Journey of the Pink Dolphins

by Sy Montgomery

  When we returned to the dining hall, out came two adorable baby uakari monkeys. With naked, bright red faces, auburn coats, and funny stump tails, they resembled tiny orangutans—although locals, having never seen orangutans, say they resemble sunburned tourists. They were named Amadeus and Ludwig. They touched everything, first with their lips, then their tongues.

  As the babies hurled themselves around the room, David told us his story. He came from the States to Peru thirty-seven years ago, to manage the Holiday Inn in Iquitos. He met Roxanne there in 1980. She walked up to the reception desk with an ocelot in her arms. It was an orphan she had rescued from a restaurant, where it had been kept chained as a sideshow. “I told her she could have it, but it would have to stay in the bathroom,” he recalls. The next time they met, the Holiday Inn had folded and David was working at a lodge called Amazon Village. David had trained in the Army as a paramedic, and Roxanne asked him to manage her newly purchased camp and run its free clinic. The pay was bad, the equipment meager, but he took the job. “In Korea, we did some nasty things. In Nam we did some nasty things,” he explained. “Now I want to give something back.”

  The clinic now treats patients from fourteen area villages; last year he saw 1,260 people for ailments as diverse as diabetes, conjunctivitis, complicated childbirth, broken bones, rashes, malaria, worms, ten cases of snakebite. Locals can’t believe that the treatment is free. “What do you charge?” they always ask him. “Today I’m charging double,” he sometimes replies. “Give me a big smile.” Gratefully, they try to repay him anyway; one child brought him a bandanna filled with eggs.

  His supplies, compared to his patient load, are still deficient: he has no anesthetics whatsoever. His snakebite antivenin expired in July 1995. He was down to nine bottles of antibiotics, six enemas, a single jug of milk of magnesia. He gratefully accepted our supplies, which Dianne had procured from a neighbor who works at a hospital.

  David entertained us with his stories during an enjoyable dinner. He told us about some of the dolphins who frequent the camp: Sadie, who, with her baby, will approach him within six feet; Isabel, whom he described as “like my wife—zipping around all over the place, back and forth, back and forth”; Marie and Daphne, who look identical except Daphne has a white scar on her dorsal; Old Fart, the one who spouts the loudest and sounds like the Jolly Green Giant after eating all his own beans. He told us again the story of how dolphins saved Roxanne from the bull shark, which he had heard but had not witnessed. And he told us a story Roxanne hadn’t: how one day, a male dolphin had rammed her while she was swimming, knocking her hard with his snout under her left breast. It may have been the breeding season, and he may have mistaken her for another male; or, I thought, had the dolphin been using his sonar, he would have seen that this was the precise location of her heart. “They are very strong animals,” David said. “We shouldn’t underestimate them.”

  Roxanne, David explained, spends most of her time in the States, raising funds—which was why we were not able to hook up with her in Peru. Meanwhile, David stays here, preoccupied with day-to-day disasters: An anaconda killed all his chickens. Pit vipers hide in the bamboo. He keeps cutting it down, and Roxanne, who thinks it is beautiful, keeps planting more. His latest difficulty, he said, was a plague of vampire bats in camp. That was why the green mealy parrot in the cage outside is so lonely, he said; vampire bats killed its companion. (“This was not in the brochure,” I whispered to Dianne.)

  At that moment, a cockroach jumped into my face and then ran down my arm. I flicked it away, directly onto Dianne’s plate, from whence she then flicked it across the room, like some kind of insect badminton. And then a mammal ran over my foot.

  “A rat,” David said.

  I discreetly folded my legs up on the chair, Indian-style.

  “One other thing,” David said, as we were about to go off to bed.

  “There might be tarantulas.” One had dropped onto his chessboard in the middle of a game the other day.

  “Oh my God,” said Dianne, “the one thing I am terrified of.”

  “I said, there might be,” David countered.

  “In our room ?” asked Dianne.

