Mother of God

by Paul Rosolie

  Thankfully, though, there was relief. In my early teens I’d spend entire weekends in the forests and rolling hills of Ramapo Reservation and Harriman State Park with my friend Noel. We’d been friends since my third stint in first grade and by age thirteen were heading out into the woods with nothing more than hunting knives, a few steaks, sleeping bags, and my dog, with the intention of getting as lost as possible. Those adventures sustained me. I needed adventure: not vacation, not distraction, but true, meaningful adventure. We had some good ones. After getting lost in the woods together, we’d build a place to sleep out of sticks, sit up by the fire at nights, and scramble over mountains sometimes for days to find our way out. Through the glowing green summers, the oranges and yellows of autumn, and through the bare frozen mountains in the lonesome winters we forged our navigational skills, resourcefulness, grit, and a powerful friendship.

  Through middle school and freshman year of high school I broke all kinds of records for detentions and suspensions and made my way to each June feeling I had barely survived. By tenth grade I couldn’t do it anymore. To keep my brain from atrophying I read books during class. I took refuge in historical figures who had also felt trapped or alienated by early education, especially the ones who were passionate naturalists like Teddy Roosevelt, Albert Einstein, and Ben Franklin. I read about people like Winston Churchill, Varian Fry, Jane Goodall, Alan Rabinowitz, and Steve Irwin; people who had sought adventure and purpose in life and had really lived. In the Shire of my world people went to the grocery store, discussed cell phone plans, golfed, and watched sitcoms. It was comfortable, clean, organized, and safe. Though I understood the privilege it was to live in a stable place so far away from the world’s troubles, I wanted out. I didn’t want to be safe; I wanted to have the shit scared out of me.

  Around sophomore year of high school my grades deteriorated to the F range. I was failing. Things with my parents, whom I’d always been so close with, started to fall apart. They knew me well enough to know that if I failed, there was no way I was going to summer school, and then I’d just be a dropout. I was furious, depressed, and losing the only anchor I had ever had. The dinnertime laughter and warmth of childhood had been replaced by fights that rocked the walls each night. I remember wondering if things would ever go back to the way they were.

  Being thrown against the wall by my science teacher was the end result of a yearlong battle of wills. I had been reading inconspicuously in the back of the room. Dr. Sherk had been droning on for the second period in a row when he stopped his lecture, walked toward me, and grabbed the book from my hands. He returned to the front of the room and into an office space to stow the book. I followed. Inside the office, with the door closed, he held it behind him like a child playing keep-away. “I wasn’t disturbing the class, or affecting you in any way; give it back,” I said. He pointed his finger at me.

  “Get out of my office.”

  “Give it back.”

  “Get out now or I’m calling security.”

  “Fuck you, just give me the book!” I never expected all five feet and two inches of him to come King Kong across the room and grab me by the neck, but he did. I launched back and sent him across the room to the opposite wall, where I watched his face turn colors as I choked him. I wanted to bury my fist in his face. I was furious but on some level liked the feeling of excitement. What would happen if I did it? What if I just smashed his face with everything I had? Surely the cops would be involved, maybe I’d be expelled, but surely the monotony would be broken for once. That was all that mattered. I almost did it. But instead I released him and let him fall coughing onto the floor. Later he was fired for throwing a metal scale at some kid, I heard. But the incident scared me. I was losing my patience with life.

  Not long after, I was wandering around the hallways and stopped by to see friends in shop class. There were wood and tools on every surface and sawdust on the floor. It smelled like my basement at home, where my dad did his woodwork. It was then that an offhand joke made by one of the nerdy-looking juniors halted me in my tracks. One guy botched cutting a smooth heavy piece of wood, and the junior started laughing, saying, “It’s a good thing we’re mowing down the Amazon rainforest so that we can dick around with wood in class.” Several of them laughed.

