Journey of the Pink Dolphins

by Sy Montgomery

  But I was able to glean how, twenty-five years before, Ricardo had learned the powers of the dolphins.

  He was already studying to be a shaman at that time, he said, having learned the secrets of many plants. He went fishing one night on the Amazon, when he heard a voice calling him from the dark forest. He followed the voice to a tall, pale woman with long blond hair. Together they walked to the water’s edge, where he saw a rock that shone with a light as brilliant as the moon. He picked it up, and as he did, he saw many dolphins jumping in the water. This light, the woman said, is my encanto —the power that I want to give to you. And then she disappeared.

  But she came to him in dreams. Together they traveled with the dolphins to the great underwater cities of the Encante. She taught him the icaros, the prayers to call the dolphins. For six months after that, dolphins would follow him by day in the water, and at night in his dreams. The dolphins showed him their powers. They are the protectors of all the animals in the water, he said—the fishes, the caimans, the stingrays, the boas. “The dolphin doesn’t like it when people fish too much,” Moises interpreted, “and then he breaks the nets.” Moises here added that he knew this was true because, once, an older brother had caught a big fish with a thrown bamboo harpoon. When the fish became tired, a dolphin came and pushed the fish away from his brother’s canoe, and broke the harpoon in half. “And wild pigs, when they cross the river, the dolphin is angry. The dolphin can kill those animals. He is boss for the water.”

  The dolphins also taught Ricardo their medicines, their prayers and chants, he explained. It was the dolphins who taught him to speak the Huambisa dialect, he said, and they also gave him many icaros. While he was learning from the dolphins, he was forbidden to hunt land animals. But the dolphins brought him great luck in fishing.

  Today he still has the encanto the beautiful woman gave him. Where is it? He doesn’t keep it in his house, Moises explained; he keeps it in his mind. Still, many different witch doctors try to steal it from him; catfishes and caimans, too, try to steal it away. But the dolphins always protect him; and he can call the dolphin spirits whenever he needs them. He calls them in a trance, which he achieves by drinking a powerful potion called Ayahuasca, made from two of the most sacred plants in the forest, toé and ayahuasca.

  I had heard of Ayahuasca. In Quechua, it means “Vine of the Soul.” Many Amazonian tribes use this powerful hallucinogen to achieve trances in their sacred rituals: The Jívaro of Ecuador call it yagé; the Tukano of Brazil call it caapi. The great English botanist and explorer Richard Spruce recorded reports of the drug’s powerful effects: “The sight is disturbed and visions pass rapidly before the eyes, wherein everything gorgeous and magnificent they have heard or read of seems combined. . . .” But, his report continues, “soon the scene changes; they see savage beasts preparing to seize them, they can no longer hold themselves up, but fall to the ground.”

  Moises had taken Ayahuasca himself thrice—and he did not plan to do so again. “In ten minutes, you don’t feel your bones in your body,” he told us. “It comes too much in your head—bad things, angry things.” The visions can be terrifying—in one, Moises had been attacked by vampire bats. Almost everyone who takes the drug vomits copiously, and yet the nausea persists long after the stomach is empty. Some people shriek in uncontrollable fear. Most lose control of the bladder and bowels. But shamans are different, Moises explained. Ricardo, he assured us, is a very strong man, and he uses Ayahuasca several times a month. He has learned not to vomit the drug, for if you do, he said, the Mother of the Vine leaves you, and can no longer lead you to the spirits of the underwater world.

  Before we left Ramirez, Ricardo and I had come to an agreement: the night before we were to leave for Roxanne Kremer’s camp on the Yarapa River, Ricardo would come to the lodge and perform a ceremony.

  With the help of the ayahuasca vine, he would ask the dolphin spirits to come to us this very night.

  The ceremony began at 8:30 in the room next to ours at Paul’s camp. Ceremonies are usually conducted at night, Ricardo explained, because he can talk with the spirits more easily when there is less noise. We sat in a circle: I at Ricardo’s left; Dianne to my left; Moises to her left. A hurricane lamp glowed in the middle of the floor.

