches Heaven and Hell; the Indian believes his spirits walk among us. These spirits can be contacted through a ceremony that involves taking a hallucinogenic snuff. The messenger to the spirits appears as a condor (a black scavenger bird). Ten thousand miles to the north, the Navajos had a similar (almost exact) ceremony with peyote; the messenger appeared as a raven (a black scavenger bird). We thought they were crazy, too. Some tribes drink the ashes of their dead comrades, a custom I believe we should do more of at Kochevar’s.

We approached the village, called Camisea; it was a tidy collection of bamboo huts built on stilts. At one end stood the Mission, on stilts also; it was plywood and tin. Rolls of barbed wire lay beneath it. The missionary approached, a short Peruvian Jesuit; he was unsmiling and serious, clad in hip waders, raincoat and rainhat.

Cowering behind him were a dozen grubby urchins... no wait, there were my five little noble savages, now clad in filthy tshirts that read, “Do You Know Me? American Express.” They had been transformed from masters of their environment and destinies, kings and rulers of their jungles, to illiterate Peruvian Indian school children, the bottom line of respectability in Peru. Welcome to the twentieth century, guys, I mumbled to myself.

We purchased a beautiful mahogany dugout and two paddles for $50.

A dozen Indians were instructed to carry it to our camp.

As we walked back in the blood-warm pouring rain, I turned to Laslo, “What’s a Fer-de-lance?”

 

-To be continued

 

Amazon: Part 6

by Steve Church

 

The jaguar was crouched 30 feet away, twitching with that feline excitement that comes just before the kill. Under its spotted coat muscles rippled, as if weasels wrestled there. Even though it was dusk and the diffused jungle light soft and fuzzy, the huge cat eyes were glowing as if a volcano lay behind them.

“Don’t move a muscle,” whispered Laslo. “The wind is with us; he can’t smell us.”

Maybe the beast couldn’t smell us, but he could damn well see us, seein’ as how we were 30 feet away and being carried right to him on a persistent current. Being in the front of the canoe, I was being served up like chopped liver to the only cat in the world that doesn’t mind swimming for its dinner.

“He...he... he doesn’t seem to be afraid of us,” I stammered hoarsely.

“Hell, man, he’s not afraid of anything,“ hissed Laslo. “The jaguar has no enemies except man... and he’s probably  never seen one. I’ve never even seen a jaguar outside of a cage,” he breathed.

I hadn’t either and I can assure you the creature takes on a whole new Identity. I was just getting a vivid mental picture of being ripped apart by a 300-pound cat when the shore’s backwash pushed us out into the river and out of the jaws of death.

The blazing eyes of the beast followed us around the bend.

“Holy mackerel!!” I felt as if I’d just walked through an LA street gang, unscathed.

“Let’s get a picture!” Laslo was paddling for shore.

“WHAT!! Are you crazy! That’s why there’s National Geographic!”

We beached the canoe and proceeded to “sneak” up on the beast.

I suppose that “sneak up on” is not exactly what two white boys do to the jungle’s most sensitized creature.

Probably more than anything the din of our sneaking startle the brute and with seemingly little effort he sprang 10 feet up the bank and vanished without a sound... which was fine with me.

He was the most perfect creation, the most majestic animal I have ever seen. He made an African lion look fat and harmless. Laslo and I looked at each other with the realization of just how soft and ugly and slow and defenseless the human species actually is. The human being is an awkward blob after the jaguar.

We were now three days downriver from Camisea and the Urabumba had taken on a new face. The river was two football fields wide, with its muddy waters swirling and boiling as if it lived itself. Our dugout was sucked and pushed about like a bathtub duck. It was a powerless, eerie feeling.

Gone were the cliffs and breezes of the Andies, it was now a smothering soaking heat. We were paddling through a steam bath. An insect-infested steam bath. The middle of the river with its limpid breeze was the only place safe. When we finaly were forced to camp, due to nightfall, we’d race to set up the tents as thousands of flying, crawling, leaping, blood-sucking insects would descend on us. Huge beetles, horns clicking, marched towards us, lines of fire ants and army ants changed course at the smell of fresh meat. Giant wasps, like helicopters, appeared and hovered. Black biting flies and mouthfuls of mosquitoes filled the air.

