Mother of God

by Paul Rosolie

  While JJ told them the story of the station, and how we’d lost it, I slinked away into the kitchen to spend a moment with my own emotions and the flood of warm familiarity and longing that the station had cultivated. There was no denying it: Las Piedras was where I wanted to be; it was where I belonged. In those moments I savored the surroundings but inwardly cringed from the pain of renewed loss at seeing the old place again. Out on the deck, where memories of Lulu and other early adventures loomed like ghosts, I stood before the map of the Madre de Dios, tracing over the massive protected areas.

  In the northwest was Manu National Park, where Charles Munn had begun his research before heading to the southwest of the Madre de Dios to focus on the Tambopata/Candamo project and create Bahuaja-Sonene National Park. To the northeast of the map was Alto Purus National Park, that mysterious roadless giant, home to nomadic tribes and the headwaters of Las Piedras. As I gazed at the map it became clear that in the center of these huge protected areas lay the majority of the Las Piedras River—a vast unprotected area with the power to connect the established national parks.

  Munn had come to the Las Piedras River. He’d even built a lodge, JJ told me, with a Peruvian partner, a few hours from our station. But then he’d vanished from the Madre de Dios for reasons no one seems to know. Looking at the map, I wondered if he had secretly been planning a fourth giant park—it certainly made sense. The other three created a lopsided triangle, with the Piedras in the center; protecting it would connect the others and possibly make the Madre de Dios home to the largest area of protected west Amazon in existence. It would mean that almost the entire Madre de Dios was protected, ensuring survival for the ecosystem and species, as well as local people and the numerous isolated Indian groups.

  In the months that followed, keeping Las Piedras off my mind was impossible. I spent hours dreaming of ways I could one day buy it, and dreaming of what it would be like to get it back. I would build a long network of canopy walkways at the station, and we’d have people year-round studying the wildlife, running the farm, and educating people from all over the world. We would have a rehabilitation center for wildlife, and maybe even specialize in giant anteaters. But most important, we could start truly working to get the entire river protected, and connect the national parks. Anything was possible.

  My room at home in New Jersey was littered with notes and plans, funding proposals, and various other possible leads on the subject of reclaiming Las Piedras Station. I knew that the foundation that owned it was not using it and had no idea what to do with it. The preserve was surely a financial drain for them. And so after so much worry and want, planning and hope, I was completely blindsided to receive a phone call from JJ that started with the simple, ecstatic sentence: “We got it back!”

  The return to Las Piedras was surreal. Apparently the foundation had purchased much of the reserve Emma and JJ had owned, but never paid up for the portion where the station was located. After a few years of stalling, not knowing what to do with the land, the foundation decided they wanted out and offered to just give it back. However, of the original 27,000 acres that Emma and JJ had protected, they gave back only about 1,200—just the part with the station on it. The rest of the land, the vast area of primary forest, they kept and planned to sell for almost five times the price they paid. Though the fate of the land remained uncertain, it was impossible to feel anything but wondrous gratitude at the news that the station was ours once again. The Las Piedras River would be home once again.

  By that time, the logging road that had come off the trans-Amazonian highway years ago was well established. On our return to Las Piedras, JJ and I witnessed dozens of trucks per day. They were cutting the heart out of the river in a land that was too big for anyone to police. How humans love plundering a forest, like spoiled children with their parents’ ATM card and no concept of moderation. Each truck that passed us, though, was fuel for the rekindled mission of getting the station running, getting universities and tourists to come, and making it known what a treasure the Las Piedras River really is. But before we could begin implementing our plans, we needed to address the fact that the station was in dire need of repair.

  When the foundation left they took the dishes, couch cushions, our radio, and virtually everything else. They also left the roof in tatters, pocked with holes that let in rain, which threatened to saturate and destroy the wood of the deck. When JJ and I first returned, we faced months of worry as the rainy season approached, but in the end we were saved by dozens of past volunteers, friends, family, and people from all over the world who pitched in funds to fix the roof. Later, volunteers, friends, Gowri, JJ, my sister Michelle, and I hauled the materials up through the jungle. The support we received for the roof emergency was just one of the signs of how much Tamandua Expeditions had grown over the years.

