by Paul Rosolie
From then on JJ and I were inseparable. Whenever we could, we’d share research shifts, or go on walks at night through swamps. He was the first person I had ever met who was as enthusiastic as I was for nature, and in the jungle we had our heart’s fill of adventure. I was learning so much so fast from JJ, I wrote several times in my journal that my head hurt. JJ began showing me species I had never heard of; we saw things that others in the group never did. Our adventures had a palpable magic, a quality of energy and discovery that was the catalyst of our developing bond. It amazed both of us. Sometimes we’d get back from a hike, and Emma wouldn’t even believe the things we told her. JJ said I was good luck with animals and would sometimes shake his head and look ponderously at me, repeating that he’d never seen anyone who loved the forest as much as I did.
JJ challenged me to push myself farther, and it became clear that I really had found home. He showed me how to hitch a ride down the river on floating logs, how to find water in bamboo, what plants were edible, where various species lived, and what to stay away from. We searched for anacondas together, both hoping to find a giant. One lesson involved him deliberately getting me stung by a bullet ant, or izula, a two-inch black insect known for having the most painful wallop of any insect on earth. It lived up to its reputation, and I spent a painful twenty-four hours in bed awake, sweating and throbbing with a paralyzed arm.
By the third week I was sleeping out in the jungle every night, suspended in my hammock, listening to the nocturnal symphony and soaking up the smells in the dark. I’d spend entire afternoons climbing strangler fig trees and exploring the canopy. I didn’t need anyone or anything when I was in the jungle. I felt whole; alive, turned on, and engaged. It made sense to me. Sometimes I would come back from hours in the jungle, or be heading out when everyone else was settling into hammocks, and could feel JJ watching me.
Once while high in the crown of a tree I found an odd species of ant that had a flat, aerodynamic head and abdomen. I noticed that if the wind blew, the ants would stop running and freeze, so as not to be blown off the tree. But when I’d brush them off into the air, instead of falling to the ground they miraculously would use the momentum of the long fall to navigate back to the tree, lower down on the trunk.
The first two or three ants doing that I took as a fluke. But when I had flicked my thirtieth ant from the tree and watched it deliberately steer back to safety, I knew I had found something: gliding ants. Evolutionarily it made perfect sense: if they fell to the forest floor they’d be eaten, especially in the flooded months of the year when fish are just waiting for insects to fall from above. The ants developed their flange-shaped exoskeleton so that they could direct aerial descent, and avoid being eaten. I was consumed by the excitement of discovering what had to be a new species and spent hours making detailed drawings and notes on the ants.
Later on I would discover that an insect ecologist named Stephen P. Yanoviak had had the exact same experience flicking ants out of the canopy two years earlier, also in Peru. He and other researchers published the findings on the gliding ants, Cephalotes atratus, in the scientific journal Nature. The fact Yanoviak beat me to it never bothered me. Although I made the same initial observation he did, at the age of eighteen I had none of the tools necessary to describe a species. But the most important tool I lacked was not a Ph.D. in insect taxonomy; it was the confidence to believe that what I had uncovered was something special. I had been conditioned to assume that you are never the first person. Whatever it is, someone has already climbed it, or photographed it, bought it, sold it, biked it, hiked it, and probably posted it on YouTube. It becomes a worldview: don’t get too excited because it’s all been done before.
When I told Emma about the ants she merely shrugged and told me not to get excited. “Someone or other must have found it at some point,” she said dismissively. And even in my own mind, I was so accustomed to the rules of the world I had grown up in that I shrugged it off, thinking she was probably right. In the end she was right, but not by much. Only a few years later I discovered something new to science, on my own. That fact, among others, fueled my sweeping realization that throughout my life teachers, principals, society, and so many people around me had told me only what wasn’t possible. The jungle was showing me what was.
