A boy lets his father know when he is ready to receive Arutam. At ten or eleven, accompanied by his father, he selects a sacred place in the forest such as a huge kapok tree, where he clears an area for the Arutam to enter and erects a palm shelter for himself. He touches the tree, asking for ancestral guidance. When the sun is low he drinks a plant concoction, usually a tobacco drink, with the power to release visions, and he lies down to sleep, his father watching over him. It is then that the visions, hopefully, appear to the boy and he receives Arutam.
The visions can take the form of animals, frightening or comforting, or of water or mountains—all have their meanings. They represent ancestors, the boy’s grandfathers or great-grandfathers, giving him spiritual guidance. These visions, this Arutam, is for the boy alone and must not be shared with others. He may not receive it the first time, but he will try again until he does. A young woman may go on a quest for her Arutam, but she can also receive it through her husband’s experience.
If I knew nothing about the spiritual life of our Achuar guides at Kapawi, it would not be difficult to intuit their extraordinary connection to nature. We spent our days taking forest walks with Simon Santi, who painted bold black geometric patterns on his face daily out of respect for the forest. He was a quiet man and gentle, in his late twenties, his smooth skin a creamy umber and his dark brown eyes averted lest they seem aggressive or flirtatious. The Achuar avoid displays of emotion. He wore a headband of leather, mounted with small feathers of toucan and macaw in red and yellow. He spoke no English. Fernando, a guide from Quito, accompanied us to translate.
Simon might have had extra eyes, he was so skilled at spotting the tiniest tree frog splayed on a green leaf in perfect green consonance, or a mottled brown one in the forest litter at our feet. He cautioned us to be careful not to step on Leafcutter Ants bivouacking in line with their green flags to their huge underground home. It had several entrances, and a group of ants designated the quality-control squad intercepted the workers, taking away leaf bits that didn’t make the grade, before they were allowed to enter.
Simon told us to beware the biting Army Ants and he let an imposter, the fake Army Ant, crawl all over his arm. I couldn’t tell the difference. He showed us the “Dragon’s Blood” tree with its antiseptic red sap turning to white when rubbed into the skin. Minuscule Lemon Ants patrolled the bark of a sapling; in symbiosis they kept other plants from growing nearby with their own herbicide in exchange for their tree home. They smelled lemony, and with Simon’s encouragement I popped a pinch of them in my mouth. They went down easily and made my breath sweet and clean for the next hour. A red Poison Dart Frog smaller than my little finger sat on a mushroom, glowing like the noxious little creature it was. There was enough poison on its tiny back to paint ten arrowheads and kill as many animals, although the curare plant was used more frequently. The Achuar still hunt with long blowguns and unerring accuracy.
This forest was not very “birdy” for reasons I didn’t fully understand. There were birds, but not as many as might be expected in Ecuador, which has more birds than anywhere in the world given its size, more than sixteen hundred species. Perhaps they had been killed, although the eco-lodge was in an Achuar reserve off-limits to hunting. If they had been killed before the reserve was established it could take years, as many as thirty generations, for a species to reestablish itself. Still, it was a puzzle. Except for the headbands, which are passed from generation to generation, I did not see the clan wearing abundant feathers, and small birds wouldn’t make more than a one-bite meal.
Yet, at a salt lick on a river cliff, we did see multitudes of Orange- cheeked Parrots, Dusky-headed Parakeets, and Chestnut-fronted Macaws gathered for their breakfast vitamins, and on a sandbar a small flock of glorious Blue and Yellow Macaws took off and flew above our heads, while more than fifty Swallow-tailed Kites, refugees from the wintry North, wheeled over the river.
It was on night walks that the forest truly came alive. Our headlamps revealed many different kinds of tree frogs everywhere, the Great Tree Frog, as big as a Bullfrog, sitting on branches with its white belly lit up, and more Poison Dart Frogs, tiny little spots of blue, green, or yellow, waiting for an insect meal. Insects abounded, clouds of soft-bodied Whiteflies shimmered over pools of water while a pair of six-inch Walking Sticks in the act of mating blended into rough brown bark. A fist-sized arachnid they called a Scorpion Spider with an elongated body clung to a cistern wall. Luminescent beetles and more species of bats than I could count fluttered past us in the dark.
