by The Routes of Man: How Roads Are Changing the World;the Way We Live Today
Though famously hard and dense, mahogany floats. These woodcutters are guiding two rafts of boards to market in Puerto Maldonado, Peru.
Encounters with human beings became less frequent the further we got from a real road. We passed a few farms the first day but none after that. Being near the water and in motion made the air seem cooler, though it was hot when we stopped. Once, we saw a family of capybaras, the hog-sized rodents, crossing a sandbar as we came around a bend. Often we caught flashes of macaws, usually scarlet and usually flying in pairs. One night we slept on a sandy bank, and in the morning our hands and legs were covered with bites: sandy places were often infested with fleas. We all knew to be wary of the swarms of white flies occasionally visible near the sand at water’s edge: these carried leishmaniasis, the hard-to-treat tropical skin disease that can cause disfiguring lesions and sores, among other maladies.
Still, the river and its surrounds were mysterious and magical, and not only for me. Gilberto told us there was a tree called a sangapilla that smelled wonderfully fragrant, but only from a distance—get closer and you couldn’t smell it. Then there was the zorrino, or ituto in native parlance, a long-snouted fox whose meat was bitter unless, according to Gilberto, you cut off its tail immediately after killing it. Another notable feature was its caustic urine, which burned the skin—the fox could flick this through the air with its tail. Oh, and the gamungo, a big hawk—if you shot it you had to stomp on it thoroughly, otherwise its meat was too spongy to eat.
The river itself, roiling and unpredictable, was also an object of fascination. Sometimes there were rapids where the water was wide and deep—how could that be? Other times the boat seemed to pause or stall on great upwellings, places where it seemed a giant must be about to emerge from the river bottom. Gilberto told how he had been swimming in the river one day when a whirlpool sucked him under—only to spit him back out thirty feet away. He was not cavalier about the river, didn’t joke about it. As we learned on our third day out, his third son—one of five children—had drowned while learning to swim in it.
Our immediate destination was the mouth of the Curiacu River, and we arrived at dusk. The settlement on the left bank, Boca Curiacu, consisted of a sawmill, a small engine shop, and four bars, all crowded onto a narrow strip of land at river’s edge. The river ran alarmingly high just a few yards from the open-air, dirt-floored, thatched-roof structures. A sign outside one said in Spanish:
WE SELL
beer
soda
cigarettes
cooking oil
I BUY GOOD WOOD
servicio chicas
Servicio chicas might best be translated “attention from girls.”
On the Curiacu River edge of things, there was a stretch of riverbank where a bunch of men were assembling a raft of mahogany boards. They were in the water, on the raft, on the shore, back in the water, tying boards next to each other with rope. Like the other boards I had seen in rafts, these varied in size, but on average were perhaps six to eight feet long, a foot to eighteen inches wide, and two to six inches thick. They were rough-cut, but essentially straight. The wood had obviously been harvested over a period of time; the more freshly cut pieces had a reddish glow that made them stand out from the others.
When the raft-builders had quit for the evening, Gilberto suggested we use the raft as a swimming platform. I’d heard that bathing in the Amazon River wasn’t such a good idea, but we desperately needed a clean-up. Tim thought it was probably okay, as long as none of it passed our lips.
We first let ourselves in slowly, then later we jumped—the river was deep. The water felt good. But it was utterly opaque, and disconcerting to have your hand disappear from view the instant it went under the surface. We shampooed. After my hair dried, it felt clean but nevertheless produced a small shower of brown dust on my shoulders whenever I ran my hand through it.
That evening, I had one of the worst night’s sleep I’d had since my kids were small. Tim and I each had a small tent, but the recent eroding of the riverbank by high waters had left no ground on which to pitch them. A barkeeper we approached said we could put them on his terrace—it was looking to be a slow night. An hour or two after sundown, we did, and retired.
