Mother of God

by Paul Rosolie

  In those quiet, rainy days at Inotowa, I had patiently burned to see my family, Gowri, and to live. I felt like I had unlocked some secret of consciousness, and felt as if anything was possible. Hours were spent scribbling realizations and plans into my journal. The positive charge I felt in the wake of that solo expedition left an afterglow that lasted for years. Despite having almost died, and the fact that I had not been anywhere near where I was trying to go, the solo was an adventure, a recharge, and I emerged determined to do many things—determined to live.

  Over the next year I kept my promise to Gowri and returned to India. Together again, we continued what we had started months earlier, engulfed in the mysterious magnetism between us—which the months and thousands of miles between us had failed to break.

  After we were reunited, our adventures only escalated and took on an almost cinematic grandeur—climbing the orange boulders of Karnataka, exploring the green jungles in Kerala, nights by the Bay of Bengal. Visions of Pondicherry are forever painted in my mind—running in the evening with Gowri through the bustling cobblestone streets of vendors and traffic in the salt-sweet coastal air, alongside a temple elephant. We held hands as we dodged the traffic, and marveled at the behemoth, its trunk swinging from side to side as it went, bells jingling from its ankles. However, for me the elephant and the vibrant insanity of the street were merely a frame for her. In flame-orange Patialas and forest-green curta, black hair swirling about her smiling face and dark eyes—it was almost more than I could take.

  There was no longer any doubt that the universe had made the inexplicable decision to unite two parts of a whole from opposite sides of the world, to create something written by fate. We got engaged in a tent, beneath a powerful thunderstorm, amid the dark mist-shrouded incisors of the Agumbe rainforest of the Western Ghats. We formed a plan for her to come for college in the States and began the long process of making it a reality, first with her parents, then with mine, and then with colleges and U.S. immigration officials.

  While this was going on, JJ and I set our sights on a new project: developing Don Santiago’s thousand-acre property into a rainforest reserve and ecotourism destination. We were starting anew. Though secretly my heart burned for Las Piedras, and nowhere else, I dived into the Infierno project with everything I had.

  I began reading the work of great conservationists who had succeeded in protecting large tracts of habitat all over the world: Alan Rabinowitz, Charles Munn, Gabriella Fredriksson, George Schaller, Lawrence Anthony, Paul Watson, Jane Goodall, Steve Irwin, and so many more. These were people who had employed ingenious methods of raising awareness, leveraging governments, and mobilizing locals, employing whatever tactics were possible to create ecosystem-level change to safeguard the earth for humans and animals. Through them I began building an arsenal of practical conservation knowledge, armed as well with the hope that if they had done it, I could do it.

  While I was studying larger-scale conservation, I began joining Pico, JJ, Mario, José, and the entire family for hours and hours of meetings and talks, days of exploration and planning, and before long we were building a new research station on Don Santiago’s riverside land.

  With Emma and Joseph permanently back in the United Kingdom, JJ was gravely affected by their absence and was not the same friend I had once looked up to. There was anger in him, a distance, and it simply wasn’t the same between us. Yet he did his best as we worked together to get our new project off the ground, and bridged the gap by working harder than ever. The first order of business was cleaning up the country: Santiago’s large land was right next to Infierno and each night we heard numerous gunshots as hunters took what they pleased from it. In meetings with the entire Durand family, we came to the conclusion that if there was any hope of running a quality ecotourism operation, we’d have to put a stop to the poaching immediately.

  So JJ and I began poaching poachers: camping out in the jungle, walking the trails at night, and tracking gunshots and footprints in the darkness. We sought the assistance of local police, but they were unwilling to send officers traipsing through the jungle and instead advised us to buy a pair of handcuffs and bring in whomever we bagged. It was rough and dangerous work, and we had more than a few close calls.

  One time I found a poacher walking with a peccary over his back and played the lost tourist trick, asking him for directions and in the course of conversation, finding out his name. That was a lead, and now we knew who to watch for. JJ and I made a good team and would track hunters from opposing angles, surprising them in the act. We had each other’s backs.

