Mother of God

by Paul Rosolie

  As the solo approached, I dived into Irwin’s work, concentrating on the passion he was able to transmit, even more than his skill with wildlife. In face of the cynicism and fatalism that are all too common, he was a stubborn source of light. He conquered the world with inimitable raw optimism and passion. By caring so freely, he enabled others to care, and to stand in defense of all that is green and good in the world. His influence created many conservationists, including me.

  With Gowri and my friend Norm, I began filming wildlife and practicing being before a camera. From early tests with video, I knew I could never match Irwin’s presence on film—no one could—but there were other ways of incorporating hope and energy into conservation. Yet no matter how deep my fascination and ambition for the Western Gate, the greatest question remained logistics.

  After the last solo attempt, I had respect for how utterly helpless a single human being is in the Amazon. In the intervening time I had continued to hone my skills in the bush, accomplishing minor solos without incident. This gave me confidence that the storm solo had been a unique and isolated event, and if I went searching for the Western Gate, logically, especially if it was not the rainy season, then it should be no different than any hike I took around the station (except that it would last for days and possibly weeks).

  The problem with finding the Western Gate was that the route required traveling into country so remote that every danger was amplified. I’d be traveling up a medium-sized tributary, then traversing jungle, hiking up another tributary, and crossing the Western Gate into the unknown. As I had spent two years poring over the details, it seemed doable. Then again, climbing Everest is doable—it’s getting down that is often the crux. I continued to struggle with the hard fact that if something went wrong out there, it would all be over. Even something as minor as a broken leg, an infection—anything. Once I was dropped so far from civilization it could take weeks if not months to navigate back on foot after a catastrophe. How could I put myself in such a position?

  The breakthrough came one day while I was reading an issue of National Geographic, in an office building in Manhattan, of all places. The article was about the adventures of long-distance solo trekker Andrew Skurka. The article mentioned that Skurka had hiked more than four thousand miles across eight national parks in Alaska, covering several hundred miles with a raft he carried in his pack. My heart instantly began racing and my hand gripped the peccary tooth that lay across my chest. Later that day I began researching the rafts and found a small company out of Colorado called Alpacka Raft that specialized in making white-water-capable, super-lightweight pack-rafts. I had just found a tool that was designed for the specific purpose of accessing inaccessible places on rugged expeditions.

  It was a discovery that required a complete reevaluation of my dream expedition.

  With the pack-raft I could hike as far as a river would go, deep into headwaters unreachable to anyone else, and when the time came to turn back, the raft would sweep me downstream at quadruple the speed of walking.

  With a pack-raft now part of the plan, the expedition I had always dreamed of began to materialize. While leading trips with JJ, I made an effort to learn every edible and medicinal plant he could show me, a crucial backup to the three weeks of food I could comfortably carry in my pack. Well practiced with camera gear, rations calculated, pack-raft purchased, I was as ready as I ever could be to take the plunge.

  15

  The Launch

  Deep in the forest a call was sounding, and as often as he heard this call, mysteriously thrilling and luring, he felt compelled to turn his back upon the fire and the beaten earth around it, and to plunge into the forest, and on and on, he knew not where or why; nor did he wonder where or why, the call sounding imperiously, deep in the forest.

  —JACK LONDON, THE CALL OF THE WILD

  Morning mist hung over the jungle as worlds passed by. Into the mouths of ever-narrowing rivers, toward the deep unseen, the small craft traveled. Farms and villages became fewer by the day, winnowing to the last desolate outpost towns with hopeful names, the fringe of human presence on the frontier. A woman washing clothes as her children frolicked in the warm current, a man paddling a dugout canoe piled high with the wealth of the land. In the mist a young girl with fish-shaped eyes and midnight-black hair lay across the back of a tapir with her cheek pressed to its ear, the water and mist cloaking her naked body as our boat swept past.

  Sleep and consciousness alternated in dazed succession as the days and hours slipped into one another. It would take a week from Cuzco by air, land, and boat to reach the remote start of the expedition. In the solitude of these days, patience and fear, wonder and doubt jockeyed for favor. Soon the option of turning back would vanish. It felt as though everything had been reducing toward this moment, or perhaps building, my entire life.

  For the final leg of the journey I hitched with a brazil nut farmer named Manuel and his wife. They were confused by the gringo in their midst. I told them where I was headed and they looked aghast, the way onlookers watch a drunk cross a street. They took me all the same after I traded a tank of gasoline and two hundred soles for the ride.

  Santiago had warned that this was not a journey to take lightly, that getting to the Western Gate could be dangerous and past it all bets were off. Anything could happen. Thankfully, the fear I felt was counteracted by the anticipation, the thrill of the journey. I was heading into the last great wilderness—that shrinking thing that is vanishing from our wonderful planet; that world no one knows.