A large group of woodcutters arrived perhaps an hour after that. They were just down from camp, they had just been paid, and they had money to spend on the overpriced beers—Boca Curiacu bars charged 5 soles ($1.50) a bottle, as compared to 3 soles (90 cents) in Puerto Maldonado. The barkeep cranked up his generator and brought out a pair of giant speakers; he set them up about six feet from our tents. To his credit, he did not otherwise disturb us; and to the woodcutters’ credit, none of them did anything worse than occasionally step on us. When I got up in the morning, having slept maybe two hours, I saw that if you were a woodcutter, you sometimes might not have the benefit of any sleeping quarters at all: men were splayed upon benches, on the concrete floor of the patio, on the dirt path that led to the other bars.
One fellow, though, stood clean-shaven, sipping a mug of coffee while looking over the river. He was older, maybe fifty-five, wore a clean shirt, and showed no sign of a hangover. Also, as we later learned, he would not be riding down on a raft, but in a proper boat. We introduced ourselves; he was Romualdo, he said, and he was a rumbeador. I was unfamiliar with this term, and he explained: bosses hired him to go into the monte and locate mahogany trees. Sometimes this was on land they had permission to log; sometimes it was not. On the land where harvesting was permitted, he said, there was practically no mahogany left. So he ventured further afield, camping out, whacking his way with a machete, wandering through the woods by himself. The work was hard because mahogany did not grow in stands; the trees were always found alone. He could spot one from an uncommonly great distance through the woods, he said, just by a glimpse of the trunk, or sometimes by the plants growing nearby. And how do you mark the trees, I asked him—with plastic tape? I pictured the fluorescent kind that surveyors and tree surgeons use to mark trees that are coming down.
“No, no!” he laughed, amused by my ignorance. “I use a GPS!”
This modern tool of earth awareness, beloved of hikers and geocachers and sold by REI, enlisted in the cause of cutting mahogany trees—and accurate to within a few feet! It was the perfect tool.
Gilberto, who had slept in the boat, summoned me to have a mid-morning beer with a relative who might help us get where we needed to go. This man—I will call him Paco—owned a different bar and sponsored a lumber camp or two. Our drinking began with the ritual sprinkling of the first drops of the bottle on the earthen floor: “Santa Tierra Pachamama,” they intoned, the traditional offering to the Incan fertility goddess who could cause an earthquake. There were recollections of smuggling electronics over the Brazilian border in days gone by, before wood became worthwhile. There was an assurance that I would not identify anyone by name, which might get them in trouble, or give the exact location of the camp. And finally there was the appearance of a blond brother, Oreste, who would follow Gilberto’s boat up the Curiacu, and take us when it could go no further.
This turned out to be not very far, we discovered, when we set off that afternoon. Though it had less free-floating wood, the Curiacu was narrow and twisting and hadn’t seen as many downpours as the Las Piedras. Where it widened, a couple of hours up, Gilberto’s boat had too deep a draft and started scraping on the shallow rocks. Tim and I threw our packs into Oreste’s boat and, wading in water up to our thighs, helped lift and point Gilberto’s boat the right way down the river. He would wait for us back at Boca Curiacu.
The new boat was a rougher, shorter version of Gilberto’s. And unlike his smooth 55-horsepower motor, it used the engine typical of woodcutters: a 16-horsepower Briggs & Stratton, jury-rigged with a six-foot propeller shaft. It was loud and percussive, and we thump-thumped our way up the river for many hours before coming to a place along the river-bank that looked to us like any other. But behind foliage lay a narr
ow inlet. Oreste steered there, tied up, and led us on a trail into the dusky wilderness.
In places the canopy was so dense it was hard to see. Under such conditions, it was especially disconcerting to feel something about the size of a bird whoosh by my face: was it a bird? a bat? a moth? A bat, I concluded, because we saw more as we went, fluttering around just slightly higher than our heads. Other movements, we concluded, were those of monkeys—a whole band of spider monkeys swung by fifteen or twenty minutes into our hike. Then we crossed a stream over a very slippery log, and we were there.