  Those three syllables hit my ears like a flood: Amazon. I knelt and delicately lifted the piece of wood as though it were some hallowed treasure and inspected it. As ridiculous as my fascination for the block must have looked to anyone watching, imagining that it may have actually come from the Amazon hastened the beat of my heart. An image of mist-shrouded jungle choked in vines and endless rivers, and a kinetic tingle of a long-forgotten dream, surged over me. The Amazon.

  For the first time in years I remembered the photo of the scientists at the Bronx Zoo, and the sensation of walking through Jungle World. I remembered the hikes on rainy days with Noel when the forests were so dark and green I could pretend they were jungle. It was a piece of me that had been pushed aside amid the turmoil of teenage life, and was suddenly called back.

  Whatever riches it is possible to possess in life, having parents who are behind you and who understand whatever it is that makes you is among the most valuable assets a child can have. As my grades dropped below the point of no return, and my total suspensions for the year hit double digits, my parents suggested I drop out and go to college. “Why not just take your GED and go to college?” my mom asked.

  When classes finished in June it was the last time I’d set foot in high school. I never went back. I didn’t even tell the few friends I had. I just left. My mom and I would laugh together when at the start of what would have been my junior year, my high school was calling each day to report that I hadn’t shown up. By that time I had taken my GED and enrolled part-time in college.

  No longer confined to a desk for eight hours a day, I felt free. I started working as a lifeguard at a YMCA in my town. I saved every penny I could and spent my free time contacting scientists and conservation organizations and combing the Internet for anyone who might need a researcher. But most researchers weren’t interested in an untrained high school dropout, and everything else was tourism. I continued to search. I wanted to find the most isolated and remote spot possible. So, while my first semester of college progressed, I sent emails for months without ever getting a reply, and then, finally, got one back.

  It was from a British biologist named Emma, who ran a research station in southeast Peru. In the email she apologized for being out of touch for weeks and said she had been in the jungle. She had a crew of student researchers heading into the jungle after Christmas for several months and included detailed information about the research they’d be working on. I responded that it sounded perfect and that I had a month off between semesters. A few days later Emma replied to say that it wouldn’t work. They couldn’t make the two-day journey out of the jungle to bring me back to town, even after a month. Two-day journey? That was seriously deep jungle, and there was no way I could miss it. I spent a day agonizing over what to do and then lied and told her that I had already booked my airfare. She agreed that if I paid for gas, they’d make it work. I was in.

  On a frigid day in late December 2005, I left my worried parents and the gray concrete world of JFK Airport. As that plane came low over the Madre de Dios River, I was a fish about to see water for the first time, a raindrop about to enter the river.

  3

  Into the Amazon

  It’s a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don’t keep your feet, there’s no knowing where you might be swept off to.

  —J. R. R. TOLKIEN, THE LORD OF THE RINGS

  The door of the plane opened and the smell of jungle was instantly overpowering. It was the stench of a hundred billion trees, wet and rich. Walking across the tarmac somewhat dazed, I sucked in lungfuls of air magnificent in its floral richness.

  Puerto Maldonado is a small city located in the middle of the Madre
de Dios, nestled in a bend of the namesake river itself, as though being constricted by a titanic anaconda. Originally a gold mining outpost and then a center of rubber production, today it’s the capital of the Madre de Dios. It is a dusty but quaint city that was connected by road to the outside world only in the 1960s. Even today many of its streets are unpaved and give the feel of a small jungle town. At night gypsies juggle knives at traffic lights, and women with large orange howler monkeys amble beside tourists, while on the fringes of town red lights illuminate young girls waiting for customers.

  In the mornings bread carts travel up and down the main streets, followed by carts loaded with cages of small quails; their freshly laid eggs are hard-boiled and sold as snacks. The markets are bustling labyrinths constructed from blue tarp and corrugated steel. There the jungle’s bounty enters the economy: gold miners, fishermen, peddlers of every known fruit, and hunters with fresh-killed bush meat converge there. Only a block from the Plaza de Armas you can look out over the Madre de Dios River and the jungle beyond.