We’d dive into our tents and madly zip, hoping something hadn’t beat us inside. It had one night, as I found myself zipped in with a particularly vivacious young tarantula. She was as quick and agile as a first date, but I was finally able to subdue her with a stout smack from Foders South America. Whereupon she was’pitched head-long out the front flap. The insect mind was a terrible thing to contemplate as we huddled in those scraps of cloth with a horde of the beasts scratching and clawing to get at us.

No one has ever seen a No-See-Um, hence the name, but it must resemble a flying set of dentures. Here’s a fly so small it’s invisible but bites like a mule’s kick and if you scratch this bite in the jungle dampness your leg will fall off in a week, you’ll be dead in two... by a bug too small to see... humbling.

But good things were happening, too. Like my senses were getting extremely acute. I could hear a mouse fart from the middle of the river and if the wind was right, even smell it.

I had sweat until my skin became equal to the moist air. Our diet of rice and water had eaten away at every Big Mac and Budweiser I’d ever consumed until I was becoming extremely clear-headed, a strange and unsettling experience. I could see the chloroform pulsating through the leaves, the pin feathers of macaws passing 100 feet overhead. We had seen no humans, nor passed no human blight on the landscape for...well, I’m not sure, time seemed to have lost its meaning. We were in mother nature’s womb, and we were terribly and wonderfully at home there.

At times we’d pass huge floating islands of trees and

vines, uprooted by the previous week’s earthquake. Upon closer inspection these tangles of vegetation would reveal a hellish assortment of passengers. Snakes of every size and pattern clung to the branches. Huge lizards like the iguana and

jacuruxi (four feet long) crouched on the trunks. A few held terrified monkeys, which we declined to rescue for fear of being bitten or clawed in the process. A wound that in this climate could easily be fatal.

“THERE, A FER-DE-LANCE!” screamed Laslo at one such encounter.

An arrow-headed serpent as fat as my leg hung from a branch.

“Look at that beauty,” exclaimed Laslo, “a pit viper, extremely venomous; it’s bite turns your blood to water. The first thing people do is slash the bite open to suck out the venom and, boom, all their blood runs right out!! HA!!” Laslo was strangely excited by the prospect. He was starting to worry me.

It was on one of these languid and bizarre days that we chanced upon a half dozen dugouts pulled onto a beach.

“Machiguenga village!” whispered Laslo. “Let’s have a look.”

“This is very unusual; normally they would have hidden these canoes, so no one discovers their village. We could very well be the first outsiders to visit these people.”

“What if these people don’t want to be visited?” I suggested.

“That’s why we must be very careful. We’ll take no cameras — Indians consider machines living things — don’t make sudden movements, and do not touch any of them; we do not want to transmit any sickness. We could very well be the first contact.”

We started into the jungle on a distinct foot path, my mind swimming with visions. Visit a lost tribe of the Amazon, this was the stuff of movies, this was gonna be a real neat experience.

As we crept up the path, Laslo whispered Indian facts.“For instance, every tribe practices some type of birth control. The Machiguenga use the sap of the Green Heart as a type of foam, the Yanomamo in the northern Amazon do this: if a girl baby is born at the time a boy is still suckling, the girl will be killed. Because they need boys for warriors to attack other villages for... that’s right! Women! In fact that’s the only thing the Yanomamo fight about, women!!”

“Imagine that,” I offered.

“But that’s good, it keeps the social structure, gets new blood in the family and keeps the population in check ‘cause the men kill each other over the lack of women... which they killed at birth.”

“I see,” I said, though I didn’t.

We hiked for two miles, the entire time with the uncomfortable feeling of being watched. Shadows and light created shapes that flitted away before our eyes. The hair on my neck rose.

Finally we stepped into a clearing and 20,000 years back in time. A collection of crude but sturdy bamboo huts stood on stilts and were scattered about the small clearing. Naked brown men dozed in hammocks as naked brown women picked and ate lice from their heads. Bare boys and tame monkeys chased each other, squealing with delight. Young girls naked but for necklaces of flowers sat combing each other’s hair.

