Running the Amazon

by Joe Kane

  We reached the end of the sad Puinahua Canal near dusk on our fourth day and spent the early evening pursuing the lights of Requena. Glowing on the horizon, they promised a meal, a shower, a bed, but after we grounded our boats in a swamp and storm clouds blacked out the stars, we resigned ourselves to a miserable night sleeping sitting up in the rain, expecting all the things in which we do not believe.

  Then we heard a motor, Chmielinski yelled, and a flashlight beamed in the dark. A fishing boat was stuck in the muck. We sank to our hips in swamp goo, helped the captain break it loose, and followed him through a hidden channel into the city. But Requena stank of diesel and sewage, derelict hulls and mean-looking deckhands clogged the port, and even in the dead of night, as we sat in the captain’s shack trying to sleep, the humidity was stifling. We vowed that from there on, we would make camp at the first dugout canoe we saw after five o’clock.

  At 5:19 the next afternoon Chmielinski said, “That one.”

  As we tied up on shore, intending to follow a path that led from a beached canoe to, we hoped, a dwelling, an old woman paddled up, shuffled on the floor of her canoe, and emerged with two papayas.

  “A present,” was her only explanation before she continued on her way.

  Chmielinski climbed the muddy bank, disappeared into the bush, and found the hut we had expected.

  “We heard you were coming,” its owner, Antonio Severiano Luna, said when he came down to help drag my boat to his home. He was small, quiet, and old but ageless in the way the river men are if they have a lot of Indian blood. Their faces hardly wrinkle, and they go to their graves with heads of thick black hair.

  “How did you know?” I asked.

  He shrugged. “A friend of a friend of my brother saw you on the river two days ago.”

  He shoved my boat under his thatch-covered platform and we climbed the ladder. Chmielinski was already setting up the stove. I wedged pegs in between the floorboards and strung our tents. A young woman whom Antonio said was his daughter-in-law watched us, four wide-eyed children clinging to her skirt, and Antonio introduced a second woman, his wife, toothless, bent, and apparently quite a bit older than he.

  Antonio sat on the floor and watched Chmielinski cook a pot of chili. Cooking may have been Chmielinski’s favorite activity. He made a show of it, passing around spoonfuls of food, asking questions, talking about Poland and the world beyond Peru. Usually he wound up with more food than he gave away, our boats, as we paddled away in the morning, laden with pineapples and papayas and bananas.

  I dug in my boat and found a bottle of wine Durrant and Bzdak had given me in Pucallpa. I poured two fingers in my plastic cup and passed it to Antonio. He threw it down like a shot of whiskey.

  He said, “Thank you.”

  I poured another shot. He threw it down. We repeated this until the bottle was empty.

  Then the young woman took me aside. Her name was Eravita.

  “We have a custom here,” she said. “When you sleep in a man’s house, he may offer you his woman.”

  I did not reply.

  She said, “What do you think about that?”

  I thought that if I slept with her, her husband would kill me when he returned. I also thought that she had fine brown eyes.

  “That is an interesting custom,” I said.

  “You would enjoy that, would you not?”

  I gave in. “I would.”

  “I will ask Antonio.”

  “Antonio?”

  “He owns the land.”

  “So …”

  “So you must sleep with his wife.”

  The old hag!

  “Wait!” I said. “I am very tired. We have been on the river all day, and we have a long way to go tomorrow …”

  High cackling laughter erupted from behind the curtain that shielded the cooking porch from the main room. Then Eravita burst out laughing, and Antonio. A joke on the gringo.

  Rain poured down the thatch roof, rolled off, and splattered on the clay outside the house, but not a drop leaked through. Chmielinski and I ate and retired to our tents. The women and children crawled beneath the single mosquito net under which the family slept. I wrote in my diary. The rain stopped and slurping sounds drifted up from the river, punctuated by dolphin blasts. At night, I had noticed, these seemed to be followed by a low moan that sounded something like a man’s voice.

  Chmielinski blew out his candle and when I had filled my pages I blew out mine. Only then did Antonio stand up and cross the room and slide beneath the netting. I heard giggles and whispers and teasing.

