Mother of God

by Paul Rosolie

  Most ecosystems have a single, indisputable apex predator, but the western Amazon is more like a cage fight in murderers’ row. With so much muscle around, they’ve had to split up the terrain. The harpy eagle takes the canopy, while jaguars cover the ground. Anacondas and black caiman crocodiles, which can reach eighteen feet in length, battle in the rivers and lakes, which are also haunted by giant otters, a formidable hunter whose Spanish name translates to river wolves. Probing the deepest parts of the river are 150-pound black catfish. And yet this list of killers is far from complete: several other species of cat, croc, mammal, and large snake back up the hulking lead characters. The list of smaller hunters is virtually infinite.

  The rough tallies for the entire Andes/Amazon region: 1,666 birds, 414 mammals, 479 reptiles, 834 amphibians, and a large portion of the Amazon’s 9,000 fish species. In the Madre de Dios alone there are more than 1,400 butterfly species. The numbers on everything from bats to beetles are constantly changing as scientists learn more. In early 2012 researchers from Conservation International announced that they had documented 365 previously unrecorded species in a single study area, just a pinprick of the landscape.

  Within the impenetrable assemblage of giant hardwoods and bamboo are palms with ten-inch thorns that can run a man through, and others that walk from place to place beneath the canopy on their roots, like Tolkien’s Ents. Flowing in the cambium of some trees are poisons that can kill you in minutes and other compounds that can drop your mind into hallucinogenic pandemonium, but there are also medicines that can control fertility and cure the most horrendous diseases. The west Amazon was where the first cure for malaria was discovered and where rubber was first tapped on a large scale. Amid the diversity grows one tree that produces sap almost completely made of hydrocarbons, producing 1,500 gallons of sap each year that can be poured directly into a diesel motor as fuel.

  While the food chain can be mapped in web format for most ecosystems, the west Amazon defies human explanation. If it were possible to trace the elaborate interspecies relationships unfolding within the jungles there the result would most likely resemble a Jackson Pollock painting the size of Rhode Island. Even today we know little about the system. It is for this reason the region has been described as the “largest terrestrial battlefield” on earth. Every last organism is eaten. Life here is a countdown, a temporary stasis as the jungle waits, inevitably adding all things into the rapid cycle.

  The Mother of God is a region of extremes, polarizing all elements within it, including humanity. In a world where rivers are highways, there remain infrequent indigenous settlements. It is not uncommon to come across a cluster of palm-thatched villages among the green. In the early morning you can see women washing clothes in the river, while children play and splash. Men hunt and fish and grow crops like bananas and yucca, or collect Brazil nuts. Much of the sparsely inhabited backcountry is like this, peaceful, and made up of simple, warm, friendly people.

  At the other end of the spectrum are the extractors. Prowling the backcountry is a host of loggers, drug traffickers, poachers, and gold miners. The latter use motor pumps to tear up the riverbed sand in search of their prize, dumping mercury into the water and polluting the otherwise pristine world. Narcos also make strategic use of the geography. It is rumored that the cocaine trail comes up from Bolivia and that the runners use a small airstrip hidden in the jungle. They apparently maneuver the plane into a gap in the canopy and land on a runway obscured by the branches above, remaining invisible to aerial surveillance. But it is the loggers who are the most blatantly nefarious. There are numerous accounts of loggers clashing with local people and even isolated tribes, native arrows little match for loggers’ modern guns.

  The collision of human worlds is comparable to the westward expansion of European settlers across North America in its components, but the situation in Madre de Dios is wilder by several degrees of magnitude. Copy and paste the players from the American West into the insane context of the Amazon, change a few names, sprinkle in some anacondas and several million other species, and the similarities are eerie. Loggers versus Indians, gold miners versus helicopter commandoes; oil companies, pipelines, new roads, secret genocide, corruption, greed, missionaries, bandits, politicians, and massive paradigm shifts unfolding at a dizzying pace.

  At a time in history when scientists are recording unprecedented extinction rates and many people feel that the loss of biological diversity and deteriorating natural systems is the defining issue of our time, the west Amazon is ground zero. Nowhere are the stakes higher.