  On an earlier night, for a good-luck ceremony to bid Jerry farewell, Ricardo had worn a headdress of blue and gold macaw feathers and an X-shaped halter made of red beans, bamboo seeds, and porcupine quills “to attract the spirits.” That ceremony was conducted by lamplight, and Ricardo told us that we could speak and even take flash photos. But tonight, Ricardo wore only brown pants and a short-sleeved shirt of white cotton. Once the lamp was snuffed, we should not turn on our flashlights and we should not speak. The Mother of the Vine, not Ricardo’s finery, would attract the most powerful of spirits, and we should be careful not to disturb them.

  Ricardo lit his pipe. It was not filled with tobacco, but with a type of incense made from a plant in the same family as myrrh. He blew the honey-sweet smoke over the small aluminum pot of Ayahuasca—“to put in the icaro,” explained Moises—and then drank three deep draughts. He stood up briefly to go outside and spit over the rail.

  When he returned, he began to shake a bundle of shaka palm leaves to call the spirits. He blew smoke hard and close on the top of my head—where a dolphin would breathe, I thought—and shook the palm over each of us in turn. I was first, and the blessing showered my head with little gnats who had sheltered in the leaves earlier while the bundle had sat on a table. Ricardo snuffed the light, and he began to whistle in the darkness.

  The tune seemed as innocent as something a schoolboy might whistle on a summer day; the whistling changed to a chant. The words sounded to me exactly like the Onondaga language I had heard when I was in college, when I would visit the reservation near the university and feed apples to the buffalo. The words I found calming, and sweet as incense. Beneath my closed eyelids, I saw caterpillars, then butterflies, then leaves, then birds, a gentle stepladder of becoming. I thought: What a kind and gentle man to shepherd us to the Encante.

  Time stopped during the ceremony. The sound of the shaking leaves reminded me of rain; between the cadence of the leaves and the mesmerizing whistling and chant, I felt myself slipping toward sleep. Sleep, I decided, is a kind of water, and dreaming, a kind of river. I scratched my insect bites to stay awake. I felt an unusual peace slip over me.

  And then, hours or minutes later, we felt a change: The close, hot room suddenly was refreshed. The leaves now sounded like a jar of water being shaken, and I realized it had in fact begun to rain. A word came into my mind: mother. The rain came harder and gathered power, and Ricardo began to speak in a different language. I reached out and held Dianne’s hand.

  Thunder and lightning concluded the ceremony. We crept out of the room, leaving Ricardo to rest. Moises interpreted for us what had happened:

  Ricardo had spoken with the Mother of the Vine. He had met with the dolphin spirits. And yes, they were willing to speak with us.

  “They want to come to you,” Moises translated. “The dolphins want to teach you their powers. And when dolphins teach you that power, the spirit will be with you everywhere, even in the States, all the time.

  “They want to come to you,” he said again, “and they will speak to you in English, in French, in Spanish, and in Quechua. They will speak directly to you.

  “Tonight,” he promised, “they will speak to you in your dreams. Tomorrow, Ricardo, he explain the dream. The dolphins will send dreams for three nights. Ricardo will tell what they mean. But if you learn the secrets of the vine, they will speak directly to you, in voices you understand.

  “The dolphin wants to talk with you very long,” Moises said, “and if you want to see the dolphin city, the Encante, he will show you. He will take you there.”

  But to do so, he said, we would have to drink the vine.

  As Moises told us this, at each pause, there was thunder or lightning. “The rain
is good for concentration,” Ricardo had told him.

  It rained all night. At 6 A.M., when Dianne woke me, it was still raining. It seemed auspicious, she said, that the Mother would send a woman rain to us two women, seeking knowledge about the dolphins.

  I woke and tried to recall my dream. It seemed disappointing—too simple and vague to be a vision. It was only this: Dianne and Moises, Mario and I, took the canoe to Ricardo’s house. We had a large egg-shaped object to hand to him—the shape, I now realized, of a beautiful, light green egg case of a snail we had found the day before. I handed it to him and he took it. There were no words to the dream, no other people, no other objects. The meaning of the dream seemed obvious to me: Clearly, I was dreaming of what I hoped to do the following morning. The egg case, with its seeds of new beginnings, was my dream, and I was handing it over to Ricardo.

  Dianne’s dream was dramatic, long, vivid, and complex: it involved a handsome suitor, an old man, wedding rings, coffins, and wailing mourners. Obviously, my dream was inferior. I was sullen at breakfast, poorly concealing my jealousy.

