Pass the Butterworms

by Tim Cahill

  Paddling down the Muir Inlet, moving forward through time, Paul and I often saw Alaskan Brown bears padding across golden sand beaches. One day, a pack of killer whales came steaming up the mile-wide inlet, about eight abreast. Orcas, sometimes called the wolves of the sea, hunt in packs, and they are not often seen far up the inlet or near the ice. The twenty-five-to-thirty-foot-long whales swim fast, almost thirty miles an hour, and they don’t like constantly colliding with bergy bits, not to mention full-on icebergs. This pack must have been hungry. I figured they were on their way to visit our friends the harbor seals, currently basking unaware on the ice at the foot of Muir Glacier.

  We heard wolves howling in the backcountry at night. Once, down inlet from the alder breaks, we saw a kayaker, far out ahead of us, his paddle dipping from side to side. This was the first human being we’d seen in a couple of weeks, and we called out to him. The kayaker failed to respond, probably, we decided later, because he turned out to be a bull moose. It was his antlers swaying from side to side as he swam that had looked like a kayak paddle.

  Paul, had he known he was going to sell a photo to a Canadian beer company, might have taken a picture of that moose’s head. Instead, he got a horse’s ass. I never did see the poster, but you’d think those Canadian beer execs would send me a few cases of their fine product so I could go bungee-jumping and talk to women. At least get my roof fixed.

  A Darkness on the River

  The Marañón River drops out of the Peruvian Andes and flows into the Amazon, some six hundred miles to the east, near Iquitos. In the state of Amazonas, in the province of Condorconqui, just below the eastern foothills of the Andes, the Marañón is wide and fast. Between the towns of Imacita and Santa María de Nieva, just past the place where the Cenepa River flows into the Marañón from the north, there is an island about a quarter of a mile long and perhaps one hundred yards across at its widest. On the evening of January 18, 1995, two twenty-six-year-old Americans, Josh Silver and Patchen Miller, floated past the island in a large balsa-wood raft they had built several days earlier. They tied off in the eddy at the downriver tail of the island. About nine-thirty that night, Patchen Miller and Josh Silver were shot and left for dead.

  Josh Silver survived and was treated for his wounds at an army base, then transferred to a hospital in the town of Santa María de Nieva. The American consul general in Peru, Thomas Holladay, was notified by radio telephone that two Americans had been attacked. One was being treated for his wounds; another was missing and feared dead.

  Holladay notified the parents of Patchen Miller, Sandra Miller of New Hampshire, and Paul Dix, a Montana photographer and human-rights activist. At the time, Dix was in Nicaragua. He’d driven down to that country from the U.S., carrying a truckload of clothing and medical supplies to be distributed to the poor.

  Dix immediately flew to Peru. The arrangements he made were a blur. Had he flown from Managua to Houston first? Or Miami? He was caught in a spiral of obsessive thinking: Patchen was only twenty-six, and therefore he couldn’t be dead. Patchen was an experienced traveler. He’d been to Central America with Paul. Traveled there for six months. He’d been to Nepal and Thailand. He was sensitive to the people he met, and those people loved him. He made lasting friends everywhere he went and he was good on rivers and in the wilderness and he could live off the land and he was Paul’s son and he was only twenty-six years old and he couldn’t be dead.

  The Peruvian army, the police, and many of the good people of Santa María de Nieva searched for Patchen’s body. By the time Paul Dix arrived in Lima, there was no longer any hope.

  Thomas Holladay’s office was in the fashionable Miraflores district of Lima. Hotels there are expensive, most rooms running to over $100 a day, and Paul checked into a youth hostel—a fifty-nine-year-old man living cheap in a ten-bed dormitory room. He had to be close to Holladay, who was receiving occasional reports over the scratchy radio telephone linkup from Santa María de Nieva.

  Holladay’s office was set on a Miraflores side street that was blocked off to traffic by large cement pillars, which were guarded by soldiers with automatic rifles. There was still a lingering threat of car bombs, or attacks by the remnants of the Sendaro Luminoso (Shining Path), the Maoist rebels whose campaign of terrorism stalled in 1992, when its leader, Abimael Guzman, was finally captured.

