Pink Boots and a Machete

by Mireya Mayor

  For the first few days I spent time around the fishing villages on the Sea of Cortés. One of the benefits of my job is that I sometimes get to play with the local kids, so while Bob made arrangements for the boat, I watched another Bob get massacred. Armed with a Sponge Bob piñata, I made lots of little friends instantly. A little girl cracked open his head on her third strike. It was brutal, but the candy was a huge hit.

  I hired a local fisherman with a beat-up pickup truck to take me around to the villages. I noticed the driver had a framed picture of Jesus Christ on his dashboard and said a little prayer every time he attempted to start the car. I needed to talk to him about the legendary sea monsters I would soon be pursuing, so I prayed with him. Although I’m sure my Cuban accent sounded foreign to him, we spoke Spanish easily together, and it helped me gain his trust.

  The fisherman described how every night hundreds of Mexican fishermen nicknamed pangueros head out to the rough seas in pangas, small skiffs, to fish for the jumbo squid. It’s no easy task. The catch is heavy, weighing in at more than 100 pounds, and every squid must be caught on a hand line. But the harvest is lucrative—the squid are sent to Japan, where they are a delicacy—and very important to the local economy. Livelihoods depend on the catch. Each boat, manned by two or three fishermen, typically brings back a metric ton (2,200 pounds) of squid every night. Fathers pass down their knowledge of how to catch them to their sons. The fisherman described how these giant creatures appear like ghosts up and down the Pacific coast and then just disappear. Fishermen sometimes fall overboard and are dragged down into the depths. Many are so scared of the squid they won’t even eat them.

  In every village I was warned by the local fishermen, “Whatever you do, don’t fall in the water. They eat each other, and they will eat you.” Who knew calamari could be so aggressive?

  One of the fishermen offered to take me out on his boat to see if I could catch a squid, even though during the day it would be unlikely. Never one to turn down a challenge, I accepted. After so many tales about these alleged man-eaters, I was morbidly curious to see them firsthand. The next morning before the sun was up I helped bail out a panga on the Sea of Cortés. Then we spent five long hours without so much as a squid trace. The waters were rough, and I was feeling seasick. All I wanted to do was get to dry land and lie down. We were about to head back when one of the men announced there was a squid on the line. Ironically, it was the one-eyed man who spotted it; he had lost his eye from a hook on a line cast from one of these small boats. My hopes of getting off this rocking death trap were diminishing. Feeling a pale shade of green, I grabbed on to the line and began pulling the wretched squid in. I pulled and pulled, my arms getting sorer and sorer. I was at it for 20 minutes. They say these jumbo squid weigh 100 pounds, but I was pretty sure the one on my line weighed closer to a ton. Leaning over the edge of the panga, hanging on to this heavy creature, I tried my damnedest not to fall over. More than a half hour later I had it on board. It was massive—at least five feet long and 70 pounds—slimy, and as alien-looking as anything you will see in this world. I was very happy to release it back into the sea.

  After a day back on land, it was time to head out again. Gilly had spent the last several days with the fishermen, too, tagging more than 150 squid each day, falling only 4 short of his goal of 1,000. Listening to us talk about our plans to swim with the red devils, the boat captain Bob had hired didn’t mince words. He looked at me and Bob and the crew and said, “Ustedes todos estan locos.” I translated it for the crazy gringos. But Gilly insisted that the squid’s ruthless reputation was unwarranted. “I’ve been snorkeling with them at night in just shorts and T-shirt,” he said. “The squid would swim up to the surface, reach out their arms, and gently touch my extended hand. To meet them like this and shake hands was truly amazing.” Gilly could get quite emotional talking about his beloved squid and had been known to shed a tear or two, a sight that made the film crew giggle.