  In the waning days of 2012, I spent weeks at the station, walking trails and visiting my old friends, the kapok trees, and other denizens of the ancient forest. The peccary herds were still nowhere to be seen, but the jaguar tracks were as frequent as ever. I spent mornings watching the macaws bicker near the river and at night explored the swamps where the frogs were preparing for the start of the rainy season. I set up camera traps at the colpa deep in the forest, and weeks later was stunned by what they recorded.

  On the main deck of the station, Gowri, JJ, and I watched in astonishment as everything from Spix’s guans to tapir passed before the lens. There were curassows and pumas, ocelots, giant armadillos, howler monkeys, white capuchins, peccaries, and numerous jaguars. We gasped together at a video taken on Christmas Day when I had gone to check the cameras; it showed a tremendous male jaguar walking where I had knelt just moments before—clearly interested in my scent. All told, the two cameras recorded more than two thousand videos in four weeks, of every conceivable species in just a few square yards. Later on the videos would be combined as a five-minute short film about the colpa, which I titled An Unseen World. The short was covered by Mongabay.com and Yale Environment360, and was selected as a winner of the 2013 United Nations Forum on Forests short film contest. The diversity and abundance hidden in the forests of Las Piedras caught the imagination of people all over the world.

  Yet, for me, the greatest discovery came from a camera that was placed just behind the station itself. The short clip showed a massive mother anteater striding through the bright morning forest and approaching the camera. She sniffs, touching her long, black-tipped nose to the lens, perhaps recognizing human scent, before moving on. As she passes out of the frame there is a baby anteater visible, clinging to the wiry fur of her back. The clip stole my breath when I saw it. It is impossible not to wonder if the anteater in the video was Lulu, all grown up, with a baby of her own.

  At a United Nations screening in Istanbul in April 2013 I watched as representatives from all over the globe narrowed their eyes in wonder at a place so wild. There was Lulu, the trees, the jaguars, and other Las Piedras wildlife. I thought with hope of Munn and the Candamo story. As I took the podium to address the audience, it was with Lulu, and the tribe, and the eyes of the wounded jaguar. I spoke of the major national parks, the triangle with Las Piedras at their center, the heart of the Madre de Dios, and for the trees and animals that cannot advocate for themselves.

  In the end, it wasn’t all about risking my life at the limits of the long headwaters beyond the Western Gate. In the end, the answer came where all the answers have come over the years, from the magic of the Las Piedras River, with its long, winding path, swift current, and seemingly endless expanses of riotous rich green canopy. As I look back, it seems that although I was born in Brooklyn, my life started on that river. It changed everything.

  In the short time since we got the station back, many things have happened. Elías, JJ’s nine-fingered brother, was elected president of Infierno. Pico recently received financial support from family and friends and flew first-class to Lima for surgery that straightened his legs and will allow him to walk more normall
y. In the preoperative psychological exam, the doctor told Pico that he was one of the most hyperactive patients he had ever seen—much to the pride of Pico. The Saona lodge in Infierno is continuing to grow, and the brothers are working out the chain of command as the wildlife and forest gradually regenerate. Everyone in the family still remembers that the forest and all it gives them are still there due to the wisdom and foresight of Santiago.

  Gowri and I got married Hindu-style under the banyan tree we met beneath in India, with all our friends looking on and monkeys in the branches above. Months later, everyone joined for a church wedding in Manhattan. Yet during the ceremony, when the priest pronounced us husband and wife, I heard muffled laughs from friends in the pews who knew that Gowri and I weren’t the only ones entering the union—that in my shoulder beneath the tux were two squirming botfly larvae. Each was as thick as a pencil and had refused to be removed after the most recent expedition. I now pronounce you husband, wife, and parasites. Part of Noel’s best-man duties involved tugging out one of the worms the morning after the wedding.