  We worked hard to track the poachers on Santiago’s land. After all, if they kept killing the wildlife, we would have little chance of starting up a conservation-ecotourism project there. We continued spending long nights in the jungle, and eventually our efforts paid off. One morning while we were doing transects with a group of volunteers, taking careful data on the wildlife we observed, someone heard the moan of chainsaws in the distance. We followed the sound and saw a group of men who had recently felled a tree. JJ instantly recognized them as belonging to the same family as the guy I had encountered with the dead peccary. The poachers were not thrilled about being caught, and if JJ and I had come across them alone, it almost certainly would have turned into a fight. But with volunteers present the men were too stunned to retaliate. With cameras rolling, we kept it calm, and later showed the footage to the police back in Puerto Maldonado. The police followed up by investigating the downed trees and poached lumber, and eventually contacted the men responsible and issued a summons and a warning that any further offenses would be punished with jail time. It was a huge success for our new project, and it sent a message to the rest of the community that Santiago’s land was now a guarded wildlife sanctuary.

  In the two years that followed, many events transpired, none as significant as the day Don Santiago boarded a boat with his grandchildren and sons to travel to his house after a family party. Sitting on the boat, traveling up the Tambopata, as he had done so many times throughout his life, he closed his eyes as the sun fell on his face and drew one last, peaceful breath before slipping away. His death shocked the community and the family. At his wake, it seemed like all of Puerto Maldonado was in attendance. I spent many days at Doña Carmen’s helping with food, looking at photos, and sharing memories. One rainy day I sat with Pico for hours as he tossed back beers and told stories of his father, whom he loved so much. I held him as he wept through the day.

  With Santiago’s passing, the Infierno project took on a deep sense of purpose within the family, and as beams were erected and nails hammered, I began preparing to bring a group to the new location by recruiting up north. We continued to struggle with the poaching, and with Santiago gone, the brothers had no central leadership, which was a source of mounting tension. Regardless, we forged ahead.

  Back at home I was nearing the end of college. By then both my family and Gowri’s had accepted that this transplanetary relationship would somehow have to work. She had applied for college in the United States and then gone to the visa office in India, only to get rejected not once but twice. In a relationship defined by long absence, difficulty, and much worry, things reached a head, as it seemed she would never get her visa. Her parents, who had been tolerant of our cause, were losing faith and patience, and everyone said that once you fail an interview, let alone two, the chances of getting a visa drop to nearly zero. For a time, it seemed like I would have to choose between the Amazon and the perfect girl.

  Rudyard Kipling wrote that God could not be everywhere and so he created mothers; mine swept in with her unique tenacity for results and began writing letters to the State Department, college professors, elected officials, and anyone else whom she could get a bead on. With hope in this new strategy, and another trip to India for me, we put it all on the line and went for one last interview—this time she passed. It was an overwhelming success after an epic struggle. Bravely leaving her family to live across the globe
with people she’d never met, Gowri left India for the first time and arrived in New York City in December 2009. She met my family and friends in a big welcome celebration, in a world covered in something she had never seen before: snow.

  With a major hurdle finally behind us, I began earnestly searching for answers to how I could create real change in the Madre de Dios. I began sending out feelers, making contacts, and exploring grant agencies and larger nongovernmental conservation organizations. One of the many queries I made was to the website Mongabay.com. For years I had read Mongabay, without question the best source for environmental, wildlife, and rainforest news on the Web. They responded with interest to my experiences in the west Amazon and with the floating forest, poachers, and ecotourism; a month later they published a full-length article and interview featuring me in their Young Scientists series—an honor whose true value I would not grasp until later on.

