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Venturing into the Amazon
by Kim Tally
“The one thing
which we seek with insatiable desire is to forget ourselves,
to be surprised out of our
propriety, to lose our sempiternal memory, and
to do something without knowing
how or why... Nothing great was ever
achieved without enthusiasm.
The way of life is wonderful: it is by
abandonment.”
–Ralph Waldo Emerson
We glided silently in our canoes as monkeys cavorted overhead:
swift, brown bodies in the tree canopy, moving along as if on a
great, leafy highway.
A huge splash sounded in the distant shadows, followed by the
cries of a tiger heron.
“Jacaré,” our guide murmured behind me. Alligator. I couldn’t tell
if the heron had been killed or merely frightened.
We were in the heart of the Amazon, a mysterious, wondrous
wilderness still largely untouched by man, an amazing tangle of
waterways and forest that covers 2 ½ million square miles across
nine South American countries.
 It
was our first trip to the Amazon and my father and I came close to
missing the boat. Literally. United Airlines was in the midst of a
pilot slowdown, and our flight, which was supposed to get us to
the boat in time, was cancelled. Without much hope, I rose at 5:30
the next morning and called our boat captain, Moacir, in Brazil.
No problem, he said, catch the next flight and my son will drive
you to the boat. Little knowing how that could be possible
(driving in the Amazon?) Pops and I grabbed our bags and headed
out on what turned out to be an adventure of a lifetime.
Not only was Mo’s son waiting for us at the airport, he graciously
took us home so we could shower, then drove us onto a car ferry to
cross the mighty Amazon, the first leg of a ninety-mile journey to
catch up with the boat in Manacapurú, the last outpost on the
paved highway.
But the true highway is the Amazon itself – virtually all travel
and commerce is done on the river. Ferries, the “buses” of the
Amazon, are called birdcages: open-sided boats hung with the
hammocks of travelers who lay back in quiet repose as the river
flows by, distances being measured in days rather than minutes or
hours or even miles.
Although our
fellow travelers took a day out of their itinerary to pick us up,
they greeted us warmly as the boat glided up to the dock in
Manacapurú. As the trip unfolded, so did our knowledge of our
companions: a mix of college professors, school teachers,
photographers, a doctor, lawyer and artist who ranged in age from
their twenties
to seventies, and two young travelers who slung their hammocks up
on deck: Bård, a 23-year old tourism major from Norway, and Mike,
a seasoned traveler of 19 who spent high school skipping out of
school as an exchange student in Thailand so he could learn Thai
kickboxing in the streets. As he
was the only one who cou ld
translate his transcripts when he returned (which said he’d
flunked out of
school) – he graduated high school with honors!
He went
on to become the
heartthrob of 13 and 14-year-old girls in the small towns along
the river, the girls running alongside calling “Mikey, Mikey!” as
we pulled away from the docks. Needless to say his fellow
travelers teased him unmercifully, but he took it in stride with
an infectious grin.
As soon as my father and I boarded, the boat slipped away from the
dock, and by sunset we had left civilization behind. The
floodwaters around us seemed like an endless sea dotted with
shrubs but the captain enlightened me – we were not in fact
floating past shrubs, we were floating in the tree canopy: the
floodwaters of the Amazon rise as much as 70 feet in a season, and
the resilient trees have learned to survive being submerged for a
good part of the year.
After nearly 30 hours of traveling I was exhausted but I couldn’t
bear to go to bed: the world around me was so incredibly alien it
was almost disorienting and I wanted to stay up and soak it all
in. Marston Bates once said: “It is a humbling experience, and
surely a healthy one, to enter a landscape that man has not been
able to alter, to dominate, to twist to his own purposes,” and it
must have been here that he was speaking of. The vastness of the
water and the wilderness dwarfed me, and no matter where I looked,
there was no sign of humanity anywhere, no towns, no houses, no
boats. Every sense was assailed by newness, the sights, the smell
of water and jungle, the feel of warm tropical air against my
skin.
I could see iguanas clinging to the treetops, their prehistoric
silhouettes against the last, fading light of the sky showing
clearly they were the inspiration for Godzilla. They are in fact
incredibly shy creatures and easily frightened: as we ventured out
in canoes we had to be extremely quiet or they would plunge from
the tops of trees in a horrendous belly flop to escape us, and on
occasion would strike a branch or other protruding object that
surely must have injured them.
 Even
the sky was different. For the first time in my life I saw the
Southern Cross; and the Big Dipper, which hangs high in the sky
back home, barely rose above the horizon. Being from the big city,
I am used to seeing only the stars that can outshine city lights –
Venus, Mars, a handful of others scattered across the sky – but
here the stars filled the sky by the thousands and by some optical
trick seemed to hang low enough to touch.