  “Well, tuck your mosquito nets in tight.”

  We were unmolested by tarantulas that night. Instead, I was visited by other invertebrate interlopers: chiggers, the legacy of my cuddle with Carlotta, had left their drool to fester beneath my skin. The itching woke me up at three that morning. But there was nothing to be done; we went out to look for dolphins. At a small, deep lake ringed by kapok trees and veiled with water lettuce and giant white lily pads whose yellow stamens were crowded with coppery beetles, we found them: We watched them till sunset. They rose and fell like waves, leaving wakes of quicksilver that lingered on the lake the way dreams linger in the soul in early morning. The lake rang with the weird cries of horned screamers, corpulent black and white birds whose call sounds like a cross between a monkey and a goose, a song alternately gulped and honked and alarmingly loud.

  By evening, my chigger bites were already infected. Each bite sported a hot, red aureole big as a quarter, with a swollen circle of pus in the middle. It looked as if my entire midriff, front and back, was covered with nipples.

  Everyone at camp examined the bites with great interest and offered different cures and prognoses. David said to cover them with sheep dip or nail polish and they’d be gone in three days. (“Alas,” I told him, “I left my sheep dip at home!”) Unfortunately, Dianne did not have nail polish—normally she would have, to touch up her toenails, but she’d left it at home. Dianne felt DEET would work. Moises said to rub the bites with lemon and they would be gone in twenty-four hours. So after a full day of excruciating itching, now was the moment I had been waiting for: with a plate of cut lemons, a bottle of DEET, and Dianne to do the bites on my back, we headed off to the cold, dark shower to do battle with the chiggers.

  Just at the threshold of the shower, I noticed a two-foot-long dark red snake on the raised board walkway. I stepped over it. I hoped Dianne, who was just behind me, wouldn’t notice it.

  “Fuck!”

  But she did.

  “Sy, there’s a giant goddamn fucking snake on the walkway!”

  “I was hoping you wouldn’t notice,” I said.

  “Jesus, it looks poisonous! It’s a giant, poisonous, goddamn fucking snake!”

  “It might be poisonous,” I conceded. “But it’s not even in the strike position. Oh, come on— I’m crawling with chiggers here! Just step over it! I can’t do my back without you!”

  Dianne, however, refused to step over the poisonous snake. Instead, she went to get Moises. The snake must have sensed something was amiss, for it wisely crawled under the walkway and dropped into the water before Moises arrived with his machete, eager to kill it. A snake that color, he said, could only be an aguaje machaca, a venomous water viper.

  Finally, Dianne stepped over the threshold to the bathroom. In the dark shower, with mosquitoes swarming from the drain and the ceiling corners littered with the shed exoskeletons of large spiders, I stood naked and shivering as we dosed my angry skin with insecticide and fruit juice and cold river water. “You realize, don’t you,” I said to Dianne, “that I have been looking forward to this moment all day.”

  The trip home was exhausting and itchy. We were both nervous about taking Ayahuasca. So, it seemed, was everyone else in camp. Steve had gallantly promised to attend the ceremony. I was glad, because he knew how to restrain crazy people. I had no idea how Dianne or I would react to the drug. I remembered all the stories I had heard in high school and college about people on acid who jumped out the windows of tall buildings.

  Moises would stay with us during the ceremony, too, and also Graciella and Gladys. The women, ever practical, wisely brought an enormous plastic basin into the room, and explained this was where we were supposed to throw up or excrete any other material the Ayahuasca brought forth from our bodies. We were warned not to leave the room,
or to expose ourselves to any light, or it could permanently damage our eyes. Nor should we speak. But Ricardo would know if we were in trouble, Moises assured us. “If you be scared, if you throw, Ricardo will blow smoke on your head to help,” Moises promised. “The Mother of the Vine protect you. She will watch you for three days. And then you are free.

  “You ready?”

  Ricardo began the ceremony. Blowing incense over the bowl, he handed us the Ayahuasca.