  The Puerto Maldonado airport is a single-story structure surrounded by foliage with two main rooms: arrivals and departures. The walls of the building aren’t even walls: they are lattice, open to the air. As I claimed my bags on the small conveyor belt several tropical birds and butterflies moved around the room. I stepped out into the parking lot amid a gang of eager auto-rickshaw drivers and searched for my contact. She wasn’t hard to spot. Tall, blond, and with cool gray-blue eyes, she was a head above most of the Peruvian men. “Yeah, nice to meet you!” she said in a melodic British accent, extending her palm.

  Emma was born in Cambridge, but her family later moved to a small village north of London, called Bedford, where she grew up. After receiving her undergraduate degree in biology and earth science, and barely into her twenties, she set her sights on adventure and headed for South America, into the Madre de Dios. She had applied for and secured a resident naturalist position at one of the first and most celebrated research and tourism lodges in Peru, Explorer’s Inn. The inn sits on the confluence of the Tambopata and La Torre Rivers, considered a gem of biodiversity even within the context of the west Amazon.

  Upon arrival she had mere days to begin learning in the field from both scientists and locals, before starting work as a guide. Surrounded by an inspiring crew of like-minded people, all passionate about rainforest conservation, Emma found that she thrived in the jungle. After a few months she was speaking fluent Spanish, working on research projects, and leading tourists on adventures through the Amazonian wonderland. With her shrewd eye and trained ear she was able to expose creatures virtually invisible to the tourists she guided.

  Once, after a long hike, Emma jumped into a lake for a swim. The doubtful tourists were hesitant to follow, but Emma waved them in. As they entered the Brit felt a rapid slash and a parting of skin on her foot; she stifled a shout. Once everyone was in the water playing and distracted she had a chance to inspect and found that a chunk of her toe had been bitten clean off, most likely by a piranha. She had to conceal the blood when putting her shoes back on.

  In another instance of implacability, years after we first met, I was at Emma’s house in Puerto, mending a hammock. She returned from the market bloody. She parked her bike and took off her helmet. I gaped and asked, “What happened to you?” She explained that a young local had tried to mug her, knocking her off her bike and into traffic. Her entire forearm and chin were raw. “Are you okay?” I asked, but she was already past me. From inside the house she called, “Paul, do you want some pasta, mate?” and would hear no more about the matter.

  She was tough, pretty, and knew her stuff in the jungle, factors that made her irresistible to one of the handsome young indigenous guides who also worked on the Tambopata. Juan Julio Durand, or JJ, as I would later know him, was of Ese-Eja Indian descent and had grown up in the jungle. His skill and innate awareness in the forest were borderline supernatural. Emma recognized that even among natives Juan had a special bond with the forest. He became the warm complement to Emma’s cool demeanor, and in her first few months in Peru, the girl from Bedford, England, had found romance in the wilds of Amazonia.

  Emma and Juan Julio learned and explored together. JJ had recently been discharged from mandatory service in the Peruvian army. He had seen action while away, including a police-versus-army shoot-out (welcome to Peru). In the exchange, he had been shot in the thigh, a wound he flaunted to Emma in the days when they worked together at various lodges up and down the Tambopata. But soon they hatched a dream to start their own lodge. At that time in Peru, land was cheap, and after some saving and scrounging they were ready. All that remained was finding the right place.

  They launched expeditions all over the region in search of a location. The jungle is hardly a uniform thing, and even within the fantastic diversity of the west Amazon there are some areas that seem to glow exceptional. Surrounding Puerto Maldonado was only farmland. All of the truly wild areas required multi-day trips into nowhere. They had to find an in-between. Emma and JJ traveled days up the Madre de Dios to the border of Manu National Park, then south on the same current to the border of Bolivia, stopping to bushwhack through the jungle and search for signs of thriving primary forest. It was on the Las Piedras River that the forest spoke to them.

