by Paul Rosolie
When the highway and road came resurrected to the Madre de Dios, I feared the worst for Amazonia, but my first reaction was to rise up and fight. But Emma had chided me for being overly naive and American in my view of the world; she said the road was inevitable and there was nothing we could do. “Paul, this isn’t the movies, mate. Sometimes the bad guys win.”
The insidious inevitability of progress, the cancer of the planet, had reached western Amazonia. It seemed that everything had erupted in an instant, and there was no hope. I was left feeling gutted. Was the highway the beginning of the End of the Game for the Amazon? Why couldn’t I have been born a century earlier in history, when such large-scale holocaust was unimaginable? Could it be that my life’s work would be nothing more than documenting the destruction of nature’s greatest creation? With black plumes bleeding into the sky on the horizon and the groan of chain saws, there seemed no denying it—the west was being won.
If there is any way to accurately convey the isolating anguish pulsing through my mind and heart during this time of bleak news, it lies in an event that took place on the fringe of the North Atlantic, on what seemed to be an ordinary winter night in New Jersey. I was in my last semester at college and was just preparing to hit the sack for the night when the ten o’clock news reported that there was a beached humpback whale calf in Southampton, New York, far out on Long Island. It was the first time a whale had been beached so close to home, and within forty minutes I was flying up the highway on the three-hour drive toward the whale. For some reason, I had to see it.
It was almost 3 A.M. when I stepped out of my car and was bludgeoned by the frigid, chaotic wind of the wintry beach. As I walked through the inky blackness, salt air filled my nostrils. I had made the entire journey, skeptical of actually finding the whale, but it was not difficult to find the yellow tape that restricted a large area of beach. As I ducked under the tape I heard it for the first time, a thunderous baritone moan that resonated in my ribs. I felt my blood go cold with sudden apprehension, as the reality of seeing a doomed leviathan began to sink in. For a moment, I thought of turning back, though my legs continued forward. A sudden blast rang out above the din, the disembodied shock of a blowhole exhaling. The caliber of it, the tremendous quantity of air being moved, ignited a very primal fear that sent my knees shaking as I cautiously approached.
Crossing over the sand to where the waves broke, I saw the whale rocking in the surf. It was a sub-adult, not more than thirty feet long. His long white fins worked to steady his large black torpedo body, as waves repeatedly crashed and sprayed over him. I approached with the cautious steps of one not sure whether he is dreaming or awake. As I stood just feet from the whale, its large wrinkled eyelids framed a single huge retina that stared sadly into my own. Again the whale groaned, and shook the earth, the air, and my ribs.
Rocked by a wave the whale pitched and violently slapped its tail to the ground for balance, and then gasped. It was a staggering display of power. But when I advanced the whale was still. We stared at each other as I drew nearer, cautiously stepping into the frigid surf. To get near enough to touch him I had to wade up to my belt in the winter ocean amid the sting of the spray. Now beside and beneath the rocking giant, I placed both hands on its body, a smooth rubber enormity. For a moment I felt the whale and the whale felt me, there on the border of the dark infinity of ocean.
Driving home in silence on the deserted highway, my heart was broken for the whale, the groans of agony of its labored breathing still playing in my mind. In the end, it would take a week for the whale to die, suffocating slowly under its own weight, all alone. Although I was not able to help the whale, something in me was deeply grateful for having been by its side on the worst day of its life. Whether the cetacean registered my compassion in the moments that we touched is debatable, but what I know for sure is that it means something that someone cared. If something so great must pass from existence and no other solace exists than bearing witness, then so be it.
For years I had insulated myself in the Madre de Dios, almost greedily coveting my own Eden on the Las Piedras. I realize now that what drove me there was the search for a place where the world had not been destroyed by the sprawling, teeming greed of my own species. There I had found adventure and pure beauty, my little anteater; I had played in paradise and for a moment even thought it might last. The road changed all that. From the time of the great basin’s inception to the present, over the hundreds of millions of years that make up the Amazon’s creation, there is no doubt that we are alive for the century that will decide its fate; the Battle of the Amazon is on.
