A wolverine is eating my leg

by Tim Cahill

  This book made available by the Internet Archive.

  For the Board of Directors

  INTRODUCTION

  are guys who have been lost in the desert, who have had a crisis of courage in some underground cavern, who have been beaten up by sacred Himalayan rivers. They seem like daredevils, this group that rides the raggedy edge of risk. And they are problematic individuals, these fellows. Some of them drink a little too much or laugh too loud. They are in entirely too good a mood.

  Over the years, a lot of people have asked why I've invited them to any parties at all. I suppose I owe these old friends some explanation.

  Look at them from my point of view:

  They are, to be sure, often an embarrassment. The subject matter—adventure travel—is sometimes considered fodder for the old Action for Men type of magazine, the kind with articles that take place in the present tense, right now, as you are reading them: "A Wolverine Is Eating My Leg!"

  The adventure story—or, more properly, the impulse that drives it—is often difficult to describe. A few years ago, I spent some time trying to explain myself to the media. I didn't do that hot of a job. "Various insane adventures in the out-of-doors have helped me preserve my sanity," I pointed out, "during a time in which my sanity was at substantial risk." Or somewhat less-precise words to that effect.

  I was supposed to be promoting a book I'd written about a serial killer, a book that takes the reader on a tour through the twisted sewers of the monster's mind. My publisher had scheduled me to appear on a lot of radio talk shows. ("The caller is either misinformed or a moron, Jim.") I chatted with print reporters ("Let's get another round; publisher pays") and appeared on several local TV talk shows: Good Morning Detroit and Chicago and Cleveland and Toronto and Boston and Los Angeles. The subject matter required that I dress in a funereal fashion, so the audience saw a large bearded man who, I'm sure, didn't seem entirely comfortable wearing a suit and tie. I looked like a gorilla in a tuxedo.

  Worse, I found that the bright lights of a television studio seemed to have a paralyzing effect on my body and my

  powers of speech. There was a stiffness in my performance on these shows that I am sure was not lost on the viewer. "This guy wrote a book? He can't even talk."

  The question most asked by those reviewers who had read the book and comprehended its psychological nuances was: "Tim Cahill (they always use your full name), how did you maintain your own sanity during the four years it took you to write Buried Dreams?"

  The temptation to drool and gibber was always very great at this point; to say, quite seriously, that the constant litany of horror "never bothered me, bothered me, bothered me, bothered me. . . ."

  In fact, looking inside the mind of a murderer was terrifying, and it did bother me. It bothered me a lot. It played on my mind during racquetball games; it hit me halfway through short treks in the mountains. There was really no release from the dark parade of horrors that marched over the pages of my research. I was enduring a kind of psychological Chinese water torture. In those bad, shaky times, when I realized that one more morbid detail, one more sordid fact, would send me screaming around the bend, I knew it was time to go out and risk my life for no very good reason.

  So I told interviewers across the country that I sought psychological relief in risk-sport. Actually, I've been flirting with serious risk for just over a decade, and when the "wuffos" (wuffo you jump out of an airplane?) have asked me in the past why I choose, say, to climb mountains, I have generally denied that there is any risk at all. Sometimes numbers help: in an old issue of Science 85, for instance, experts and lay people were asked to rank the risk of dying from thirty activities. The experts' ranking closely matched known fatality statistics, which showed that more people die yearly from activities the public considers innocuous (using home appliances, power mowers, spray cans, food colorings, food preservatives, and contraceptives) than die climbing mountains (rated twenty-ninth in terms of death risk by experts; skiing was thirtieth).

  No one with any sense believes statistics, however, and

  INTRODUCTION

  an argument can be made that fewer people die climbing mountains because fewer people climb mountains than use spray cans. The law of averages legislates against the users of spray cans. More to the point, most of us perceive mountain climbing as a dangerous activity, and we take precautions precisely so we won't go plunging to our deaths. The question then arises: why do something you perceive as dangerous, even if the numbers suggest it isn't? Why go out and purposefully scare yourself silly?

