Mother of God

by Paul Rosolie

  JJ and I exchanged looks of wonder. The field was not a field at all. It was floating grass. The reason some palm trees looked like their tops were sprouting from the “field” was that they had grown from the bottom of the lake, and we were seeing their canopy. Suddenly it came into focus.

  Cautiously exploring, I walked to the edge where José had demonstrated the depth, and saw that a fallen palm tree stretched across the water, half floating on the water between the land and the grass island. “Can I walk on it?” I asked. Alarmed, Jose answered with an emphatic no. But I was unconvinced. Leaving my camera and other valuables on dry ground, I was able to balance on the fallen palm and walk out across the water toward the grass. José sputtered and cursed in surprise. “Come back!” he whispered. (We were all whispering, for some reason.) But I made it to the grass and stepped off the log. The ground sank under my weight, the way a raft does. One foot, then the other, and I was standing on an undulating, soggy mat, floating on the surface of the lake. “Look,” I whispered, “it’s fine!”

  Just at that moment the grass gave out, and I plunged straight down. Suddenly I was underwater. From the terrifying, cold blackness I reached up and grasped at the grass above. Desperately I pulled my self back up toward the air. When I resurfaced, JJ’s hand grasped my arms. I scrambled and he pulled—both of us were working to get my body out of the predatory black abyss below. “Dios mio!” he said, smiling. “I thought you were gone!”

  Now we were both on the floating mat of grass, above the lake, amid the canopy of palms. Cautiously placing our first steps, we discovered that staying by the dwarf trees made for better footing, since each tree had a clump of roots and grass at the bottom that was sturdier than the areas of just grass. The moon was so bright that we could explore without the use of our headlamps.

  “Are you coming?” JJ asked over his shoulder to José, who essentially replied that there was not a chance in hell. “See you in one hour,” JJ hissed back into the darkness where José stood.

  With that we began exploring in earnest. The terrain buckled and gushed under our feet, bobbing and bubbling, sinking, and tangling our limbs as we slowly moved across the archipelago of grassy islands. We passed the tops of some trees, and the bottoms of others. In the eerie moonlight spiderwebs were ghosts all around us. More than a dozen times I caught dark patches in the water and turned on my headlamp to reveal the red gleam of caiman eyes watching us from the motionless obsidian surface of the lake. An owl surrounded us in its ominous warning. Omnipresent and unknown eyes of hundreds of creatures, obscured by darkness, watched our progress.

  This was farther down the Amazon rabbit hole than even JJ had ever been. It looked like we had reentered the Jurassic. The blazing moonlight only accentuated the phantasmal archipelago of floating islands. This was Dr. Seuss on acid. “I feel like I am on ayahuasca,” JJ said, looking around after forty silent minutes on the strange terrain. “Me, too,” I whispered, though I had never taken the hallucinogenic at that time.

  “Look-a-dis,” JJ said, pointing to the ground. I turned and stepped over to where he was looking; he traced his finger along an area where the grass was pushed down in a large S-shaped trail as wide as my waist. “What the hell is that?” I asked, though I already knew what he was thinking. “This is anaconda,” he said slowly. “It’s a track.” “No, it’s not,” I replied quickly; it was far too big.

  Yet as we walked in the hours that followed, completely absorbed in exploration and forgetful of José, we saw many such pathways, all in sweeping S shapes. Some were as thick as my arm; others had the girth of an oil drum. There was no way, I thought, that these could have been from snakes. No way, there were too many of them, they were too big, and they seemed so fresh . . . It was as though as we walked, dozens of giant snakes were slipping into the water, just out of view.

  Without warning JJ vanished. Suddenly alone, I stared bewildered for a moment at the hole in the grass beside me. Then, as my brain caught up, I dived onto my stomach and reached down into the dark water. From below the surface my hand found JJ’s. I pulled and JJ scrambled now, and within moments he emerged soaked and panting. We were both shaken, and in that moment realized how utterly terrified we were of our surroundings. It was several moments before we began to laugh hysterically.

