Running the Amazon

by Joe Kane

  Below the pongo we entered Campa Indian territory. From the left, or northwest, bank of the Ene steep hills clotted with stands of rain forest and open, rolling savanna rise to about five thousand feet. These roadless highlands, called the Gran Pajonal, include some of the least-penetrated areas of Peru, and are inhabited mainly by Asháninka, as the Campa speakers call themselves. The four thousand or so Asháninka who live in the Gran Pajonal’s roughly one million acres are one of the last peoples native to the upper Amazon basin who retain to a noticeable degree their traditional ways. In part this is because they were long considered exceptionally savage. Unlike many of their indigenous neighbors, they had the foresight to massacre the early Franciscan missionaries. In fact, in 1740, under the messianic half-breed Juan Santos de Atahuallpa, they drove missionaries completely out of this part of Peru, and the difficult terrain and their fierce reputation kept their territory free of outsiders for the next one hundred and fifty years.

  At the turn of the twentieth century, however, the rubber boom brought prospectors flooding into the Amazon, this time armed with sophisticated weaponry. By 1935 the Franciscans had built three missions and an airstrip in the Gran Pajonal, paving the way for colonization after World War Two, particularly by Europeans. The newcomers established themselves along the rivers, which offered the best agricultural land. (Despite the Gran Pajonal’s apparent fertility, less than one half of 1 percent is considered arable.)

  Many lowland Asháninka have since settled around the white colonies and missions, and though they often display the outward signs of their traditional life—they wear long, dark cotton cushmas, paint their faces with bright orange achiote-seed rouge, and draw dark, cat-whisker lines about the eyes, cheeks, and foreheads—they have for the most part built an existence around handouts, odd jobs, canned milk, white rice, and the Christian god. They provide the work force for the colonist farms (according to a Danish anthropologist studying the area, there has been an active trade in Asháninka children, and it is not an uncommon practice to whip an upstart Asháninka with a dried bull’s penis), but the intricacies of white law often prevent them from owning land.

  Meanwhile, the Peruvian government, faced with an enormous international debt, is anxious to tap the Amazon basin’s oil, timber, and minerals, and as part of an ambitious colonization program has encouraged a variety of missionary groups—Roman Catholic, Baptist, and evangelical—to “educate” such native peoples as the Asháninka. Such efforts, however well-intentioned, are devastatingly insidious. Traditionally, the Asháninka lived in small family-group clusters, but as missionaries have gathered and herded them into larger settlements, communicable disease has increased enormously. As, in consequence, have medical clinics manned by people long on the Word but short on real medical ability.

  Until recently, the dense forests of the high Gran Pajonal offered refuge for the Asháninka, who continued to survive there by hunting and gathering and slash-and-burn agriculture. As settlers have pushed into the highlands, however, conflicts have naturally increased. It is unlikely that many Asháninka will remain “uncivilized” for more than another generation or two.

  The Ene River is considered frontier, although the government has established a beachhead of sorts at the six-shack village of Puerto Prado (store, whorehouse), near the Ene’s confluence with the Perené River, at the southern foot of the Gran Pajonal. Judging by the few we met, the mestizo colonists who have fled to the Ene from Peru’s cities, which are generally horrible, have worked hard literally to carve a life from the virgin bush and cannot afford to look back. Luis, a twenty-six-year-old from the city of Huancayo (his thatch hut was decorated with a Beatles poster), proudly showed us a recently planted grove of avocado seedlings that would not bear fruit for at least four years, assuming floods, insects, and weak soil did not do them in first. “I had more fiestas in the city,” he said, “but here I have a future.”

  Later that same afternoon, after we had pitched camp on the Ene’s muddy left bank, I waded up a clear-water creek and met three men who were naked except for their soapsuds. When I asked in Spanish to use their soap they found the question uproariously funny, laughing and poking one another and pointing at me, but in the end they said yes. I lathered up until we shared the same uniform. They were short, dark men with strong, fatless trunks, broad chests, shoulders knotted with muscle, and stubby, slightly bowed legs. With the exception of the thick black growth on their scalps and pubic regions they were completely hairless. One of them reached out and tweaked my chest hairs. I gasped. They laughed again.