  Well (I should have said), there are some emotional and even biochemical rewards. Danger, or the perception of danger, releases opiate-type natural drugs into the nervous system. Endorphins still sloshing about in the brain after the first skydive complement the sense of accomplishment: people often mention an overwhelming sense of euphoria.

  Ralph Keyes, in his book Chancing It: Why We Take Risks, mentions this euphoria along with a feeling of control. The skydiver, for instance, is the only one who can pull his own ripcord. The skydiver controls his or her own destiny and, according to Keyes, "those who feel more control over their lives are less likely to have accidents, commit suicide. . . . Taking extreme and even death-defying risks can actually reduce one's sense of being at risk because it increases a sense of control over one's destiny. . . . Fear is sought because (unlike anxiety) it feels as if it is subject to our will. In islands of created danger, the danger creator is king."

  A third benefit of perceived jeopardy is total concentration. Quoting Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, a psychologist who has studied risk-takers from professional dancers to rock climbers, Keyes says that "concentration could become so total that it resembled a state of religious transcendence."

  Following the moments of transcendent concentration and the resultant endorphin-fueled euphoria is a calm so serene that Keyes believes the term stress seeker is "a misnomer. One of the main reasons for seeking stress is to enjoy the subsequent tranquility."

  All this is said with a good deal more poetry in Diane Ackerman's book, On Extended Wings. Ackerman, a pilot, scuba diver, and horsewoman, writes that she likes "that

  moment central to danger . . . when you become so thoroughly concerned with acting deftly, in order to be safe, that only reaction is possible, not analysis. You shed the centuries and feel creatural. Of course you do have to scan, assess, and make constant minute decisions. But there is nothing like thinking in the usual methodical way. What takes its place is more akin to informed instinct. For a compulsively pensive person, to be fully alert but free of thought is a form of ecstasy."

  I suppose those salient factors—concentration, control, ecstasy, and tranquility—go a long way toward explaining the desire to scare oneself badly. They are, of course, the very sensations a man whose work has become a psychologically dangerous obsession needs to experience. If the work in question is a study in human evil, as mine was, the claustrophobia can become intense; the obsession soul-threatening. Reason demands that the escape must be equally intense.

  And so it was that I came to understand that risk is a form of therapy. That's what I'll tell the interviewers next time around. The stories I've written about various adventures are among my favorites. In them, I've discovered you can put your life on the line in order to save your soul.

  Which is why I want these loud, goofy, boisterous fellows at my party.

  Tim Cahill, Montana

  A WOLVERINE IS EATING MY LEG

  men, old-timers for the most part, can be found in and around Canaima. Formerly the exclusive haunt of adventurers, bush pilots, prospectors, and explorers, Canaima is, these days, a modern resort. Set deep in a Venezuelan jungle known
as the Lost World, Canaima is only a day or two's journey by outboard-powered dugout from Angel Falls, at the base of Auyan-Tepui, the devil mountain. The resort itself is situated on an immense lagoon formed by the Rio Carrao and fringed by soft, pink sand.

  Everywhere there are orchids, and the fecund, slightly sweet odor of the jungle is amiable and caressing. At its deepest, the lagoon is black, somehow metallic, and great clouds float across it in reflection. Where it's shallow, the water is clear and clean and brown, the color of strong tea or good bourbon. Such dark jungle rivers and lagoons carry organic acids and do not provide a good place for insects to breed. Piranha are seldom found, since they tend to live in slow, swollen, sediment-rich rivers, such as the Orinoco, whose surface is the color of lead. I have seen men fishing for piranha on the Orinoco banks, fishing for the sheer joy of killing. They would pull the piranha in and let them flop to death on the bank. The little fish looked like vampire sunperch.