  The captain strongly disagreed with Gilly’s emotional portrayal of the creatures and said he’d personally witnessed them pull several fishermen to their deaths. He described how they can propel themselves up to more than three times the speed of an Olympic swimmer; a human didn’t stand a chance. He described how one squid would pull the man down and drown him, and then several more would join in the ambush and then eat the body. I was beginning to think I’d been better off with the great whites.

  That night, several miles out in the ocean, the water was again rough. The plan was for Bob to jump in first and dive down to the dangerous depths. I would feed the electrical cord for the lights and wait until a jumbo squid ascended to shallower depths. Then I, too, would get into the water. We were using red lights, so as to not startle the squid with bright, white light. Underwater the squid themselves flash red on and off. Perhaps they would confuse us as one of their own. Why they flash, like most of their habits, is still a mystery to science. Some scientists speculate that it’s a form of communication. Others argue that the flashing behavior might serve to confuse a lurking predator whale.

  I was excited, but no one was as keyed up as Gilly. Despite having studied them for more than 20 years, he had never been deep-diving with these animals, and most of the behavior we would document he’d never seen. Bob’s camera would become Gilly’s eyes underwater. Bob jumped in and before long, I got the OK from him to dive in. In the dark waters only a few feet away from me swam both the weirdest and the most beautiful creatures I had ever seen. Their long bodies lit up and changed colors, like a spectacular underwater light show. I was trans-fixed by their movement, their long tentacles flowing gently through the water. Lethal and beautiful at the same time, they were hypnotic to watch.

  At first it seemed the squid were wary of the lights. I was beginning to think that their aggressive reputation was undeserved and if anything they were shy at a distance. But curiosity soon got the better of them, and one of them went for the light, then the camera, then Bob’s mask. Soon Bob was surrounded. I remembered his words topside, “You have to let them know you are big and bad, and they will have a fight on their hands if they don’t back off.” Another of the squid began spurting ink. With his camera Bob began pushing the attacker away, his free hand disengaging a tentacle from his mask. It quickly backed off. With bated breath I realized that as quickly as it began, the drama was over.

  Heading back to shore, I couldn’t wait to get out of my wet suit and back into my pink boots. The ocean is a mysterious and wondrous place, which I love and respect. We know more about other planets than we do about what lies beneath our amazing seas. I felt privileged to have spent time with these mystifying sea predators. But I had come to the realization that I am most comfortable on land, on my feet back in the jungles of our cute, closely related cousins. Gorillas I can read. Red devils and sharks…not so much.

  Ten

  My Fear of Heights Conquered (Sort Of)

  APRIL 1, 2003: Today marks the beginning of the last two weeks of this expedition. It is the most rugged and difficult journey I have ever done. After a grueling nine-hour trek, we set up camp and went fishing, as we are nearly out of food. My legs are covered in blistering red sores, most of them now becoming black scabs. Seems the antibiotic is finally working. But waking up on the ledge that sits high on the tepui’s wall over a green abyss makes it all worth it. Sitting here above the clouds, never have I witnessed a more amazing sunrise.

  A number of early explorers spoke of mysterious mountains that thrust skyward over South America’s dense jungle. The mountaintops appeared like islands in the sky. Their descriptions inspired Sir Arthur Conan Doyle to write The Lost World, a novel set in an isolated place where dinosaurs and other prehistoric animals existed. The dinosaurs were fiction. But the mountains are real, and the present-day Guyana natives are superstitiously scared of them. It was in this remote, trackless, virtually unexplored jungle of southwestern Guyana that I would have one of my most memorable extreme expeditions.

  And,
yes, Guyana is where I almost died years before. History would repeat itself.

  Our team’s mission was both high risk and high return. At National Geographic headquarters, the producer Peter Getzels, an American with a British accent that seemed to fade in and out, sold me on the idea almost instantly. He pointed to the high probability of discovering new species, and that is always exciting. He said the place we were going was a place few people have been, and though we can locate it on a map, that doesn’t mean we’d find it. Mysterious…I liked it. He also explained that several other expeditions had set out to survey the area and failed. We would be the first to explore and collect specimens. It sounded like a challenge, and I’ve never met a challenge I didn’t like. But then he warned me that the expedition would include not only real science but also severe rock climbing. Hold the horses. “Severe rock climbing?” As in hanging from the side of a cliff wall thousands of feet up? No, thanks.

