by Joe Kane
“Well, Piotr,” I began, “I’ve been thinking.”
“What have you been thinking?” he asked, and looked straight into me, his unflinching, ice-blue eyes holding my own with an unbreakable grip. That look held no emotion, no bullying, no prodding, nothing but an even measuring of the spirit that asked, What exactly are you made of?
My answer was: hesitation, doubt, weakness. I experienced a blind, overwhelming desire to be in my own country in my own home in my own bed, curled up with my girlfriend, a glutton’s feast spread out beside us, the present secure, the future bright, the Amazon and Chmielinski, that Polish drill sergeant, thousands of safe miles away.
Chmielinski continued to stare at me.
I said, “I was thinking about how exciting this is going to be. You and me and our little kayaks and that big river. You know, exploring and all that.”
“Good, Joe,” he said. “That is the rightful thing.”
THREE • THE RIVER SEA
13 • The Upper Ucayali
Chmielinski and I left sleepy Atalaya in mid-afternoon. Bzdak, Durrant, and Wendoly and Rosa Torres saw us off. Spurred on by the Torres sisters’ encouraging squeals, Chmielinski began the journey of three thousand five hundred miles with a flurry of quick strong strokes, but my attempt to imitate his performance was a fraud. My stomach hurt; I felt the flu coming on. The sun was intense, the humidity suffocating, the Tambo a maelstrom.
We paddled into the middle of the river and let the strong current sweep us away. Minutes later the jungle had reasserted itself. Verdant walls queued along either side, marching to the river’s edge. The flooding Tambo had undercut her clay banks, and one four-story tree after another had collapsed into the river. Their tops were submerged like the heads of drowned corpses, but their trunks stayed rooted to the earth and vibrated with the current. Every hundred yards or so one of these trunks would suddenly spring back up, breaking the river’s surface with a roar and launching a volley of spray from its shuddering branches.
That was the brutality of the jungle—its anonymous, threatening mass. The high Andes had been brutal but transparent, showing themselves plainly to the eye for miles in every direction. In the jungle, however, everything hid behind a lurid green barricade. The bush seemed to be one many-limbed, conniving beast.
The tropical sky, by contrast, presented itself boldly. Concocted from an intense mix of tropical heat and humidity, it was never all of a piece, but its theaters were distinct. We were ten degrees south of the equator and heading due north. The sun was directly overhead, the sky blue and blinding. Though I wore sunglasses and a hat, I saw spots before my eyes and my head burned. A few miles north, however, a haystack of deep purple storm clouds dropped a steady, sharply defined column of rain that looked like a cyclone’s tail. To our left, sanguine cirrus feathers hovered over the bush. Behind us, the dark ridges of the Gran Pajonal faded to gray behind a thick skirt of low fog.
A mile below Atalaya the Urubamba River joined the Tambo from the right. These two big jungle rivers form the Ucayali, which at the confluence is about half a mile wide. We would follow the Ucayali for twelve hundred miles, more than twice the distance we had traveled since reaching the river’s source three months ago. Those twelve hundred miles would deliver us only to the Ucayali’s confluence with the Marañón River, near Iquitos. From there we would paddle four hundred miles to the Brazilian border, and from the border another two thousand miles to the Atlantic.
Swollen from the week-long rain and mined with floating trunks, the Ucayali plowed through the bush with intimidating strength. Pockets of turbulence swirled up from the deep, erupted in spinning mushroom caps, and spun off in unpredictable currents that grabbed my kayak and pushed it back, sideways, in circles. Trunks thumped my boat, and I saw the bloated carcass of a drowned pig, its hooves in the air. My shoulders and forearms ached from working the paddle.
The river offered no sign of people until dusk, when a fat barefoot woman in muddy rags signaled us from shore, near the mouth of the tiny Unine River. She hooted our efforts to climb the soupy, fifteen-foot left bank. Dragging our boats behind us, Chmielinski followed her into the bush and I followed him, walking in this duckling fashion along a path that opened to neat rows of coffee, corn, peanuts, and tobacco and a trim thatch-roofed shelter mounted on bamboo stilts.