It was clear, even on this first trip to Las Piedras, that my destiny would come to intertwine with that of the station. One morning near the end of my stay, JJ and I were on Transect A, following a set of jaguar tracks when we heard voices. The LPBS is sufficiently remote that anytime you hear people it means trouble. The moment we heard the voices JJ grabbed my shoulder and threw me to the ground, and from the foliage we observed as a group of men, all of whom were armed, walked up the trail. When they had passed by us JJ silently stood up and stepped onto the trail, making a small whistle that startled the crew of invaders. From the look on their faces it was clear that JJ had seemed to appear from nowhere. My entry was less discreet.
JJ confronted them about why they were on his land and what followed was a tense standoff. I saw for the first time JJ’s warm, playful face become twisted and vicious as he spat Spanish back at the shouting men. I couldn’t understand what they were saying but the argument nearly came to blows.
That night at the dinner table Emma explained that in recent years their land had been under serious attack. There had been loggers and poachers, and she accurately predicted that soon there would be oil companies as well. The men JJ and I had met were the previous owners of the land, who regretted the sale and simply wanted it back. As she spoke, for the first time I could see the reason for the weariness in her eyes. In her thirties by this time, Emma had spent more than a decade in the Madre de Dios building her dream, and the weight of it was crushing.
It was just Emma, JJ, and eleven-month-old Joseph running 27,000 acres on the Amazon frontier. Though the website Emma had designed brought in a trickle of tourism and research volunteers, it was far from enough to support the taxes on the land, upkeep on the station, and costs of keeping loggers and poachers out. Perhaps if they had a team working in civilization to send them more tourists, volunteers, and business, the undertaking would work, but that was not the case. While in the jungle Emma and JJ had no one to help them attract more people. Listening to Emma speak, I was dumbfounded. If they were having trouble luring scientists, that was one thing, but in terms of tourism I was sure they could make a killing if they got the word out. I told Emma that I would bring volunteers and help them stay afloat. How hard could it be?
I probably said too much too fast, and Emma offered the same token smile parents give to children planning what they want to be when they grow up. She’d heard it all before: everyone who came to Las Piedras and fell in love with the place, everyone said they’d be back. Hardly anyone followed through.
The doubt in Emma’s stone-gray, pragmatic eyes was crushing; her expression across the table said it all. After so many years on the frontier she could see through an overenthusiastic eighteen-year-old suburbanite from a mile away; she’d been one herself once. After all, I had spent only a month at Las Piedras and in days would be heading back to school in the United States. She knew I had no concept of what she was up against; no idea about the realities of working in remote Amazonia. The truth was that she and JJ had taken on more than they could manage and were on the verge of real trouble.
4
Jungle Law
Contrary to all justice and reason, in despair they set fire to their villages and fled into the depths of the jungle.
—FRIAR CRISTÓVÃO DE LISBOA, FROM TREE OF RIVERS, BY JOHN HEMMING
Not too far from the Las Piedras Station, close to the Bolivian boarder, another protector of the jungle was also running out of time. As the lieutenant governor of the remote town of Alerta, Julio García Agapito was widely respected. He had earned a reputation as a young, hardworking, brave, and effective archenemy to illegal loggers in the area, a role with a historically low survival rate in Amaz
onia. But García was no gunslingin’ hero; he was a humble Brazil nut farmer and a family man with everything to lose.
In December 2007 he repeatedly filed formal requests for protection with Peruvian authorities and received only eerie silence in response. Like many indigenous people, Julio García saw big-leaf mahogany trees as a source of wealth for his people, one that if properly managed could bring in much-needed revenue to their isolated community. But the loggers had no respect. They came from outside and took everything, with no consideration for rules. They were aggressive and dangerous, massacring wildlife and taking advantage of and even killing local people. Juan had been working closely with INRENA, Peru’s resource management agency, to stop the lawlessness and together they had busted numerous mahogany shipments and had some serious close encounters.
