Running the Amazon

by Joe Kane

  We saw no one as we paddled down the little creek and turned right into the muddy Tambo.

  We smelled Atalaya several miles before we saw it. The breeze wafting up the Tambo mixed the stench of Atalaya’s ordure, kerosene, and diesel with the sweet-sour odor of jungle rot, producing the first sign that we were emerging into the modern world. Then, on the left bank, we saw corrugated tin roofs glinting amid the green jungle wall, and a flotilla of log rafts, dugout canoes, and leaky aluminum flat-bottom skiffs. Little dun warts grew into thatch huts, and farther on, raised on stilts, stood shaky structures of plank, twine, leather, and cardboard. Their open pipes dripped effluvia into the river. Rats and pigs ambled along the mud bank and paused beneath the pipes to anoint themselves. Brown faces darted through the bush and stopped at the single cement ramp that is Atalaya’s port.

  Atalaya sits a mile above the Tambo’s confluence with another great jungle river, the Urubamba. To the west, cutting the village off from Lima, rise the dense gray-green hills of the Gran Pajonal, and, behind them, the Andes. To the north and east is the Amazon basin. No roads leave Atalaya; she is serviced only by sporadic river traffic and an air taxi that splats onto her soggy grass landing strip once a week or so. Other than tiny Satipo, sixty miles southwest by air, she stands alone, isolated, the only real town for hundreds of miles in any direction. She has perhaps a thousand inhabitants, and a mud plaza and mud streets, and, along the river, a commercial center—a row of precarious lean-tos and stalls, not one of which looks older than yesterday, or as if it wouldn’t topple in a good storm.

  This was the face of our Oz. It had been six weeks since we put the raft in at the military bridge near Cuzco. Wallowing in Atalaya’s mud meant deliverance.

  To our surprise, Atalaya did have a clean, two-story cinder-block hotel whose dollar-a-night rooms included bed, shower, electric fan, sink, and refrigerator. There was electricity from six to ten at night, but the fans did not work, and a refrigerator that is cold only four hours a day is a peculiarly Peruvian notion. Still, the beds and sheets were clean, and with some creative gymnastics beneath the water that dribbled from a hole in the bathroom wall I approximated a shower.

  That night, having stored the raft and kayak in the hotel courtyard, Chmielinski, Truran, Bzdak, Durrant, and I took to Atalaya’s streets. The air was humid but cool, and from the hills that rose beyond the last shack in town the scent of night-blooming jasmine slipped down and rode gently above the mud. Young couples strolled arm in arm, sidestepping puddles and flushing chickens and pigs before them. A mufflerless motorcycle carrying three passengers skidded past us. A gas-powered generator rumbled in the church next to the plaza. Sticking my head through a side window, I saw a standing-room-only crowd of about a hundred and fifty, watching Johnny Weissmuller in Tarzan the Ape Man.

  A bearded leprechaun slouched up the street: Tim Biggs. He appeared happy to see us, but distracted. He said that he and Odendaal had arrived in Atalaya only two days before us—“Frans was pretty sick, man, he could hardly use a paddle. He floated most of the way”—and that their visas were still in limbo. Having failed to secure them by radio, Odendaal had hopped the air taxi out of Atalaya and gone to Lima. Biggs did not know when he would return, but he accepted this mess with some relief. “Even if the visas come through now, I think I’ll head on home. I’m not too excited about spending another three months without Margie, you know?”

  With Biggs gone, the kayaking team would be Odendaal, Chmielinski, and me. That was a shocking notion, to say the least, and one that needed more thorough digestion, but we agreed to drop expedition talk for the moment and get on with a decent celebration—it was Biggs’s thirty-fourth birthday. We found a bar, and because we were now broke borrowed money from Biggs. This we invested in beer, keeping Biggs busy while Bzdak lifted his room key and snatched the pair of khakis I had loaned Biggs in Arequipa, and which had become his river uniform. These we wrapped in a towel and gave him as a birthday present. He seemed delighted.