  From that point on we stuck close together, helping each other along. We were discussing caiman behavior and picking our way along a large section of especially perilous grass when JJ froze. Suddenly, grabbing my shoulder with one hand, he pointed toward the ground.

  What looked like a beached whale was lying not five feet from us. I could actually feel the blood drain from my temples as synapses struggled to register what my eyes were seeing. All the while we stood motionless, bobbing gently up and down for a long moment of slack-jawed silence.

  The snake before us was lying flat on the ground, but her back was as tall as our knees. Her gargantuan shape spread out in sweeping curves into the darkness in either direction, her fat midsection just feet from where we stood. Vision came in waves of comprehension instead of all at once. This snake was easily double the size of the one we had caught just two weeks earlier. This was a monster.

  JJ’s hand was viselike on my shoulder, while with the other he pointed to where my eyes had also just traveled: the body of a second anaconda. Without taking our eyes away from the tremendous snakes, we stood there and hugged in triumphant awe. A smile was forcing its way onto my face. This snake was as thick as a small cow, and easily well over twenty-five feet long. This was not just a large snake, but the mega-snake of legends. Somewhere in my consciousness, the thought fired that if we could get a photo of this snake, we would be on the front cover of National Geographic. In all the years of daydreams, all the months of trudging through the swamps at night, I had never imagined that reality could offer something like this.

  We were silent, both of us basking in the fantastic wonder of the moment. Each of her giant scales glistened, smooth and in perfect symmetry with the thousands of others that covered every inch of her tremendous length. Her immense head lay partially obscured by the tall grass, her back broad and smooth like that of a whale. I could see her watching us, sampling the air with a great black tongue, itself the size of any ordinary snake. The second anaconda was considerably smaller, perhaps fifteen feet in length, and lay draped over her in several places, seemingly in amorous embrace; both lay still, as surprised by our presence as we were by theirs, and waiting to see what would happen next.

  When we had stopped walking I had frozen in midstride, stunned by what I had seen. Now, however, I placed my foot delicately down, and the vegetation rocked gently in the water. A tightening of the snake’s muscles became discernible. Her head rose from the grass off to the left, flicking a tongue as thick as a man’s finger up and down, scenting the air. Then, all at once, she bolted.

  My brain fired a hundred thoughts all at once as her coils exploded into action, rapidly entering the water and disappearing. Propelled by an irrational urge to restrain the snake and get photographic evidence of her size, I dived onto her back like a shortstop catching a line drive. My presence did nothing to impede her progress, and my arms could not close around her, such was her circumference. I was carried more than seven feet on the anaconda, my arms clinging to her trunk, legs dragging along beside.

  As she swept my body over the surface of the lake I tried digging my heels into the grass but they never held. For the first time it suddenly occurred to me that if she opted for fight over flight, then that giant tooth-filled mouth would do irreparable damage to my face, not to mention that she’d be able to collapse my ribcage in about half a second. Thankfully, she never struck. Instead her head entered the water, followed by the first third of her body, and then the section of her body I was gripping. Digging both knees into the grass, I tried to brace. But her power was as unyielding as a horse, or a truck: there was nothing I could do. She dragged me fully into the water, face-first, as JJ watched in frozen astoni
shment, his circuits too blown to move.

  Cool black water swallowed my head and shoulders in the flash of an instant as the rest of my body, clinging to the giant snake, followed into the dark abyss. I let go and paddled like a windmill for the surface.

  With my head above the water I held on to the nearest grass, where the last fifteen feet of the leviathan trunk sped over my shoulder and through my hands into the water. In profound awe I carefully savored the last moments of her presence, hands recording with every fiber of their ability the smooth, scaly immensity passing by. With my heart jackhammering in my chest, it was a moment of unparalleled shock; I was intimately at the mercy of perhaps the largest snake living on earth. As her body narrowed to her tail, my hands came closer together and then finally touched as she departed. My last view of her was of her tail disappearing into the black water below.