  It was within the depths of this world that I slept on that torturous night. All hope of finding Santiago’s wild land had faded. Now the great adventure had become a survival situation, a question of direction and luck. I remember waking into darkness like the belly of a black hole. Alone in my hammock, I listened desperately. Something was nearby, something big. I could hear breathing. I shut my eyes. Heartbeats shook my chest, and my blood rushed audibly. I had no thoughts, only blind terror. The volume of air drawn with each sniff told me this was something massive. My nostrils filled with a pungent odor as my hand instinctively went toward my headlamp, making a small noise against the hammock’s fabric.

  A growl erupted from the darkness. A god’s voice. Warm breath fell on my neck in savage staccato like thunder, cosmic and overwhelming. Every fiber of my body understood the command of that growl: don’t move. I closed my eyes and lay still, too terrified to move. Cradled in blind purgatory, grasping at lucidity, I was helpless and prayed that whatever happened next would be over quickly.

  In the context of their rainforest environment, jaguars are ghosts. Masters of the shadows, they employ a skill for stealth that is leagues beyond human ability. Scientists who study jaguars their entire lives can go years without a sighting and instead have to rely on tracks and scat, and on camera traps and radio collars to collect data. The cats are thick-bodied and powerful, the pit bulls of the big cats. They move silently over land and through water. They can drag a deer up a tree and, at 250 pounds, can overpower anything in their environment. To a jaguar, dispatching a human wrapped in his hammock would translate roughly to you or me peeling a banana.

  I could feel her breath as she drew my scent into the labyrinthine reaches of her nasal cavity, her face only inches from my right ear. Is this how it ends? She sniffed and drew nearer, exhaling another furnace draft onto my neck. For a small eternity she was silent, standing invisibly beside me, incredibly close.

  Lost and alone beneath the storm and the canopy, on the dark side of the planet, it was a pivotal moment of a story that began when I was very young and would shape my entire future. Despite the jaguar at my side, a remarkable calm ebbed through me. She hadn’t come for blood.

  2

  Restless

  Earth and sky, woods and fields, lakes and rivers, the mountain and the sea, are excellent schoolmasters, and teach some of us more than we can ever learn from books.

  —JOHN LUBBOCK

  When you travel east from Lima by air, floating over the snowcapped steeples of the Andes, the clouds are numerous and blinding. Jagged parapets draped in glaciers fall to immense valleys that seem to yawn into eternity. The land between the great peaks is stoic and barren, treeless and empty for thousands of miles at a time; an alien landscape interrupted only rarely by a long and lonesome dirt road.

  The FASTEN SEAT BELTS sign came on as the pilot threaded between mountains that seemed too massive to be real. I was vaguely aware that the guy in the seat next to mine was pale green and burping bile from the turbulence. Behind me a woman was praying the rosary in Spanish. The plane’s wings were flapping as we were jerked up and down. But I was mesmerized and barely noticed. I had waited my whole life for this moment.

  The empty valleys below were gradually shading green. The barren emptiness began to turn to lush foliage and then riotous cloud forest as we lost altitude and the mountains dropped off. Vision came in glimpses through the clouds as glac
ial rivers cascaded through a world of moss and mist. Then came more clouds, torturous moments of whiteout when I could feel my heart pounding with anticipation. Then it happened.

  Shuddering through turbulence, the plane dropped below the ceiling, revealing an unbroken immensity of green jungle from horizon to horizon. For the first time in my life the breath was sucked from my chest. Rivers lay across the range in great sweeping arcs like bronze serpents reflecting light skyward. Mist sat like puddles scattered in the omnipresent foliage, rising and curling in places. It was like looking into the vault of the universe to where all the greatest secrets were kept, the library of life.

  How could there be so much jungle? Since childhood I had dreamed of this, wondering what the Amazon would look like, smell like, and feel like; imagining, hoping, waiting but never once gaining any preparation for the mind-blowing reality of setting eyes on it for the first time.