Magnificent parrots and macaws perched on thier shoulders. It looked like a Hollywood set, it was too real, too perfect...then they all noticed us...

All hell broke loose, parrots were thrown into the air, and with much screaming and confusion the entire village disappeared into the jungle. I turned to Laslo: “You’d tell me if I had a little breath problem, wouldn’t you, Laslo?”

“Quiet... don’t move...look harmless.”

I looked across the clearing to behold a dozen men, bristling in bows, arrows, blowguns and spears, advancing quickly.

Look harmless? I was standing there naked but for a pair of filthy shorts and decrepit tennis shoes. But I wanted to get extremely harmless so I commenced to wither. I proceeded to shrink myself into Mother Teresa. You could have killed me with a feather. The Indians now stood in a semi-circle 10 feet away, lances and arrows being shaken under our noses. They were not smiling and seemed extremely agitated. It was very apparent that these people did not, in fact, want to be visited.

“Holy cow! Laslo, tell them we made a wrong turn, tell them we’re leaving, tell them something quick!!” I hissed at him. They seemed to be a lot more bothered by me than Laslo. One fellow would lunge at me, spear pointed at my faltering heart, then scream and leap back. Then another would repeat his performance.

“Don’t run,” whispered Laslo, “there’s something about you they don’t like at all.”

“Oh, Lord, they see through me, they see that I’m not that good of person, they see...”

“IT’S YOUR GLASSES, MAN!!

THEY’RE REFLECTING THE INDIANS!!!”

I had a pair of reflective lens Vuarnets on, which I now tore from my face. A great gasp rose from the Indians.

I suppose if you didn’t get out much, and a huge, filthy, white-skinned man with mirrors for eyes walked into town and proceeded to pop those eyes out... and say you’d never seen mirrors or light eyes, it might cause a moment of distress. An elderly aristocratic gentleman, feather headband and war paint, stepped forward. He carried himself with the dignity of international nobility. The chief. The chief pointed to Laslo’s machete and made obvious coveting noises. Laslo made refusal noises.

“Laslo... don’t you think it might be a nice gesture, before they serve us up for dinner?” I mumbled to Laslo, smiling at the chief.

“Look around, man, there is not a piece of metal or plastic, or paper, in this camp; I’m not going to be the one to take them from the stone age to now. It’s not right!!”

Right or wrong, the rest of the crowd was obviously not used to seeing their chief refused and nasty murmuring circulated.

“You better say something and quick!” I was having a hard time believing this entire scene. Suddenly, Laslo told the chief something that caused him to break into a toothy grin.

Then the entire crowd broke into grins, they lowered their weapons and approached us, touching us all over and holding our hands.

“ALL RIGHT!!! Just what did you tell them, Laslo?”

“I told them we would bring them all machetus on our next visit.”

“Well, of course we will!!” I was grinning like a jack-ass eating thistles. The chief yelled to the hidden women and children, who vaporized front the jungle and shyly approached. We found ourselves surrounded and being urged to the largest of the huts. We complied.

The chief sat cross-legged and motioned us to do likewise. With a wave he sent women and children scampering, soon returning with necklaces of monkey bones and jaguar teeth and draping them about our necks. We in turn presented him with a roll of fishing line, the only 20th century item Laslo would permit as a gift. The women next presented wooden bowls of suspect hors d’oeuvres, some of which were recognizable as fried grubs, or raw eel, which I respectfully declined. Others, not so recognizable, I tried. One such platter contained a crispy fried concoction that tasted nutty and not totally disagreeable. I happily munched away. The chief then presented me with a gourd of a milky substance that had a distinct fermented smell to it. Something very familiar...

I took a long pull and offered it to Laslo, who refused it politely. Not wanting to offend our host, I gulped another great mouthful, made enthusiastic noises, and passed it to the chief. He was delighted that I found it likeable and we spent the next hour gestering wildly and consuming this suspect substance. He then gave us the royal tour, his subjects following reverently behind. The gardens, the swimming hole, each hut and family. The entire village accompanied us back to the river and wept at our departure. It was the most astounding day of my life.

“Hey, Laslo, just what was that concoction we were eating?”