  We heard you were coming. We were not sneaking through the jungle alone and unobserved. We were guests.

  15 • The Marañón

  Twelve days after leaving Pucallpa we followed the Ucayali into the Marañón, entering it from the right, or south. It is at this confluence that the river becomes, in scope if not in name, the Amazon. In fact, it is called both the Marañón and the Amazon for the next four hundred miles, until it crosses the Brazilian border (where Brazilians then call it the Solimões). In any case, at the confluence it is almost two miles wide, or more than three times the width of the Ucayali. It took me thirty-five minutes to paddle to an exposed sandbar in the middle of the river. Chmielinski got there ten minutes ahead of me, and when I arrived he was running up and down the ivory-white sand, hefting his paddle like a spear and shouting “The Amazon!” for no one but me to hear.

  A small village, Puerto Franco, sits atop a low bluff of sandstone and clay a few miles below the Ucayali, on the left bank. A dozen bare-chested Indians awaited our landfall there. (Yaguas, I believe, though the differences between mestizo and Indian, let alone Indian and Indian, blur so much from that point on down the river as to be meaningless.) A woman descended the bluff. Chmielinski gave her his paddle, and while she played with it in her wood canoe, breaking into an excited whooping, we climbed the bluff.

  “Where have you come from?” a squat, muscular man asked when we gained the top. He had broad shoulders, narrow hips, and a sharp, hairless face.

  “From where the river starts,” Chmielinski said (in Spanish, literally, “from where the river is born”).

  “Pucallpa?”

  “Farther.”

  The man conferred with his friends. “Atalaya?”

  “Arequipa,” Chmielinski said.

  None of them knew where, or what, Arequipa was, and our conversation faltered. We studied the woman in the canoe, now deftly working the tricky plastic paddle. Behind her, the wind had whipped the tawny river into whitecaps, and I had to strain to see the far bank, a thin green line between water and sky. But for that verdant ribbon I might have been looking at an ocean. El Río Mar, as the Amazon is also known: The River Sea.

  “How long have you been on the river?” the man asked.

  “Three and a half months.”

  His jaw dropped, revealing a mouth full of fine teeth, and he and his friends jumped up and down and whooped as the woman in the canoe had. At first I thought they were mocking us, but then they clapped our shoulders happily. They lived here, the river came, the river went. That it started so far away, and that we might one day see the place where it ended, delighted them.

  We climbed back into our kayaks. As we departed we passed two women poised at the end of the village, silhouetted on the bluff. Three feet in front of them a chunk of earth the size of a small house broke away and fell into the Marañón. Their huts stood a few feet from the lip of the bluff, but the women reacted to the disappearance of their front yards with only a glance.

  The river came, the river went, it took their homes with it. Soon the huts would follow that clot of sand and clay. Not long after that, the rest of the village would fall, too, and the families would move on and start again. And Peru would not know where Puerto Franco had gone.

  In the roadless bush the Marañón is a kind of country highway packed with river craft, only some of which might properly be called boats. On the Ucayali we had seen perh
aps one boat a day, other than our own, but on the Marañón we never saw fewer than three at once, most of them driven by seven-horsepower outboards onomatopoetically called peque-peques, with five-foot-long drive-shafts that doubled as rudders. Only the motors on these craft might be considered standard issue. The hulks were wild amalgams of uneven planks, the cabins patchworks of plastic, cardboard, and sheet metal. Often the cabin roofs were thatch, and threatened with ignition by the smoking motors below. Always, in each hull, at least one shirtless man bailed away in a bobbing motion, his dark face bathed in sweat, his water pail rising from the hull and spilling over the side in a rhythm so steady he seemed to be linked to the motor itself.

  Passengers, and their pigs and chickens and twine-wrapped crates, were stuffed into the holds of these precarious water taxis well beyond overload, buried in darkness even at noon, as if bound in prison ships. Trapped and helpless, they screamed when the wind picked up and a storm descended and the boats rocked. In those moments I gave thanks that I was in the kayak depending solely on myself, and I worried about Bzdak and Durrant. Though the Jhuliana had appeared sturdy on the banks of the Ucayali, she would be dwarfed by the mighty Marañón. But as we paddled among the river traffic there was no word of her.

