Running the Amazon

by Joe Kane

  After all this time Chmielinski’s enthusiasm remains undimmed. When we resume our paddling he launches into one of his Polish marches, straining his lungs. By now I know the words and sing along, though I have no idea what the words mean, and no inclination to ask.

  The paddling is easier than anticipated, the bay rocking us on gentle swells, the sky a thin gray, and by dusk we have covered almost forty miles. My confidence soars, giving rise to a guarded optimism—soon I will step from my little boat for the last time. I will be in California for the start of baseball season. I will sleep in one place for more than two nights in a row. I will kiss the woman I love.

  We decide to attempt a landfall at the small port of Vigia. A band of grizzled roughnecks, all Popeye forearms and missing teeth, stares down at us from the seawall. Assessing that gallery of tough faces, I am pleased to discover that I am not intimidated. I think: I am as much the riverman as any one of them. Then I employ one of Chmielinski’s tricks. I take five hard strokes and drive my kayak far up into the sand at the wall’s base. It is a cocky display, one that identifies me as either one tough homem or a complete idiot. In either case, not to be messed with.

  My hairy-chested bravado is unnecessary. These rogues are fishermen, brothers of the sea. When Chmielinski explains our mission they shoulder our boats and we march in a long line to Vigia’s one hotel, where we are feted with beans and fried fish and cold beer.

  Out of the kayak, endlessly rocking. As I drift off to sleep on a cool patio near the kitchen my body vibrates with the rhythm of ocean swells.

  February 18

  Whatever hubris possessed me yesterday Marajó Bay beats out of me today. In mid-morning the skies darken and a storm descends, throwing breakers that rise up and curl and crack over our heads. Though we travel parallel with, and a mile off, the bay’s right-hand shore, it would be pointless to run there for shelter—the waves are rolling right into a mangrove swamp and would crush us against the exposed roots of the foul-smelling trees.

  So, following Chmielinski’s example, I turn the nose of my boat into the waves and hang on until mid-afternoon, when the storm finally abates and the sea calms.

  After holding in the waves for half the day, paddling hard but standing still, we are drained of energy. Yet the shoreline is a tangle of thick bush and there is nowhere to put in and pitch camp. We continue to paddle.

  Two hours later reeds fluttering on the horizon signal a shallow island. We drag our boats through knee-deep mud and up into a sandy clearing. Two dark, bony men huddle around a bed of coals. A pig nuzzles a discarded meat tin, and a scabby dog and two cats, the first I have seen in Brazil, negotiate over a fish head. One of the men rolls a cigarette and lights it off the embers. Studying us from the corners of his eyes, he says that we are welcome to make camp on his sleeping platform. This consists of twelve warped planks and four stilts held together, as near as I can determine in the fading light, solely by a graça de Deus.

  The air reeks of pig, everything is damp, and six neighbors who seem to have materialized from the sand itself sit on their haunches and stare at us, nodding in mute incomprehension as Chmielinski tries to explain our purpose. One, a pregnant girl, has a head swollen like a hydrocephalic’s.

  Why am I disappointed with this reception? After four thousand one hundred and fifty miles I should know that to come from the source of the Amazon is to come from Mars. I should expect no more than the pig that burrows under the platform while we sleep, rooting and snorting the night through.

  He is gone in the morning—the clearing has flooded. We paddle away from the platform without waking the owner, curled up in a corner on a piece of cardboard.

  February 19

  Today Marajó is altogether different from yesterday, undulating easily, like a calm gray lake. We run with the outgoing tide. Shortly after noon, as the tide begins to turn against us, we are about a mile short of Taipu Point. Marajó Bay runs almost due northeast and, on its north bank, meets the Atlantic at Cape Maguari. On its south bank, it ends roughly at Dos Guarás Island, thirty-five miles southeast of Cape Maguari and ten miles northeast of Taipu. If we paddle due north from Taipu, in thirteen miles we will intersect an imaginary line drawn between Maguari and Dos Guarás.

  We take shelter in a nearby lagoon and find a small gaff-rigged schooner anchored there. The God Judges You is twenty-five feet of sturdy wooden boat, sail only, no engine save the muscle of a sleepy crew of three: the leathery captain, Juarez; the first mate, Edinor; and Manol—“Marinheiro!” he says, and thumps his thin, hairless chest. They have been swinging to anchor for two days, waiting out the storm that hit yesterday. Though the storm has passed their cachaça supply has not, and so, for the time being, the fish of Marajó Bay are safe.

  The lagoon is a fine place to stop for a drink. Palms and mangroves rise thick on all sides, and a row of aristocratic, long-legged ibis stand along an exposed sandbar. As the tide begins to turn in our favor I paddle toward them, but they explode into the gray sky like an orange cloud.

  Then we bid good-bye to the crew of the God Judges You, Chmielinski sets course due north, and we paddle out of the lagoon in search of the Atlantic.

  A mist descends on Marajó Bay and slowly thickens to fog. The source of the Amazon, too, had been shrouded by fog, but in my memory it seems another world altogether. I have been a tropical man for so long now that I can hardly remember what it means to be cold. What had the Polish stranger and I said as we staggered across the continental divide? “All downhill from here.” For six months I have chased an idea that I now understand was only an excuse to move.

