by Joe Kane
Our hosts cooked their sparse evening meal, fish boiled with platanos, and said that although there was not enough to share, we were welcome to use their second pot. Chmielinski prepared a batch of comida plástica (here I will hazard the claim that our meal marked among the Asháninka the first appearance of beef Stroganoff), and as we ate we joined the family in a kind of Zen walking meditation, circling the fire in an attempt to outwit the mosquitoes. When this failed, the stoic Asháninka were content to be bitten, but Chmielinski and I threw down our bowls and commenced a frenzy of swatting.
When Chmielinski went down to the river to wash the cookpot I tried to open my water bottle—the fever had given me a terrific thirst—but my wrists were too sore to twist the top. The old woman saw my predicament, squeezed the bottle up against her floppy breasts, and loosened the lid, but this was only a temporary solution. We erected our tents in the chicken hutch, and later that night I awoke to find my hands so swollen I couldn’t unzip my tent to let myself out to urinate. This wasn’t just painful, it was humiliating—I felt like a baby in a crib. It was time to stop kidding myself. Chmielinski was an explorer, but I was a masochist. I decided that if we reached Pucallpa I would quit the river once and for all and go home where I belonged.
I lost track of the days. Chmielinski woke me in the morning, I followed his boat’s wagging tail, I collapsed at night. At the town of Bolognesi—huts, chickens, pigs, bugs, mud—Chmielinski went in search of fruit while I crawled onto a grassy knoll overlooking the river and vomited. I rolled over to look at the blistering noon sky and saw five old peasant women staring down at me.
“Where are you going?” one asked.
“Brazil.”
“You should fly.”
To reach Iparía we paddled through a stinking swamp expecting “all the things in which we do not believe” (as John Steinbeck once wrote of skin diving). We hauled our kayaks up a thirty-foot sandstone bluff by rope, and found six slatted huts and a gentle, middle-aged mestizo woman named Flora, who was terribly frail except for her strong bony fingers. She lived with her half-blind father, Guillermo, and her quiet adolescent grandson, Elvis Presley.
Where had Elvis Presley gotten his name? He shrugged and made a desultory display of playing air guitar. He was not proud of the name. He led us to a thatch-covered patio and helped us prepare a camp. He dreamed of being a lawyer: “They are smart men.” Later that night we would hear him reading aloud to his grandmother and great-grandfather.
On her prized possession, a two-burner kerosene stove, Flora cooked us a spirit-reviving soup of cilantro and rice. She, Elvis, and Guillermo grew rice in the swamp. For many years they had farmed near Iquitos, but every rainy season the floods had wiped them out. They had been in Iparía two years. It was higher ground, Flora said, and life was better. Guillermo agreed. “We have the moon and the river, and plenty to eat. Sometimes no money, but the people are good. Not like those bums in Lima.”
Flora’s husband had gone away to Iquitos three months ago and not returned. She did not know what had happened to Elvis’s parents—it had been years. In the morning she said she would like to have a rice-harvesting machine, “so I can grow old with all of my fingers.”
Elvis and Guillermo helped us lower the kayaks back into the swamp. As we paddled away, Flora cried out, “How you suffer!”
It was late November. The Pachitea River had flooded, and where it entered the Ucayali it looked as if a man could cross it on the floating trunks. The village at the confluence, also called Pachitea, is the largest Shipibo settlement on the Ucayali. Julio Caesar Gomez, the government teacher who taught the village’s school, estimated that there were about two hundred families in the village, though it was difficult to say with certainty, for the Shipibo were always coming and going. Given its proximity to Pucallpa, Pachitea is visited by representatives of the Summer Institute of Linguistics, a nondenominational coalition of evangelical missionaries devoted to translating the Bible into the indigenous tongues. Gomez said that when the missionaries were in Pachitea, the Shipibo stayed in the village, because the missionaries brought them presents. The Shipibo, he said, were very attentive at the religious services, and particularly enjoyed the singing. But when the missionaries returned to Pucallpa, “the Shipibo forget everything.” It was Gomez’s opinion that the majority of Shipibo had not been converted to much of anything beyond an appreciation for plastic jewelry and canned milk. “The children especially are afraid,” he said. “Their parents tell them that if they are bad, the white men will steal their skin and shrink their heads.”