  Not long ago, while with a volunteer group, I met another giant anaconda at the floating forest. Her girth was slightly larger than a car’s steering wheel, and this time I was with a crew of eight people, some bigger and stronger than me, in broad daylight. Dragging seven people on its back, the snake thrashed and curled, and pulled us down into the bog until we were up to our necks in water and there was no choice but to suffocate beneath the water as we sank, or release her. There are, it seems, some secrets the jungle is still unwilling to relinquish. But that won’t stop me from looking. JJ, Pico, Gowri, and I are currently plotting our second expedition to a tributary that Don Santiago swore is home to a species of anaconda that has horns on its head. If it weren’t for all that I’ve seen, I would never believe it, but as experience has shown, the man was never wrong.

  With limitless expeditions ahead, and thousands upon thousands of miles to explore in the west Amazon alone, my childhood fears of being born in an adventureless age, at the end of all things, have long been assuaged. Many of the species I worried about as a child, ones that really were on the brink of oblivion, have been making comebacks: gorillas, right whales, bald eagles, polar bears, even amur tigers. The list is long. The success of these species and their respective ecosystems is a direct result of people fighting to save them.

  In the Amazon the future is still very much uncertain, yet there are indications of change. The Madre de Dios recently trembled with the chop of propellers from teams of helicopter commandos sent by the government to remove illegal gold miners. The soldiers descended ropes and removed each miner from his forest-destroying gold barge, before blowing the barges apart so that they could never again ruin the land. Perhaps even more heartening, in 2011, years of indigenous protests finally resulted in the cancellation of plans to build a dam that would have flooded just under 114,000 acres of the Madre de Dios forests. Bolivians recently elected their first indigenous president, Evo Morales, and gave constitutional rights to the earth. Rivers, fish, air, trees—these things have rights there and are regarded as part of the collective public interest, of the inheritance that everyone is entitled to. Brazilian grocery stores were recently in the news for their decision to boycott Amazon-grown beef—one of the biggest drivers of deforestation. Hopeful signs, from the grassroots to corporate, governmental, and international levels across Amazonia, could fill volumes. It’s not clear what will come of it all, and the chance of ruin is still very real, but there is light on the horizon. Yet there will always be challenges.

  Currently a new, sinister threat is facing the Las Piedras, and in turn the Madre de Dios. This time in one of the most pristine areas of all, a place as remote and fantastically wild as the Western Gate: Alto Purus National Park. It is in these inaccessible rangelands that the Las Piedras is born. Geographically it is one of the largest swaths of intact old-growth, lowland rainforest left on earth. The uppermost Las Piedras, and the surrounding Purus region, cradles a virtually untouched wilderness where the pristine ecosystem is sanctuary to Amazonian wildlife that lives completely without human interference for hundreds of miles at a time. It is also one of the last strongholds for voluntarily isolated nomadic tribes, that have found refuge in this last, vast stretch of jungle—which may very well be about to have a highway cut through its heart.

  While biologists, anthropologists, and numerous local communities within the park are aghast at the environmental and anthropological cost of the road, there are those who claim it is necessary to connect the few remote villages there, that are currently only accessible by air, to the rest of the country by road. It is a battle playing out in a corner of the earth so far removed from people’s consciousness that the voices of the conservationists and indigenous communities who categorically oppose the road’s construction are merely a whisper against the roar of those who crave development. Are we comfortable with knowingly extinguishing one of the last truly wild and authentic places on our planet? Are the ecosystem services, endemic wildlife, and already-imperiled tribal cultures there not worth fighting for?