  As the boat wound ever deeper into the jungle, Peter Beard’s aerial photographs from Africa came to mind. Taken more than fifty years ago, his images show vast herds of hundreds, even thousands of elephants moving across the plains like ants—a vision of a much different earth just decades before my lifetime. There are no longer such herds of elephants; their ancient routes have been blocked by farms and roads. They have been poisoned by farmers and killed by poachers. The sad reality was that I had missed what Beard had the privilege to witness: Africa in much fuller glory than today. It struck me that I might be living a similar generational privilege in the Amazon, that the massive areas of uninterrupted and uninhabited forest might not exist a century from now. The weight of these thoughts, combined with the imminent wagering of my own life against the elements, nearly overpowered my determination to continue. Flashes of fear verging on panic would grip my throat, and there were moments when I almost told the driver to turn around. Yet as we continued to wind into seemingly endless unspoiled green, I was buoyed by subtle changes I saw in the landscape. The many hesitations my mind had concocted were continually washed away by the illuminating wonder my eyes beheld. The warm awe of witnessing such riotous biotic climax was hypnotic. It was impossible not to think about the significance of this place I was entering. My resolve was nurtured amid hours of meditation.

  Ever since the La Torre anaconda expedition, I had been fascinated by the obvious negative correlation between human density and the abundance and diversity of a given area of forest. Traveling through the Madre de Dios, I had seen forest devastated by logging and hunting as well as places degraded by gold mining and its long-lived mercury contamination. But, in contrast, I had also seen the most secluded and pristine wilderness imaginable and the resulting riot of wildlife. Again and again the inverse rule held: the farther from humans you travel, the more animals you see. Now, traveling upriver on a boat with two strangers, I was considerably farther from civilization than I had ever been. With each bend in the river, the beaches were more crowded with tracks evidencing the visits of large animals, the hulks of basking caiman, and endless flocks of birds. Likewise, tree branches exploded with life. It was a celebration of human absence.

  After La Torre and other expeditions, Pico and I discussed the inverse rule at length. We observed clear evidence that even sparse human presence can alter habitation of a given area of forest in negative ways. Even a lone farmer brings with him the din of a boat moto
r, the roar of a chainsaw, and the sharp report of a gun. He brings livestock, dogs, gasoline, fishing nets, light, and a plethora of other substances, sounds, and practices that have resounding effects on the surrounding flora and fauna. These and other observations we recorded spoke to the unique importance of untouched wilderness. During my subsequent visit home, however, I was surprised to find the idea of wilderness a point of intellectual contention. The very concept of the wilderness that now surrounded me was for some a matter of debate.

  One line of reasoning sees wilderness as a myth, a modern construct invented in response to the wholesale vanishing of nature in the face of all that is human. In this view, wilderness is a romantic notion, a yearning for something that was neither labeled nor much appreciated when nature was omnipresent in our lives. Only when it had become apparent that wilderness was vanishing did people begin to appreciate, treasure, and worship an idealized version of the wild.

  It is understandable that for many people words such as pristine and wilderness elicit uncomfortable reactions. Even many conservationists are uncomfortable with this language because it has the potential to devalue crucial and complex biodiversity areas in people’s minds, and instead focus everything on places that better fit the “untouched” romantic image of wilderness. This is an increasingly salient point as many of the most important ecosystems and endangered species become intertwined with human roads, cities, farms, pipelines, and dams. Tigers and elephants in India fight for survival in a humanized, not wild, landscape.

  Implicitly, this glorification of pristine wilderness denigrates nature as we know it, devaluing the more mundane and everyday nature of our backyards. Our distance from nature, in this view, undermines our humanness and contributes to our existential separation of individual from environment, in many cases justifying ecologically destructive behaviors. By extension, sustainability requires that we do a better job of understanding and acknowledging the importance of biodiversity and natural systems, even taking the rules of nature as a greater wisdom from which to derive our own conduct. Sitting in the front of a boat, watching the unimaginable verdancy around me, I realized that if humans must live in their natural surround, then it is a surround of compromised nature and not wilderness with which we must make peace. Such is the reality across most of the globe today. Yet, even with this proviso, it’s not quite so easy in practice for us to achieve.

  My experience in the Amazon told me that the argument against wilderness was both rational and agreeable and, at the same time, profoundly wrong. Indigenous cultures all over the world have sacred areas of wilderness where they do not live. Places they utilize for spiritual direction or rites of passage, or perhaps places that they do not enter at all. As I traveled further away from consensual nature and deeper into earth’s “inner” (as opposed to “outer”) space, a different realization unfolded within me. Humans must indeed learn to live on the earth that they know. In contrast, this earth that was swallowing me was not a place where most modern humans would be welcome or one they would understand. Here the rules were different. In this anachronistic wild, humans were not the top predator. It was a strange and novel vulnerability to experience. Yet even as the omnipresent power of the jungle stretched out, it was impossible to forget that the immensely powerful realm I now entered was at the same time so incredibly fragile. Anything but the most non-intrusive human presence could change and destroy it.

  In light of this, the wilderness debate takes on tangible consequence. It may seem trivial at first to debate the specific syntax of words like nature, wilderness, or pristine. But in the Amazon these definitions carry genuine weight capable of determining the fate of entire species, cultures, and ecosystems.