“That, my boy, was roast brazil nuts and insects. Tasty, huh?”

“Ahhh... well... what was the drink you refused?”

“Now that, cowboy, is called ‘masato.’ The Indian women chew and swallow the manioc plant, letting it ferment in their stomachs for a few hours, then regurgitate it. It’s Indian beer!!”

I stared at Laslo. ‘You mean I just spent the afternoon eating bugs and drinking vomit??”

“That’s right!” he grinned.

Six hours later the amoebas exploded in my stomach and I collapsed like a Hong Kong suitcase.

 

-To be continued

 

 

Amazon: Part 7

by Steve Church

 

Author’s note: This is disgusting..but I’m a prisoner of the story.

If you have ever traveled outside this country, America, you may have noticed that we live in a very hygienic place. We are obsessed with sterility. Pasteurized, homogenized, wrapped, sealed, scrubbed, injected and inspected, we are a clean people. This is good... if you stay in America, but when we leave our sterilized environment, we’re virtually human flypaper for every germ, bug and parasite that gets within a mile of us. We have no natural immunity. Hell, we don’t need it; we’ve got soap and penicillin.

Consequently, one tiny little lunch of insects and vomit with the Machiguenga Indians and my

stomach was hosting the Amoebic Olympics. Never had these pygmy parasites found such a paradise as a white man’s stomach and they were proliferating like rats.

For two days now, I had been the most unpleasant company. Whatever I tried to eat was immediately rejected, one way or the other, and usually on my miserable person. Being in a tippy canoe with no convenient landing locations, I was left to wallow in my own filth too weak to care, I slumped in the bow mumbling and drooling.

To make matters worse, I seemed to have contracted Dengue fever, one of the milder fevers that could have befallen me considering the horde of flies that had blanketed me for two days. Yes, I was charming company as I lay in that dugout shivering, throwing up, sweating, groaning, and failing miserably with my loose bowels.

Finally, I could take the heat and stench no longer, and went overboard. To hell with the piranhas, the snakes, the sharks... however, for that orifice-swimming toothpick fish I did tie fishing line about my pant legs... tightly. I then tied together two sets of calabashes (gowds) one under my knees, one under my neck, for a kind of minimum flotation. Then Laslo tied a vine to my ankle and set me adrift. For two more days, I drifted in a weakened stupor, always acutely aware of the murky gurgling water and the horrors that lurked beneath me. I floated submerged but for my eyes, nose and kneecaps and told myself I didn’t care what happened, didn’t care if I died; I was, in my opinion deathly ill. Then it happened...

My eyes jerked opened, there was something terribly wrong, it felt like a nuclear submarine was rising beneath me, and I was 20 feet from the canoe. Suddenly, I didn’t want to die, I suddenly felt excruciatingly alive! Then it surfaced... it was a sea monster...

“AAAAIIIIEEE!!!” I screamed... I think.

The beast had the head of a rhinoceros, almost three feet from its bulbous nose to its pink eyes. Intelligent eyes, but not in our definition of intelligent. This animal had evolved in an entirely different direction from anything I’d ever encountered. It looked like the creature under “Here Be Sea Monsters” on old ocean charts. If there was any particle of matter that wasn’t actually attached left in my body, it would have exited at this time. The beast was four feet away, demonic pink eye staring into mine. I felt urgently out of place.

Then, like an alien movie, a hole the size of a tennis ball opened on the top of his head and foul smelling old faithful blew 15 feet in the air. That did it... I was legally dead... Sure, my mouth was open and moving and my eyes still bulging out, but the brain had mercilessly short-circuited.

“IT’S A BOTO... A FRESH WATER DOLPHIN!! DON’T SCARE IT!!” yelled Laslo.

I realize that at this point, one of our fair readers may write in and say, “Church is full of #@*%!!“ I have a Master’s on the Amazon boto and it doesn’t look like that at all... but has this guy ever actually been in the river with it an arm’s length away? Besides, as you well know, a newspaper of the professionalism and responsibility of the Chronicle & Pilot would hardly print anything but the truth.

So where was I?