On February 28, 2008, a contact tipped off Garcia about a truck carrying mahogany, with license plate WZ-7256. He immediately reported the truck to INRENA, which intercepted it. García’s heart must have been pounding as the local police inspected the fresh-cut wood. The truck had been carrying more than seven hundred board feet of timber. The driver had been restrained successfully, but García’s mind had to have been racing with the knowledge that there would be retaliation from the loggers. However, he probably couldn’t have guessed how rapidly it would arrive.
The INRENA officers were beginning to haul the heavy red wood from the truck when a figure appeared and jumped into the driver’s seat. Before anyone could react the truck’s engine roared and wheels kicked up dust as the truck sped away with the timber. Juan and the other officers were dumbfounded. Somehow a second driver with a duplicate key had been waiting, as though the loggers had planned it.
The INRENA officers scrambled into their own vehicles and sped off in pursuit of the truck, leaving García at the empty INRENA office wondering how it had all been orchestrated. It was then that yet another figure materialized. Garcia had no time to react. The two men saw each other for only a silent instant before the flash of the attacker’s gun filled the room. Ten rounds ripped through him.
The story of García’s death spread around the Madre de Dios and the world, even as far as the New York Times, but it was nothing new in Amazonia. Three years earlier in Brazil, loggers cornered a seventy-four-year-old conservationist and nun named Dorothy Stang and shot her in the stomach, then the back, then several times in the head. Also in Brazil loggers tied a young girl to a tree and doused her in gasoline before burning her alive, an example to the rest of her community, which had been opposing the loggers. In the lawless west Amazon, standing for what you believe in can come at a price.
In the Madre de Dios and other places in the region, mahogany trees are red gold. The Madre de Dios mahogany boom, as Emma called it, began in the 1980s and reached its climax in the mid-1990s. At that time the demand for valuable tropical timber for luxury furniture in the United States and Europe had already caused a Gold Rush–style siege of loggers to clean out every old mahogany tree from the areas easily accessible from Puerto Maldonado. As the supply diminished, the demand sent the remaining loggers into increasingly remote areas in search of the grand prix of timber, big-leaf mahogany. This led them to the Las Piedras River.
Prior to the mahogany boom, the Las Piedras had been almost completely untouched. Save for a collection of small indigenous settlements in its lower region, the river was virtually uninhabited and pristine. By the mid-1990s, however, boatloads of loggers became a frequent sight; one study reported as many as two thousand logging boats in a single year. The unregulated logging became so rampant across the Madre de Dios that the government eventually outlawed the harvesting of mahogany in all areas except for registered timber concessions. It was an abrupt and drastic measure.
The result was a massive strike in July 2002 that arose in Puerto Maldonado and virtually shut down the city. Government offices were trashed, and stores were shut for several weeks. Amid the chaos at least one police officer caught an arrow in the rear. In November of the same year the illegal loggers elected their leader as president of Madre de Dios Region. Ban or no ban, hordes of loggers continued to pour into the forest. It got to the point where so many loggers were out in the frontier that pimps sent boatloads of prostitutes out into the jungle with tape measures instead of wallets so that they could accept payment for their services in board feet of timber.
The brazen gangs of woodcutters would take what they pleased from indigenous community lands and even entered national parks. It was reported by several park guards that the loggers would fire their guns into the air while passing guard stations in a clear warning to the rangers: stay inside. The young and untrained forest guards, paid miserable wages, found themselves in way over their heads.
There were even rumors that the loggers had clashed with uncontacted Indian tribes in the Las Piedras’s headwaters. During his time in office, Peru’s then-president Alberto Fujimori was denying the existence of uncontacted tribes and claimed that these stories were mere legend. Some people claimed the tribes were real, savage cannibal leftovers of the Stone Age. Others claimed they were ghosts, malevolent spirits guarding the last sanctum of the forest. Only one thing was certain: something was up there.
In reality, the people who inhabited the headwaters of the Las Piedras and the Purus Rivers, the Tarahumanu, were the refugees of a previous period of extraction.