I loved the bats especially. There has been a huge decline of bats in the United States; a disease called white-nose syndrome has killed most of the Little Brown Bat population. This was the same species that I surprised on opening our attic door when I was a little girl and which became hopelessly tangled in my long hair. I was screaming, my mother was cutting the animal out, and my father was assuring me that everything was okay. He put the little bat in a box and we kept it for several weeks, Dad teaching us how harmless it was and how important bats were to the world.
When my husband and I moved to Putnam County, New York, we put up a bat house on the siding overlooking the stream. Before long it was filled with bats. There was no problem with mosquitoes in the summertime. There was no problem with insects inside our house, either. The bats found a way into the roof of our cathedral ceiling in the living room, some of them cozily clinging to rivets in the beams. One especially large bat I named Henry would occasionally swoop down to grab a bug out of the air while I was reading on the couch. I told guests he was harmless, to pay him no mind. Thirty-four years later we sold the house to a young couple with a baby who rightly asked us to get rid of the bats. We decided to put on a new roof. The roofer stopped counting at 120 bats when the old roof came off. There were plenty of big old trees in the woods with hollow trunks. I hoped they found a good one to live in.
Julie was preparing for the ayahuasca ceremony through fasting and repose when she heard a ruckus in the reeds beneath our hut. The male Horned Screamer was pinning the female down violently as he attempted copulation. Every time the female tried to rise, he beat her head and neck down with his wings until she was bloody and exhausted. This went on for forty-five minutes before she staggered away and the male flew to his usual perch on top of the highest tree, screaming territorially. I have seen male Mallard Ducks gang-rape a female in an equally violent act, but I did not know Screamers behaved this way. Neither did ornithologists I spoke with later.
In the late afternoon we hopped into our long canoe and journeyed an hour to the next village where the shaman was to guide the ayahuasca ceremony. A few children were splashing on the shoreline below the high red bluff where we put in. We climbed up the hill to an open and well-swept clearing the size of a football field and walked to the largest thatched dwelling in the middle. Ducking under the thatch, I saw a man sitting on a chair, holding a small mirror and applying black face paint with a brush. He was dressed in a pale blue short-sleeved shirt with the kind of headdress Simon also wore, a crown of small red and yellow feathers. On his chest was a necklace of finely patterned tiny beads that reminded me of the work of Sioux Indians. I thought I was backstage in the theater again. He looked as regal as Laurence Olivier, with his silver hair and handsome features. The ritual was the same, the concentration intense, and the transformation almost complete. He was soon to perform.
We sat down on a far bench and waited. The shaman, Sumpah, put down his brush and turned to us. He gestured to his wives in the far corner, who were huddled over a big pot. The eldest brought us gourd bowls of fermented manioc, or nijiamanch, the ubiquitous drink found all over Central and South America which goes by the common name chicha. This can be as strong as a good European beer or as weak as Bud Light depending on how much water is added. The Achuar drink it morning, noon, and night.
Sumpah asked each one of us, through Fernando, who we were, where we came from, what our jobs were, and why we were there. He radi
ated easy power, effortless intensity, as he listened to each of us.
The Norwegian couple impressed him with their love of medicine and the wealth of healing plants in the Achuar forest. He looked very intently at Julie when she spoke of her desire for his guidance under ayahuasca. And he spoke lengthily of the need for all of us to come together to protect nature when he responded to me and my love of wildlife.
Fernando translated and then elaborated more on the huge fight the Achuar have with the “Company,” as development was called in the Oriente region. Oil and mining were decimating forests and changing cultures entirely as roads broke through pristine lands. The government of Ecuador had granted sovereign rights to native peoples all across the Amazon Basin, but those rights did not include minerals beneath the ground.