I visited Don Santiago on my own and asked him to draw me a map of the route to reach the Western Gate. He was hesitant. “At this time of year, with the rain, it’s impossible,” he warned. Still I begged him to show me, and he obliged, drawing crude lines into my notebook with his gnarled fingers and providing an afternoon’s worth of oral history on the journey to get there. “But you have to be careful,” he warned. “The jungle at this time of year is dangerous; you don’t understand its power.” I told him I understood, but was inadvertently lying to both of us.
As if in a dream I packed a bag of bare essentials: machete, hammock-tent, pot, lighters, compass, and then spent two days traveling as deep into the forest as I could get with humans. I was able to hitch a ride up an incredibly remote tributary of the Tambopata. Disembarking the boat beneath the towering canopy, I waved thank-you to the men who brought me and made some minor adjustments to my pack.
Had I been thinking rationally I would have noticed the thick cloud ceiling that had gathered angrily above the canopy, and might have paused for a moment to think about the gravity of committing myself to the mercy of the Amazon in its most violent season. Instead I turned to face the wall of dark foliage before me and drew a deep breath, then started walking.
13
Storm Solo
It’s a land that God, if he exists, has created in anger.
—WERNER HERZOG, THE BURDEN OF DREAMS
Thunder pulsed in the burnt sky as hours and miles passed. There were no paths between the miles of mute, expectant trees. Before leaving Puerto Maldonado I had printed a map, which I checked against my compass to hold a bearing every five hundred feet. The paper in my hand showed a larger squiggle and a smaller one: the river I had left, and the one I was going to. The plan was to traverse the jungle between the two rivers in a single day, and then spend several more freely exploring. The destination river, the Tahuamara, was virtually untouched. On the map, the area between the two rivers was a seventeen-mile stretch of homogenous green. What the map didn’t show, and what I didn’t know, was that between these two rivers was the largest swamp system for hundreds of miles around. Even if the seventeen miles had been dry forest, the distance would have been near impossible to cover, but in the swamp maze, there was no chance. I was doomed from the start.
The first day I spent walking—endlessly. I camped at night and woke at 5 A.M. In the sullen silence of the overcast dawn, I packed up and continued on my bearing, deliberately forcing forward optimistic thoughts that I would reach my destination by noon. By 9:30 A.M. the rain was falling hard, and I was still hacking endlessly through the brush. By midday I knew I was in trouble. I should have reached the river long before. Within the swampy, tangled forest the bugs were horrendous, the worst I had ever encountered. Before me as I walked was a hovering mass of dozens of mosquitoes, their shrill wheezing drone working on my brain like a dentist drill as I fought desperately to keep the word lost out of my mind.
Despite my frequent compass checks, the forest had its way with my sense of direction. It was simply impossible to maintain a bearing. I would find south and start marching, but twenty minutes later when I checked my compass it told me I had been traveling northwest. It was an eerie realization to make: the compass or the brain, one was malfunctioning.* By 3:30 P.M., as it began to rain in earnest, I vaguely took note of a tremendous termite nest that had be
en constructed around a slanted vine, the nest hung like an upside-down teardrop. Four grueling hours later, when I should have been miles farther on my course, I came before the same nest again. At the sight of it, panic jolted through my veins.
I walked faster then, heart pounding. Claustrophobic urgency propelled every step as I craned my neck and scanned in every direction, praying for a gap in the foliage that would signal the river. The jungle was groaning and buckling, ominously growing darker as the canopy above churned in the wind. The clatter and pound of falling debris from above were terrifying. The storm was gathering force and my heart was pounding. As the wind gusted, a hundred feet to my right a branch the size of a mature oak snapped and hit the earth with the force of a car crash. As one foot went before the other with ever increasing desperation I couldn’t help but wonder what the hell I had been thinking. I needed to find shelter. If the storm opened up full blast, there was little chance of surviving the carpet bombing of shed tree limbs that would result. Please let me find the river, I whispered through clenched teeth as I hiked on, but as the weak light began to fade it became ever clearer that I would be spending a second night out, this time with no way of denying the reality that I was lost.