  Paul Dix made his way past the pillars and shoved his passport through a window covered over in bullet-proof glass; he was given a numbered visitor’s pass and escorted to Holladay’s office. The consul general was a burly man with a full beard, just going to gray. He wore immaculate suits, spoke softly, combed his hair straight back from his forehead, and had the slightly pugnacious look of an Irish bar fighter.

  Holladay didn’t have much information yet. The assailants were said to be Indians. But they could just as easily have been armed revolutionaries or drug traffickers. Additionally, the tensions were building between Peru and Ecuador, its neighbor to the north. War was a very real possibility. If it came, it would be centered around the Cenepa River, not far from where Patchen had been shot. It was possible that the Americans had been caught in the crossfire in some unreported border conflict. Or mistaken for spies. Or shot by spies from Ecuador in an effort to discredit Peru.

  Thomas Holladay is a busy man, but he began researching the incident and made time to see Paul Dix often. Together they planned to travel to Imacita, then travel downriver to the island where Patchen had been shot. The place was very remote, and there was no reliable information about how to get there. Meanwhile, newspapers in the United States had picked up the news: NEW HAMPSHIRE MAN FEARED KILLED IN PERU.

  Paul Dix lives in Montana, in my hometown, and I’ve known him for many years. We’ve traveled together on numerous magazine assignments: kayaking in Glacier Bay and Baja; sailing in Hawaii; climbing and dinosaur-bone hunting in Montana. We’re friends.

  When I heard that Paul was in Peru—and why—I called the American embassy there and was connected to Thomas Holladay.

  “Is Paul okay?” I asked. “I mean emotionally.”

  Holladay said he thought he was. “Paul Dix is a strong man,” he said. There was a pause. “He mentioned you,” Holladay said finally. “You’re the writer.”

  I told him that I was, and Holladay suggested I might want to accompany him and Paul to the place where Patchen was killed. It was unclear whether we’d need to go in with armed guards—Peruvian police or soldiers—but two American citizens had been attacked, one was likely dead, and Holladay wanted to focus some international attention on the place. The strongest possible expression of outrage was in order. A visit from a high-ranking American diplomat would help do that, as would stories in the media, both in Peru and in the U.S.

  That was why Holladay was going. Paul, he gave me to believe, had his own reasons, which were private and deeply conflicted. In that context, it wouldn’t hurt at all if he had a friend along.

  I said I’d get down there as soon as I could.

  Not long after that conversation, Paul Dix was sitting in Thomas Holladay’s Miraflores office when Josh Silver hobbled in on crutches. He’d been transported by speedboat back upriver—past the island where he’d been shot—and had then traveled by bus over the Andes. Paul knew Josh. They’d spent nearly six months together, along with Patchen, in Nicaragua in 1989 and ‘90, at the height of the contra war.

  Both Paul Dix and Thomas Holladay took extensive notes as Josh described what had happened on the Marañón River on the night of January 18.

  Josh’s Story

  The tropical night came down hard, bang, like that, and the light didn’t linger in the western sky as it does in more temperate zones. The raft was tied off at the downstream edge of a long, low island covered in dense brush. There was a large sheltering tree, like a ceiba, at the foot of the island, and it balanced itself in the marshy soil on huge woody buttresses. Vines dropped from the branches, and the forest beyond was a vertical canopy, a dark carpet of vegetation
.

  Josh Silver and Patchen Miller had rowed a couple of hours that morning, but the river had risen six feet the night before, and the raft they’d built was ungainly in the higher water. It was a ten-by-fifteen-foot monster, mounted on six 55-gallon oil drums. There was a roof, and rowing station with ten-foot-long oars.

  The Rio Marañón is one of the rivers that can be considered the headwaters of the Amazon. Miller and Silver planned to float five hundred miles to Iquitos, Peru, then continue down the Amazon in passenger vessels. They were three days into the trip, and they were being careful.