  That first night in the floating forest became the stuff of legend. After the giant female had left, we caught the smaller snake, a fifteen-footer, and brought it back to the edge to show a terrified José. Though we told him what had happened with the giant, he did not believe us. No one did for years to come, and that was fine; what we had stumbled onto that night was a place of secrets unparalleled in the Madre de Dios or the rest of the Amazon. In years to come I would query scientists, local people, experts, anyone I could find, but none of them documented anything like such a place or seen such a snake. For JJ and me, it was the beginning of a whole new adventure, a relationship with the floating forest that would yield many more encounters.

  It was sunrise by the time we got back to camp at José’s, where we fell into our tents for much-needed sleep. That night we sheepishly returned to Don Santiago’s hut. There we told our tale to an eager Pico and a smirking Santiago. JJ reenacted my jumping onto her back as he stood there with his mind blown. “I told you,” said Santiago, smiling tooth and gum. Like the other times we had stopped at his hut, on this night we sat for many hours talking, eating, drinking, smoking, and telling stories.

  Though Santiago had not been as fast as the rest of his family to accept me, in the wake of the La Torre and then floating-forest expeditions, it seemed at last I was in. Santiago dug his teeth into the skull of a peccary head and then passed it to me. Like Pico and JJ, he seemed to find this forest-loving gringo a curious thing; it just took him longer to open up. Long after JJ had retreated to his sleeping bag, Santiago and I sat together talking for the first time alone, and then we sat together in silence.

  I was aware of him watching me. Throughout his many decades, Santiago had seen creatures yet undescribed to science, tribes that no one knew existed. I knew I was in the presence of a living encyclopedia of the Madre de Dios, a man with a lifetime of hard-won secrets, though I do not know what prompted him to tell me what he did.

  Over the soft crackle of the nearby coals he said, “There is a place I saw once that no one has ever been to.” I looked up. He continued in his gravelly whisper, “It is a place wilder than any other I have seen.”

  “Like La Torre?” I asked. He shook his head and spat out some cigarette paper.

  “La Torre is nothing compared to this,” he said. His hand was flat over the table now, indicating a pause so that he could be certain I understood what he meant. “La Torre is a place that very few people go, it’s very wild, but this is different. What you don’t understand is that even one or two people change the spirit of a place—the animals change behavior. The place I am talking about . . . no one has been there for centuries.”

  “What’s it called?” I asked dumbly as he poured newly heated tea into the mug before me.

  “It doesn’t have a name,” he said without smiling.

  I tried not to let my eyes fall out of my face onto the table as he spoke. He told of watching a mother jaguar play with her cubs on an open beach, and of otters teaming up on a twenty-foot black caiman. There harpy eagles haunted the canopy and flocks of macaws filled the sky like flying rainbows; the river was so thick with fish that you could scoop up dinner with your bare hands. The only tribes who knew of the land had regarded it as sacred and never entered, and so the place had remained untouched for millennia. What he described was a lost world.

  He explained that it was not reachable by boat, that a person could only get there by crossing from one river over to another, and then hiking upstream. “There is a huge tree, like a puerta.”

  “It’s a door?” I asked, confused. I interrupted him only when my Spanish failed me, or at times when he used Ese-Eja instead of Spanish by accident. It took me a while to understand what he meant here was that the tree was a barrier, a gate that prohibited any chance of boat travel, even by canoe. What lay westward was unexplored. “La Puerta Occidental,” or the Western Gate. He offered no further explanation.

  When his story finished we sat in silence for a long while, as my mind struggled to comprehend what I was hearing. The La Torre had shattered everything I’d known with its stunning abundance of wildlife. How could there be a place even more pristine? We must have sat in silence for thirty minutes before I worked up the nerve, slowly. “Show me.”

  At this Santiago chuckled. “When you’re older,” he said, as he stood up. “Good night,” he announced, then left the thatched hut.