Virtually anyone familiar with Amazonian exploration has heard the name Percy Fawcett. A legendary explorer at the turn of the twentieth century, Fawcett mapped previously unknown parts of the Amazon Basin and along the way encountered tribes that had never before seen outsiders. Convinced that the jungle held a lost civilization, which he named “Z,” Fawcett lived his life as a series of ever-intensifying missions that eventually cost him his life; the explorer vanished in 1925 and was never heard from again. Yet despite the remarkable adventures of Fawcett himself, the most haunting indication of the Amazon’s power came in the wake of his disappearance, as expeditions were launched by teams from around the world to find the lost explorer. Expedition after expedition followed Fawcett’s fate and were swallowed up by the jungle. More than a hundred people who went searching for Fawcett never returned.
As I made camp I tried to squash the ticker of thoughts deafening my mind. Measurements, deductions, predictions, superstitions, and analysis of every possible outcome. Most immediate on the list was how likely or not it was that I’d get crushed by a falling tree. Next was what would happen after tomorrow if I still couldn’t find a way out. I focused on breathing and tried to concentrate on making camp flawlessly: hammock set, shoes, and pack hung from a cord to reduce the amount of ants that doubtlessly would accumulate; small brush cleared; machete on the ground beside me.
As I made camp, the image of my hammock being smashed into the earth by a falling branch while I slept played over and over in my mind. No one would ever find my body. There was nothing I could do about it, though. I needed sleep.
Inside my hammock, the break from the mosquitoes was delightful. The entire day had been filled with them, I have never seen so many in my life. Las Piedras certainly was not so bad as here, not even close. Even La Torre had been a walk in the park compared to this. Maybe it was the endless swamp, or proximity to lakes. Whatever it was, the teeming hordes of bloodsucking insects, and their ever-present drone, only increased the fear-inducing repulsiveness of the jungle labyrinth that would not release me.
For the first time in my life I felt that it was possible I might die. So many hours of persistent and fruitless walking had seemingly gotten me nowhere, and from looking at the map, it was painfully clear that the landscape was far larger and more intricate than I had ever thought. The reality was that in hundreds of miles of forest it could take weeks to find my way out. But I didn’t have weeks—a few more days spent this way, and I’d be gone. The clock was ticking.
Lightning flashed green in the canopy above, seething, promising things to come. It took all of my concentration to keep my eyes shut and try to pretend that sleep was possible. For hours I lay this way. Suddenly I awoke in pitch black. For a breathless moment I was frozen as my mind booted up, and tried to put back together where I was. It was on this night that I awoke to the jaguar just inches from my right ear—so close, I could feel her breath as she drew in my scent, her face only inches from my right ear.
Despite being entirely at the mercy of the cat beside me, I gradually began to feel a thrilling, calm wonder. In the blackness, the jaguar and the human were disembodied forms exchanging sound. Cautiously I moved my arm a half inch. Again the soft thunder from her throat washed into my ear in hot breath. For several minutes, there was no sound but that of breathing and beating hearts.
The slightest sound of flexing leaf fibers announced her departure. I moved my hand once again, but this time there was no reaction to the sound. Slowly sitting up, I unzipped my tent and switched on my headlamp. Water vapor particles hung animated in the still air in the beams of light, the trees ominous and alien above. Just moments after being inches from a jaguar I stood panting with relief and exultation in the jungle night, no longer afraid.
I traced my fingers through the soft impressions made by the jaguar’s paw. Moving around camp, I brushed the ants off my hanging shoes and pack and removed some tobacco and a handmade pipe a close friend had given me weeks earlier. The smoke curled and intermingled with the vapor amid the foliage as I tried to digest what had just transpired, and what lay ahead.