  The river between the towns of Imacita and Santa María de Nieva was Indian country, and the Indians had reason to hate and fear outsiders. The two Americans could see for themselves what was happening: There was an oil pipeline road, built in the 1970s, that cut directly through traditional Indian hunting grounds. The road brought settlers from the mountains down to the lush, more easily farmed jungle. Other outsiders were just beginning to exploit the land for timber, for gold, for oil. And the government of Peru was encouraging even more settlement. There was a longstanding border dispute with neighboring Ecuador. That country claimed it owned the land along the Cenepa River, which flows into the Marañón, not far from Imacita. Some Peruvian politicians had proposed a policy of “living borders,” a strategy of moving so many Peruvians into the area that Ecuador’s claims would never be realized.

  And all these forces, the Americans knew, were slamming up against the indigenous people, despoiling their traditional lands and eroding their way of life. Miller and Silver believed in Indian rights, and respected traditional ways. They wanted to learn from the Indians, to support them in their struggles to hold on to their lands.

  But they weren’t stupid. In the upriver town of Muyo, where they built their raft, the settlers—people of Spanish heritage and mestizos, of mixed Indian and Spanish blood—told them that these Indians, the Aguaruna, were dangerous people. There had been several European people killed on the Marañón a few years ago. Or maybe it was ten years ago. Anyway, two—or four, or six—people had been shot to death. By Indians. It was a little fuzzy in the details, but everyone—all the settlers they met in the new towns along the oil pipeline road that paralleled the river—said to stay out of the Indian villages. Don’t get off the river, and don’t talk to the people. Just keep moving.

  And so they had.

  The river at Imacita, where they put in, was wide and deep. It changed colors as the sun moved across the sky. Sometimes the Marañón was the color of strong green tea, and sometimes it looked as thick and brown as chocolate milk. But even then, at its darkest, the water reflected the sky, so often the raft seemed to be floating over puffy white clouds. The banks were dense with vegetation—mostly forest trees, but there were some banana trees, and a few fields of sugarcane standing fifteen feet high, like green fuzzy-tufted pussy willow. Where the banks were steep, small waterfalls tumbled down mossy rocks, and when the sun’s light hit these falls at a slant, they glittered like polished silver against the various shades of green.

  Occasionally they passed well-constructed split-cane huts, with thatched roofs. The Indians didn’t live together in groups. There seemed to be some areas that were more densely populated, but the houses were always separated, one from the other, by half a mile or more. Most of them weren’t even visible from the river, but you could kind of calculate the distance by the evidence of cookfires, by the plumes of smoke rising above the trees.

  Everything looked well kept, exceptionally clean, and you could see that these people had it together. There were no electrical wires, no roads, and no garbage heaps anywhere. Sometimes they saw young Indian children, in clean shorts and T-shirts, fishing along the bank with bits of string. The shirts had NBA logos on them, Ninja Turtles, Batman—missionary clothing-drive stuff. In the calm stretches between rapids, Indian people of all ages moved across the river in dugout canoes. They used single-bladed oval paddles. There was also some commercial traffic: speedboats full of passengers and cargo going downriver, others coming up, but none of the white or mestizo passengers ever stopped at any of the Indian villages.

  Miller and Silver weren’t in the Amazon basin. Not yet. The altitude was about nine hundred feet. There were mountains beyond the banks rising to three thousand and four thousand feet, and the peaks were covered over in perfectly white clouds that contrasted sharply with the impossibly blue sky. It was hot at midday but relatively cool at night. Every afternoon, it seemed, there was a brief rain, one of those tropical torrential deals that lasted an hour or two, and then there were rainbows. Always rainbows, every day.

  The river was three hundred feet wide in places, and it wound through the land in wide sweeping curves. The curves could be a little hairy. You had to set up for them about half a mile ahead: Read the river, avoid the “V” of hard current that would pull the raft into the worst of the rapids, and be sure that you still had enough river to clear the rocks on the outside corner of the curve. The river kept trying to slam the raft into those rocks.