  The tweaker introduced himself as Mikele. The other two men, who appeared to be his age, were in fact his sons. They said they were Asháninka, and that they had a farm farther up the creek. We dressed—they wore cotton pants cut off at the knees—and hiked to their land.

  Mikele and his sons appeared to be prospering. Their three families had cleared and planted about five acres with banana, papaya, pineapple, avocado, lemon, guava, mango, and yucca. (Yucca, or sweet manioc, is to the Asháninka what potatoes are to the Quechua.) Chickens shared the clearing with a pig ripe for butchering. The main building, a large, sturdy log platform, looked like an outdoor stage. A loft had been built at the back and covered with mosquito netting and a thatch roof.

  Mikele’s youngest son, ten-year-old Jesus, had studied at the Franciscan mission at Puerto Ocopa. “Ow are jew, meester?” he asked me. “Are jew clin?”

  Mikele sold me a dozen mangoes, three yucca roots the size of my forearm, and ten eggs. With the money I paid him he would buy salt and kerosene in Satipo, a one-hundred-forty-mile round-trip that would take him three days in his dugout canoe, which was powered by a seven-horse outboard motor. He would have to make the trip within the week. The Ene was rising. In a month the river would be too high to travel, the farm cut off. They would be isolated for three months.

  I asked Mikele about the colonos.

  “Our people have always been near the river,” he said. “There is not much hunting anymore, but the soil here is good. We are doing well. Our farm is big. We are not hungry.”

  “How do you get along with the whites?”

  Mikele smiled. “That is our land, too,” he said. “We will let them stay until we need it.”

  As is the custom, he did not wave or say good-bye when I left. Hiking back to our camp, I found myself wondering what he would think of snow, or the ocean.

  After two and a half months of river travel we had finally returned to sea level. What a homecoming. The jungle floor was, in a word, wet. Always, everywhere. Mud collected in every dark hole and crevice, wood didn’t burn, sweat didn’t dry, cuts didn’t heal. The acrid odor of jungle rot gained purchase in our clothes, and in the thick jungle humidity the stink simmered and our clothing disintegrated. Sand infested the food, the drinking water, the tents. It wore holes in the raft’s rubber skin and rubbed blisters on our shanks.

  And, everywhere, bugs: spiders, cockroaches, moths, bees, wasps, ants, chiggers, ticks, and, of course, mosquitoes. They buzzed and hummed around our eyes and ears, bit our feet and ankles, and embedded their greedy little snouts in our skin, which soon erupted in sores that festered constantly. Even the most angelic of these pests, the butterflies, collected in such swarms that they became a nuisance. They descended on the raft hundreds at a time, in vast fluttering clouds, and hung upside down from the bill of my baseball cap.

  In an odd way, the troubles we had faced almost daily in the high country—the cold, the altitude, the deadly white water, the guerrillas—had helped keep us going. Progress had been a matter of overcoming immediate and often mortal obstacles. If nothing else, those dangers had focused us. The jungle was a different matter. Entropy is the law of the bush; one wallows in it and slowly sinks. In the soggy jungle funk we grew languid and sluggish. We argued and complained about trivialities: Who should fetch the firewood, what to cook for dinner, when to wake up, how hard to paddle the raft in the slow-running river, where to make camp. We
threatened to destroy ourselves by anomie.

  “Look, guys,” Chmielinski said our third day on the Ene, after some silly squabble. “What are we going to do? We can argue and be rude, or we can learn manners. We can stick to our rules. An expedition is easy when everyone is feeling good. When you are feeling bad, rules tell you what to do. If it is my turn to cook, it does not matter how I feel. I do not have my own life.”

  “But you must allow for bad luck,” Durrant said.

  “Luck does not matter. The firewood is wet, there is not enough food, the stove is broken. Does not matter. You must perform your duty.”

  This was a code Chmielinski had brought with him from the Old World. It had seen him through six years of adventuring in South America, and was reflected even now in the careful attention he paid to every task he performed. As Chmielinski told it, in his Poland everyone had a specific role, a place, well-defined duties within the structures of family and community. In that poor and troubled country one’s dignity was found in the performance of those duties.