  It was warm and thick as blood, and bitter as bile. We both drank three deep draughts. Each swallow brought a shudder, as a tidal wave of nausea swept us both. I had planned to wait for its effect repeating some kind of calming mantra: “Mother of the Vine, come to me,” or something like that. Instead, my mind chanted desperately, “Don’t puke, don’t puke, don’t puke, don’t puke. . . .”

  Ricardo snuffed the light and began his whistling chant. I held Dianne’s hand with my left and Steve’s with my right, feeling my body swirl with the drug. I waited for the visions to take me.

  The first vision came quickly. Inside of my closed eyelids, it mate-rialized: a jaguar in the moonlight.

  I realized this was a powerful omen. The Barasana people of Colombia consider jaguars the intermediaries between earth and sky, life and death, spirit and soul, water and land—and no wonder: This largest American cat is master of the worlds, for it can swim powerfully, climb trees like a leopard, and is active day and night. The Kayapo-Gorotirés say the jaguar originally owned fire; now you see it only reflected in its eyes. In fact, the Kayapos called the first flashlights they ever saw “jaguar eyes.” Among the Tirios, with whom my friend Mark Plotkin has lived, a shaman may take on the form of a jaguar, in whose form he is capable of unbridled ferocity; the Shipibo say a man who wants to become a powerful shaman will see a vision of a huge jaguar enter his anus and emerge from his mouth. Thereafter, spells cast by the shaman are so strong they cannot be broken.

  It seemed I watched the jaguar for many minutes. Its silver, devouring eyes stared directly into mine. It didn’t move. I didn’t move. And although I had seen this look on the faces of tigers, and knew what it meant, I was completely unafraid, for I was aware that this was a spirit-jaguar. If it chose to devour me, I would submit.

  Had the jaguar appeared to tell me something? No words came into my head, no message. Its presence was enough. And then its eyes dissolved into my own. I saw my own eyes staring back at me under my eyelids.

  This eerie vision, after many minutes, dissolved, too, as I felt Dianne let go my hand. She was going to throw up—something she was desperately hoping not to do. Since vomiting is something not even she can pull off with style, she was intent on bypassing the basin, retching privately—outside, over the rail. But when she made her escape out the door, the two other women followed to make sure she didn’t fall into the water. I tried to get up, but noticed my legs were no longer attached to my body.

  Over the next three hours, my main preoccupation was trying not to throw up. Ricardo must have known this, for at the times the nausea was worst, he blew incense over my head, and the rhythm of the shaka palm quickened. Steve and Dianne later told me they felt me shaking with the effort to keep the drug in my body. I wanted the dolphins to come. I wanted to see the Encante. I waited for some message, some vision.

  Finally, I could stand it no longer. I crawled drunkenly to the door to retch over the rail of the walkway. I didn’t feel any better. By now the drug was in my blood, not my stomach, and so what was making me sick was in my brain, I reasoned hopefully; perhaps there would be more visions. Supported by the contingent of staff who had raced to help me, I returned to the little room.

  The ceremony went on and on, and so did the nausea. I began to think that of all ailments I had suffered, this was the worst. This was worse than the time I got seasick shark-tagging with a biologist: Just as I was turning green from the chop, he had decided this was the time to lure the sharks, and poured overboard a bucket of fish blood. This was worse than all the diarrhea I’d suffered in four trips to India. This was worse than the time I got dengue fever. I’d been with Dianne at a Dayak tewa in Borneo, drinking rice wine flavored with the corpse of a fetal deer out of a human skull—but at least with dengue, I had gone unconscious for three days, and missed the discomfort. Dianne had watched over me then, and before I passed out, I gave her instructions that if my body began to stink she should call my husband to tell him I’d died.

  Finally, Ricardo stopped chanting, and Moises pronounced it was over. In the morning, Ricardo would interpret our visions and dreams.

  “How do you feel?” Moises asked us.

  “Fresh as a daisy!” I answered. “Fan-tastic!” chirped Dianne.