From the 1870s through the early 1900s, the rubber boom consumed the Amazonian west. Several decades earlier, Charles Goodyear had made a monumental discovery: the process of vulcanization. The process involved mixing latex with sulfur, which transformed the coarse tree sap into a durable substance, and it changed the face of the industrialized world. The demand for rubber for tires, shoe soles, machinery, and thousands of other items during the industrial revolution in the United States and Europe caused a frenzy. In Tree of Rivers, John Hemming wrote, “It made the best gaskets for steam engines. It came to be used in pumps, machine belting, tubing, railway buffers, and later as coating for telegraph wires.” At the turn of the century, bicycles were changing the world and the automobile was in its infancy; both needed tires. All of this inevitably resulted in a mass migration to the only place where the invaluable latex could be tapped: the Amazon.
In the fray the Brazilian government designated the Amazon River an international waterway, opening it up to vessels from every industrial nation. For the first time in history the Amazon became a busy highway filled with hundreds of ships from every nation, all seeking to exploit the region’s rubber. However, the rubber trees were scattered among billions of other trees within the untouched wilderness of the Amazon. The only way to get at these trees was to walk from tree to tree, from dawn until dusk, collecting latex. Naturally, for the rubber bosses, native labor was the most effective way of collecting the prized sap. The result was a period of genocide and atrocities so savage that the rubber boom ranks among the darkest chapters in human history.
Yet the rubber boom was, in truth, the second wave, an aftershock of the first period of mass destruction in Amazonia. Whether for spices, metals, slaves, timber, oil, or medicine, jungles have long cast their shadows over the most grizzly acts in human history. It was the white men who brought the Heart of Darkness to Africa, and in the Amazon the Spanish and Portuguese swept across the basin in a slashing, burning, disease-ridden holocaust. Paraphrasing the words of Winston Churchill, John Hemming wrote that “rarely in human history has so much damage been done to so many by so few. A thousand colonists gradually destroyed almost every human being along thousands of kilometers of the main river and its tributaries.” One Father Daniel, horrified by what he saw, wrote of the Europeans: “They kill Indians as one kills mosquitoes. . . . And they use—or abuse—the female sex brutally and lasciviously, monstrously and indecently, without fear of God or shame before (their fellow) men. . . .”
Despite the basin-wide slaughter that began in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, there remained some tribes that refuse
d to be made into slaves. As foreign enterprises forged into the Amazon during the rubber boom, many tribes moved deeper into the jungle. Already isolated tribes fractured and fled into the most remote and inaccessible reaches of rivers, where the white men couldn’t come. When the rubber boom ended, these tribes remained isolated, out of sight and out of mind to the rest of the world. They became the legend of loggers, the only people who sometimes encountered them.
An ex-logger I came to know in later years told me the story of his son-in-law, who had been a logger on the Purus River in the 1990s and encountered a tribe. The loggers had rounded a bend with their motor off, thus surprising an encampment of nomadic hunters from a tribe. The loggers raised their guns, and the tribe raised their bows. No one knows who shot first, but the loggers reported taking down at least one member of the tribe. When their boat had drifted out of range and out of sight of the tribe, the loggers assumed they were safe. Yet on the next bend a silent arrow more than six feet long, with a foot-long bamboo head, tore through one of the men, killing him.
Though reports on Indian fatalities during violent encounters are impossible to confirm, the tribespeople are decidedly the victims of the outside world; it is not they who encroach on us. Their ferocity is what has enabled them to survive, and ferocious they are: one explorer on the banks of the Madre de Dios River was porcupined by thirty-four arrows before having his skull crushed by clubs. For this reason, although they are commonly referred to as “uncontacted,” the most accurate term for the tribes that survive in the ranges of Las Piedras and other parts of Amazonia is “voluntarily isolated.” They are not leftovers from the Stone Age, but instead a modern people who continue to fiercely defend their way of life.