  Chmielinski’s was not an attitude I initially endorsed. From my corner of the New World, from my culture of abused abundance, I regarded the preoccupation with duty and manners and prescribed social roles as a weapon of the powerful few, the invoking of arcane forms for the purpose of intimidation.

  I had to admit, however, that life as I saw it lived in the jungle tended to support Chmielinski’s view, at least in a visceral way. The mountain homes of the Quechua had been chaotic affairs, smoky black holes with animals underfoot, entrails drying on the walls, pots and pans and corn husks scattered about. Order had been external, in the ceaseless puna, which rolled on barren and unchanging for as far as the eye could see and the heart could bear to imagine. On the jungle floor, however, domestic life was an exercise in stark minimalism. Home was a platform, four poles, a thatch roof, a hammock, and a mosquito net, surrounded by a rapacious verdant chaos. Every day the jungle had to be chopped back, disciplined, bent to man’s order, or the illusion of it.

  12 • The Tambo

  Late in the afternoon on our fourth day on the slow green Ene we began to look for Puerto Prado, near which the Ene would join the Perené to form the Tambo River. I let the raft drift ahead and paddled the hundred yards from the middle of the river to the left bank. Two men were fishing with line thick as a pencil.

  “How big are the fish here?” I asked one man.

  In answer he pointed to his friend. “One of him,” he said. They were after zungaro, a catfish that can exceed a hundred pounds.

  The second man said, “Yesterday we saw two gringos with plastic canoes.” Biggs and Odendaal.

  “Where is Puerto Prado?” I asked.

  “This is Puerto Prado.” I raced after the raft and caught it just before the Ene bent sharply right and due east. We beached the boats and climbed a small sand-dune island.

  There, below us, was an absolute monster of a river—the Perené in full flood, engorged by rainy-season runoff from the central Andes. Roiling, mud brown, flecked with frothy white whirlpools and swirling currents, she charged along at a good ten knots, roaring like gravel falling out of a dump truck and carrying a flotilla of uprooted trees the size of small tugboats. On the far bank, perhaps four hundred yards away, hundred-foot chunks of earth collapsed into the river in silent explosions, taking with them fifty-foot trees that shuddered as they fell.

  We made camp there on the dune’s crest. The news that Biggs and Odendaal had passed through the day before surprised Chmielinski. “They should be going faster,” he said. “Something is not right.”

  That night the Perené’s roar filled the air, making sleep difficult, and as the river meandered ever closer I heard the percussive collapsing of the near bank. By morning our island had shrunk to about two hundred square feet, or a tenth its previous size. On one side the Perené was still in flood, and on the other our once-gentle friend the Ene had overnight become a blustering brown giant chortling along at two to three times her former speed and volume.

  Meanwhile, running from the flood, the whole world seemed to have climbed aboard the dune. Under my pants, discarded in the sand the night before, I found a frog the size of an apple flanked by a dozen offspring. A snake slumbered in the raft, lizards crawled among the food bags, and, in the tent Durrant ran screaming from, clutching a towel about her breasts—

  “Get out, Zbyszek! There’s a huge spider in there!”

  “Yah, look this,” Bzdak, not fully awake, mumbled from inside the tent. “Lot of small ones, too. I think—I think he reproduced on me!”

  Durrant stuck her head back inside and shrieked. “He did! Bloody hell! There’s thousands of them!”

  “He reproduced pretty good.”

  On one side the Ene sidled ever closer, from the other issued the continuous thunder of terra no longer firma tumbling into the wild Perené. We loaded the raft quickly and sloppily, tied the unmanned kayak to its stern, and put in at the tip of the island, where the two rivers met.

  At first that fast new river was frightening. Though considered a “headwater” of the Amazon, the Tambo is twice the size of the Sacramento, the biggest river in California, and comparable to the mighty Columbia. She would barrel along straight and fast for a quarter mile, lulling us with a bouncy joyride, her rolling boil drumming lightly on the raft’s underside and only hinting at the force at work below. Then she would slam into a curve and snap us awake with powerful turbulence and huge whirlpools that surfaced and sucked and disappeared like some kind of carnivorous aquatic giants. We escaped their grasp only by paddling hard to Chmielinski’s urgent cadence.