  Rafts also navigated the Marañón, floating along at the river’s dawdling pace, perhaps one knot. Families drifted slowly to Iquitos with the fruits of a season’s labors, one raft carrying a ton of oranges, another a pyramid of coconuts, another bananas ripening too fast for market.

  That afternoon we tied up to a raft that struck me as the most ingenious piece of marine engineering I had yet seen. The floor consisted of two dozen fifteen-foot topa logs lashed together with liana vines (topa is a strong, light, buoyant wood akin to balsa), with a thatch-roofed, bamboo cage on top. The cage held—this amazed me—six cows.

  Two huge oars, each about twenty feet long, were fastened fore and aft, and a mahogany blade about two feet square had been lashed to the water end of each oar. The oars were used not for power but to steer the raft away from whirlpools and back eddies. Three young men slumped next to the cage, glazing in the sun.

  We ran our boats up onto the raft and woke the men, who were from a village far up the Marañón. Given the one-knot current, they had been afloat …

  “Three weeks,” the tallest of them said. Like his shipmates, he wore only a pair of tight cotton shorts. In fact, the raft appeared to hold little else but the men, their shorts, and the cows, which they would sell by the pound in Iquitos.

  “Surely they have lost weight,” Chmielinski said.

  “Yes,” the man said. “But what can you do?” They would sell the raft as well. Topa fetched a good price.

  “How old are the cows?” I asked.

  “Three years.”

  “How much will you get for them?”

  He estimated a price in soles. At the current rate of exchange, it came to about a hundred and fifty dollars apiece.

  Three men, three years raising the cattle, three weeks on the river watching the cattle waste away.

  Chmielinski said, “That is a lot of work for not much money.”

  The man shrugged and said again, “What can you do?”

  Iquitos sits on the left bank of the Marañón, on the outside curve of the wide, gradual right turn the river makes before it finally sets its course directly for the Atlantic, twenty-three hundred miles due east. The visitor arriving in Iquitos by boat, even if that boat is a kayak, climbs a rickety wooden stairway from the river and alights on a fading but gracious promenade that runs north along the Marañón for about a mile, or a third the city’s length. Looking down into the river from the promenade one sees ocean-going freighters moored to floating concrete docks that rise and fall with the river, which will come up as much as thirty feet during the rainy season. Herons and egrets feed in the marsh below, and, to the east, waves break on the eleven-mile-long island, Padre, that divides the Marañón in two.

  One senses immediately that Iquitos is at heart a river town. Indeed, it is surrounded on three sides by rivers—the Nanay to the north, the Marañón to the east, the Itaya to the south—and to the west, the only road leading out of town ends abruptly in dense jungle after about twenty miles. Consequently, Iquitos is isolated in a way that Pucallpa is not, and has retained a certain grace. The pace is slow (it is too hot to move quickly, and in any case there is nowhere to go) and the fundamental rhythm is not that of the automobile. In fact, the preferred mode of intraurban transport is the motorbike. It is not unusual to see five or six abreast on the city’s half dozen main streets, with three people on one machine—daughter at the helm, mother in the stern, grim-faced granny wedged snugly between them, the entire trio outfitted in dresses and heels and hurtling along the waterfront in the humid dusk.

  Iquitos is not large as cities go, and it is not old. Though it was founded in the mid-1800s, it did not really grow until the rubber boom at the turn of the century. Still, its core has a colonial, vaguely Mediterranean tone (including a cast-iron building designed by Alexandre Gustave Eiffel and shipped from Europe in pieces); until the advent of air travel, Iquitos was closer to Europe than to Lima.