A short, bare-chested mestizo sat in the middle of the shelter, wearing a self-satisfied expression beneath tiny dark eyes that sparkled like a panther’s. His thick hair had gone to silver, but his belly was hard and flat, his shoulders and arms thick with muscle. Though shoeless, he had a regal air. He introduced himself as Don Rafael Machelena, patrón of Unine. (“Don” connotes power and respect.) He rapped Chmielinski’s kayak, threw his head back, and snorted.
“Where are you going in this contraption?”
“To the Atlantic Ocean,” Chmielinski said.
“In this? You are crazy. You will not make Pucallpa.” He snorted again. “Do you want a cup of coffee? It may be your last.”
In the middle of that desolate bush Don Rafael served us a thick, delicious brew in elegant china cups, the first real coffee we had tasted in months. (Like many poor coffee-producing countries, Peru exports its best beans and serves instant.) He shaved tobacco from a club that looked like a green salami and rolled us each a strong smoke.
“I grow this stuff,” he said. “The coffee, too.”
The woman was his wife, Elsa. She cooked us a dinner of rice, eggs, yucca, fried bananas, and a piquant paste made from peanuts and chilies.
“I grew all this, too,” Don Rafael said as she served it. “And chocolate! I sell it to the Russians. Those idiots need it. It is cold over there!”
Chmielinski heated a serving of our beef burgundy. Don Rafael turned up his nose and said, “How barbarous.”
He had never left Peru—“How can I? That is for rich men”—and he had been to Lima only once, but as the night wore on and we burned one log after another we discussed Lech Walesa, Ronald Reagan, François Mitterand, the Dalai Lama, and whether Swiss watches are as good as they’re said to be. He read us a letter from a man he had met on the river who now lived in Nepal. “It is some world,” he said when he finished, and we agreed.
By then I had a sore throat and my head ached. I excused myself and rolled out my air mattress and listened to Don Rafael and Chmielinski. I was glad that we had stopped in Unine. Contented and self-sufficient, Don Rafael gave the anonymous bush a wise face.
In the morning the patrón brewed more of his coffee and Chmielinski boiled a pouch of chicken cacciatore. “This is crazy,” Don Rafael said as he ate it. “Plastic food.” When he finished he gave us a clump of bananas and two clubs of his tobacco. “If you do not smoke, hit some vagabond over the head with it!” He advised us to travel as fast as we could. The floods would begin in a matter of weeks.
Then he marched into the bush, machete in hand, and we slid down the slick bank into a cold fog.
In all my imaginings of the Amazon I had never thought about fog, but there it was, cold and clammy, just like fog anywhere. Chmielinski and I paddled side by side, our boats perhaps six feet apart. The fog was spooky stuff to kayak in. It seemed to smooth the water into a glass sheen, to hush it, but every few minutes I heard a loud farting sound and a slapping at the river’s surface. An hour later, when the fog burned off, Chmielinski hissed at me and nodded toward the mouth of a creek. Something surfaced, I heard the farting sound, it went under. I counted. At forty-one seconds it breached again.
I paddled over to investigate. A blast behind me startled me so badly that I almost tipped out of my boat. I turned and waited. About a minute later a pink-and-gray blob bubbled up and voided a blowhole the diameter of a large marble.
It would be several days before Chmielinski and I convinced ourselves that those flatulent schmoo-heads were dolphins, which we hadn’t expected thousands of miles from the Atlantic. In fact, freshwater dolphins as primitive as those pinks, or Inia geoffre
nsis, are found only in one Chinese lake, the Ganges River, and the Plata, Orinoco, and Amazon rivers in South America. With their dorsal humps, thick elongated snouts, and doughy bodies they more closely resemble beluga whales than the common marine bottlenose dolphin.
However, the Amazon also has a close freshwater cousin of the bottlenose, the “black” dolphin, or Sotalia fluvatis. From what I would see, pinks and blacks share habitats (some marine biologists would disagree). In demeanor, however, they cannot differ more. A black cavorted in the space I had so hurriedly paddled away from after that blast from the pink. Leaping out of the water again and again in a smooth arc, it appeared to be about three to four feet shorter than the pink, and the grace of its performance seemed to mock the lumbering ancient, who surfaced indolently, barely nudging its blowhole out of the water.