  The Purus road is a case of a few people interested in personal gain pushing for something that will allow them to profit more easily from exploiting the untouched forests there. And in pursuing their gain they will impoverish the world. Perhaps a few of them will get rich driving the last illegally cut mahogany trees out on the new road, or perhaps some of the hundreds of farmers that flock in will collect enough Brazil nuts to live well for some years. What is certain is that once the road is cut, settlers will invade. Vast tracks of forest will be leveled and burned for farms, and what was once pristine nature will be stamped out as they destroy one of the last remaining truly great wilderness areas. The wildlife will vanish, the tribes will retreat. Species will disappear forever. It is something being demanded by a select few, the results of which will forever erase a treasure from this earth. Our action or inaction will ultimately decide the fate of the mysterious unseen world that exists behind the veil of foliage and mist that is the Alto Purus watershed.

  It is the paradox of Amazonian degradation that no one act will fell the giant, but instead a slow death by a thousand cuts—road by road, dam by dam, tree by tree; tiny slashes taken until the once-great tapestry is reduced to a ragged net. It is for this reason that the Purus road, a gash graver than most, cannot happen. It is for this reason that anyone who calls the jungle home, or has walked in the hallowed depths of the Amazon’s shadows, or has even taken comfort in knowing that such places exist, is standing defiantly against the looming road. Such is our historic responsibility to the ecosystem and to wildlife, to the nomadic tribal cultures there, and to generations to come that will undoubtedly find it even more difficult to locate the visceral solace of untrammeled, pristine wilderness on earth.

  The fact is that we are at a crossroads in history from which there will be no going back. The survival of the Amazon—or the rest of earth’s rainforests and species, for that matter—is a question that will be decided in the next century. Future generations might only have film and fossils from which to learn about the great green wildernesses that used to exist. To them, the creatures that we know today could be as distant as mammoths and ground sloths are to us: nothing more than fascinating memories.

  No. Passivity is a luxury that we cannot afford. Like it or not, this is our responsibility, and it will take every ounce of our will and ingenuity to meet it. After all, we are the first generation to be confronted with such a globally consequential task, against such overwhelming odds. From the Amazon, to the Congo, Sumatra, and Borneo—rainforests are vanishing day and night. The clock is ticking. And the only thing between the bulldozers and the trees is us.

  It is curious that the Amazon, so large in our minds, is actually quite small. From far above on a clear day—the God’s-eye view from a plane—the jungle looks like moss across an endless field. Even the clouds are far below, barely over the canopy, like bits of cotton bl
own across some lawn—or like mothers doting over the greenery, carefully watering the jungle from above. From so high up, the great jungle can be seen for what it really is: a very delicate collection of life on the smooth face of a planet. The greatest of its creatures become microbes, the great trees are reduced to lichen—even the bipedal primates that are so clever seem small and insignificant, save for the great scars they cut into the green. Cleverness is evident in this grand exploitation, but it will take a different kind of intelligence to preserve the whole and heal the wounds. And so the question becomes whether this one species can rise from cleverness to actual intelligence; to evolve from being a blight on the great basin to become instead the greatest of its stewards. But that remains to be seen.

  Thankfully there are still vast stretches where the green is unbroken and the canopy extends to the horizon. On the Las Piedras River, beneath the towering treetops of bearded branches, dripping with oropendola nests and cascading floral tapestries, the jungle’s morning chorus is as joyous as ever. No, I was not born in the wrong century, or even the wrong decade. This is exactly where I was meant to be, rafting beneath the tall emerald canopy, pulled by the swift current, on the long, winding, wild heart of the Madre de Dios.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I may have never turned my journals, filled with impressions, memories, and sketches, into a book without the encouragement of my friends and family. Most important, I thank my parents, Edward and Lenore, and two older cousins, Danielle and Michael, who told me I could. Without their support and patience, this book would not exist. Along with my parents, my sister, Michelle, helped edit and shape early drafts. Also, for their thoughtful input and encouragement, I thank Peter Quartuccio, Lorraine and Douglas Capozzalo. As well as the generous and careful eye of my professor and friend Mike Edelstein, and those of my family and friends.