It seemed I scarcely went to bed before Mo was waking us for a
pre-dawn canoe ride, the first of many forays. The forest lay
silent as we motored through the dark, but as the sun tinged the
horizon, the forest came alive. Whole trees erupted with squawking
parakeets. Parrots screeched overhead and in the distance a dull
roar made me think I was hearing jet engines, and in a moment of
dimwittedness, I wondered how on earth they had gotten a runway
into the jungle. It was only as we got closer and I glimpsed them
flitting through the trees that I realized the dull roar came from
howler monkeys, the largest of the primates in the Amazon.
Mo never tired of taking us out in the canoes and took genuine
pleasure in sharing the treasures of the Amazon with us:
bromeliads growing high in the trees, delicate orchids clinging to
tree trunks, giant lily pads that, when he pulled them from the
water and held them up, were as tall as he was and covered with
fierce thorns. He taught us about the prehistoric hoatzin, a
rotund, bald-faced bird that is a terrible flyer; and the horned
screamer which has one strange claw on each of its wings and a
“horn” protruding from its forehead. We found one exhausted in the
middle of a lake and after patiently letting Mo show us its nearly
6-foot wingspan, the screamer perched on our cooler, content for a
lift to the nearest island.
 Our
excursions became an incredible lesson in observation. In short
order I was convinced I was blind as people would ooh and ahh over
things I couldn’t see – or saw just the instant before they
disappeared. Monkeys peering from the foliage. Macaws a distant
splash of scarlet in the trees. Our guides showed incredible
patience with me – smiling indulgently as I searched every distant
tree for the iguana I was told was there, only to find it three
feet away and as plain as day once I knew where to look. One guide
tried repeatedly to point out some bats to me as we rested in the
shade of a tree – and I searched for them in vain, oblivious to
the fact they were clinging to the tree in front of me, a scant
foot or so from my face. To my untrained eyes they had looked like
some kind of fungus growing on the side of the tree and I had
dismissed them. We grinned in triumph that, at least this once, we
had conquered my unseeing eyes.
Our patient guides were also our canoe drivers and I was forever
amazed at their skill: they could plow through the forest in pitch
blackness without a disaster, and they could always find their way
back to the boat no matter how far into the forest we went or how
devious a path we took. Only once were we lost and that was in
broad daylight. What started out as a short canoe ride in search
of a Cormorant nesting site turned into a 6-hour paddle, and those
who brought snacks on the canoes were hailed as heroes. But what a
sight it was to behold. The place was filled with thousands of
Cormorant nests in every nook and cranny of every tree as far as
we could see. The adult Cormorants, huge black fishing birds that
look a bit like a Heron, lurked awkwardly near their nests,
nervous at our intrusion, surrounding us with noise and exuberance
and life.
Each day, each moment provided new revelations: a rare Harpy
Eagle, the most powerful bird on the planet (capable of lifting a
sloth or pig in its talons and flying to the tops of the trees),
glowering down at us from its perch, fiercer than the fiercest
bald eagle. An Emerald Boa coiled layer upon layer on a tree limb,
glowing an iridescent green in the darkness as if from some
internal light. Pink dolphins playing in the wake of our boat. A
narrow passageway of deepest green suddenly filled with hundreds
of Snowy Egrets wading or nesting or flying with a slow,
deliberate grace, unperturbed by our presence, going about their
gentle existence as if we were invisible.
For all its wildness and beauty, the Amazon is not without her
people. Many families live in isolation, eking a small existence
from the water and forest. Because of the enormous rise and fall
of the river, even homes on stilts are impractical, so the
ingenious natives build their homes to float, creating pontoons
out of a unique wood that is able to support the entire home on
the surface of the water. Animal pens also float, and gardens are
often planted in canoes. For families fortunate enough to possess
a bit of dry land, the jungle is slashed and burned to create a
small space for bananas, other fruits and manioc, a root that is
ground and dried in enormous wok-like pans over a hot fire, the
manioc requiring constant stirring with a huge wooden paddle by
some poor soul who is inevitably drenched in sweat.
One moonless night, Mo and his driver set out in a canoe, and
having no idea where they were going I joined them. We quickly
plunged into absolute darkness, the quiet sounds of the forest
muffled by our motor. The water around us was glass and the
reflection so pure, the stars were strewn at our feet and it was
only by the break of trees at the river’s edge that water could be
distinguished from sky. As my eyes adjusted, the thick carpet of
stars surprisingly provided enough light by which to see.
 Mo
spotted a small Cayman – a type of alligator – in the tall grasses
ahead and snatched it bare handed from the water. Like the myriad
piranha and other fish we had caught, he shoved it under the grate
at our feet and I thought to myself, the piranha can’t crawl back
out but the Cayman can! – and covered one bare foot with the
other, but within moments I forgot about the Cayman as we pulled
up to an isolated, floating house.
