Mother of God

by Paul Rosolie

  We took measurements and a few photos, careful to minimize the time she’d be handled. She had an average circumference of twenty-eight inches, and a total length of fourteen feet, nine inches; what a beast! Her even shape, well-toned muscle, healthy color, and glossy scales indicated that this snake was in top physical condition. During our inspection the anaconda was placid and cooperative, not at all defensive, let alone aggressive.

  With measurements and photos taken, it was time to release her and end the stressful ordeal. JJ, Chito, and I carried her on our shoulders, gently placing her near the water’s edge. Incredibly, she didn’t bolt. For a time the snake lay on the beach and I sat beside her. My hand rested on the cool scales of her thick trunk, which rose and fell as she breathed. I tried to carve the sensation of her, the image of that massive body, into my mind. JJ and crew hung back, still wary of the giant and nervous that her unrestrained jaws were so close to my face. At last she began to move, sliding en masse into the water. My hand remained on her back as the length of her tremendous body slipped beneath the river’s surface with supreme grace. Then she was gone.

  The final hours of our expedition were spent splashing and frolicking in the river, then cooking, laughing, and recounting stories around a fire, long into a night of a million stars.

  10

  The Floating Forest

  A much more important problem is the question as to the existence of the carnivorous monster that has left its traces in the glade.

  —SIR ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE, THE LOST WORLD

  The magic of that hulking female anaconda stayed with our expedition for the two days it took us to return down the Tambopata. Our emotions were soaring in the wake of such overwhelming success. I still couldn’t believe all that I had seen and kept switching on my camera and checking the photos to reassure myself that it had all been real. Pico’s river-navigating lessons gave way to practice, and I piloted the boat as we arched with the current. JJ’s face bore none of the twisted frustration of the week before. Even Chito had loosened up after our adventures.

  We arrived at Don Santiago’s farm at dusk. He was sitting beneath a palm shelter beside the river, drinking soup. His sons greeted him with hugs and I received a friendly nod. He motioned us to sit and I noticed a stark change in behavior among the brothers. Like privates suddenly in the company of a general, they spoke and even moved differently around their father. And so did I.

  As we stampeded in, he rose to put a log on the fire, and for the first time I was able to inspect the octogenarian. He was dressed in a filthy buttoned shirt and trousers. Most days he wore rubber boots but today he was barefoot. Even so he stood at about the same height as me, roughly five foot ten, but bent and sinewy, with misty eyes and large, powerful hands. Placing the log onto the red coals, he blew with expert precision; several flames leapt alive in the cracks of the wood. He swung an ancient coffeepot onto the wood and then sat again, pushing out his chin and dragging his sausage fingers across coarse porcupine-white stubble. Watching him move, I couldn’t help but think of my grandfather, my dad’s dad, who was the same age but a very different creature. Living alone in the jungle at just a few years shy of ninety would be a death sentence for him and just about anyone I could think of back home, but not Santiago.

  Santiago had grown up in old Puerto Maldonado, back before it was really anything, when there were only about a thousand people living there. In those days it was a tiny settlement, just an outpost on the river, really. There he lived on the banks of the Madre de Dios River in what is known as the Old Town, Pueblo Viejo.

  His mother died when he was fourteen, and so parentless, penniless Santiago took to the river working as a transporter, piloting canoes up and down the Tambopata River. This was long before Puerto Maldonado was connected by road to the outside world, in the days when the only way to get in or out was a rare floatplane journey, or river trip. As a result, all goods coming in or out of Puerto had to come and go by boat; and in those days, there were no motors.

  Young Santiago used his athleticism to pilot canoes by pole, against the infinite resistance of the Tambopata, almost a hundred grueling miles upriver, all the way to the state of Puno, where donkeys loaded with supplies from the outside world would meet them to exchange goods. Santiago came of age in the wild west of the Amazon at a time when that corner of the earth had been abandoned for centuries, a sleeping giant. Though he had not been a native of the lowlands by birth, his time on Tambopata launched him deep into the world of several local tribes that ranged from peaceful known communities to fierce uncontacted tribes.