Neither freshwater dolphin possesses any loudly exotic talents (although the pinks are fond of rubbing one another, and of hanging out in large cuddling clusters), but together they occupy a significant niche in the sexual folklore of the Amazon. A dolphin eye, dried and grated into a woman’s food, will drive her mad with desire. If a man views a woman through the ring of a pink’s dried eye socket, she will be unable to resist him. A dolphin ear worn around the wrist guarantees a prolonged genital tumescence. Intercourse with a female dolphin is so intense a man will die in the act. According to the most pervasive bit of lore, a male dolphin can assume the appearance of a young man. Dressed all in white and wearing a hat over his blowhole, he appears in river towns and seduces virgins.
Pink dolphins do have a gymnastic, Gumby-esque ability to turn around completely within a space the length of their body, which enables them to follow shallow, flooding rivers into the jungle floor and to maneuver around the debris that clogs the river in flood season. However, this provides little defense against Inia’s sole predator, Homo sapiens. The pinks are nearly fished out in the lower Amazon, and increasingly rare on the upper river.
Once I had adjusted to their snorting, the pinks were, like Don Rafael, an avuncular, reassuring presence. If something that goofy could handle the Amazon, I thought, maybe there was hope for me.
The upper Ucayali is an intestine of a waterway, twisting and turning more than any other major river in the Western Hemisphere. By plane, Pucallpa is about a hundred miles from Atalaya, but by boat on the Ucayali it is four times that. There are no reliable maps of the river—it floods every year, changes course by many miles, and wipes out entire villages in a single swipe. The survivors move on, and a year later the village pops up somewhere else entirely, a collection of thatch huts where before there had been only bush and bank.
“Where is Tabacoas?” one asks in Iparía. “Tabacoas?” comes the response. “It used to be one day from here, but it is farther than that now.”
The river divides into dozens of channels, and it is often impossible to know which of them to follow. The sun provides no clues. One moment it shines in your face, the next on the back of your head, and two turns of the river later it is in your face again. You plunge blindly ahead, trusting in the direction of the current.
Though maddening, the Ucayali is also sublimely beautiful, most visibly so within the tight confines of the narrow side channels we so often found ourselves plying. In these canals (seldom more than ten yards wide) we easily approached parakeets, large crowlike birds of neon blue, parrots, darting golden finches. Where two canals met, dolphins and flying fish whipped the surface, and a few yards farther on a muddy log might rise up on stubby legs. As we closed in, these heavy-lidded caimans would slide off the bank and disappear in what only my naive sense of trust told me was the opposite direction.
The upper Ucayali is a river of loners. A few grizzly mestizos, such as Don Rafael, work small plantations to which an Indian settlement may be attached, but for the most part the river is peopled by Asháninka who continue to live traditionally, in small, isolated family groups. Our second day on the river we saw only one other boat, a dugout canoe paddled by an Asháninka boy moving stealthily through the shadows along the bank, a hundred yards behind us. After three hours of this we stopped, hid in a creek, and surprised him.
He was not alarmed. He wanted to make a deal. He said, “You need a turtle,” and held out a specimen the size of a man’s hand, with a hole punched in its shell and a piece of yarn threaded through the hole. Holding the yarn like a leash, he set the turtle down on the floor of the canoe and whistled. The turtle huffed to the front of the canoe, teetered on the edge, and stopped. The boy whistled again, and the turtle returned.
“You need a turtle,” he said a second time. Chmielinski explained that if we took the turtle it would surely die. The boy sighed and said, “Then eat him.”
Chmielinski paid him for the turtle but did not take it.
I felt like the turtle—teetering on the brink of escape but trapped at the end of a leash. To overcome my fear I had taken to throwing myself into the warm, silty Ucayali every couple of hours, and had begun to enjoy swimming in it. But we had to get down the river before the floods, and to that end Chmielinski had established a staggering regimen.
Each day we rose before dawn and from then till noon paddled fifty-five minutes of every hour and took a five-minute floating break in the kayaks. (Chmielinski called these respites “five minutek.”) At about noon we stopped paddling for a half-hour lunch. The first two days out of Atalaya we tried to eat on land, but the mosquitoes forced us to return to the boats and drift with the current. After lunch we paddled fifty minutes of every hour until sunset, then made camp.
