by Paul Rosolie
Each mushroom, each decaying leaf is a world of its own, each a microcosm of fantastic complexity even apart from the whole they support. Yet there is no apart in such a world of cryptic complexity. The towering trees that rise from the barren clay of the basin support thousands of lichens, insects, mosses, fungi, birds, mammals, reptiles, and amphibians, and they cannot exist without the specific other life-forms of the biome. It is speciation in concert: each organism evolving alongside numerous others in the quest for life. For thousands of miles in every direction, as I lay on that beach, such was the landscape, vibrant with the riotous tumult of life.
It had taken considerable testing of my own mettle to make it so far—speaking plainly, I had been scared shitless for weeks. To journey into such dense and uncharted wild is to wager your own life; out in the jungle a lone human is just one broken limb, one wrong turn, and one miscalculation away from being absorbed and digested into nothingness. Many times I had thought of turning back, more than once physically doing so, yet always in the end pushing on.
Yes, the jungle, or any wilderness, is a treacherous place for an individual. But the Amazon is uniquely capable of swallowing a person, silently deleting them from existence. It wasn’t just Percy Fawcett and the dozens who vanished behind him; the jungle swallows people constantly. JJ alone had told me numerous stories of locals vanishing. On the day before his thirty-first birthday, in 2000, biologist Francis Bossuyt walked to a lake near Cocha Cashu research station and never returned. Despite the ensuing weeks of searching by friends and colleagues, nothing of him was ever found; not a single clue to his fate was ever uncovered. Indigenous lore acknowledges the vanishings, suggesting that certain people are selected, inducted by the immortal beings in the stars to leave earth, and to do so without warning or trace. However you choose to explain it, there is an undeniable, awful tendency of the jungle to draw people into its bosom of shadows and remove them from living reality.
Although I carefully calculated every known aspect of my expedition, at any moment I could join Fawcett and all the others. In response to high-stress survival situations, the brain releases chemicals to create a state of peak experience, a heightened awareness to one’s surroundings that I savored like a junkie alone on that beach. Each sensation, each molecule in my own body, seemed charged, connected to the landscape, immersed in something profound. With the humble fire crackling by my side, stranded on a nameless beach at the world’s end, whatever might lie ahead of me was worth it.
For days I pushed on alone through the wilderness. At first my skin was turned to raw meat from the constant wrath of the sun, and the siege of sand-fly bites. Usually in the forest there are 150 feet of canopy to guard against the harsh tropical rays, but traveling in the open beside the river was more like navigating a desert environment in terms of the constant dry heat. But eventually I felt my body adapting to the harsh conditions, and rising to the challenge. My skin began to harden and heal. Yet my mental transformation was most remarkable. My brain, too, was adjusting to the new reality of life alone in the wilderness, and operating with a level of focus I had never experienced before. Everything felt new.
Adventure in its purest form is raw discovery. The draw to see what’s around the next bend becomes hypnotizing; I was drawn forward by the powerful tide of the forest. In the wild, the self becomes the only thing because there is nothing else. Out there the grave business of survival and discovery is understood without being spoken, and all else fails to qualify as relevant. Days of travel deepen this sensation, and you begin to feel the tug of the jungle, the sucking sensation of deep wilderness that draws you toward its hidden recesses. It was fascinating how powerful the urge to continue was, how much my mind obsessed over it. By that third night, my eyes felt wider, ears sharper, and gut more hollow than ever before. Reality was amplified. I was amazed at what my senses could interpret.