  But there are no piranha or insects at Canaima, and the tourists, especially the well-to-do Venezuelans, tend to wear those abbreviated swimsuits associated with Rio de Janeiro. For many North Americans, Canaima is a first taste of the jungle, and in the bar overlooking the lagoon, they may meet some of the old-timers and this is where the trouble sometimes starts. Legitimate businessmen in Canaima complain that it is almost impossible to get wealthy tourists to invest in aviation services or other necessary concessions. Instead, people want to drop their money into unlikely gold- and diamond-mining ventures.

  And the tale is told of a bush pilot I'll call Norman. Norman shouldn't have been anywhere in Venezuela. His visa had been revoked over some serious financial misunderstandings, but he was in Canaima when two brothers from Houston arrived. Somehow, probably over drinks at

  JUNGLES OF THE MIND

  the lagoon bar, Norman discovered that these two big, good-hearted old boys owned a machine shop in Houston, and that they were doing very well. Norman decided to tell them about the diamonds. The stones were there for the taking, buried in the coarse, sandy banks of a river that flowed along the flat top of Auyan-Tepui.

  Norman had bought the diamonds from a drunken miner near the Luepa army base. They were poor stones, small, discolored, and virtually worthless. Norman salted the sand with them on the devil mountain, and when he flew the brothers up there and showed them where to dig, each came up with a couple of the dark little stones.

  The brothers went back to Houston, borrowed all they could on the machine shop, and sent Norman $25,000 to get started on their newly acquired diamond mine. Norman took the money and flew off in the general direction of Brazil. Now, in this area of Venezuela, isolated landing strips are everywhere, and many of them are uncharted except by those who conduct extralegal business. Norman had hired a couple of men to stock one of those strips with drums of fuel. Unfortunately for Norman, he hadn't been paying his bills, and when he put down on the rutted, red-dirt strip in the middle of the jungle, he discovered there was no fuel. Because of his visa difficulties, he couldn't land anywhere where fuel was legitimately sold, and so he decided to try for Brazil on what he had left in his tank.

  It is a ticklish matter, crash landing a light plane in a jungle. You want to glide down as slowly as possible; you want to snag your plane in one of the trees that rise like monstrous stalks of broccoli above the lesser vegetation. These trees can be more than one hundred and fifty feet high, and most bush pilots carry a rope for the final descent.

  Norman ran out of fuel near Santa Elena, a town about twelve miles short of the Brazilian border, and he was taken into custody. Meanwhile, the brothers were back in Canaima, asking around about Norman, and they didn't seem so good-hearted anymore. Just big. And determined.

  That's the end of the story, as the old-timers tell it. No one saw the brothers again. Several years later, Norman

  A WOLVERINE IS EATING MY LEG

  showed up in Canaima. The old-timers couldn't help but notice that he had no fingers on his right hand. They were all gone, cut off neat and clean, just as if the job had been done in a machine shop.

  Most stories involving precious stones and jungles end poorly. The Muzo mine, about one hundred miles north of Bogota, Colombia, is the source of 80 percent of the emeralds sold on the world market. Bulldozers strip the hillsides while about twenty thousand prospectors wade through the river below, panning for emeralds loosened by the machines above. The prospectors are not allowed to move above the riverbanks, and armed guards on the hillside fire at them if they do.

  After years of gangland slayings in the jungle, the Colombian government has rented the mine to "the Heavy Gang," which won control of the mine from "the Goose Gang" after at least one massacre and uncounted assassinations. The government's lucrative decision to cooperate with the gangsters has eliminated much of the violence associated with Muzo. Officials recently told Warren Hoge of the New York Times that the mine has been "pacified," but Hoge quoted an outside observer who said he had counted twenty-four corpses in twenty-one days at Muzo. The observer said that some prospectors had taken to swallowing their emeralds when confronted by thieves, and some thieves had taken to disemboweling their victims.

  Two of the most popular bars in the area are called the Seven Knife Stabs and Where Life Is Worth Nothing.