Ecuador made a satanic deal when it hitched its future to oil production from corporations outside the country. Many global corporations like Texaco (now Chevron) and Canadian and Chinese corporations invested heavily but did not bank in the country, which put Ecuador in massive debt, from which it has not been able to recover. Petroecuador now drills most of the wells, but the price tag is still too high, both economically and environmentally.
Ecuador is one of the biodiversity hot spots of the world, with more species of plants and animals than almost anywhere else on the planet. These places should be sacred. The people who live there believe them to be sacred. In its rush to development the government trampled on the environment and the health of its indigenous people. Thousands of oil spills from leaking pipes carrying crude to the coast, or the waste pits that swell during rains and run off into fields and streams, have been documented for forty years. The incidence of cancer has risen dramatically in villages near the wells, and downstream. The people call the disaster “the Chernobyl of the Amazon.”
Missionaries in the late 1950s and ’60s encouraged the hunter-gathering Huaoranis to settle in villages, to convert to Christianity, and, ultimately, to make deals with development. The clans had historically engaged in internecine warfare, murdering each other at an unsustainable rate and spearing intruders with equal violence. While most of the Huaorani people settled along rivers in small villages, some clans wanted nothing to do with the outside world and still wander the Yasuni forests to this day as their ancestors did.
Joe Kane in his book Savages describes the struggle the Huaorani have had with the intrusion of big oil and logging in the north Amazon Basin. They are still trying to make Chevron pay the billions owed them from an international court ruling for desecration of land, water, and the health of their people.
Kemperi, a shaman in the village of Bameno, had a message to the foreign peoples who live where the oil companies come from:
My message is that we are living here. We are living bien [in a good way]. No more [oil] companies should come, because already there are enough. They need to know that we have problems….Many companies want to enter, everywhere. But they do not help; they have come to damage the forest. Instead of going hunting, they cut down trees to make paths. Instead of caring for [the forest], they destroy. Where the company lives, it smells nasty; the animals hide; and when the river rises, the manioc and plantain in the low areas have problems. We respect the environment where we live. We like the tourists because they come, and go away. When the company comes, it does not want to leave. Now [the company] is in the habit of offering many things; it says that it comes to do business, but then it makes itself into the owner. Where the company has left its environment, we cannot return. It stays bad. Something must remain for us. Without territory, we cannot live. If they destroy everything where will we live? We do not want more companies, or more roads. We want to live like Huaorani, we want others to respect our culture.
The Ecuadorian government, led by President Rafael Correa, who billed himself as an environmental leader, kept opening up more plots for oil and mining bids, mostly to China in exchange for a $7 billion debt. The fight moved to the pristine southern tier of the basin and engaged the huge tribe of Shuar, numbering close to fifty thousand including their Achuar relatives, about six thousand, to the south and east on the Peruvian border. Their joint lands extend for hundreds of miles and their past as headhunters is well known. For the Shuar on the Cordillero del Cóndor, a lush rainforest on the Andean slopes, the arrival of drills for a Chinese gold mine was tantamount to a declaration of war. They began sharpening their spears along with their Achuar allies. The Shuar chief Domingo Ankuash said, “The strategy is to unite the Shuar like the fingers of a fist. The forest has always given us everything we need, and we are planning to defend it, as our ancestors would, with the strength of the spear. To get the gold they will have to kill every one of us first.”
This was what Sumpah was referencing when he spoke of the need to come together to fight for nature. Fernando told us that although they had not shrunk human heads lately, they kept the practice alive by shrinking monkey heads. I shivered a bit when we rose to leave Julie with her Achuar shaman for the next eighteen hours. As we motored upriver, Julie’s waving figure on the red cliff became smaller and smaller until she disappeared entirely, and I wondered what on earth I was thinking bringing this dear Nova Scotia friend to this remote and volatile part of the earth.