From where I sat, I could distinguish the odor of collared peccaries nearby, their musk more delicate than the white-lipped variety. The air bore the tangy odor of fermenting huicungo fruit, and the dank aroma of a blooming bride’s-veil mushroom, ready to drop its skirt of fungal lace for the night. These interpretable scents were just notes amid the bouquet of various other aromatic compounds. In the insect din, the distant chanting of frogs, and the lonely tinamou’s song I could hear the more subtle happenings of the forest. Somewhere upriver I heard the distinctive purring of pale-winged trumpeters, and farther off an Amazon horned owl. Without consciously thinking it, I knew that a predatory fish was hunting in the shallow water of the opposite bank, that a family of howler monkeys were bedding down for the night, and that capybara were preparing to emerge from the river cane nearby. I took pleasure in the chattering swarm of bats above my head, echo-locating insects and snatching them on the wing; the sound of jaws crunching exoskeletons was constant and satisfying. I had front-row seats to the greatest show on earth.
There were behavioral differences in the wildlife as well. I saw species in daylight that would never dream of leaving the cover of dark back in the human-inhabited Amazon. There was no comparison between this isolated rangeland and the more familiar and accessible forests of the Madre de Dios. I spotted harpy eagles twice as often. And every morning there were jaguar tracks surrounding my tent. The heavy prints in the sand indicated mostly males, and one of them, a massive three-hundred-pounder, had boldly approached my tent during the night. He had come within twelve inches of the wall of my tent, the closest any of the jaguars had come while I slept. Another item to add to the “next time” list: camera trap. Kicking myself, I could only imagine the images I would have gotten had I brought one and faced it toward my tent.
Along with the jaguar tracks, the beaches were jam-packed with signs of other species, a Library of Congress of knowledge for me to record and decipher. On virtually every beach I found indications of tapir, ocelot, jaguar, agouti, paca, more than three dozen birds, tayra, giant otter, caiman, anaconda, and on and on. It was almost difficult to imagine so many species all using the same area. It was like a hidden Serengeti in the Amazon, a beach where every creature came to play, hunt, drink, and interact. This was what I knew I had to film.
But the discovery that gave me the greatest pause was undoubtedly a tremendous yellow-footed tortoise—the same species Lulu had attacked in our last days together, and the same one I had seen many times in the forest. However, this one was different. I spotted it when cutting a bend, and needed several minutes to compute what I saw. The tortoise was so huge that its carapace was almost three feet from end to end, and the animal’s back was higher than my knee. It looked more like a Galapagos giant tortoise than the familiar yellow-footed one I knew. It was three times the size of the largest I had ever seen.
Kneeling beside the ancient reptile, I watched as its legs, heavily armored with thick scales, and wise, broad head were drawn into its immense shell. She hissed calmly. It had been decades since anything had threatened this creature. When it was young, luck had kept it from being crushed in the jaws of a jaguar like so many others of its species. Yet the time when a jaguar’s gape could threaten it would have passed half a century earlier, long before the walking mountain of scale and bone had reached its final size. It was a stunning female, and I realized that no one I had ever met or spoken to had seen its equal—not even Don Santiago. With spine-tingling comprehension it dawned on me that surely I had reached a place alien to the world of men. The presence of the giant was proof: one of the most commonly hunted, easily found species had been left here to grow indeterminately, endlessly until it had become the mountainous dome of caramel gold I knelt beside. At that size no jaguar, anaconda, or even caiman could threaten the titan grazer. Surely well over a hundred years old, that tortoise must spend its days calmly plodding through the undergrowth, foraging, free from worry of predation.
I patted the huge dome of the tortoise and spent some moments in awed appreciation of the being before me. Walking on, I decided that soon I would stop, se
t up a permanent camp, and concentrate on filming for a few days. But for some reason I couldn’t; my nerves wouldn’t let me.
The forest was physically different here. The river water flowed free of sediment, bluish and pure—and colder, too. Here and there along the banks of the river, small waterfalls fell, cool blue highlights among the green. I was now far into the headwaters of the Moxos, the source of the river. This place was not accessible by road or plane or boat. It was a corner of the jungle hidden from the rest of the world, a true no-man’s-land. The jungle here was dark and ominous, towering in ancient authority. Traveling onward the following day, I felt my courage buckle under the weight of the jungle’s sacred depths. By day six I had gone farther than I had ever planned. As I walked quietly beneath the looming walls of jungle, the dark canopy snarled mist into the sky, and a creeping terror began to build within me. I no longer felt that this was a place where I should be.