The chain-smoking Gomez and his young wife, who hosted us for the evening, were overfond of neither missionaries nor Indians, and escaped downriver to Pucallpa whenever possible. Gomez owed the government one more year of teaching, and then they were going to travel.
The Shipibo speak Chama, one of some thirty surviving languages indigenous to the Peruvian jungle. They wear their black hair in a bowl cut, and the women also grow it long in back, to their waists, and adorn themselves liberally with jewelry, particularly through the nose and ears. The women dress in traditional woven skirts and blouses, but most of the men have adopted the modern trousers-and-T-shirt trappings of the average starving mestizo in Lima.
The Shipibo were aggressively curious, crowding around our boats, giggling and elbowing one another and pointing at us. Most wore a sort of knowing grin, as if they were about to pull off an elaborate practical joke. We watched a soccer game between two teams of adolescent girls. The field was huge, larger than a regulation pitch, but they covered it with amazing speed. They played barefoot but kicked the deflated ball ferociously—one girl launched a bullet of a shot—and they tackled often, their bones crunching with the sound of chicken wings being torn apart.
As for the lingüísticos, as the Summer Institute missionaries are known, they have had a base in Pucallpa since 1947, and their influence in the upper Amazon basin is pervasive and controversial. Their defenders point out, rightly, that for decades the lingüísticos have been the only outsiders apart from the Roman Catholic missionaries to have an interest in the welfare of the Indians, and that by teaching the Indians to read and write they help to prepare them for their inevitable clash with the forces of so-called progress. The lingüísticos’ critics point out, also rightly, that their work with the natives, and most particularly their translating of the indigenous tongues, is inspired by the simple fact that it is the most effective way to replace the indigenous cosmologies with such Christian doctrines as guilt and hell. (The only missionary I met on the Amazon who claimed to be affiliated with the lingüísticos, a Baptist dispatched by the U.S.-based South American Mission, was also the only English-speaking person I met who referred to the Indians as “savages”; in Atalaya, as a prelude to a ceremony arranged for our benefit, he had forced a hungry, embarrassed, “saved” Asháninka boy to sing “Nearer My God to Thee” in his native tongue before permitting him to eat.)
The moon was coming full and the river running strong, and I was starting to recover from my illness, whatever it was. The next morning, our tenth since leaving Atalaya, we decided we would push on straight into the night until we reached Pucallpa.
We paddled steadily through the day, and late in the afternoon hitched a ride on a raft built of some two hundred mahogany logs, manned by six ragged fellows from a village several hundred miles away, near the Brazilian border. Afloat for almost three weeks, they looked like shipwreck survivors. They planned to sell their logs in Pucallpa. Because the most accessible hardwoods in the upper Amazon basin have long since been cut, their load would earn them sufficient cash to get them through the next year.
As we drifted I brewed coffee on our stove and one of the men built a fire on a log, stuck a branch in a plucked chicken carcass, and cooked it over the fire. We ate and drank and watched the moon begin its ascent. I tried to recall where we had been the last time it had come full. The Acobamba Abyss. I had almost drowned.
When
Chmielinski mentioned that he was Polish, the raft’s captain, a huge man the others called Gordo, or Fatso, asked if he was the Pole who had run the Colca River. Chmielinski said he was. The men gathered around and pumped him with questions about Lech Walesa. Chmielinski admired Walesa and had no trouble speaking about Solidarity, which he did for the next twenty minutes.
When Chmielinski had finished, Gordo said, “But they put him in jail.”
“The communists did that,” Chmielinski said.
“And well they should have,” another man said. “He was disrupting the government. You cannot have that.”
“Why not?” a third man asked. “Look at us. What do we have to lose? These logs?”
“I don’t think communism is so bad,” Gordo said. “Peru could use a change. The generals and the drug dealers own Peru.”
“Communism sounds good until the communists take over,” Chmielinski said. “Then everything changes. People disappear, there are shortages. Everyone suffers.”