  Ricardo had stayed the night in our camp, and he had agreed to come with us to Huasi, on the way to his house at Esperanza, to watch the dolphins with us, and to interpret our dreams. Mario tucked the boat into a grassy bank. Moises asked me for my dream first. He discussed it with Ricardo, and then replied: “In your dream, you want to see the dolphin spirit, but you will not recognize him. He maybe appear as your friend, your husband or wife. Many things in dreams can be transformed.”

  The canoe in which we traveled in my dream, he explained, was the dolphin’s boat—the boat in which he would take us to the Encante. And the giant egg case? “When Ricardo blew on your head, he asked the Mother of the Vine and the dolphin spirit to give you power—a shell, a gun, a spear, a machete. The thing in the boat is the thing the dolphin wants to give you.

  “When you drink the vine, the dolphin spirit will give you a defense also. When you drink the vine, you’ll receive big powers,” Ricardo promised through Moises. “Jaguars and eagles, big demons and big bats—they will help you, and stay behind you always.”

  Now Dianne came forward in the canoe to reveal her dream: “I had a handsome young lover, but there was also an old man in love with me,” she began, and my heart sank lower. In her dreams, beautiful Dianne has two lovers vying for her; my dreams deliver only the egg case of a snail.

  “I was not in love with him,” Dianne continued, “but I chose him over the young lover. . . .”

  With the old man, Dianne went to the jewelry store to pick out a wedding ring. The jeweler showed her case after case of big diamonds. The old man, smiling, urged Dianne to pick the biggest one; but she said she would be happy with the smallest. Then Ricardo appeared in the dream, and he handed her another box filled with diamonds. They went into an adjoining room to look at the rings, and found the room was full of beds with dead people lying in them. When Dianne picked out a ring, it turned into yellow plastic with a gray gorilla on it. How odd! In the dream, Ricardo told her not to worry, that she should wear the plastic ring till the diamond ring was ready.

  Then Dianne and the man walked outside. Beneath the store, they saw people dressed in black, wailing. “But it was OK, because we were very happy,” Dianne said. “And then the old man walked into the jungle.”

  Ricardo was pleased with the dream.

  “The black young man is a gray dolphin,” he said, meaning the tucuxi. “The tall white man who give you the ring is the pink dolphin.” Both these interpretations surprised us because in Dianne’s dream, the young lover had not been black, nor the old man tall. They may well have become so in Moises’ interpretation.

  Ricardo continued: “The ring is the dolphin’s powers. The yellow color is good luck. Someday, if you get sick, the gold color will help you. The diamond is your defense. Glass is good luck for you. So is clear water.

  “The rooms the dolphin shows you are his home. The beds are the beds in the hospital.” (The Encante has very good hospitals, Moises had stressed to us earlier.) And the wailing mourners? This, too, was a good sign, said Ricardo—these were really dolphins praying, and rejoicing at seeing Dianne.

  “Your dream is very good,” he said. “All the people you see are dolphins. The dolphins want to give you many things. The dolphins looked last night more for Dianne than for Sy.”

  I felt an utter and complete failure: I could not follow the dolphins in the water; I could not spot them from the treetops; and now they eluded me even in my dreams. I despised myself with a vehemence that took me by surprise. It made me wonder whether the antimalarial drug I had been taking for a month and a half was making me crazy. Later, Dianne and I would discover that this is in fact a known side effect of the drug.

  Dear Moises must have seen the disappointment on my face, for he added, gently, “Sy, you will have a dream the next time.”

  For the next two nights, he said, we should record our dreams, and Ricardo would interpret them for us. We would be traveling to Roxanne Kremer’s camp on the Yarapa then, bringing her camp manager the supplies we had promised. When we came back to the Tahuayo, though, the spirits would speak directly to us; for on that night, with Ricardo there to guide us on the journey, Dianne and I would take the vine.

  The journey to Roxanne’s camp took nine hours. Within fifty minutes we joined the Amazon, or Marañón—“The Mother River of the Amazon,” Moises explained, whose headwaters are born in the cloud forest. From the Amazon, we would take the Rio Ucayali, whose tributaries arise from Machu Picchu, the ancient Inca city in the Andes, east via small channels to the Yarapa, to the lodge Roxanne named Dolphin Corners.