  The Las Piedras is the longest river in the Madre de Dios, a three-hundred-mile squiggle through dense, unbroken jungle. It is so far off the radar that the only reference to the river in literature is from the early 1900s, in the book Exploration Fawcett, which describes one team of explorers that “crossed from the Tahuamanu to the Rio de Piedras, or Tabatinga. . . . In spite of the party’s numbers, so many of them were killed with poisoned arrows that the rest abandoned the trip and retired. There is a tribe there called the Inaparis.” As Emma and JJ struggled to start their lodge, the tribes Fawcett described were still active in the Piedras’s headwaters, and still shooting arrows at intruders. But the river’s remoteness and danger had kept it wild, and it was there that Emma and JJ had their breakthrough.

  On their second day of forging by boat up the Las Piedras, they were rounding a bend when a screaming cloud of crimson suddenly engulfed them as seventy macaws took flight. Flashing cerulean tails, the birds launched into a long 360 before settling back onto the riverside cliff. Both Emma and JJ had worked with the endangered birds at Explorer’s Inn and realized they had discovered something special: a colpa. Often referred to as clay licks, colpas are areas of exposed clay where birds and other animals come to feed on salt deposits. Species flock to these areas to replenish sodium in their bodies. Colpas attract herbivorous mammals, including monkeys, deer, peccary, birds, armadillos, and numerous other prey species for cats like ocelots, puma, and jaguars. These deposits are rare, and their locations are guarded secrets to the creatures and local people that know them. Colpas on the riverbanks can attract hundreds of macaws at a time, creating one of the most colorful natural spectacles on earth. Emma and JJ had just struck gold.

  In days to come JJ pushed his powers to the limit as he and Emma explored the untrailed reaches of the land near the colpa. They found black spider monkeys, giant uncut hardwood trees, massive herds of wild peccary, and copious jaguar tracks. They found aguajales, small forest swamps, as well as streams, and even a fifteen-foot waterfall. This was home. It was there that they began building their research station.

  At that time the Peruvian government was eager to offer land concessions to make economic use of the vast unpopulated areas in its southeast region. The Brit-native team was able to secure first an ecotourism concession, then a Brazil nut concession, and finally a third parcel of land that brought the total area they protected to twenty-seven thousand acres.

  Emma used her British contacts to bring schools and ecotourism groups to the new research station and base research projects there. Soon Emma and JJ were busy guiding travelers and Ph.D. candidates, protecting thousands of acres, and raising their son. Isolated from the world b
y hundreds of miles of jungle in every direction, brimming with wildlife, the Las Piedras Biodiversity Station, or LPBS, was the most beautiful place in the Madre de Dios.

  On the two-day journey upstream in January 2006, I could barely keep my jaw shut I was so amazed. The jungle was endless. I had grown up in a world where civilization surrounded everything, and nature was confined to finite areas; but snaking through the jungle the inverse was true, to an immense degree. The reality of being a speck within thousands of miles of Amazonia was exhilarating. For eight hours the first day and six hours the second, we wound upriver through explosive green foliage. We covered miles of unbroken jungle, seeing people only briefly, when passing an indigenous village of thatched palm huts, where men in canoes hewn from solid logs waved to us.

  There were caiman on virtually every beach, and dozens of turtles sunning themselves on logs with butterflies balancing on their noses. We saw monkeys in the treetops, kingfishers and herons alongshore, and every so often a pair of macaws would fly overhead. In a moment of hushed wonder we watched as a giant anteater paddled past our boat as it crossed the river, its periscope nose and long, bushy tail propelling it through the current like a bizarre seven-foot dragon. Even Emma couldn’t hide her fascination; in more than ten years in the Amazon she’d only seen the massive animal twice.

  On that boat were several other volunteers, students who had signed on to help Emma and JJ with their macaw research. I couldn’t help asking Emma rapid-fire questions, until she slipped on her sunglasses and headphones and pretended to sleep, leaving me to gawk at the passing scenery. I was losing my mind in excitement; I wanted to stop the boat and run into the jungle. In the interest of making good time Emma would hear none of it. But when I spotted a large whip snake and called out, she was at full attention.