  People always ask me how I came to work in the Amazon at such a young age. It is a difficult question to answer, because the trajectory that sent me into the jungle started when I was very young, and had something to do with a dismal cloudy day in high school, when a teacher threw me up against a cinder block wall. No one else was around, just him and me. His hands were around my neck and for a moment I paused in disbelief, watching his ugly gray eyes, so revoltingly close to mine, bulge in anger. In that moment I was terrified, but not for me. I was scared because I could feel the cerebral rage dispatching through my limbs, and the imminent reaction that I knew would be out of my control.

  But I hadn’t always been violent. I started out as a gentle, nature-loving dyslexic kid from New Jersey. Actually, I was physically born in Manhattan, back when my parents were living in Brooklyn, and I have always identified the latter as where I’m from. Even after we moved to Wyckoff, a town in the New Jersey suburbs, we’d still make it to Sunday dinner every other week at Grandma’s house in Brooklyn, under the shadow of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, with all the aunts, uncles, and cousins, for the best food in the universe.

  Both of my parents were teachers, but my mother became a full-time mom after my sister and I came into the picture. My dad kept his job in Brooklyn and made the hour-and-a-half commute each way for almost twenty years. When he got home from work each day my mom would be in the kitchen, filling the entire house with the scents of garlic and marinara. We’d all play and laugh and eat together, every night. My dad and I were always wrestling and playing ball. We built snowmen together, hiked, and sometimes he’d make us all laugh until it hurt by quoting dramatic passages by Dostoyevsky.

  Though I wasn’t diagnosed until high school, I am dyslexic, which disability caused me to struggle throughout my school life. It took me far longer than everyone else to learn to read, and math was like Sanskrit. School was always a nightmare for me. I just wanted to be outside, and as a kid I’d look out the window until the teacher yelled at me. So then I’d draw, which also wouldn’t end well. That’s how I ended up doing first grade twice, in three different schools.

  While I bounced around the education system, my parents took teaching into their own hands. I remember weekend hikes with my parents and sister, along with our golden retriever, Sam. I was always in search of bugs, frogs, salamanders, and snakes. For me, exploring the forest, overturning rocks and stones, and being in the woods was freedom. As I grew, my delight in the natural world intensified. I continued to develop a keen eye for things other people didn’t see, and a gentle touch needed to handle small forest life.

  My parents encouraged my love of the natural world, and I can remember my mom spending hours explaining the difference between African and Asian elephants, black bears and grizzlies, and other basics to a captivated five-year-old me. She used to blindfold me and have me identify the trees in our backyard by the texture of their bark. The big old oak that leaned over our house, the maple that my sister and I liked to climb. I was good at that.

  I cried when she read me an article about Lonesome George, a Pinto Island Galapagos tortoise. The article explained that he was the last of his kind and that when he died his species would be extinct. I was well under ten years old, and the thought kept me awake for weeks. That a species could be removed from existence by humans, or that an ecosystem could vanish before I had the chance to see it, horrified me. I grew up with a sense of urgency. I wanted to see the world’s wild places and creatures before they disappeared. Thankfully, at that age there were many things I didn’t know.

  While still in grade school I’d spend months each summer caring for and raising praying mantises, the T. rex of the insect world. Threatened by pesticides and habitat loss, they were the first endangered carnivores I worked to protect. Each spring I’d hatch mantis nymphs and release several hundred of them into the wild and keep twenty. Over the summer I’d feed them insects, and they’d brutally cannibalize each other; by the fall I’d be left with one or two giant, brilliant green, four-inch-long carnivores that were eating butterflies, katydids, and steak. One time after they had been mating for days, I watched a female rip a male mantis in half, and then eat him. I drew and studied my mantises and learned everything about them. I bred them, wanting to help boost their numbers in the wild. I spent time rehabilitating injured or orphaned animals. One time in my early teens I found a six-foot-long black rat snake (Pantherophis alleghaniensis) that had been attacked by a dog and gravely wounded, and kept him on a shelf in my room for two months while he convalesced.