  The Amazon was wavy like the ancients’ wine-dark sea—red, even though it is technically white-water here—and can stretch a mile wide. The opposite bank—with its tall stands of caña brava grass studded with dangling tassels like the barbed tips of spears (and in fact, Moises said, this bamboo is used to make spear shafts)—seemed far away. But it was not a bank at all, but one of thousands of islands that rise and fall here like waves, as the river, snakelike, eats and digests and finally excretes the land. “When I worked here three years ago,” Moises said, “the Yarapa was parallel to the Ucayali.” Now they join at an angle. At the mouth of the Yarapa, he told us, there is a sunken village. Three years ago, he watched the river swallow it. The entire village disappeared in a month. “My father said to me,” Moises recalled, “that water is a natural thing. Man don’t stop that thing. Just the God.”

  And so it should be, Dianne and I nodded in agreement. But this is no longer true. We remembered that one of Vera’s chief fears for the dolphins was the hydroelectric projects Brazil envisioned for its river systems: a series of some eighty dams were proposed in the 1980s to harness 5,828 megawatts of the Amazon’s yearly energy for southern Brazil. Each dam blocks the routes of the migratory fishes, she pointed out; one small dam, in the state of Para, caused a 77 percent extinction of fish species. Only five species are left there, and only two of those are still abundant. The dolphins, unable to adapt from a diet of over fifty species to only two, are nearly gone.

  We soon saw more evidence of man’s growing power over the Amazon—a tugboat pushing two giant barges loaded with a herd of yellow CAT bulldozers, massed like mechanical dragons. Moises said they were headed for the Pastaza River, where American companies were drilling for oil. The Pastaza arises from Ecuador. In the 1930s, Royal Dutch Shell discovered pools of floating oil near the Andes’s eastern foothills, and by 1938, the company had blasted a route along the cliffs of the Pastaza Canyon—the first road across the Andes in Ecuador—and the beginning of a 315-mile pipeline that traverses the Andes and oil drills that spread across the forests of Ecuador and into Peru. Most of Ecuador’s oil production, some 300,000 barrels a day, comes from the Amazon region, and its waterways suffer. In July 1992, the month after the Earth Summit Conference was celebrated in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, a major oil spill in Ecuador released 27,000
gallons of oil into the Napo River, where Moises had grown up. The effects on the river animals were undocumented. “The only instances of accidental dolphin mortality that we are aware of,” Vera and her husband, Robin, had written in their landmark paper “Biology, Status, and Conservation of Inia,” “are associated with oil exploration.” João Pena had told them that American companies contracted by the Brazilian government agency PETRORAS were exploding large charges of several hundred pounds of dynamite along the length of the main tributaries of the Amazon. The explosions were followed by clouds of fish, turtles, and dolphins. They floated up dead, like ghosts rising from the Encante.

  But tourists are seldom aware of these events, and they still flock to the Amazon as a Mecca of wildness and wonder. And visitors like ourselves, too, can unwittingly spoil the very wildness they seek. As we approached Roxanne’s camp, suddenly it seemed that motorboats filled with blond gringos were everywhere, zipping along fast enough to overturn a villager’s canoe. There were six lodges situated along this five mile stretch of river, a concentration that has served to increase the population of local people attracted by the wealth tourists sporadically provide. The village of Porto Miguel, located at the center of the string of lodges, had grown from a population of about 150 ten years ago, to over 1,000. With the increase of population has come an increase in hunting and farming, and the tallest trees along the river are now the weedy cecropias, evidence of secondary growth after older trees have been flooded or cut down.

  At Dolphin Corners, we were met by Roxanne’s camp manager, David Olive. Slender, bespectacled, graying, and obviously weary from his duties, he was nonetheless delighted to have visitors who did not need medical attention. His young wife, a local girl, was away visiting her mother, leaving him in charge of the camp and its human and animal residents. Ramon, a deaf-mute with crippled hands and feet, helped David care for orphaned animals; Wilder helped with boat motors; and Samuel was the camp’s chief carpenter. In the camp’s round, thatched dining hall lived a young orphaned toucanet named Bottomless, and two canary-winged parakeets, also orphans. More birds lived outside, some caged, others loose. Penelope the guan stalked about on elegant, storklike legs. She liked to perch on the rails along the walkways, from which height she looked down upon people with an imperial red stare. On a harness hooked to a dog run over the grassy yard, a woolly monkey named Carlotta immediately wrapped me in her four limbs and long, prehensile tail. Her body felt feverishly warm—her normal body temperature, David later told me, is 102 to 103. I loved her embrace, but eventually had to pry her loose.