In the clearing were two thatch-roofed structures: a cooking shack, with smoke issuing slowly from the eaves, and a dormitory of sorts, with four raised platforms for sleeping, and mosquito nets around three of them. Laundry hung from lines. There were several chairs, a table, and a stool, all crudely hewn from mahogany.
Resident here were three small children, two women, one boy of about seventeen, three young men in their twenties, and a baby monkey named Susy. We got to know them all a little bit over the next few days. They were poor people, from Puerto Maldonado, from Pucallpa, a jungle town in the north, and from the mountains.
Oreste introduced us to Miguel, whose wife was one of the women and whose toddler was one of the kids. They lived in a third structure in a nearby clearing, along with his sister-in-law, the other woman. Miguel was like the crew boss. He welcomed us and suggested a place to put our tents at the clearing’s edge—the same spot where the rumbeador had also pitched his tent some weeks before, as it happened.
We met the crew as they returned around dusk: a tall, untamed man with an unusual full beard, named Pablo; a muscular, unassuming man, Rolando, who looked as Inca as Pablo looked Spanish; and a slight teenager, David. Miguel explained that for the past ten days they’d been working on one tree, cutting it down and sawing it into rough boards. They had finished today. Meanwhile, he himself had felled another big tree a quarter-mile away. The next project, which would begin in the morning, would be to relocate their mini lumber mill from the old site to the new and to reestablish it: the trees had to be sawed where they lay. How else to get them out?
Miguel had shot a wild turkey that day; that would be our dinner. But it wasn’t too early to start looking for tomorrow night’s meal, and Rolando invited us to go with him. He borrowed the boss’s shotgun for the expedition. He gave us the lay of the land as he looked for animals.
All the rain lately could get in the way of work, he acknowledged, and your clothes never really dried. But they were glad of the rain, because they needed it to fill some dry washes that led down to the Curiacu, so that they could float the boards they had cut over the past few weeks, and get them to market. He took us to one such wash, which had only a few inches of standing water in it. “Wild pigs come here at night,” he said, pointing out their hoof prints, and then their droppings, floating in the pool. After a big storm, he explained, water would run through here swiftly, a foot or two deep.
Where there was no nearby stream, Rolando explained, they cut their own road. He showed us a stretch of one: it was about ten feet across, just wide enough for rolling a good-sized chunk of trunk down the hill. As we paused to take in this corridor, I noticed a stream of activity down around my boots. It was a causeway of leafcutter ants, many of them with trapezoids of green leaf held aloft in their jaws as they walked from a plant to their underground nest. Giant soldier ants guarded the perimeter, their heads as big as BBs, jaws held open—they were so big they were easy to see with the naked eye, even in low light. This stream of hundreds of thousands of ants extended several yards in either direction, as far as we could see and “much, much further than that,” said Rolando. “It’s their highway.”
Rolando peeked under a few logs for crocodile eggs, but didn’t shoot anything that evening. Later he would: on subsequent nights, we would eat monkey and a pretty bird with red plumage. Neither Tim, mainly a vegetarian, nor I was happy eating these things, but it’s what we were offered, and there was not much else to eat. The monkey Susy was the dear pet of Miguel’s daughter, Nallely; the two were fairly inseparable. Tim correctly guessed that Susy was there because her mother had ended up in the dinner pot. It’s a common story around jungle camps. Back in Puerto Maldonado, I was told, Oreste had a pet tapir. Same story with the tapir’s mother.
Miguel’s three-year-old daughter, Nallely, with her pet spider monkey, Susy. The story of Susy is, unfortunately, less delightful than the photo might suggest.