  An armada of uprooted trees sailed in and out of the frothy brown devils, some of them chugging along harmlessly, others threatening to puncture the raft with their sharp branches. We parried with our paddles, fending them off as if they were marauding pirates.

  By noon, however, we had adjusted to the brown Tambo’s charged rhythms, learned to read her swift currents and skirt her voracious whirlpools, and simply by riding her current we traveled faster than at any time since we had stepped off our respective buses in Arequipa, and twice as fast as we had on the Ene.

  Chmielinski lashed a paddle to the stern. While one of us worked it like a rudder, the rest drank beer and relaxed. I scribbled in my notebook, Durrant settled onto the food bags and read, Bzdak took pictures and slept, Chmielinski studied his Portuguese Berlitz.

  Truran dove into the Tambo, swam to a runaway log raft with a hand-carved wood paddle lashed to it, and rode it downriver twenty yards ahead of us, flirting with the whirlpools.

  “Great stuff!” he said when he returned to the big raft an hour later. “Give me a little money for food and one of those rafts and I’d be happy here for months.”

  Late in the day the Tambo took a sharp left turn and headed due north. Behind us, the peaks of the Andes had faded to small gray shadows; to our left, low clouds hid the hills of the Gran Pajonal. I took my turn at the rudder enveloped by green bush, brown water, and the bright blue sky overhead. Now and then, in a thin clearing along either bank, a ghostly, cushma-clad Asháninka stood stiffly as we approached, then offered a wave that escalated from tentative to frantic as we sped out of his life. Here and there I spotted a hut, smoke curling from a fire, or a dugout canoe hauled up on the muddy bank by a path leading into the dark bush.

  Despite the flood, despite the fact that in that roadless country the rivers are the only highways, I saw no trash, no bottles, no cans, no plastic, no Styrofoam. No power poles, no billboards, no neon signs. And heard no sounds but the voices of my friends—“José, cerveza please”—the Tambo’s insistent lapping on the rubber raft, and the occasional anguished roar of a tree dying a natural death.

  In a day and a half on the swift Tambo we covered almost seventy miles. About noon the second day Chmielinski spotted, along the right bank, a white clapboard house atop a grassy hill with a clear, sweet-water creek running below it. Up the creek, squatting amid the bu
sh like misplaced Andrew Wyeth paintings, were acres of rolling pasture, a whitewashed schoolhouse, a pump house, a grain mill, a herd of fat cattle, a manicured soccer field, and a dozen neat bamboo huts.

  Chmielinski estimated that we were ten miles short of Atalaya, which we now envisioned as the threshold to the civilized world. We decided to stop at the idyllic hacienda, clean ourselves and our abused equipment in the clear creek, and arrive in Atalaya clean and refreshed. But we received an odd reception at that neat white house. A skinny, nervous criollo glanced at the papers Chmielinski presented him, said we could make camp next to the soccer field, and slammed the door shut.

  We set up camp and did our wash. While Bzdak mixed cocktails from pisco and a powdered fruit drink, Chmielinski spoke briefly with two shy young sisters, one of whom said she was the hacienda’s schoolteacher. We saw no one else until a few hours later, when a squat, barrel-chested Indian man showed up with a soccer ball. As we kicked it around another half dozen Indians materialized, and soon we had a game, big, strong gringos versus small, fast Indians. Our opponents said nothing, but they played with wild abandon, exploding with shrieking laughter at every errant shot, goal, bad pass, or tackle. The game ended suddenly, when my knee popped—it felt as if a nail had been driven into it—and the Indians disappeared as mysteriously as they had arrived.

  Durrant and Bzdak carved me a walking stick, and at sunset, in pain, I retired to my tent, lit a candle, and read Conrad for a few minutes. I soon found myself distracted. Something about the hacienda felt strange. Everywhere else we’d been we’d attracted crowds of curious locals, but here in the middle of this fairly large settlement we were being left completely alone. It was eerie.

  In the morning, as we packed to leave, Truran and Durrant echoed my thoughts. “It feels like we’re in some sort of religious camp,” Truran said. “You know, where they tell you when you can eat and when you can talk and when you can take a leak. Gives me the creeps.”