As Mo asked and received permission to disembark, the household
cat slipped onto the canoe to steal one of our fish, running to
the far reaches of the porch with its still-wriggling prize.
Having seen numerous starving animals in the few towns we had come
to, I knew it was every animal for himself out here.
Hands reached down to help me out of the canoe and we were led
into their simple home – the only furniture in sight was a long
bench which was offered to Mo and a stool which was offered to me.
The children politely perched next to Mo as their parents, with
nowhere else to sit, leaned against the wall. Every home we had
visited in the Amazon was immaculate and this one was no
different: the floor was pristine beneath my feet and the copper
pots hanging on the wall glistened in the candlelight. I was
touched by the graciousness of these isolated people who welcomed
us into their homes and, for a brief moment, gave us a glimpse
into their lives. My high-school Spanish wasn’t enough to catch
the drift of Portuguese, but as their gentle voices washed over
me, I was struck by a sense of utter serenity and rightness with
the world.
In the course of the conversation, Mo discovered the man had an
injury that had refused to heal and offered to take him back to
the boat for some much-needed antibiotics. I quickly found myself
huddled with a whole passel of children on my canoe bench as the
journey to the boat proved too exciting for them to miss. As we
reached the boat, one of the children tapped me and pointed. Sure
enough, the Cayman had crawled out from under the grate and was
clinging to the bench in front of us. I’ve never been so glad to
get out of a canoe in my life!
But injury is of serious concern in the Amazon and medical care is
hard to come by, usually coming in the form of a medical boat that
makes its way up and down the river on some kind of haphazard
schedule. In one village, the headman mistook us for the medical
boat and families paddled their sick and injured out to us. Gene,
a generous-hearted doctor from Laguna Beach, spent the morning
holding clinic, the crew translating between patients and doctor.
One girl of fifteen, living in isolation with her husband, had
gotten her hands on infant formula and begun mixing it with river
water for her newborn, somehow believing it was better for her
baby than breast milk. By the time the infant got to us, it was
gravely ill with dysentery. There was little Gene could do but
tell the girl to breastfeed in the hopes the baby might recover.
In all, the clinic was a success. Wounds were tended, the ill were
comforted and the headman apologized profusely for the mistake.
One of my great joys on the trip was to watch the interaction of
the Caboclos, as the river people are called, and my fellow
travelers: Gene with his patients, Bård and José, one of our
guides, playing pick-up soccer in the tiny river towns, Bård and
Mike taking pictures with their video cameras and playing it back
to the delight of the children.
 In
one small village, we stopped at the local school which had no
books and no paper, only one chalk board, one smiling teacher and
a roomful of students who enthusiastically sang us verse after
verse of “Happy Birthday” in Portuguese. We sang back in English
and to the stunned amazement of our audience, there was only one
verse. We were so embarrassed, we began to wonder, “Shall we just
sing the same verse over and over?” – but someone rescued us with
a video camera, playing back the children’s rendition of the song
which left them in heaps of laughter.
In another town, a rather drunken man broke free from his friends
and wrapped his arm around my father, initiating an intense
conversation which neither my father nor I understood. Too polite
to break free, my father tried telling him in Spanish he didn’t
understand, but the man’s grasp of Spanish was no better than our
grasp of Portuguese. Finally, I said the only words I knew: “E meu
pei” – he is my father. The man and his friends looked at me and
let out a shout in Portuguese, “Ah, he is your father!” and
clapped my father on the back, chattering happily at him.
In still another town, I was caught in a torrential downpour with
two cameras and no way to protect them. I ducked under the nearest
awning, and the shopkeeper beckoned for me to come in. In the
middle of nowhere, this small shop had a satellite dish and a TV
with world-cup soccer on, and every little while another local
would slip in out of the rain to catch the game, the rain on the
corrugated roof sounding like a thousand soccer fans pounding in
the stands. Not once did the shopkeeper try to sell me anything –
she was content just to have rescued me from the rain. When it
came time for me to leave, she sent me on my way with a smile and
a wave.
I never once felt a sense of culture clash. The locals seemed to
delight in meeting us as much as we delighted in meeting them, and
everyone seemed to reach out across the language and cultural
differences and find ways to communicate.
At journey’s end it proved hard to leave this amazing place which
had so quickly stolen its way into our hearts. I thought again of
what Emerson had said about our insatiable desire to forget
ourselves and to do something without knowing how or why, and I
could see in the faces of my fellow travelers that for a brief
moment in time we had forgotten ourselves, abandoning ourselves to
the magic and wonder of the Amazon.
© Kim Tally 2003
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