  Three hours later the bay begins to rock us with gentle waves that arrive in long, slow sets. Foot by foot, stroke by stroke, the turbid waters thin to a translucent green. A hundred yards ahead of us a shadow creaks in the fog. As we paddle closer the frayed canvas sails of an ancient cutter take shape in the still air. The Jesus of Galilee: Rough jute rigging, splintered wood, absence of brass and plastic. A vessel not of this century.

  We ship our paddles. Chmielinski shouts. No response. The fog grows thicker yet, sealing us in a gray envelope with the ghost cutter. We sit quietly and listen to the slap of rigging on wood, watch the old boat rock ever so easily, going nowhere.

  Chmielinski leans over and scoops a handful of water to his lips.

  “Salt,” he says.

  AFTERWORD

  Eight years after we ran the Amazon, five years after this book was first published, I still get questions. Two, mainly. One is: What happened to everybody?

  Well, no, Kate and Zbyszek did not stay together. The differences—geographic, cultural, emotional—were simply too vast. After the expedition Kate lived in London for a year and worked for the national health service. Then, bored out of her mind, she lit out once again for South America. For the Bolivian Andes, to be precise, where she spent three years directing a health-education project for Aymara Indians. I visited her there in 1990. It turned out to be the end of her stay: That same week she came down with typhoid and her joints swelled up like balloons. She moved back to England.

  Zbyszek, for his part, became an American citizen and married a fourth-generation Wyomingite. (I went to the wedding, at which Zbyszek delivered one of the great matrimonial vows: Trying to wrap his lips around “With this ring, I thee wed, and bestow upon thee …” he somehow came up with, “With this ring, I be wed, and be still upon you!”) He has published two books of photography, and his photos often appear in major magazines. He and his wife, Lauren, now live near Chicago, where he is a staff photographer for a local newspaper. I talk to them about once a week, because Zbyszek and I have continued to travel and work together.

  I’m in close contact with Piotr, too. After we finished the Amazon he managed to smuggle his wife, Joanna, out of Poland and into the United States, where both now have citizenship. They live outside Washington, D.C.; Piotr owns an environmental engineering firm, HP Environmental, that is, by all accounts, one of the best in the
country. Let me put it this way: When the federal government suspected that the air and water in the White House were contaminated, Piotr was the man they called in to investigate. He and Joanna have a three-year-old son, Maximilian, who, the story has it, was born running.

  Jerome Truran took that last shot at an international title, didn’t win but did well, retired, and married a Canadian, Morna Fraser, herself once ranked among the world’s top ten female kayakers. They have settled in Vancouver, British Columbia, and one way or another I see them about once a year. They live quietly and happily, and they still spend a lot of time on the water. In 1991, they were the lead kayakers on a National Geographic expedition that ran Peru’s Colca Canyon. It was an expedition that, in its way, said something about the bonds of friendship formed during the running of the Amazon—once again, Piotr was the leader, Zbyszek the photographer, and I the author, this time of an article that appeared in National Geographic in January 1993.

  I have no contact with the other principal characters in this book. From what I hear, Jack Jourgensen had a bitter split with François Odendaal and later fell on hard times. As for Odendaal, I have neither seen nor spoken with him since the day he fled the Amazon. I do know that at about the same time that he was in London telling the Royal Geographical Society that he led the first source-to-sea navigation of the Amazon I was ducking bullets along the Peruvian border, still thirty-five hundred miles short of the Atlantic. Tim Biggs meanwhile, is in South Africa, raising a family. Sergio Leon is back in Costa Rica. I shared good times with Sergio, and I hope our paths cross again.

  Me, I married the girl I left behind, Elyse Axell, and we have a two-year-old daughter, Clare. Running the Amazon was frightening, but I didn’t know real fear until I had a child. After Clare was born, we lived for a while in Ecuador, where I was on assignment for The New Yorker and researching my next book, Savages. We have since returned to California, and I have taken up adventure gardening—I grow these killer tomatoes.

  The second question is: Would you do it again?

  Let me be absolutely clear about this: I think so. Maybe. Who knows?

  Without a doubt, running the Amazon was the looniest thing I’ve ever done. That I survived was a matter of luck as much as anything else. I felt relieved when we finished and was happy to get home. I own a house and a car. I like books, movies, good food, cold beer. In short, I enjoy the distractions of modern life, and I’m thankful to be in a culture that readily provides them. But the Amazon taught me something about the true cost of such comfort: Basically, it’s insulation. Direct experience is our best teacher, but it is exactly what we are most bent on obliterating, because it is so often painful. We grow more comfortable at the price of knowing the world, and therefore ourselves.

  So all I can say is this: For a while, at least, the Amazon sucked me out of my cocoon, and my life has been the better for it. To anyone seriously considering a flying leap into the void, I say: Go.

  Oakland, California

  October 26, 1994

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Joe Kane lives in Oakland, California,

  with his wife, Elyse, and their daughters,

  Clare and Sophie. He is the author of

  Savages, about the Huaorani people

  of the Ecuadorian Amazon, and has

  contributed to The New Yorker, National

  Geographic, and other publications.