  After we had weaved our way back to the hotel that night the manager handed Chmielinski a note he’d forgotten earlier. Truran and I accompanied Chmielinski to his room and sat with him as he read the note by candlelight. It was from Odendaal. Though there was still a chance his visa would come through, he had decided to give up his dream of kayaking the Amazon. He said we should continue without him.

  When Chmielinski had finished reading the letter we sat in silence for a moment. Then Truran squeezed me with one arm and shook Chmielinski’s hand with the other. “Good luck, gents,” he said. “Looks like it’s up to you.”

  Up to us? Up to Chmielinski. My short stretch in the white-water kayak had convinced me that it would be absurd to attempt to paddle such a beast thirty-five hundred miles. I had already decided to travel instead with Bzdak and Durrant on a Johnson, carrying Chmielinski’s supplies and rendezvousing with him as possible, but this idea I kept to myself. We were not going anywhere soon. Odendaal had said he would be returning to Atalaya to complete his filming, but he had neglected to indicate what would happen to the remaining expedition assets, which were now at his disposal and without which we could not hope to continue our journey. The money we had borrowed from Biggs gave us a budget of about two dollars a day per person for one week. We decided to wait for Odendaal.

  The next afternoon the heavens opened up with a blinding deluge, a foreshadowing of the rainy season that within a few weeks would leap upon us with all claws bared. The streets flooded, and as I stared down at drowned chickens, I was happy not to be on the Tambo. Two hours into the storm the river was strewn like a lumpy stew with tree trunks, derelict rafts, half-sunk canoes, torn-up thatch roofs, and every weird sort of jungle debris, all of it literally hurtling along. I shuddered as I studied the river. Caught up in that mess in a kayak, I would be squashed like a water bug.

  The two young women from the mysterious hacienda, the teacher and her sister, tracked us down in Atalaya, where, as it turned out, they lived. Their names were Wendoly and Rosa Torres, and they took the five of us to their home and introduced us to their father, Alejandro, the chief custodian at the village school and the father of four other daughters and two sons. The two-story home he had built on the outskirts of town, of bricks baked in his kiln, was the tallest building we had seen since Cuzco. “Who wants to marry one of my daughters?” he asked when we visited. “I will build you a house right here, myself!”

  While we sat and talked with him beneath the shade of a mango tree, near the creek that ran behind the house, Wendoly and Rosa shyly served platters of papaya, mamey (something like a cross between an apple and a plum), and small, exceptionally sweet mangoes out of which Torres had bred the teeth-separating fiber that can make eating the fruit such a chore.

  Bzdak asked Señor Torres if he knew any mysteries of the selva, as the jungle is known. We had witnessed the horrible work of one, the bushmaster or shushupe, which is the largest venomous snake in the world. (The bushmaster and the fer-de-lance are considered the deadliest vipers in the Amazon.) Thirty-six hours after being bitten by a bushmaster an Asháninka man had walked down out of the high country into Atalaya’s tiny medical clinic. Durrant had assisted the two clinicians in an unsuccessful three-hour attempt to save the man’s gangrenous left leg, which had looked like a cocoa-colored balloon oozing yellow axle grease. (The facility, sponsored by the Save the Children foundation, had no electricity and no running water, but it was the only place within several hundred square miles that could legitimately be called a medical clinic.)

  Sea kayak with Christmas tree, Iquitos. (illustration Credit 12.24)

  On the River Sea: Piotr Chmielinski (left) and the author near the Brazilian border, two thousand miles from the Atlantic.(illustration Credit 12.25)

  Friends in Tabatinga. (illustration Credit 12.26)

  Piotr Chmielinski and caboclo fisherman with the author’s birthday dinner. (illustration Credit 12.27)

  In storm’s wake on the Solimões. (illustrati
on Credit 12.28)

  Piotr Chmielinski (foreground) and the author. (illustration Credit 12.29)

  Sea kayak with bushmaster.