  For a long time, the wilderness discussion in Amazonia has become ensnared in the academic quicksand that it is the Amazon’s human history (leave it to humans to make it all about us!). In 1971, Betty Meggers’s book Amazonia: Man and Culture in a Counterfeit Paradise argued that the Amazon had historically thwarted any substantial human settlement and so was a pristine natural entity. Meggers saw no sustainable way to develop the Amazon and was largely influential in the “touch it and you’ll destroy it” viewpoint that subsequently informed perception and policy.

  In 1992, William Denevan published a paper, “The Pristine Myth: The Landscape of the Americas in 1492,” which argued that Amazonia had indeed been inhabited by vast civilizations of ancient peoples. Some scientists even go so far as to claim that the diversity of species in Amazonia is somehow a by-product of past human disturbances, and that the biodiversity of the Amazon is man-made. Outside of the scientific community, current Internet sources claiming to debunk “eco-myths,” go further to view the Amazon as “a purposefully engineered tree farm planted by humans thousands of years ago.”

  At some point in the debate, the prevailing message has morphed into the view that if humans had once been there, they should be there now—as though it would be irresponsible to let the gigantic forest “wasteland” continue to stand unpopulated by roads, bridges, bars, brothels, and industrial zones. Brian Kelly and Mark London bluntly ponder this view in The Last Forest, writing, “If an earlier civilization successfully settled here before Europeans came with their diseases and murderous ways, then why can’t it happen again?”

  So what is the truth? As of 2012, a team of leading Brazilian and American researchers published in the journal Science that, contrary to popular belief, “large ancient civilizations never cleared and tamed the western Amazon.” The research, headed by Crystal McMichael of the University of New Hampshire in Durham, sampled soil from an area of more than three million square kilometers. The soil cores showed traces of charcoal and burnt grasses near river bluffs, but no indication of common Amazon crops. Inland from rivers the charcoal and other human indicators were far less common, further corroborating the long-held belief that most of the human presence in pre-Columbian Amazonia was along waterways. As for the spaces between, as one of the team stated, “If humans were in those areas, they didn’t stay very long, and they didn’t farm.”

  The team’s findings are corroborated by the observations of the first European explorers to travel the basin. Their findings also fit with the hypothesis that without metal tools brought by Europeans, pre-Columbian people in Amazonia could not practice slash-and-burn agriculture and would have had relatively little ability to influence the forest.

  In the end, when religions, political agendas, and the jousting of scientists are set aside to reveal facts, it seems obvious that whatever the exact nature of pre-Columbian civilization in Amazonia, there have always been wild places between us. There have always been great stretches of jungle straddling the horizon while generations came and went, where trees towered toward the sky, never once entering the human consciousness. In short, Amazonia is dominated by vast expanses of wilderness.

  I use the word wilderness loosely to describe those areas that are untouched, the shrinking part of reality crucial for the survival of species and the production of ecosystem services—among them, balm for the human psyche. But my fascination with wilderness goes beyond my love for adventure and wildlife, and my own personal, quasi-spiritual need for remote places. As a naturalist, I am interested in the baseline information that these inaccessible corners archive.

  In New York and New Jersey, where I grew up, as well as in parts of the Amazon and India, I have witnessed a kind of generational amnesia to ecological abundance. It is a sinister phenomenon whereby members of each generation seem to accept what they see around them as the way things ought to be. It is a problem of shifting baselines, a lowering of the standards by which we judge the condition of our environment. Over generations and across continents, this collective inability to accurately assess environmental change has become a serious problem.

  Growing up, I didn’t look at the trees and wonder why the trees were so thin. And I didn’t wonder why I was almost twenty before I spotted my first bald eagle over the Hudson River. It wasn
’t until I was older that I learned that the forests I grew up in had been clear-cut a century earlier and that bald eagles had been radically reduced by DDT only decades before my birth. What I accepted as normal would have seemed tragic to someone who had experienced the same places only a generation or two earlier.

  This same narrative is playing out in different forms all over the world. In fishing communities, elders remember days of plenty we can barely comprehend. In India, I met people who recall great swaths of jungle filled with elephants and tigers; places that are now nothing more than a distant memory. I now began to wonder if something similar could be happening on a more subtle level right under my nose in the Madre de Dios. Even in the limited time since my first journey to Las Piedras, I had witnessed a decline in the number of caiman, capybara, and turtles basking beside the rivers. Similarly, in the forest where JJ and Santiago’s community of Infierno was located, there were many people who considered it normal that there were no herds of peccary in the forest, when in fact they had been hunted into local extinction only a decade or two before. I had seen these human-impacted areas, as well as the stark gradient of increased abundance and diversity that occur in the deeper, less accessible areas.

  Therefore, as my solo expedition grew nearer by the second, my eyes scanned and studied the passing scenery endlessly. The gradients of impact were not hard to discern. As the boat traveled past the last deserted remnant of civilization, wildlife became far more abundant than anything I had seen before, save for the uppermost reaches of La Torre. Huge black caiman basked on the banks. Herons and lapwings steadily increased in number. Families of capybara became more common, hiding in the tall river cane. These places might never have heard the sharp echo of a rifle, or at least it remained an unfamiliar sound. It was clear here that animals used the land with greater abandon. With mounting excitement, I recorded these and other observations, scribbling in my notebook and sometimes testing out my camera.