  “Did I mention I feel like I am going to die?” I said to Dianne and Steve when everyone else had left the room. “Maybe you are,” Dianne replied. “That would be an improvement,” I said, and we three dissolved into a fit of giggles. We felt so miserable it was funny.

  Hours later, still floating on great waves of nausea on my bed in our room, I received my final vision. “Dianne—do you see anything?” I asked.

  She had been dreaming sporadically, she said: pleasant images of canoes sliding over taffy-colored water, the dorsal fins of pink dolphins.

  “Well, you won’t believe what just showed up under my mosquito net,” I said.

  “What?”

  There, hovering above me, as clear as a broadcast of Star Trek, was the perfect replica of the Starship Enterprise.

  Tamshiyacu-Tahuayo Community Reserve

  A Fortress of Orchards

  "So, what was the significance of all this?”

  Three weeks later, as I was telling the story of our Ayahuasca experience, my dinner companions were skeptical. They included three biologists and a lawyer, and all were high-powered professionals from Chicago. My friend Paul Beaver, who has a Ph.D. in biology, called this group “the Scientists” and considered them big guns. He thought it important for me to get to know them. They were all members of the board of directors of the Chicago-based Rainforest Conservation Fund, which has supported the now more than one-million-acre Tamshiyacu-Tahuayo community reserve just outside Paul’s camp since its establishment in 1991. It was the first reserve in Peru to be run for the benefit of the people living on its periphery as well as its plants and animals—an extremely unusual approach, I realized, but one that, possibly, held out realistic hope for preserving the pink dolphins’ world.

  Except for its current president, none of the board members had ever laid eyes on the reserve or met any of the people their funds were meant to support—until now. The group had decided to spend two weeks that June exploring the reserve they had helped to found. Intrigued by the group’s premise, and eager to learn more about the rain forest from the scientists, I gratefully accepted the invitation to accompany them.

  While Dianne was on an errand in England, I now found myself back in Peru, sitting with my new friends at one end of one of the long wooden tables at Paul’s lodge, drinking beer and Cokes in the flickering lamplight and telling each other our stories.

  Jon Green, a tropical biologist with a specialty in invertebrate physiology and a professor at Chicago’s Roosevelt University, thought taking Ayahuasca was dangerously foolhardy. Jon was not a man of excessive caution: With his wife, Joy Schochet, a developmental biologist, he had spent most of two decades in Thailand and Malaysia, elbowing aside crocodiles and venomous snakes to sieve worms and crabs out of the mud. His question about the significance of my experience was tongue-in-cheek: To his mind, the only significance of the visions was the drug’s physiological disruption of normal brain chemistry. But Jon, like me, was a Star Trek fan, and he wondered what the shaman had made of my vision of the Starship Enterprise.

  Ricardo had interpreted the jaguar vision first, I explained. The jaguar, he had told me, had been sent by the dolphin spirits as my defense on the journey. “Everywhere, in your house, in the canoe, walking on the ground, you will have th
e jaguar as your defense, watching over you like a shaman,” he had told me through Moises. “The jaguar is very powerful. Every day in the Amazon, a thousand thousand people going to die—but you have your defense. Maybe the Mother of the Vine knows about the tigers”—and here he was referring to my work in India—“and that is why she gives the jaguar.”

  My own eyes staring back at me beneath my eyelids Ricardo had ignored. (I later learned from a friend back in the States, Cindy Thomashow, who had studied shamanic trances, that an image like this is a common element in vision quests, meant to focus introspection before journeying further.) But the Starship Enterprise was another matter. A long train of Spanish and Quechua had followed my account of the vision, as Moises tried to explain to Ricardo what a spaceship is. Once he understood, though, its significance was clear. Normally, the spirits send a canoe in which to travel to their realm, he explained; but because I was a foreigner from a country so technological, they had instead sent a spaceship. Or perhaps, I later thought, they had sent a spaceship because I still had so far to go.