  In Peru, Gowri joined me, JJ, Pico, and the rest of the family in working on the Infierno project. She took to the jungle like a fish to water, so much so that her knowledge of birds and butterflies soon surpassed even my own. For years I had dreamed of sharing the Amazon with her and seeing her wide-eyed reaction to the endless immensity of the jungle. Yet there was one place in particular that she needed to see: Las Piedras. We contacted the organization that owned it and arranged to visit for several days. It was a living dream to bring her there. As nice as Infierno was, for me, Las Piedras would always be home.

  We spent a magical week exploring the trails and aguajales, the ancient trees and hallowed meandering streams—watching macaws and basking in the warm reality of being together. Yet there were a number of disturbing changes that had occurred in my absence. The organization that had bought Las Piedras Station clearly had no idea what they were doing and had let the place languish. Their incompetence was so great that even longtime clients, big-money annual companies that had been coming to Las Piedras for years through Emma and JJ, broke off ties with the place. The trails had overgrown, and, worst of all, the old man they had hired to watch the place when no one else was around had shot at every peccary and spider monkey he saw.

  At one time you could barely step outside without encountering herds of boisterous boar nearly a hundred strong, but now the forest was silent. The herds had left, as had the troops of spider monkeys. A single hunter had changed the forest, profoundly altering the ecosystem. As I lay with Gowri in my arms, in the same hammock where I had once rocked Lulu to sleep, I looked about the most beautiful place I had ever known and dreamed of one day, somehow, winning it back.

  As for the road downriver, where the forest had been burned and cleared two years back, there were now new houses popping up each day. With each hut came another few hectares of jungle cleared. It was straight from the rainforest destruction textbook, chapter: Roads. Yet I swallowed the bad and pushed forward, making positive progress where I could. In the spring of 2010, the Durand family and Gowri and I welcomed our first full crew of volunteers to the Infierno station. We called the operation Saona Expeditions, using the Ese-Eja word for anaconda.

  The name was partly due to the fact that on an early assessment of the land, JJ, Gowri, and I were stalking through the forest, taking inventory of everything we encountered, and had an incredibly rare run-in with an anaconda. We had marveled at the massive kapok tree that Santiago had preserved, we had seen Spix’s guans, Amazon coatis, and were following a herd of collared peccary when we came to a colpa, bordered by a small stream. There we pondered how the herd of pigs could have evaded us so completely, and inspected the colpa. It seemed active with many animals: tapir, peccary, deer, and I noticed a stunning blue morpho lapping at the salts below.

  Climbing down to get a photo, I was beside the stream when I heard a muffled pop. Just three feet to my left, in the stream, a female anaconda more than fourteen feet long lay coiled around the body of a peccary. The herd had come through here, and the anaconda had grabbed one by the cheek as it passed and wrestled it into the water. The pop I heard was the pig’s spine breaking in half. Gowri almost lost her mind at the sight of such a massive snake, but was still able to snap a stunning photo of the scene.

  When JJ and his brother Federico arrived the commotion was too great and the huge snake bolted, leaving the peccary in the stream. It was an unfortunate accident that really was my fault. I had not realized the snake was beside me until it was too late. In the end we took the freshly killed peccary back to the community, where a feast was served, compliments of the anaconda. If it weren’t for Gowri’s photo, no one would have believed us, and with it the atmosphere became one of rare excitement.

  During May and June our first groups arrived with people from all over the world: Belgium, New York, South Africa, and various other points on the map. JJ and I were the guides, Pico the driver, Elías and his wife, Elsa (the one whose father had been eaten by the anaconda), were the groundskeeper and cook, respectively, with support from the rest of the family. The volunteers saw tamanduas, caught caiman, swam in the Tambopata, and began building transect data on the new forest block. The operation seemed a huge success, and the Durands were overwhelmingly pleased.