Oh, yeah, so a tiny part of me says... dolphin?.. this is no dolphin... I’ve seen Flipper, I’ve seen dolphins, and this wasn’t one. This was some prehistoric brute that had surfaced just this once in the last million years and I, no more than a Crested Buttean with a plane ticket, happened to be three feet away at the time.

Its skin was a pale blue white, like a water-logged corpse. The massive head sank, a dorsal fin sliced the water and the tailfin of a dolphin exploded into the sky and it was gone.

So was I.

Laslo hauled me in by my ankle, drug my carcass into the canoe, propped me in the bow like a crash dummy and proceeded to talk to me.

“That was a very unique experience,” he told my remains. “The Amazon boto is considered very good hack.”

I, of course, could not relate the fact that I hadn’t seen it that way... He went on.

“The people that live along the Amazon actually believe that the boto leaves the water at night, walks among the villages and seduces women. There are numerous birth records in this part of the world that list the father as a boto.”

I stared at him vacantly.

The boto surfaced alongside our dugout the rest of the afternoon. It must have followed us for five miles downstream.

“This is great; he’s playing with us!” said Laslo.

Why do we always think that about animals? I thought. This creature is no more playing with us than Godzilla did with Tokyo.

No, this beast was examining us with a prehistoric mind that defied mortal comprehension. A shiver ran down my spine each time that pink eye surfaced and studied us. I was happy to make camp that night.

The nights had become bizarre as well. The minute I’d doze fitfully off, the same vivid dream would start. Running through quicksand, with a hollow-eyed zombie in close pursuit. By morning I’d be an exhausted pile of pasta. The dream was exactly the same night after night, and extremely real. The jungle had turned from a green Eden to a humid hell. My white-skinned self felt like a marshmallow at a bonfire. (An Indian’s skin is so tough, by the way, that during the missionary injections, the needle will often break off.) The heat was inescapable, as were the insects. Noises like a flock of screaming macaws passing overhead would grate like sandpaper on my brain. A troop of monkeys would howl and beckon from the overgrown bank. We’d investigate, the noises would stop, the primates seemingly to have vanished. We’d paddle away, whereupon raucous laughter would ensue and projectiles of jungle fruits would be hurled at us from the treetops. I felt drastically out of place and ill suited. Losing weight daily, I withered in the dank, infectious air.

Then one day we passed another canoe. “CARNE!” yelled its greasy occupant and paddled to-ward us.

“Wa~a buy some meat from this guy?” asked Laslo.

Visions of cheeseburgers danced in my head as this jungle butcher pulled alongside. He proceeded to remove a covering of banana leaves from the corpse of a young tapir. Great sections had been hacked from its body, a blanket of flies covered it. I missed America desperately at that moment.

We started to see more and more traffic, mostly smugglers of one thing or another; we’d give their heavily armed and grim crew a wide berth.

One day a bright orange raft with a huge outboard hurtled past us. A Mann County uppie steered, as four Indians clung to the bow. Shell Oil Exploration was written on its side.

Then we floated into Sipowa, our final destination. To its muddy banks a hundred boats of varying descriptions were secured. Great rafts of mahogany trees floated anchored. We’d made it.

Sipowa was a collection of about 20 ramshackle tin buildings. In one, we discovered a generator, a refrigerator and old beer. The patrons were a gnarly crowd of gold miners, cocaine smugglers, jaguar hunters, trappers and escaped convicts. The place reeked of character. This might have been of some concern to me had I not been on my last leg. A month in the jungle had reduced me to a 90-pound collection of green bones.

Rain beat on the tin roof in a deafening roar; from time to time a customer would pull a gun and blast away at a vulture or offending rat. For what the placed lacked in class, it made up for in cold beer, however, and I was glad to be there.

We located the short wave radio operator and for three hours attempted to contact Pucallpa, 200 miles away, the closest major town.

FinaIly, we reached a charter Cessna pilot that would be our rescue. We were told he’d be there when the weather cleared. If that meant two hours or two months, we had no way of knowing.