The men listened to a soccer match on a battery-powered AM radio after dinner, in the dark. When it was over and the radio off, the air filled with a loud and layered chorus of animal song. Most noticeable at first was the little, loud-mouthed frog in the slight space between Tim’s tent and mine: it made an unpretty blast like an ambulance coming up in traffic. When it went away, we picked up on castanet frogs, clickity-clacking rhythmically. Deep in the background came a sound like the deep, rubber-bandy bonk! bonk! of North American bullfrogs, but it was easy to lose amidst the sharper, higher peeps and tweets that, until you knew better, sounded as though they were coming from birds but were still other kinds of frogs. Occasionally something would crash down through the brush, sounding awfully large—a monkey? a bird? a big bat? Moths banged headlong into my tent whenever my headlamp was on for more than a moment.
But the very coolest noise was the roar of the red howler monkeys. This sounded nothing like the chimpanzee hoot of television and movies; in fact, I didn’t understand how it came from a monkey at all. It was an extended, whooshy roar, somewhere between the wind howling through trees and a blast furnace. It made you think a twister was about to hit; it rose and fell like the background music to a thriller.
Sometimes the night grew extraordinarily still, preternaturally full—everything had stopped to listen. But never for long.
The next day began with a baby’s cry, and ended with the roar of chain saws.
Rolando had been up a while, and when I explained my surprise, saying I’d expected someone who worked hard like him to sleep as late as possible, he replied, “La cama mata al pobre” (“Bed kills the poor man”). We accepted tea, which worried Tim because it was only lukewarm, and we had no proof that the water had actually boiled, and thus was safe to drink. (About a month later, we would wonder if that tea was what caused Tim to be hospitalized more than a week with lungworm, a jungle parasite, which I miraculously avoided.) We saw Pablo, a muscular man, scratching away at his thigh, blaming it on a fungus that he said a shot in Puerto Maldonado would clear up right away. He watched with some interest as I applied mosquito repellent, and examined the label on the bottle. “Gasoline works too,” he said. We set off into the woods toward the mahogany.
Pablo explained that the rumbeador we met had been useful, but a really good rumbeador would know in advance which mahogany trees were too decayed to be worth harvesting. About a third had so much decay inside the trunk that it was a waste of time to cut them up, he said. But of course Pablo wouldn’t know that until it was too late. “We have to cut them down to see if they’re worth keeping” is the way he put it. It reminded me of the line from the Vietnam War, about having to destroy a village in order to save it.
The four workers set off to relocate their mill to the site of the freshly fallen mahogany tree. The old site was about half a mile’s walk from camp. It was a clearing, deep in sawdust and littered with branches and fragments of stumps. As with any fresh disturbance in the rain forest, it attracted a million flies, as though the carcass of a dead animal were lying there. Miguel, the boss, confirmed my impression that a lot of the tree had not been used. “We saw it up the best we can,” he said, “but there are always rotten parts, and much of it gets wasted.”
A portable sawmill reduces mahogany trunks down to boards that can be carried (or sometimes floated, on seasonal streams) from the forest down to the river. Note the flies on Panchos back!
The main components of the mill were a shiny steel saw blade with c
arbide tips, at least a yard in diameter, and a Briggs & Stratton engine identical to those that powered the workers’ boats up and down the rivers. It seemed to me these engines, as much as anything, made possible the commercial exploitation of trees from the rain forest. They were known by their onomatopoetic nickname, peque-peque, which describes the sound they make, at least when they’re idling. Once they’re gunned, their roar is hard to find a word for.
The men all had their shirts off now, and flies covered their torsos when they stood still, which was not often. Rolando used a length of rope to strap the engine directly to his back, without any pads or cushioning. The engine appeared to be half his size. He had only rubber flip-flops on his feet. He set off down the trail, Pablo not far behind with the giant saw blade tied to his back—again with no cushions, the carbide blade tips just inches from his skin. Miguel carried two chain saws, one with the longest blade I’d ever seen—over a yard long. He and David, the teenager, wore an ankle-high version of the cheap rubber boots I had on. David carried jerry cans of the fuel and oil that would power this machinery.