  After weeks of preparation and a solid month of running groups, I returned to Puerto with staff and volunteers, and as usual made a call home. My dad’s voice came on the line and he asked me if I was sitting down. Right away I feared someone had died, but then noticed the smile coming through in his voice: a television network that filmed for all the major networks had called and wanted me to call them back as soon as possible. Thanks to the article on Mongabay, the adventures JJ and I had had at the floating forest, with Lulu, and the struggles we’d faced in conservation had made their way around the world. I’d received mail from people from all over the globe who were fascinated and curious to learn more about the mysterious floating forest and other secrets of Amazonia. Now it was a television company from the United Kingdom; they had read about my work from an interview, and wanted to know if I’d be interested bringing viewers into the jungle through networks like Animal Planet, Discovery, and National Geographic.

  While so many exciting new things were taking place, I was at heart still concentrating on the bigger picture in the Madre de Dios; the highway was still coming. Of all the conservation literature I had read, the story that remained fixed in my mind was still the creation of Bahuaja-Sonene National Park, and the astounding brilliance of the La Torre that I had experienced as a result. Charles Munn had imagined the park and provided the scientific muscle for the plan, but in the end it had been the local support and then Daniel Winitzky’s documentary that had really won the battle. He had done something that the scientists, locals, and every other conservationist were unable to do: he had gotten people excited.

  The documentary Candamo, which resulted from Munn and Winitzky’s collaboration, was well received in Peru and even overseas. Reporters flocked to catch a glimpse of the living Eden in the Amazon, and suddenly the battle over the Candamo valley drew international attention. As time went on, it gradually came into focus that Las Piedras, La Torre, the Tambopata, all these incredible places that were allowing me to live out my own dreams existed because people before me had protected them.

  The Candamo campaign began merging with my dream of journeying to Santiago’s Eden, past the Western Gate. For years my grand solo had been placed on the back burner, while the project with Infierno and drama of getting Gowri took precedence. Yet the plan still burned within me, and as time went on, I became increasingly fascinated with the idea of filming the journey.

  If what Santiago had said was true—and I knew he was never wrong—then the landscape up past the Gate would be incredible. If I could capture even a small glimpse of that world, perhaps it would be possible to follow in Winitzky’s footsteps; perhaps I could get people to realize what was at stake. Given the television networks’ new interest in the west Amazon, it seemed worthy of serious consideration.

  Several issues immediately surfa
ced, the most obvious being whether camera equipment would somehow detract from the experience of the journey. This, however, was a worry I quickly discarded. Filming would provide a perfect excuse to spend days in hides, carefully observing wildlife, and the potential for positive change that could come from a documentary of this type was well worth whatever cost. Questions of cameras and conservation and surviving in the wild serendipitously led me to inevitably ask, as I had so many times before, “W.W.S.D.?” What would Steve do?

  When I was in middle school and high school, I would come home every day to watch Steve Irwin’s adventures. World famous for his work as the Crocodile Hunter on television, Irwin was a dedicated conservationist and first-class outdoorsman who used his fame as a platform to protect species and ecosystems, and to inspire others to do the same.

  What most people don’t know about the Crocodile Hunter is that before he was famous, Steve Irwin spent years working for the Australian government, rescuing and relocating crocodiles that otherwise would have been killed. In a boat with his dog, Irwin patrolled the backwaters trapping and wrestling the largest reptilian carnivore on our planet, the saltwater crocodile. The guy was the real deal. Living solo in the bush doing the most dangerous job imaginable, Irwin would often film himself working, a habit that later on would help catapult him into the international spotlight as an ambassador for the natural world.

  It is impossible to know what forces allow one life to “reach across time not merely to inspire but to mold the dreams of another,” as Wade Davis writes in One River, or to fathom the connection that can exist between two people who never met. Steve was a teacher throughout my formative years, one of the greatest guiding forces in the process of wringing fruition from dreams. I watched as he expertly handled snakes and other wildlife and would later recall his skills as I developed my own over the years. His overwhelming passion and enthusiasm for protecting life on earth had even inspired me to apply for a job at his zoo, which I had been pursuing for months, up until the time of his death. I was determined to meet the man. That I never did will always feel like an injustice.