We sold our faithful canoe, drank beer and diplomatically tried to avoid being shot. Then, two days later, the drone of a small plane passed overhead, obscured by a low-level cloud layer. We grabbed our gear and raced toward the “airport,” a muddy strip hacked from the jungle, and an obvious 1,000 feet short. The tiny Cessna dropped from the clouds a hundred feet above the trees, cut the engine and crash landed in the mud before our eyes. An impeccably dressed, dark and handsome pilot leaped out. He was covered in gold braid and fruit salad. The plane, however, was a wreck.

“Rapido!” he urged. “We must depart before we lose this break in the weather.”

There was a 200-foot ceiling; it was raining pitchforks. Myself, Laslo, our soaked gear and an obese, sweating reptile salesman squeezed in with his cargo of about a dozen stinking cages of assorted snakes and lizards. I was smashed in the rear seat with this despicable character and his macabre inventory. All I could think of was that if this plane crashed I’d be trapped in there, immobilized by my seatmates, fat and covered with venomous reptiles. The pilot climbed in, fired the engine and started to taxi through the mud... which immediately covered the windshield from the props
backwash. We were careening and bouncing down the runway totally blind. The pilot was looking at the edge of the forest from the side window. We had no idea where the end of the runway might be as the plane hurtled toward it at 100 mph.

I prepared myself for impact when the pilot heaved back on the stick and we leaped into the air, clearing the treetops with a good eight feet to spare. We all, the pilot included, yelled in relief.

About an hour into the flight, I noticed a collection of buildings below us. In a sea of jungle, as far as the eye could see, these four dormitory-looking, white-washed structures were placed in a square, with a sort of courtyard in the center. Upon closer inspection, the place became frighteningly sinister. Green algae climbed the walls, the windows contained not glass but bars. It looked like a nightmarish insane asylum, or something Papillion escaped from. A chill ran

through me.

“WHAT IS THAT??” I yelled to the pilot.

“The Peruvian Maximum Security Prison!” he yelled back.

“Why aren’t there any walls around it??” I asked.

“The jungle is the wall; no one ever escapes from the jungle!”

I had, I mumbled to myself, by the hair on my teeth.

The zombie dream was absent that night, and has never reappeared.

The end.

 

Amazon: An epilogue

by Steve Church

 

The preceding Amazon stories covered a trip taken in May of 1982. But for the mouse fart, every word was true... or very close.

 

The Machiguenga now work for Shell Oil, exploring for oil. They wear T-shirts, listen to transistor radios and sell monkey bone necklaces to the hundreds of tourists that now float the river each year. I’ve heard they are listless, without spirit... zoo life.

The harpy eagle and jaguar have all but disappeared. Since 1966, 30% of the Amazon’s forests have been leveled to roads, mining and grazing. In Central America, 80% of the forests have been destroyed.

Contrary to popular opinion, the jungles don’t produce much of the world’s oxygen; the oceans do... however, the burning of the forests themselves create tremendous amounts of carbon monoxide, which destroys that often heard of, but rarely seen, ozone layer. They are burning 90,000 acres of rain forest a day... or a football field-sized chunk every second. The problem here, folks, is that rain forests only make up two percent of the world yet house half the tree, plant, and animal species on the planet. We presently have identified 1.5 million species of plants and animals on this earth. Some scientists believe there could be up to 30 million species. Why just in the last year, three new types of monkeys have been discovered in the Amazon alone.

But we’re destroying species at 1,000 per year, most never being documented. It should be apparent to us by this time that everything in this world is connected; when one species disappears, it takes another with it. For every ailment or sickness people suffer, the cure is somewhere in those forests. Yet we destroy the knowledge rather than learn it.

We have just recently figured out that the rain forests create the winds. That’s right... the hot air of the equatorial forests rise to the poles, the polar air sinks to the equator. The earth’s rotation deflects this north-south movement, creating trade winds. The trade winds transport dust from Africa, enriching the Amazon’s soil an ocean away. Everything is tied together.

You don’t think it could happen? It happened to the passenger pigeon, once the commonest bird

in the world, hunted to extinction in 50 years. So why care? Simply this, the world will be a poorer, more ignorant, lonelier place without them.

Want to be part of the problem? Burn this paper.

Want to be part of the cure? Call Rain Forest Rescue, 1-800-255-5500, and recycle this paper.