  I explained that I had never been rock climbing, much less severe rock climbing, a laughably tough technical grade. I was born and raised in Miami, where the tallest mountains are landfills. Even if I wanted to, I wouldn’t have time to beef up my climbing skills before the expedition was on its way. But Peter insisted that I take a lesson at a climbing school in Maryland and then decide if I was up for it or not. I agreed. What I didn’t mention is that I am scared to death of heights.

  The explorer gene in me must have beaten out my fear, because before I knew it, I was on my way back to Guyana. Truth is, I could never turn down an expedition, even one that involved high altitudes. On the departing flight from Washington, D.C., the entire coach section was filled with Guyanese wearing jackets and ties. I couldn’t believe my luck when the flight attendant offered to bump me and the crew to first class. Then I learned why. The plane was full of mourners heading home for a funeral, with the deceased peacefully resting in coach. It made for an eerie if not foreboding start.

  In Guyana I was joined by biologist Bruce Means and herpetologist Jesus Rivas, as well as by two of America’s best climbers, Mark Synnott and Jared Ogden, both highly experienced with extreme peaks. Our survey of these cliffs would almost certainly bring to light species completely new to science. But nothing worth doing is ever easy. If our search for undiscovered creatures was to yield results, we would have to tackle the dangers of extreme climbing and rappelling, both in our ascent of the tepui and our descent into the darkness of a giant sinkhole.

  There are more than a hundred of these remote, high, sheer, flat-topped table mountains called tepuis. They are found in Venezuela, Brazil, Suriname, and Guyana, but they are not well mapped or well traveled. Their biological value lies in that they are some of the earth’s oldest geological formations. The sandstone rock of these formations was laid down as sediment about 1.6 billion years ago, making them more than three times older than the earliest macroscopic fossils. Over millennia, the vast sandstone plateaus were fractured by movement of the Earth’s crust and eroded by the day-by-day effect of water. Even by geological time the formations are ancient, and very little is known about the plants and animals that live on their cliff sides and in their sinkholes. Virtually untouched, this ecosystem is a link to Earth’s prehistoric past. The tepuis are places where time has stood still, and the result is an astonishing landscape not seen anywhere else on Earth.

  Our goal was to reach the summit of Mount Roraima, famously known as “the lost world.” It is Guyana’s tallest tepui. On the border of Guyana, Brazil, and Venezuela, this massive mountain extends for nearly nine miles and is three miles in width. Its wide, flat summit tops out at 9,094 feet. I was psyched.

  Our diverse crew met up in Georgetown, Guyana, and after a short meeting with the country’s forest ministry, loaded piles of climbing gear and scientific equipment onto a rattletrap prop plane. Bruce, Jesus, Peter, and I would fly to a remote airstrip, hike from there to the mountain, and then the climbers, as well as cameraman John Catto, would join us by helicopter later in the expedition. The only helicopter in all of Guyana, it would be borrowed from the military. This would allow Mark and Jared to do an aerial reconnaissance of the climbing route, complete with GPS readings. Armed with that expertise, we scientists would pursue our exploration and collection of the species of flora and fauna that inhabit the vertical world of Mount Roraima’s prow. Several scientists, traveling by helicopter, had studied the tepui summits, but no one had studied the plant and animal life of the cliff sides themselves.

  We landed on a tiny grass landing strip in the shadow of the tepui, at the edge of the jungle. We unloaded and trekked to an Amerindian village named Pipillipai, with a population of 670, and were greeted by the Akawaio tribesmen. Because this entire area was unexplored, only the local Amerindians would be able to find us a route to the mountain. Here we recruited numerous guides, 30 porters, and 13 trail cutters, who’d lead the way with machetes, hacking away obstacles in the path. It was a hard recruit because they’d have to commit to leaving their wives and children for well over a month. They also knew that it was a dangerous mission, not least because of the deadly and feared fer-de-lance.