When you are lost alone in the wild, when matters become serious enough that you fear for your life, it is rough having no one to share the experience with. The day had been an eternity of pounding stress over monotonous hours in horrible silence, the strange swampland seeming devoid of life. The fear and wonder of the jaguar’s visit had overpowered the dread of being lost and shocked me out of loneliness. As I puffed my pipe, it was strangely comforting to think of the jaguar stalking the forest nearby, and that she had come to check on me. At least she was out here, too.
In the morning the odyssey continued much as it had the days before: the horrendous tangled foliage of the endless swamp; the angry, brooding sky; the lonely stress of being lost. I tried not to think about water. I had stopped sweating despite the humidity, which was worrisome. There had to be a stream somewhere. Carefully consulting the map, I changed course by several degrees, and was encouraged when around noon, the sun emerged and the land lifted away from the marshy floodplain and once again became terra firma. Progress came faster, and suddenly I was covering several miles per hour.
By 11 A.M. I had been hiking for more than five hours, as the forest again began to show signs of change. This change I recognized as good. Just over an hour later, I heard the slow rushing of water. The terra firma descended into sandy floodplain and floodplain petered out into a jungle of massive wild cane. I sprinted beneath the twenty-five-foot stalks of prehistoric-looking grasses in wild excitement before finally emerging out of the green and into the wide-open freedom of a beach.
I fell to my knees on the sand beside the river and threw my arms in the air, then fell onto my back. The clouds were breaking up and sun flooded loving warmth over my body; it felt like being reborn. It felt like I could breath again. Throwing off my pack, throwing down my machete, and peeling off my clothes, I headed for the river. I jumped and splashed and made all the noise I could. Swimming below the surface and gulping, I tried to drink the entire river.
The open beach was the antithesis of the haunted swamp I had spent the previous days in. Walking upriver along the sprawling beach, I gaped up at the blue-and-yellow macaws that flew against a magnificently clear sky. Over the course of the afternoon I saw turtles lying on riverside logs taking in the hot afternoon sun with butterflies on their noses. Monkeys leapt through the trees and capybara splashed in the river. Machete in hand, I walked up the sandy beaches, taking it all in.
Many naturalists before me have experienced this fascinating dynamic in which you come to know species so well, it creates an almost neighborly familiarity (for the naturalist, of course, not the animal). It must sound like lunacy to anyone who has not experienced it, but walk
ing up that beach as oro-cerulean macaws swept across the sky in all their shrill, color-burst glory, I was glad to see them. It was the same for the capybara, turtles, and other creatures. Added to the neighbor phenomenon, or perhaps a part of it, I also was cognizant of feeling more at ease with other creatures around; if the capybara were calm, I could be calm. The same went for the turtles, lapwings, and other life on the open beaches.
It was the first time ever I was out in the jungle without any restrictions, responsibilities, or distractions. No one was waiting for me to return to the station; no one could find me even if they wanted to. I had the greatest jungle on earth all to myself; it belonged to me, and I to it. Throughout the day I drank and drank, and took frequent plunges into the river. The plunges became more cautious after I spotted a black caiman in the late afternoon that was well over ten feet.
In the glowing rays of evening I cooked out on the beach: ramen noodles, Brazil nuts, and chocolate, followed by tea. With the horizon’s victory over the sun, quiet cloaked the world. Orange light faded and the sky became a quiet spectrum of blue and purple, accented by leftover wisps of orange cloud. With the elation of survival, the relief of being free, I experienced a moment I had always aspired to live out, alone in the Amazon.
That night I made camp in high hopes that tomorrow would be a peaceful day of exploration on this river that seemed ignorant of the existence of man. Despite the harrowing journey to get there, I had made it. Everything had worked out. If the weather cooperated, I planned to spend as much as a week on the deserted river, enjoying the jungle. Yet on this night as well, peace was not in the cards.