  Today the upper Tambopata is among the most pristine forested wild places on the planet; back in the days Santiago was poling canoes, it was virtually untouched. As an adopted native, Santiago learned the language of the Ese-Eja Indians, as well as their medicines, beliefs, and insights into the vast jungle. He encountered jaguars and giant anacondas, and some species that have yet to be described to science. Before he was twenty he had undergone an initiation ceremony in which a shaman sewed the nerve of an electric eel into his forearm, guaranteeing strength and virility for life. From then on, he was native.

  As he grew into his twenties Santiago joined the region’s police force. It was a time when the gruesome process of religious conversion was in full swing and missionaries were still constantly striking out toward remote places to convert the locals. Santiago followed these expeditions as a police officer, sometimes traveling for weeks on end to reach remote locations. He was always in a protective position, ensuring that the inevitable conversion happened in the most humane way possible.

  An accident with a falling tree in his mid-twenties crushed Santiago so badly that it took him almost three years to recover (an event that was eerily mirrored by Pico later on). In order to get the medical care he needed, he was sent out of the jungle and over the Andes to the coast, to Lima. There he connected with his grandfather for the first time. Santiago’s grandfather made use of the time to send him for more schooling, and so Santiago, a backwoods boy, was educated in sociology and anthropology.

  After he returned to the Madre de Dios he worked as a policeman for several more years, always in the jungle, and always with indigenous people applying his compassion and newly acquired education. When he quit the police he was still a young man, now with a good pension. He dived into working to better the life of the people who had taken him in when he was young, the indigenous people of the Tambopata. He settled on the river and began a farm. And with seven others, he began organizing the clans and communities that lived along the banks of the great river. After years of work and applications to the government, Santiago and several others founded the indigenous community of Infierno in 1974. This gave the people of the lower Tambopata something they had never had before: their own titled land, recognized by the government.

  In the years that followed Santiago began a family and, according to JJ, swapped five hundred hectares of land for his wife. As they began having child after child together, Santiago continued to improve the community of Infierno, even setting up a school and a medical post there. Thus JJ and his brothers were born in the jungle. When they were old enough they would travel to Puerto Maldonado for school, but always, the jungle was home.

  JJ tells the story of the day two boys floated down the Tambopata on a raft. They were from the Andes and had escaped a terrorist organization similar to the Shining Path. When they arrived at Infierno one of the boys took off; the other was taken under the wing of Santiago and Carmen. Years later, when the young boy, who would take on the name Alex, noticed in Puerto members of the terrorist group he had escaped, Santiago took the matter to the police. The tip from Alex resulted in a huge bust, and the government of Peru congratulated Santiago and his new son in an official adoption ceremony. Later on, I would know Alex as the most skilled birder and guide I have ever met.

  And so Pico, JJ, and Chito, three jungle boys, proudly recounted our La Torre expedition to their father, who listened polit
ely. Every so often he would nod and say, “Claro, claro,” for “I understand.” When we got to telling him about the biggest of the anacondas, Santiago laughed hardest at the parts when Chito got sprayed in shit and the gringo almost crushed. “It was probably half the size you say it was,” he said with a dismissive wave of the hand.

  JJ excitedly said, “Tiene fotos, papa! Mira aquí,” and reached for my camera.

  I pulled up the photos of the biggest anaconda we had wrestled, the large female. The old Amazonian regarded the photographs. Then he began to shake his head. “You know,” he said through a frown, “this is the smallest anaconda I have ever seen.” Pico cursed and slapped his hand on the table, laughing. JJ spat. We were all shocked. He placed the camera on the table. “I have seen anaconda eating tapir before, anacondas this big!” He held his arms in a hoop to show us the dimensions of the snake from his story.