“We already have that,” the second man said. “I cannot imagine it getting any worse no matter who runs the country.”
Gordo opened a papaya and passed it around. It was perfectly ripe, glowing red and orange as the sun now settling into the jungle wall. Another man gave us sugar cane stalks for our journey.
“We will meet you in town,” Gordo said. “I know a place”—he named a cantina—“the women have melons like this.” He held two papayas to his chest. The other men laughed. We put our boats in the water and left the men coasting on their fortune.
The sun set and the bank and the river melded into one. The full moon cast only enough light to show us we were traveling through an alien world. I heard dolphins breach and snort. In the blackness, the whoosh of whirlpools forming and disintegrating seemed much louder than it had during the day. Invisible mosquitoes attacked. We cleaved to the middle of the river to the extent we could find it, and Chmielinski devised a system of flashlight signals that we would use if we became separated.
I heard the slapping of paddles and, almost too late, saw a shadow twenty yards behind me and gaining. I shouted. No answer.
“Go!” Chmielinski yelled.
We outpaddled the shadow, but when we stopped, an hour later, my chest was heaving and my wrists felt as if someone had cracked them over his knee.
When my breathing slowed I smelled something awful, heard a low thrumming, and noticed that the water dripping off my paddle and across my thighs left an oily film. Then we rounded a bend in the river and I was blinded by the industrial lights of the port of Pucallpa.
There is one good thing I can say about Pucallpa: There are very few mosquitoes. They cannot survive the foul air. Most jungle towns stink, but into the usual mix of excrement, urine, dead dogs, pigs, rotting fruit, fish, kerosene, and diesel exhaust Pucallpa weaves the emissions of a lumber mill, an oil refinery, and boomtown avarice.
As recently as 1960 Pucallpa was a sleepy jungle town of thatch huts and a few thousand people. Today it is not only the legislated administrative capital of the department of Ucayali, created in 1982, but also the de facto capital of the Peruvian Amazon. Pucallpa, linked to Lima by road, has wrested that title from Iquitos, eight hundred miles downriver, even though its hundred fifty thousand inhabitants make it twice Pucallpa’s size. Until the 1970s the road washed out in rainy season, and the jungle was connected to Lima only by foot through the Andes, by small plane, or by boat down the Amazon and through the Panama Canal, a journey of seven thousand miles. Now surfaced in the washout areas, the road permits the steady trucking of the huge machinery necessary to tame the jungle, and the quick export of the natural resources harvested there—from oil and timber to rare birds and animal skins.
Indians, mainly Shipibo, were a common sight in Pucallpa, though as in Cuzco their role seemed limited to selling trinkets in the streets. In the middle of the city, in an area of perhaps one square mile, were a few paved roads, several expensive air-conditioned hotels, pizza parlors, a movie theater that showed Blue Thunder during our visit, and sturdy modern banks managed by young men from Lima who knew the daily dollar exchange rate by heart. Most of the buildings were one-story, bunkerlike exercises in steel and cement. Farther out, on the east end of town, near the river, the pavement ended and the road turned to rutted dirt and slipped past the candlelit shacks of the poor, who are the bulk of Pucallpa’s permanent population.
Cuzco has its Inca walls and Spanish churches, Lima its chipped colonial architecture, Arequipa its volcanoes and quiet isolation. Pucallpa has no such distinction. It has grown too quickly, and has no real connection to the land around it beyond simple greed. It represents the apotheosis of the modern law of the jungle—open season for anything one can get one’s hands on, or one’s machines under.
At any rate, that’s how I saw Pucallpa. As in Cuzco, however, my discontent was to a degree a result of fatigue. I was still fifteen pounds underweight, beat up, and foggy headed, and my wrists and forearms creaked painfully. While Chmielinski worked Pucallpa’s arcane public telephone system in an ultimately futile attempt to hustle more funding from the United States, I slept long hours in our cheap hostel, trying to regain my strength.
After three days I had recovered sufficiently to spend time in a cafe next door run by a transvestite from Lima named Roberto. He had a knack for the restaurant business—his food would not kill you, which in Pucallpa was an achievement—but what he really wanted to do was sing.