The canopy loomed above, silent and dark, as if guarding some ancient secret. Rising out of the river were beckoning arms of fallen trees. Great vines hung from the emerald ceiling, tangling the dim corridor in warning. I walked in a state of constant, almost oppressive awe. It was as terrifying as it was fantastic. Every cell of my body seemed to sense that this was not a place I should be. On top of that gut sense was the growing, mechanical fear. I kept looking at the jagged debris of sticks and thorns jutting from the riverbed, and thinking of my raft. At this point I was now so deep in the forest that even the river’s current would take days to bring me back to the world. If I hit a sharp stick, or was pulled over a submerged huicungo tree, that raft could be ripped in half. If that happened, I would have to retrace the progress I had made not only by hiking but through the remaining seventy-odd bends I had made by boat on the river. It was a dizzying distance to consider. And in such a remote area, it could be weeks or months before another boat traveled so deep. I began to feel uncomfortable. It also weighed on my mind that the Jura River, which Manuel had sworn was the home of tribes, was only a half dozen miles away.
After days of hiking and camping, watching and listening in the silence of the forest, I felt a crushing sense of isolation, and a deep loneliness settled in my chest. The thought that it would be weeks before I would see another human hung eerily over me. Even the softest footstep on the sand echoed loudly here. I felt like an intruder and could only pray that this hallowed ground would grant me passage.
The day was silent, still. I tried talking softly to myself just to hear a human voice, but talking to me was boring, so instead I had an imaginary conversation with Steve Irwin. If anyone could lighten a situation and lessen the fear, it was Steve. He was no stranger to being out in the wild alone. After all, the guy had lived in the Australian bush for years by himself, catching crocs with just his dog and a boat. He knew what it was like to be on his own, and anyone who has been out there alone, whether in the Arctic or the Amazon, knows that the mind can dwell in dark places. But was I freaking out for no reason or was my gut trying to tell me something? I couldn’t tell.
My conversation with Steve went on for some time. I told him about the wildlife I saw, the crocs, the otters, and he repeatedly responded with an enthusiastic “Crikey!” I vocalized the entire dialogue. Steve’s voice was full of all the encouragement he undoubtedly would have offered had the conversation been real. It might sound comical, but the talk with Irwin was actually helping, until the thought of his death entered my head. He had been killed by a stingray, a usually harmless species, while doing an ordinary day’s filming—a mundane day at the office for him. Even the invincible, fearless Irwin had been struck down in broad daylight before he had the chance to do anything about it. My brain seemed set on finding pessimism no matter where I sought reassurance. That fact in itself was worrisome to me. I wondered if I shouldn’t just make camp and spend the day staking out a beach, hoping for a jaguar—but I was feeling too uneasy, too nervous to stop.
Ten A.M. found me walking through jungle, atop a steep cliff where the river drove into the bank below. As always there was a beach on the opposite side of the river, a long one. The view from the elevated vantage point was stunning, just wild Amazon all around. “This is crazy!” I shouted to the jungle, and it echoed in the silence. I gave a long yell to the wind and hit a fist against my chest. It really felt crazy; after days of being alone, I was starting to wonder how rational my decision to journey alone had been.
I was determined to push past the funk. A light rain began to fall. In the soft hiss of the shower the journey continued in silence, but I hadn’t gone ten yards before my eyes were pulled upriver by a sight that drained the blood from my face. Rising from the canopy on the opposite side of the river was a narrow column of smoke. From where I stood it was impossible to see where it came from. Dropping my pack, I hustled through the forest toward where I could see the source of the smoke and crouched down, suddenly regretting having screamed minutes earlier. I made my way forward along my side of the river, slowly expanding my view of the bend in the opposite beach, until I saw them.
17
At World’s End
Have you journeyed to the springs of the sea
or walked in the recesses of the deep?
Have the gates of death been shown to you?