  The author (left) and Piotr Chmielinski in sea kayaks; Kate Durrant aboard the Roberto II. (illustration Credit 12.30)

  Downtown Gurupá. (illustration Credit 12.31)

  The author (left) Piotr Chmielinski, and caboclo fishermen near Marajó Bay. (illustration Credit 12.32)

  Oz: the author (left) and Piotr Chmielinski at Belém. (illustration Credit 12.33)

  The author (left) and Piotr Chmielinski at the mouth of the Amazon. (illustration Credit 12.34)

  As soon as the jungle taxi returned the man would be sent downriver to the city of Pucallpa, where his leg would be amputated. Despite this tragedy, Torres dismissed our worries. “You sound like people from Lima,” he said. “They expect to be attacked by ferocious animals and snakes and insects. Ask Rosa about that. She is twenty-four years old, she has lived in the jungle her whole life, and she has never seen a jaguar. She has never been bitten by a snake. Every day we make the schoolchildren swim across the Tambo. Piranhas have not eaten them.”

  Far more dangerous, Torres said, were the narcotraficantes. The selva’s major export is coca paste, most of which is shipped by plane or boat to Colombia to be refined into cocaine. Atalaya sits right in the heart of the action, and certainly seemed to have a druggy tone. One night, for example, I had a beer with an American (the first American, I realized later with mild shock, that I had seen in three months) who was staying at our hotel. He was a blond young Southern Californian—he looked like a fraternity boy. He said that he had been arrested trying to smuggle five kilos of processed cocaine out of Peru and been sentenced to ten years in a prison colony on the Urubamba River. After serving several years he had been released on a kind of probation and been allowed to buy a four-hundred-acre farm next to the prison, including a house, two power boats, and a shortwave radio, and to live there while he served out his sentence. He grew vegetables, which are hard to find in the selva. He was particularly proud of his tomatoes. He had a Peruvian wife, and he was permitted to visit Atalaya every few weeks—“got a side-squeeze here.” In all, he said, it was not a bad life, but he could not leave Peru.

  His room was right below mine. Each night when he had returned he had played American rock and roll on his tape recorder, very loudly, into the wee blue hours.

  Two men staying in a room next to Biggs on the hotel’s first floor had identified themselves as narcotics police. They left their door wide open, so that anyone walking past saw the half dozen guns resting on their beds.

  On the second floor, sharing one room and a single bed, were four peons whom Truran and I recognized from the soccer game at the hacienda. It was to discuss these men that Rosa and Wendoly had brought us out to the Torres house. They said that the hacienda was in fact a coca-paste factory, and that we had inadvertently landed at the factory an hour after a plane loaded with five hundred kilos of paste had taxied down the grass runway hidden behind the schoolhouse, hit a cow, caromed into a tree, and sheared a wing.

  If what the Torres sisters said was true, and we had no reason not to believe them, the peons had been working frantically to unload the plane even as we blissfully ignorant gringos paddled up in our strange blue boat. The patrón—the nervous man who had answered the door of the neat white house—had not known what to make of us. Were we DEA? CIA? He and the plane’s pilot had kept us under gunsight surveillance while several of his men distracted us with the soccer game. Meanwhile, other men had dismantled the plane, dumped it in the river, and sent the paste downstream in a motor boat. The four peons in the hotel had been assigned to watch us in Atalaya.

  This news disconcerted us for several reasons, not the least of which was that we had seen the peons and the police shooting pool together in Atalaya’s one dingy hall.

  “Be careful,” Torres said as we left to return to the hotel. “In the selva nothing is quite what it seems.” As for his daughters: “That hoodlum can find himself a new schoolteacher.”

  We spent the next six days trading mean stares with the narcotraficantes. They shadowed us everywhere but did us no harm, although one night, as Truran and I went in search of beer, one of the peons popped up out of the dark, drew a finger across his throat in a cutting motion, and hissed the name of our hotel.

  Finally, Odendaal returned, with Van Heerden and Leon. He wore crisp new clothes and carried a roll of one-hundred-dollar bills. The good news was that the expedition now had a treasury of about five thousand dollars, courtesy of Jack Jourgensen. The bad news emerged during a meeting at the hotel, when Odendaal, armed with charts and graphs, explained why he was passing but a third of the money along to the four of us who would continue on the river. He concluded by saying that he and Van Heerden would be filming in Peru a while longer, and that when he was done he would fly back to the United States, go on to London to present an account of his descent of the Apurimac to the Royal Geographical Society, and return home to South Africa for Christmas. He said that despite the present circumstances he was still the expedition leader, that Chmielinski, Bzdak, Durrant, and I were to continue on the river under his name, and that when he returned to the States from his Christmas vacation to begin the spring term at his university he would contact us in Brazil and issue instructions for completing our journey.