“Peelings, Señor Cho,” he said. “You will be hearing my peelings?” And as Barry Manilow bleated through the loudspeakers (“Feeeeliiings …”) Roberto lip-synched the lyrics—incongruously, for he was wearing a sequined dress—while I sipped coffee and nodded feebly at his tortured, and torturing, efforts.
Everything about Pucallpa struck me as false, and in that light my own motives for being in the Amazon seemed less than worthy. The notion of traveling the Amazon source to sea under my own power loomed as a colossal stunt. Paddling the kayak was so demanding that I wasn’t really seeing anything on the river. I was ready to quit.
Three things changed my mind.
First, Chmielinski. He was an iron man. He did not need me on the river. But when I suggested that I was a hindrance, which I most clearly was, and that it was only proper that I stop kayaking, he was indignant. This, he said, was out of the question. He would continue regardless, but would prefer if I went with him. He said this so sincerely I believed him.
Second, Bzdak and Durrant. They had waited nearly a week in Atalaya for a Johnson, and had arrived in Pucallpa a few days ahead of us. I was overjoyed to see them, and not only because they had all our food and medical supplies. They were family. We were in this together.
And, finally, I came face to rude face with my options. For the trip from Pucallpa to Iquitos Bzdak and Durrant had booked passage on the Jhuliana, one of the elegant, turn-of-the-century passenger ships Werner Herzog flung about the Urubamba River in his film Fitzcarraldo. With her fine hardwood paneling, gleaming brightwork, and well-scrubbed cabins, the Jhuliana stood out in Pucallpa’s suppurating port like a diamond.
That was how I felt on the lower deck, anyway. The upper deck was more like Pucallpa. The odor drifting from shore stung my nostrils. On the stern of a dilapidated launch moored upstream of the Jhuliana a man unzipped and pissed right into a group of swimming children. One of the kids, covered from the neck down in river muck, waddled to shore. As he did, a vulture, the closest of the perhaps two hundred I could see at that moment, looked up briefly from the dog carcass into which it had buried its beak, considered the child, and returned to its prize.
In the Amazon you expect parrots, macaws, parakeets, toucans, but the vulture is the bird of the Amazonian future. It is the one indigenous species that thrives in man’s slobby wake.
That scene was enough for me. I suspected that by motorized boat, even as fine a ship as the Jhuliana, the trip to the Atlantic would be a pogo-stick hop from vulture nest to vulture nest,
Pucallpa to Pucallpa. I owed myself the chance to see the places in between, the real Amazon.
That night Chmielinski and I packed our kayaks, and in the morning we set off for Iquitos, eight hundred miles downriver.
14 • The Lower Ucayali
Beep-beep-beep godDAMN! At exactly 4 a.m., according to the whining Japanese alarm clock Chmielinski had bought in Pucallpa, I bolted awake to find a dark, fist-sized blob squatting atop my mosquito netting. It was almost on my face, its underside thrown into shadow by the half-moon.
I jabbed at it.
“Cricri,” it said, for that is what a Spanish-speaking frog says. (A Spanish-speaking dog says guau and a cat miau.) It didn’t move until I punched its soft belly, launching it into the shadows.
Then I shut off the alarm and crawled out of my tent. A knee-high mist had settled onto the sand, and a faint odor of dirty armpits drifted down from the mud skin early floodwaters had deposited on the grass shelf above the beach.
We had left Pucallpa the day before. On the occasion of our departure I had resolved to maintain a positive attitude toward our endeavor. The Chmielinski Method, as I thought of it. Attention to order and faithful execution of duty would get us to the sea. And so, as cook of the day, I set forthrightly into the matutinal routine one of us would, we hoped, execute daily for the next three thousand miles. I dunked myself in the Ucayali, boiled drinking water, woke Chmielinski, boiled coffee, boiled breakfast, packed lunch, boiled more water, watched the sun sneak up over the grass, packed my gear. At 5:35 the air temperature was about 85 degrees and rising. Cursing the mosquitoes and chasing Chmielinski, I dragged my kayak to the river and put in.