—JOB 38:16–17
Nestled in the center of the expansive white beach were three small palm huts. To the left, farther upstream, a human shape crouched and vanished in a rustling of foliage. Three naked men moved in the open just under the river cane. One walked in front, cautiously but with confidence, beside the tree line. His right hand gripped a long bow, with arrows clasped to the shaft, and even from across the river I could see the foot-long bamboo arrowhead tips. He was the only one I could see clearly, and he held my gaze—I could not tell how many there were altogether.
I wished that I were hallucinating, but I wasn’t. I just wanted to wake up. What were the tribes doing on this river? The beach where the men stood was littered with shavings from branches, imprints of recently made footprints, and there seemed to be something cooking on top of the fire. There was no question that they had heard me yelling moments earlier and now were taking cover in the brush.
My expedition was over. My life, too, was possibly over.
Their elders would have educated them to the fact that most outsiders mean trouble, even death, and they’d be justified to defend themselves. These were people who did not speak English, did not speak Spanish; they had never seen a wheel, a wrench, a spoon. They had never been inside a school, listened to the Beatles, or seen a car. They had never heard of World War II, they had never heard of the United States, hell, they had never heard of the country they lived in. These people were literally from a different world. Their beliefs, values, ambitions, fears, and motivations were made up of elements I could not understand, communicated in a language that no one from my world knew. It was possible that the people living in those huts were just as scared of me as I was of them; it was also possible that they saw me as a threat that needed to be hunted and removed. There was no way to tell. No way in hell.
At that moment, as I stared at the green palm that made their dwellings, arranged in three small huts, my heart sank. I remembered the peccary that Manuel had shot days earlier, fighting for air with its mouth in the water, lungs punctured. I remembered the spider monkey, so full of life and the desire to live. They had died before my eyes. The sound of their death, the sight of watching the life pass from their eyes just days earlier had stayed with me. It isn’t difficult to die; in fact it is very easy. As I stared at those huts, my own mortality was so tangible it made me sick. Actually, sick is not the word; the sensation I felt was worse; I could taste my own death. This was too far. This was the answer to the question I had pushed and clawed at for years—always yearning to plunge deeper and deeper into the jungle’s most forbidden depths. I had tested the boundaries and at last found the limit.
For maybe a minute I stood frozen, just watching the
beach, looking into the shadow of the forest to where the one human figure strode slowly, watching me. I could see the outline of his muscular, naked body, but his features were obscured by the distance and shadow. The other members of the tribe were mere shadows in the bush, but I could see them peering curiously back at me. I remained where I stood, waiting to see what would happen next. Would they approach? Would they try to communicate? Would they attack? How far could that arrow fly? For some reason my hand twitched, instinctively wanting to wave to them, to show a sign of peace. I couldn’t move.
Thrumming behind my fear for my own life was another fear—even on the chance that these people weren’t violent, my presence could be lethal to them. Too many times in the past, hundreds if not thousands of natives living in isolation with few antibodies have been killed by the exotic pathogens of outsiders. Everything about this situation was out of control.
There was no plan for this, there was no one to consult, no previous knowledge to draw on; encounters of this kind are virtually absent from history in the last century. In a moment my expedition had gone from living the dream to being a nightmare. What I experienced at that moment was such devastating fear and regret that it took me weeks to suppress it. Please don’t let me die.
I watched the man walking toward me, only a hundred yards now from where I stood, and realized that in all likelihood I was about to have a unique encounter. What could I do if they started crossing the river? What would they be like face-to-face? I was trying to think rationally, but instead was just panicking. All I could think was how to possibly get away. The only way to describe the sensation is that it felt like death. Under stern clouds a moment suspended in heartbeats endured.
Turning, I strode for downriver, then broke into a run. Sprinting through the jungle, I dodged trees and vines, thorns and streams as I made flight. In terms of body language, I figured nothing could be a clearer indication of submissiveness than running for my life. I was terrified on so many levels that all I could do to fix the situation was to sprint with all the strength I possessed.