  And then, at the end of the waves, just where the river began to straighten out, there might be a whirlpool. If the river was narrow and the curve tight, the whirlpool could be as much as forty feet wide. Some of them were actually concave, and you could see where the center of the vortex lay several feet below the surface of the river proper. Fallen trees, twenty feet long, swirled around in the whirlpools like matchsticks in the toilet bowl. Then, thrrrp, a tree would be sucked into the vortex and you’d never see it again. It just never came up.

  Local people called these treacherous sections of the river pongos. A bad section was said to be feo, ugly. Some were feo, feo, and in these doubly-ugly pongos, many people had drowned. Their bodies were seldom found.

  The morning of the Americans’ third day on the river, the Marañón was six feet higher than it had been the day before. Miller and Silver floated for about two hours, then hit a pongo that was much uglier than any they’d seen before. The raft got caught on the outside lip of a big whirlpool, and Patchen, at the rowing station, spent almost fifteen minutes fighting the vortex. Finally, they spun out of danger and the river swept them past a long island, where there were fields of sugarcane interspersed with patches of forest. Ahead, there was another pongo, not quite as big as the last one, a “pongito,” really, but they decided to eddy out in the lee of the island. Tie off for the day. Wash clothes. Fix the roof of the raft. Get organized and wait for the river to subside a little. Study the maps and try to figure out where they were.

  Because Ecuador claims this land along the Marañón—and because several border disputes have erupted into full-scale combat over the past fifty years—good, detailed maps have military significance and are hard to obtain. The tensions were evident in all the military checkpoints along the river. The Americans had to stop, show their passports, and watch some soldier who looked about thirteen years old write their names into a big ledger book. The checkpoints were tight, nervous places, and it seemed as if the soldiers expected another war with Ecuador to break out at any minute. The soldiers weren’t in the business of giving potential spies information about the river, and as a result, the Americans weren’t precisely sure of their position.

  Wherever the hell they were, Josh Silver thought it was an “amazing” place. Very few gringos had ever seen this stretch of river. Some adventurous souls have rafted the Marañón, but almost all of them put in dozens of miles downriver, past the ugliest of the uglies, the Pongo de Manseriche, a twisting canyon of crashing water and orchid-laden walls half a mile high.

  Silver and Miller, however, had studied the port at Imacita where they put in. They reasoned that if commercial traffic—thirty- and forty-foot-long dugout boats, with low-power outboard motors, carrying heavy loads of passengers and cargo—was coming upriver, through the pongos, they ought to be able to float it downriver. Patchen was especially good on the water; he’d been building rafts and floating the rivers of New England sinc
e he was a kid. Later, he ran several rock-’em, sock-’em stretches of white water in the western USA, including the Colorado through the Grand Canyon.

  But now the water was high, and it was time to tie off and wait. The island seemed a good place. Earlier, they’d pulled up to a covelike section of bank and asked some of the Aguaruna people there if they could tie off for the night. The folks seemed friendly and curious, but they said no. Just like that. “No.”

  There was, as far as the Americans could tell, no one living or working on the island, and tying off there didn’t seem like trespassing. They wanted to be sensitive to the Indians’ concerns. Josh felt he and Patchen “shared a compassion” for the rural poor in Third World countries. In college, Josh had studied political science, international economy, foreign policy. It seemed to him that, all over the world, various powers had a political and economic stake in the poverty of the people.

  And that was Patchen Miller’s take on the world of power and money as well. He had spent a year in the Friends World College, which as a graduation requirement obliges students to live in two cultures other than their own. The college provides students with “narrative evaluations rather than grades.” In his Global Political Economy class, the instructor wrote that “Patchen’s term paper on the costs of deforestation in the tropics was well researched and clearly written. Excellent work.”

  Josh believed that he and Patchen shared a “world paradigm.” The six months they’d spent together in Nicaragua during the contra war had shown them how the policies of various governments impacted on the poor. It was always the rural poor who suffered.