  Situated in strategic proximity to two great jungle highways—the Napo River fifty-five miles east and the upper Marañón ninety miles south—Iquitos became the trade capital of the Peruvian jungle. Virtually isolated from outside authority, it developed a scandalous reputation, one not wholly undeserved. There was an oil rush of sorts in the 1970s, but mostly the oil companies came up dry, and turned their attentions farther into the jungle interior. Currently, the zeitgeist is heavily influenced by the cocaine and smuggling industries. One can walk into almost any bar and find the sort of soiled expatriate or local reprobate who enables the travel writer to turn a profit on a cocktail. (I had lunch one day with a Señor Merekike, who played the drunken cook in the film Fitzcarraldo. In real life, Merekike—“I slept in Mrs. Herzog’s bed!”—is a drunken cook.) For all its reputation, however, and unlike Pucallpa, Iquitos does not seem wicked. If anything, it has simply refused to be influenced by any rhythms but its own, which are as unpredictable as the river itself.

  The day after Chmielinski and I arrived, the city’s municipal workers went on strike. They demonstrated in the central plaza, the civil guard was called out, and the air quickly filled with tear gas and voices shouting through bullhorns. According to the next day’s papers, two people were wounded by gunfire. By the time the first shot was fired, however, I had already escaped around a corner, and the reports sounded flat and harmless.

  But I ran anyway, ten blocks east, until I reached the riverfront promenade, which I then followed north, hoping to find the port captain’s office. Chmielinski had decided that we could no longer travel the river safely without maps or charts. I walked for about half an hour. The bruised colonial facades gave way to low shacks of wood and plaster, and the streets were thick with people whose faces were surprisingly (to me) cosmopolitan—black, brown, red, yellow. I stopped and had a fine lunch prepared by a Chinese man whose grandfather had come to Iquitos during the rubber boom.

  Five blocks farther on I found the port compound, but the guard said I was out of luck. No maps.

  I stood outside the chain-link fence and watched a pockmarked naval officer instruct a squad of recruits in the art of saluting the colors. When he had finished his instructions he raised the Peruvian flag. It was upside down, and within seconds the wind had wrapped it around the pole.

  A rotund, calmly sweating man had stopped next to me to watch this display. He was smoking a cigarette and he wore a starched white shirt, pressed cotton pants, and polished shoes.

  “Poor Peru,” he said in Spanish. He nodded toward the flag. “We defeat ourselves.”

  “Peru cannot find herself,” I said.

  “What do you mean?”

  I told him about the problems we were having on the river, the trouble finding our way, the villages that disappeared.

 
“You need a map,” he said.

  “Where do we get one?”

  “You don’t. There are no maps.”

  “What do the big boats use? Or the navy?”

  “Luck. Prayer. Smell. But they would never try anything as ridiculous as your trip. Why do you do this thing?”

  I didn’t have a good answer. To stand in Iquitos and say I was looking for adventure seemed trite. Off the top of my head I said I was writing a travel story for a magazine, and mentioned one for which I often worked. His eyes widened. He said he was a professional guide and had once spent three weeks with a writer from that very magazine. I did not believe him until he told me the writer’s name, which I recognized.

  “Maybe I can help you, too,” he said. He led me down the street and into a bar and said, “Wait here.” He disappeared in the direction of the port compound.

  The bar was little more than a shack, but it had cold beer and a videocassette player. Six blank-faced peasant men dressed in ragged denims and sandals sat before the screen, intent on the one man who seemed to have the potential to unseat Tarzan as Cinema King of the Jungle—Indiana Jones. There was no sound, but they did not react when I joined them. My friend returned while Harrison Ford was suspended above a snake pit.

  “Come,” he said.

  It was dark now. Stumbling, I followed him down the street, through a door, and into a courtyard. Three old women sat in wicker chairs, fanning themselves. They smiled. We walked past them into a room. The man closed and bolted the door, pulled the curtains, and lit a candle, which he placed on the floor. The room had no furniture.

  He pulled something that looked like a scroll from beneath his jacket and rolled it partially open on the floor.

  The scroll was actually a spool of butcher paper about two feet wide. On it someone had drawn, in pencil, a river chart, at a scale of about 1:100,000. It included towns, islands, and channels, and a trail of arrows showed at precisely which point between the banks the current ran swiftest. The chart began at Iquitos.