  There was no point in arguing with Odendaal. He controlled the money and could do with it as he pleased, and the idea that he could lead an expedition from thousands of miles—indeed, continents—away appeared to make perfect sense to him.

  The next day Odendaal left Atalaya, accompanied by Biggs. Minutes before their hired motorboat was to leave Biggs rushed into the hotel lobby, where Chmielinski and I were packing our kayaks.

  “Nothing personal, right, mates?” he said, and then, as we shook hands, he wished us luck.

  Sergio Leon also left with Odendaal, to help with translations and filming logistics. He was tired. He and Van Heerden had had a rough time transporting the sea kayaks from Lima to Pucallpa—they had been confronted by guerrillas but not harmed—and I felt sorry for him. He had enjoyed our hike in the Andes, but he had quit his job and spent all his money mainly to explore the Amazon rain forest, and now it looked as if that experience would be denied him. However, he did not appear to have in him the emotions of sadness or regret. My last image of him is dominated by his wide smile.

  That day Durrant, Bzdak, Chmielinski, and I also said good-bye to Truran, as he waited for the air taxi. Up until that moment he had debated whether to continue down the river with us, but in the end he still couldn’t handle the idea of kayaking all that flat water. Also, he had turned thirty in Peru—old for competitive kayaking—and owed himself one last try at a world championship. He had to begin training almost immediately.

  It was strange, and hard, to stand there in the jungle and try to offer proper thanks to Truran. He had saved my life more than once, had blocked Odendaal’s attempts to drive me off the river, and, above all, had inspired me with his courage. But Truran didn’t want to hear my thanks. He spent his last hour on the Amazon instructing me in paddling technique (“Push, not pull”), and told me that if Chmielinski tried to travel too fast, as he almost certainly would, I must refuse. If I didn’t, my wrists would give out and I’d have to quit the river.

  Then, with a grin and “Cheers!,” he boarded the tiny plane and escaped.

  Chmielinski and I would make the four-hundred-mile trip to Pucallpa in the white-water kayaks Biggs and Odendaal had left in Atalaya. (The irony of my paddling Odendaal’s boat did not go un-mentioned.) Chmielinski estimated that we could paddle that distance in ten days. Durrant and Bzdak would wait in Atalaya until the river went down and boat traffic resumed and they could negotiate a ride to Pucallpa. No one in Atalaya knew when that would be possible.

  We washed out the boats behind the hotel and then hauled them into the lobby and began to pack. For me this was a char
ade. I still had not told Chmielinski that he would be kayaking alone. Having failed to find a graceful way to express my cowardice, I proceeded to pack the boat as if there were nothing else I would rather do.

  A blond man of about forty sat down on the floor beside us and watched us work. He had checked into the hotel the day before. He was Italian, but in Spanish he said that he had been in Atalaya a year ago, with his wife and young son.

  “We wanted an adventure,” he said. “We bought a dugout canoe and some food and things and put the boat in the Ucayali. Two days later we were sucked into a whirlpool. The canoe turned over.” He paused to light an “Inca” cigarette. “I went around and around, and then suddenly I shot down the river. I swam for I don’t know how long, maybe ten minutes, maybe an hour. When I reached the bank I had nothing left, not even my shirt.

  “Some Indians were fishing there. They walked me to their village, and then a couple of days later they took me to a mission with an airplane landing strip. I got free rides all the way to Lima, but the Italian consul would not help me—I had to beg in the streets. Three months later I was back in Italy, but I had lost everything.”

  “What happened to your wife and son?” I asked, and regretted the words immediately.

  The man began to cry, softly, and said only, “Everything.” Everything but the memories that had called him back to Peru.

  That was enough for me. When the Italian left the lobby I stopped working on the boat. The time had come. I had seen the mountains, I had seen the jungle, I had endured more close calls than I cared to remember.