  Now it was my turn to laugh. What he was describing was impossibly large. Try holding your own arms out, joined at the fingertips, and make the biggest circle you can. The snake Santiago was describing was bigger. No way could there be anacondas that size, I thought. “ If you are crazy, and clearly all of you are,” Santiago hissed in a rasped whisper, “ if you want to go see big snakes—real giants—then go to the aguajal.”

  JJ and the others fell silent and I made the error of letting the incredulous smile from moments earlier hang too long on my face. Santiago turned his attention on me. “You laugh?” he said, suddenly lifting the ancient folds of skin from his eyes with his brow and looking directly into mine. “Let’s see you laugh when a forty-foot snake is swallowing your ass.”

  The candles at the center of the table illuminated our conversation long into the night. Santiago told tales of expeditions past, anacondas, jaguars, tribes, and other lore. We laughed and drank long into the night, until Santiago finally decided to turn in and stumbled drunkenly off into the jungle. When he was just out of sight, we heard a sharp streak of swearing as his bare foot landed in a pile of pig shit. The three brothers fell to the ground, overcome with laughter, as their father shouted threats through the bush; you could hear the smile on his leathery face. Before sleeping myself, I savored the misty stillness of the night and spent well over an hour attempting to commit everything I had heard to paper.

  JJ and I were determined to get to the anaconda lake as soon as possible, but it took us a few weeks. In the days that followed the La Torre, JJ and Pico and I ran a volunteer group up to Las Piedras. But the glow that had swaddled us after the La Torre expedition dissipated after a vicious fight between Emma and JJ. The problems were only deepening and money was disappearing faster than ever. The difference was that by then it was no longer only their battle. I was in it now. Bringing groups, recruiting, and spending every ounce of my consciousness and resources to help save Las Piedras Station had become the norm for me. But it was not enough.

  On the night before we brought the volunteers upriver, Emma, JJ, and I had met at their house to recheck the expedition supplies and go over final details. The tension between them was so palpable that I wanted to leave the room. Over the course of an hour the conversation stayed artificially civil, but then it finally broke. In escalating Spanglish they moved from room to room in passionate debate. There was no way for me to help, no way for me to leave, and no sounds in the still night except for their voices. It went on until Joseph, then three years old, woke up crying. The interruption left a silence that was worse than the din of moments before. JJ’s eyes were slits of dark passion; Emma’s were dry and wide, as if in defiance of the circumstances. She looked at the top of JJ’s head for several minutes as he looked at the floor, before she said softly, “We have to sell it.”

  Since that night nothing had been the same. JJ and I ran the expedition on autopilot. After two weeks we returned to Puerto, where JJ and I stayed in a hotel room for a night, since things were ever worsening between him and Emma.

  On the day we left to find the mysterious lake that Santiago had told us would hold the anacondas of our dreams, I was far from mentally present. As JJ and I moved from car taxi to boat to trail, we were barely distracted from the fact that the station might be gone soon. I could not wrap my head around it, or shake the despondent gloom it had thrown over me. There had to be some way to help them more, some way to bail them out—get more business to the station. I just didn’t know what it was. I wrote letters to prominent conservationists, sought funding, but at that age I essentially lacked the skills to do anything effective to help the situation.

  First it had been the Brazil nut farmers that wanted to steal the land, then another, more powerful group had tried to steal the station itself. Most recently, an oil company had barged into the scene—even landing their helicopter on the beach adjacent to the station and setting off explosions within the reserve. Fighting on so many fronts, and against foes as powerful as an oil company, had run Emma and JJ down fast, and it was only getting worse. And although I was bringing groups to earn money, and even chipping in out of pocket here and there with savings from lifeguarding back home, my contribution to the effort was still hardly making a difference.

  JJ was also not himself. At one point while traveling he sent me ahead with his brother José, promising he would follow in a few minutes. I waited at José’s house all day: over nine hours and no JJ. Angry and frustrated, I finally put up my tent that night, resigned to the fact that JJ wasn’t showing up. But as soon as I had crawled into my sleeping bag he appeared out of the jungle. “Let’s go!” he said energetically. I had seen him do this before: follow up an irresponsible act with a gush of enthusiasm and smiles to cover his ass.