  Personally, I am not a fan of such big teams on an expedition. I feel responsible for more lives, and it is a surefire way to see fewer animals, as the noise made by the group sends them fleeing. But expeditions had failed in the past because of lack of food. The dilemma is the more food you bring, the more men you need to carry it, and the more food you need for those men, and so on. In this never-ending spiral, I nevertheless found myself hiring porters for the porters and more porters for those.

  For the next six weeks we lived in hammocks, moving from camp to camp. The going was hard and slow from the outset. The trek was nothing short of jungle mountaineering. Although the route is not that steep by climbing standards, it was up a 70-degree jungle slope. We alternately grasped plants and bushes to haul ourselves up and with machetes hacked them out of the way. As we struggled along, we found tiny frogs; spectacular bromeliads, odd tropical plants that live on other plants; brightly colored and therefore almost certainly poisonous snakes; and some fearsome-looking insects. Some of these species appeared to be unknown.

  The strain of the trek was beginning to take its toll. With every step and biting insect and the constant rainfall, I was understanding why most tepuis had yet to feel the tread of explorers’ feet. Excited as I was to go into this lost world of tangled, twisted, and suffocating disorder to find the real Jurassic Park, the jungle was proving much tougher and more inhospitable than any of us had anticipated. In four days we had covered barely 20 miles.

  Then one day, as if the going wasn’t hard enough, an old cheerleading injury reared its ugly head. I had once badly sprained my ankle and now, weakened, it blew up to the size of a baseball. I couldn’t let this slow the expedition down. I would have to keep pushing through the pain until we camped that night. Fortunately, night comes quickly in the jungle, and before I knew it I was lying in my hammock. I could hear Bruce wading around in murky water with a headlamp looking for frogs.

  Mornings here could be gorgeous when the weather was clear. A brilliant light spilled through the mist and treetops, giving a glimpse of heaven. I had a good night’s rest, and my ankle was feeling better. But the jungle was relentless, and it wasn’t just the difficulty of the terrain. Bruce woke up that morning with a painful ball under his toes. A creature had burrowed in his foot. He also had swollen lymph nodes, which generally means an infection.

  In the rain forest there are several organisms that can take up residence under your skin. I once had a botfly, for example, living in my arm. The area was sore and bumpy, but it was only when the botfly stuck its breathing tube out that I realized what it was. Burrowing worms, entozoa, are other pesky critters. They burrow into human skin causing a boil-like infection, which eventually breaks, leaving the head of the worm protruding. You can’t pull it out, or the worm breaks in the body. These entozoa often grow to be ten feet long. Natives draw out a few inches per day, ree
ling them on sticks as they emerge.

  In what can only be described as jungle surgery, I dissected Bruce’s foot with my pocketknife. Having no training in this—other than having worn a nurse uniform as a kid—I peeled the skin back and used my tweezers to poke around, evoking a few grunts and a little scream from Bruce. I found the culprit. Bruce’s painful ball wasn’t a botfly or a worm but rather a burrowing flea that dug into his flesh and became distended with eggs. One flea turns into hundreds, and they all feed on blood. I had to be very careful removing the mother flea, so as not to unleash the eggs.

  With one problem solved, we could move on, but we were hardly in the clear.

  The original plan was for us to establish a base camp in the jungle, after which the climbing team would bring in additional gear and provisions for the ascent. But what we thought was a day’s walk to the prow had taken a week. We couldn’t communicate our position to Mark and Jared because the satellite phone wasn’t working. We had no way of knowing if we were on course. When a cackley call finally went through, all we could tell them was that we were about three miles northeast of the prow, near a waterfall.