An encounter in the forest calmed me. There was only peace there. A gigantic kapok tree, the sacred ceiba of Mexico, two hundred feet tall, twenty-five feet in girth, its anaconda-like root-arms undulating across the forest floor, was where the spirit seekers came at night and where they received Arutam. I could feel it. The tree had been alive for hundreds of years and sheltered many a soul, a thing of great beauty and history. Within its crevices lived frogs and insects; bromeliads climbed on its vines. Its seedpods had probably floated across the Atlantic eons ago to colonize Africa.
Later that night the Norwegians and I drifted in the canoe, as the endangered Black Caiman, hunted for its exquisite crocodile leather, reflected blood-red eyes on top of the black water. Bats flitted over the surface, ridding the air of insects. One the size of a little butterfly hovered in front of my nose as if deciding I might be a meal. It could have been a tiny Vampire Bat; there were many species unknown to me. A Ladder-tailed Nightjar sat motionless on a stump pretending it couldn’t be seen in our flashlight’s glare, while an Agouti, or “Paca,” ran under the boardwalk, and an Armadillo scurried into the brush.
Julie arrived back before breakfast full of enthusiasm for the ayahuasca vine and the ceremony in Sumpah’s village. She and others, including Fernando and Simon, had lain on large banana leaves under the stars while Sumpah spoke of what was to come and the drink was presented in bowls. It was several hours before the visions began, hours of purging the ayahuasca from her body before drinking more and lying back down to Sumpah’s endless chanting. Then she felt the spirit come to her. A gray wildcat with stripes crawled up and lay on her chest purring, and another of the sacred animals, an Anaconda, curled around her head and body. She was not afraid. She lay there peacefully listening to the night, to babies coughing in their sleep and mothers soothing them. Sumpah interpreted Julie’s visions. He said it was a very good sign to have more than one spirit animal visit. Soon the horizon brightened and the little village came to life.
Julie experienced a profound change. A year later she told me it had been an “awakening,” an “opening up to a new reality…my sense of being separate from everything has been removed like a cover over my eyes and I see that…what is in you is in me…that I don’t live life but life lives through me.”
To the four basic elements of earth, air, fire, and water, a fifth is sometimes added, an invisible element. Aristotle called it aether, Hinduism akasha, or that which was beyond the material world, and Buddhism recognized it as an experience of the senses. In science it has the power to move things. Many tribal people in the world today who live with nature keep the invisible spirit life whole and within them. It encompasses a vast cosmology of waking life and dream life and embraces all things
seen and unseen in nature.
In our metal and stone cities with hard edges and constant contact we do not connect often with this spirit world. We have our churches, our music and art, and our love for each other, but the wonder of the natural world is often lost to us. God goes by many names. Whether we call on Zeus, Arutam, Shiva, Jehovah, or the Goddess, there are no atheists in wilderness.
23
Ocean
Paleontologists are unsure which land mammal related to whales entered the water fifty million years ago and never left, becoming the largest animal ever to inhabit the planet, including dinosaurs. It excites me to think we still share Earth with the Blue Whale, 100 feet long and 160 tons. Although whaling took them to the brink of extinction, with almost 350,000 killed in Antarctica alone, by 1971 whaling of these giants ended and the Blues are now slowly rebounding off California and the eastern North Pacific, where more than 2,200 were counted in 2014. Colliding with boats may be what they have most to fear today.
My childhood summers growing up on Nantucket were filled with whale talk, whale bones, and whale paraphernalia. We spent rainy days in the Whaling Museum poring over ships’ logs, the same ones Herman Melville read before he wrote his great novel. The hair-raising tale of the ship Essex stove in by an angry whale in the South Pacific became the basis for Moby-Dick.
In the fifty years I spent on Nantucket I never saw a whale offshore, although my mother and I would comb the horizon. We took trips out of Cape Cod Bay in tourist boats to see pods of Humpbacks identified by name because of the singular patterns on their flukes: Salt, Anchor, and Ganesh can still be seen. My love affair with whales continues to this day.
In Hawaii, Humpbacks sang as I dove under the waves. I became transfixed by the soulful keening, answered from the deep in whale chorus. How remarkable that the sound penetrated through the heavy water!
Wild Things, Wild Places Page 27