  “I’m going to sleep, JJ,” I groaned from my tent. I was furious at him for leaving me all day. “Where were you?” I asked, and he giggled and told me I should have some coffee. I had not yet learned that sometimes JJ disappeared for long periods with no explanation. It was maddening, but some minutes later he convinced me that he was sorry and that we should still go explore the lake, despite it being night. We began walking the long, straight path toward the lake of Santiago’s legend.

  During the course of the hike we encountered night monkeys, many frogs, and a tapir. With each encounter my frustration slowly dissolved, pushed to obscurity by a growing sense of anticipation. I reasoned that there was no chance of finding an anaconda tonight. I had too much experience searching the jungle to be so foolish; but that little voice in my head, or maybe my gut, had begun to glow warmly. I had a good feeling about this.

  The trail was straight and our march long and uninterrupted through an endless tunnel of trees. José was with us. He carried an old rifle over his shoulder, hoping to pick off a paca or other game for the pot. After more than an hour of walking we reached where the main trail turned and dropped into the floodplain. There we stopped for a moment, each of us choosing a different place to pee. As I was unbuckling my belt, I noticed a blue glow at the limits of my headlamp’s beam. What the hell is that? I wondered.

  Crawling through the dark foliage on my hands and knees, I went after the hypnotizing light that shone from the detritus. Pushing branches aside, I felt my heart quicken. What could be shining like that in the forest? When I reached the spot I fell to my knees. Before me were the glowing wings of a blue morpho butterfly. There was no body, just the four wings. The metallic cerulean iridescence was throwing the light of my headlamp back at me; that’s what I had seen. I lifted the wings with tremendous care and made my way back to the trail. José saw me staring into my palms and approached. He whistled in surprise.

  Blue morphos are large, fast butterflies, and it is rare to get a close look at their stunning wings. There are myths that the morpho is a spirit or enchantress that tempts men to follow and then brings doom. Others believe that it is a powerful spirit that, if caught, can cure the ailments of the capturer. Some believe they are messengers of the forest gods. Standing beside me, José gazed at the wings for some time and then cupped his hand under mine. �
��This is very lucky,” he said, looking into my eyes.

  He turned and searched for a moment, and then cut a large leaf. Taking the wings from my palm, he laid them on the leaf with reverent care, and then folded the leaf into a package, tying it off with root fiber. “Keep this,” he said, handing me the green parcel. For some reason I thought of my uncle Albert, an old Catholic priest, giving me rosary beads as a child.

  We descended the floodplain slowly and in silence. By now there was a kinetic energy to the night. I am not a superstitious person, but finding the wings had cast a spell, a feeling, of luck onto the night.

  At the foot of the terra firma began the gnarly floodplain, overgrown with thousands of aguaje palms and pocked by holes of varying depths. “Mucho cuidado. Be very careful!” José whispered as JJ fell up to his waist. As we walked it was impossible to judge the depth of the mud. Some places held our weight; in others we were over our head. Progress was slow. “Is this where the anacondas are?” I asked, but José said no. We were close, though. The aguaje palms ended and suddenly we were in a great clearing.

  All of us turned out our lights, and the brilliant moonlight revealed a surrealist landscape that bound us all in transfixed confusion. It seemed to be a field. No, there was water in places. The trees were all disorganized: the tops of some palms spread directly out of the ground, and others grew tall; there were smaller trees growing from the field, a kind of dwarf forest. I was struggling to understand the sight while José stepped into the brush. He cut a tall sapling, maybe thirty feet, and trimmed the branches from its top. Then he walked to the edge of a water area and thrust it downward. Gravity pulled the long pole through his hands into the water: ten feet, fifteen, twenty, twenty-five, and then it was gone. JJ whistled in surprise. José turned to us. “It’s very deep and very dangerous. We are here.”