  Even as a child I considered myself the keeper of things meek and wild. On summer vacations buying two eels from a bait shop and releasing them in the ocean became a tradition. Hopping out of the car to help turtles cross roads before they were run over was a must, as was, later on, secretly freeing birds and monkeys from the snares of poachers. Throughout my life I would too frequently find myself holding tiny lives in my hands. It was as if they were drawn to me, and I to them. Regardless that the creature would most often have no concept of my help, in whatever crossroads of fate and luck that exist in this world, I felt a deep responsibility to protect. Most often, of course, it was my own species that was the reason for the imminent tragedy to the small life that so desperately needed an ally.

  Once I encountered a fisherman unloading his catch, and beside him was a magnificent guitarfish, a graceful kite-shaped type of ray with a spike-ridged back, gasping in the sand. The ray was of no use to him, but instead of returning it to the ocean, he had been callous or lazy enough to simply and needlessly let it die. I spent a half hour ducking and gasping beneath the breakers while holding the beautiful alien in my arms, oxygenating its gills until it regained the strength to swim. You’ll be all right, I whispered. There is at least one human who is not a savage. You’ll be all right. And at last it was.

  The older I grew, the more I was drawn to nature. I was mystified by how sharp my own senses could become beneath the towering tulips, oaks, and sycamores of New York and New Jersey. As a kid I spent an inordinate amount of time chewing on big questions, wondering, exploring. Watching sunlight refract, or a doe nurse her fawn; I was deeply fascinated, illuminated, by the world I saw around me. Though my mom dragged me to church every so often, the woods were where I felt close to whatever energy pulses through life. Turn-of-the-century naturalist John Burroughs wrote, “We now use the word Nature very much as our fathers used the word God,” a sentiment that developed organically in young me.

  Somewhere from the childhood haze that is both vivid and fleeting emerges one day that I remember in almost perfect detail: visiting the Bronx Zoo for the first time—specifically, the Jungle World exhibit. I had dragged my parents around for hours, talking nonstop, fascinated by everything I saw. But Jungle World shut me up. I couldn’t have been more than eight years old but I can still feel my own spooked awe as I walked into the rainforest house through dark curtains, hearing the calls of hidden primates, thunder, and insects. There were giant kapok trees and hanging vines; brilliant arrow frogs and other creatures I’d never heard of, a
ll presented in a world crafted by experts to mirror jungle habitat. It was pure magic. How is it that places and creatures we have never seen can resound in our innermost depths?

  I remember struggling to imagine that such a place could truly exist. The world as I knew it was pedestrian, manicured, and predictable, not wild and mysterious. But my skepticism dissipated in the face of abundant proof: photos of scientists working the field, dirty and dedicated in distant countries. In particular, the photograph of a half-dozen men holding a twenty-foot-plus reticulated python burned onto my mind. For those people life was an adventurous and purposeful quest, out in the jungles at the ends of the earth, saving species. Moving through the shadows from one exhibit to the next, I experienced something I had never felt before: belonging. It was perplexing at my young age to experience such powerful gravity toward a world I had never seen and barely believed existed. There were no words, only an innate recognition of coded bearing, as powerful as the instinct that guides a hatchling sea turtle into the throbbing counsel of the poles. It was a unique moment of orientation in an obtuse childhood, which I held on to like a treasure, through many dark winter months sitting at a desk, and over many years.

  As I got older my ambition began to boil and my fight with the education system intensified. I wasn’t the only one who suffered. I would look around the classroom—in the dismal stillness of a teacher’s droned lecture, or worse, as the scratch of pencils made the only sound—to see dozens of kids in slow atrophy. Of course, there were those who didn’t mind it, or were too young to question the system, as well as those who seemed to actually thrive in the structure—watching them made me feel all the more dysfunctional. What was it they had that I lacked? However, I wasn’t alone in my struggles, and over the years saw many brilliant and creative young minds bound by walls, rules, conformity, and endless boredom. Artists, musicians, athletes, farmers, and free spirits of every kind have been hammered into submission by an archaic, outdated system. Even today it kills me to watch kids drag through school during the years when they should be out in the world, experiencing and learning. What does education do? As Thoreau famously answered: “It makes a straight-cut ditch out of a free, meandering brook.”