Twelve hours a day in the boats, seven days a week. Fifty strokes a minute, thirty-six thousand strokes a day, two and a half million strokes to the Atlantic. At times the existential chasm suggested by the execution of a single stroke paralyzed me, and I had to set down my paddle and drift until Chmielinski, realizing I was no longer at his side, paddled back and prodded me into a sort of life.
After three days on the Ucayali my wrists were painful to the touch, inflamed with the tenisinivitis about which Durrant and Truran had warned me. I had flu and a gastrointestinal complication picked up in Atalaya. (“One hundred percent of the population here has parasites,” the clinician had said.) I could not hold food, and I was so tired I couldn’t sleep. The heat and humidity were awful, the sun so relentless that I continued to see spots.
But I was not lonely. Or, I was not as lonely as I wanted to be. That may have been the worst burden of all. On the raft we had been a family of five, the days filled with jokes and conversation and camaraderie. The real advantage to such numbers, of course, is that it is easier to hide in a crowd. Now it was just Chmielinski and I. I did not mind that we were strangers. In fact, I welcomed it. I am a selfish person, and prefer to wallow in my own company. No, the problem was quite the opposite: You cannot live with someone around the clock for months on end, in relative isolation, and not expect him to share the most intimate details of your life. You cannot spend all of your time hiding behind baseball talk (in fact, with Chmielinski, I could not spend any time talking baseball). With nowhere to hide, I saw, to my horror, that this stranger would come to know me inside out.
Here I must give Chmielinski his due. He brought to our enterprise an attitude exactly opposite to mine. He acted as if he wanted the company, and made every effort to keep me on the river. He carried all our tonnage—the canned food, the kerosene stove, the water jug. He crammed far more than his share of the supplies into the nose of his kayak and down into its tail, strapped them on his deck and affixed them to the hull with elastic cords. Water jugs, pineapples, fuel cans, stove, spare paddles—his boat looked like a floating junk shop. And with all that weight it rode low in the water, which meant he had more resistance and had to paddle that much harder. When the afternoon wind came up the river lapped into his cockpit.
By our fourth day I was embarrassed at how little I carried.
“Give me something,” I said.
“I give you something, Joes
ki. When we get to Pucallpa, I give you the biggest ice cream you can eat.”
He selected our campsites, persuaded the Asháninka that we were of the same species and not hostile, cooked breakfast and dinner, made sure I took my malaria pills. Once, overcome by fever, I passed out in my kayak. When I came to he was towing me. He sang songs, mainly Polish marches, and he sang them loudest at dawn. His voice rocketed across the river and into the trees, where it ignited flocks of parrots and set howler monkeys to roaring.
One afternoon he said, “Joe, you sing now.”
“I can’t sing.”
“Sing anything you like.”
There was no way out of it. “They call it Stormy Monday,” I began, “but Tuesday’s just as ba-a-a-a-a-d—”
He cut me off. “I sing,” he said. “You write.”
That night we camped with an Asháninka family, two young men dressed in holey cushmas and a bare-breasted old woman in a ragged skirt. They lived in a thatch-roofed hut raised on ten-foot stilts (the matriarch indicated we were to sleep in their chicken hutch), and the sum of their possessions was two tin pots, a machete, some fish hooks, a bow, and assorted arrows, though there were mosquitoes and fleas in abundance.
One of the young men showed us the arrows. The shafts were of wild cane, the fletching parrot feather, the tips a hardwood further hardened by flame and lashed to the cane. One arrowhead was round and bulbous, for knocking out of trees what was, I believe, an exceptionally stupid turkeylike bird. Another, for taking fish, had barbed serrations, and a third, broad as a fist and sharp enough to draw blood when tapped, was for sachavaca, or tapir. The man said that five years ago you might have seen a hundred or more cross the river in a single day (a memory shared by Alejandro Torres in Atalaya), but now he was lucky to see two or three. He did not know what had happened, but the hunting was terrible.
Three logs smoldered in the middle of the muddy, forty-foot-wide clearing. Their smoke was supposed to keep the mosquitoes at bay, as was our repellent, but the welts on my face, neck, arms, and legs indicated otherwise. I rubbed my hand with repellent and held it out at eye level, palm up, over the fire. Within perhaps thirty seconds it was black with mosquitoes, about a quarter of which displayed the raised wings of sancudos, or malaria carriers.