  JUNGLES OF THE MIND

  The law of the jungle seems to be this: there is no law in the jungle. Which isn't to suggest that there aren't a lot of policemen and soldiers around. There are, and one reason for this is that boundaries are difficult to establish. There are border disputes everywhere: Peru and Ecuador, Belize and Guatemala, Guyana and Venezuela. The less populated an area becomes and the deeper into the jungle one goes, the more forms there are to fill out and checkpoints to go through. One may be obliged to show a passport, a visa, or permits; to state age, marital status, occupation, reason for being in the area; to explain one's very existence.

  In certain areas of Peru, one may have to first report to the Peruvian Investigative Police (PIP) before checking into a hotel. Miguel Zamora, the man who heads up PIP in the northeastern town of Chachapoyas, did not seem to trust the three of us. The expedition had been launched in search of a pre-Incan culture known as the Chachas. We were also making our own maps, and these, Zamora decided, might be of assistance to, say, an Ecuadorian military expedition. Every other day that we were in town, Zamora called us in for another little talk.

  On the other hand, the chief of police, the commandant, seemed to like and trust us. He had sent his daughter to a school in Lima, where she studied English, and she had taught him an American song.

  "Heengalay bales, heengalay bales . . ."

  We figured it out more from the tune than the words, and so, on a hot July afternoon in Chachapoyas, which is located in the eastern foothills of the Andes, on a plateau that drops off into three thousand miles of jungle, we joined in with the commandant.

  ". . . jingle all the way, oh what fun it is to ride in a one-horse open sleigh . . ."

  Every time we saw the commandant, he reminded us of the fun we had singing "Heengalay Bales" together. He

  A WOLVERINE IS EATING MY LEG

  wore a hat something like an American policeman's, except it was three times as high and had gold braids on it. It looked like a hat that a loony dictator would wear in a slapstick film. The commandant learned more about our reasons for being in Chachapoyas in one hour than Zamora did in the half-dozen chats he had with us.

  As it turned out, we found a number of forts and stone cities of the Chachas. They were set deep in the forests in a mountainous region known as Ceja de Selva ("eyebrow of the jungle"). We had used a sixteenth-century Spanish text as a guide, and the cities were as described in The Royal Commentaries of the Incas. We camped for days in some of those vegetation-choked ruins and tried to imagine the lives of a people long gone. I suspect these should have been humbling days, but an intense euphoria overwhelmed all other emotions.

  It was as if the jungle had drawn its b
reath and sucked these people back into its darkness. There were ceramic artifacts one thousand years old and more, and the potsherds sometimes lay in company with human remains. We left this evidence for the archaeologists and marveled at the power of the forest. It had sent roots snaking through the interstices of the great stone forts and had swallowed the culture whole. Standing in the ruins, I imagined uncontrolled natural forces at work: it was like walking through the rubble of a hurricane-ravaged shoreline. The ruins had taken on the syrupy odor of all that triumphant vegetation. I was standing on the scene of some slow, choking horror, and I was alive, I would survive, and these thoughts left me feeling blessed and giddy.

  JUNGLES OF THE MIND

  I sat next to an investment counselor on a recent flight from Miami to a jungle island off the coast of the Yucatan peninsula. I told him about the picture—the white woman in panty hose, the three impassive Indians—and what it meant to me. We worked our way around that meaning, just as I am doing here, by swapping jungle tales. The man told me this story:

  "I have a friend who is a very successful contractor, and his wife is what you might call an adventurer. She's a pilot and has been all over the world. Well, she heard about some gold mines up one of the rivers of Brazil and wanted me to see if I could find investors. It looked a little too iffy for me, so she went ahead and raised the money on her own. She got all the permits and certifications that you need and hired two Vietnam vets to help her work the site.

  "One day, a government plane set down on their landing strip and they were arrested. The charge was murder— multiple counts. It seems there was another operation in progress in the area. The guy who headed the thing was hiring criminals, escaped convicts and various other unsavory types who might feel comfortable in the jungle, away from any legal agencies. These fellows would work a site, and each of them, I suppose, had a percentage of the take. The fellow who was running the operation would fly to the site with a couple of thugs and shoot the miners, take the gold, and save the percentage.