  “Good night,” I said in return. After that I was alone, left with the hopeless task of sleeping as the sensory aftershocks of riding an anaconda still echoed on my skin and the wonder of Santiago’s stories coursed through my brain. For hours in the darkness I watched the Tambopata slip beneath the moonlight, and wondered what magical world I had entered.

  BOOK TWO

  THE BATTLE OF THE AMAZON

  11

  The Other Side

  Fate gives all of us three teachers, three friends, three enemies, and three great loves in our lives. But these twelve are always disguised, and we can never know which one is which until we’ve loved them, left them, or fought them.

  —GREGORY DAVID ROBERTS, SHANTARAM

  By the time I reached the age of twenty-one the Amazon had become the central, driving force in my life. The worries of my teenage years had long faded away: I had not been born in the wrong century and missed out on the age of adventure; instead I had just been ignorant of where to look. In the span of three years I had caught crocs and anacondas, raised an anteater, begun working as a conservationist protecting the place I loved, and become friends with JJ and his wild, indigenous family. Then, of course, there was the discovery at the floating forest, an event that radically restructured my view on the world: if a place like the floating forest and a creature like the snake I had ridden could exist, what the hell else was out there?

  When I was home in New Jersey, my entire identity was the Amazon, and I liked that. There was never a time when I didn’t wear my peccary-tooth necklace on a balsa-bark cord. It was a great recruiting tool: I’d walk into a deli or outdoors store or go on a hike and inevitably someone would ask what animal it had come from. Many conversations would start in this way, and as a result, many people came to Las Piedras.

  I was getting talented at leading a double life. During college semesters I would work and save for the next expedition, as well as plan, recruit volunteers, and explore from an academic angle the things I had experienced in the field. I’d plan with professors to take my finals early, and a week before semester’s end I would pack my bags and head to JFK Airport. It was like jumping between worlds. You drive to the airport on the cold concrete, past leafless trees beneath a gray sky. You journey for dark hours high above the earth, before being spat out the other end of the wormhole into a boiling tropical wonderland. In one life I had a cell phone, checked email, studied for tests, and watched TV at night; in the other I drank from a river, hunted for anacondas, and explored the secrets of the earth, sometimes in places no one had ever been.

  Returning from the Amazon stained with the red earth of the jungle and stoked with the flame of high adventure, I found my life elevated to a level beyond my w
ildest dreams. Yet it was not without struggle. Of course, there was the constant cloud cast by the trouble with the station, and often I would send part of my meager lifeguarding paycheck to Emma and JJ, to help with the cost of legal documents, travel, and the other minutiae of defending what was ours, a fact I discreetly withheld from my parents. I also wrote letters, made phone calls, and sought the help of anyone who might be able to help protect a research station in the Amazon—but I made little to no progress.

  My mom and dad were my greatest supporters. They could see that in the jungle I had found the crossroads of passion and purpose, and they seemed pleased about it. However, others questioned my path. Some extended family members and friends would ask me when I was going to “grow up” or “find a real job.” Somehow, to them what I was doing seemed childish. One relative repeatedly asked, in an exasperated tone, just how many vacations I was going to take to the jungle. On another occasion a friend of my parents described his new mahogany bed set with enthusiasm as I squirmed.

  I also found myself struggling for acceptance in college. Although I had great enthusiasm for ecology, conservation, and the many strata of disciplines related to protecting and understanding Amazonia, my dyslexia and poor academic performance earned me the scorn of more than a few professors. In return, I developed a noted distaste for the dry and joyless way in which many of these accomplished academics plodded on through their work. Teddy Roosevelt had a similar complaint, writing that for others at university “the tendency was to treat as not serious, as unscientific, any kind of work that was not carried on with laborious minuteness in the laboratory.” He abandoned “all thought of becoming a scientist.” Yet he went on to become one of the most important naturalists in history, fathering the U.S. national park system and thereby creating a precedent for other countries around the globe. But my inability to keep my head above water in academics worried me: how then would I continue to work and make an impact in the Amazon, in a field where everyone of consequence seemed to have a Ph.D.? In this way, the future was an unanswered question.