by Joe Kane
Two miles downstream, in the morning light, the river and the horizon blended into a solid silver-blue canvas, and I felt as if I were paddling inside a cloud. I would not say that I was joyous at that moment, for the blue sky signaled a long, hot day, but neither was I tormented. I had something new working in my favor on this leg of the trip—my kayak.
Chmielinski had sold the white-water boats in Pucallpa, and we had continued our journey in the sixteen-foot Aquaterra “Chinook” sea kayaks Sergio Leon had stored there for us. The new boats were a deliverance. The white-water kayaks had been highly maneuverable, but now we were navigating a river that day by day became more oceanlike. The obstacles we would face included tropical storms, hard winds, rolling waves, and extreme distances. The sea kayaks, longer and wider than the white-water boats, were sturdy and fast. They held a straight line in all but the strongest currents, and they were equipped with pedal-operated rudders, which greatly reduced the strain on my aching wrists and forearms.
And this was my boat. Unlike the white-water kayak, no one else had used it. I took a captain’s pride in my new craft. On its tail Chmielinski had painted “S.S. Elyse,” after my girlfriend back home (his boat was the “S.S. Joanna”). The good ship Elyse was about as comfortable as a thing can be if you have to sit in it twelve hours a day. Its broad, open cockpit allowed me to bend my knees, and I had glued foam-rubber padding to the plastic seat. It had deck straps fore and aft and storage pockets in the cockpit. As we left the beach that morning I had, within arm’s reach, my Swiss Army knife, a water bottle, a pineapple, a dozen bananas, two papayas, sunscreen, lip balm, T-shirt, rain gear, baseball hat, spare sunglasses, mosquito repellent, an emergency medical kit, and my waterproof briefcase with pens and notebooks. For the first time in a long time I felt comfortable, and in control.
In the swift new boats we traveled the one hundred twenty miles from Pucallpa to Contamana in two days. Conta, in the Chama language, is “palm tree,” and mana is “hill.” There were no palm trees in Contamana, or, as far as I could tell, any Indians, but there was a hill, a five-hundred-foot sandstone bluff that is the last significant rising in the land all the way to the sea.
Contamana was about the size of Atalaya, but by Amazon standards much wealthier. It had timber nearby, gold in the surrounding creeks, a healthy rice industry—growers and brokers had packed the town for selling season—and a state-owned PetroPeru refinery. (It is said that eleven thousand PetroPeru employees earn as much as 175,000 schoolteachers.)
Along the waterfront soft electric lights lit a neat wooden promenade, and beneath the lights smiling men in clean shirts walked arm in arm with pretty women in long cotton dresses. Duckwalks lined the graded, well-drained dirt streets, and behind them stood sturdy wooden houses. Every fluorescent bulb in the ice-cream parlor worked. Smooth new felt covered the pool hall’s three tables.
And Contamana was connected with the beyond: It had a satellite dish, a television store, and a steel-and-glass church. In this last we made camp (rice brokers had filled the lone hotel), though only with reluctance did the Italian priest allow a Pole to sleep in his vestibule.
We walked to a waterfront restaurant and ordered fried chicken, hearts-of-palm salad, and rice. A man named Raoul joined us there. A mutual acquaintance from Pucallpa, a pilot, had radioed Raoul and asked him to keep an eye out for us. Raoul was wide and dark, with a serious stomach, thick black hair, and a goatee. Though fifty-six, he looked much younger. An engineer, he had come to Contamana from Lima ten years before to work on a potable-water project, but funding had disappeared. He had stayed in Contamana to build irrigation systems and broker rice. Now he was waiting to see what would happen under “Alan.”
That was how most Peruvians referred to their new president, Alan Garcia. The accent falls on the second syllable, so the name ends with a rising, optimistic tone: a-LAN. Ninety-two percent of the electorate had turned out for the vote, which Garcia had won handily, receiving more votes than the next eight candidates combined.
For Peru, after twelve years of military rule and six years under a conservative president, Fernando Belaúnde Terry, Garcia’s election represented a peaceful revolution. He was young—only a few years before the election he had been singing for his rent in the cafes of Paris—and left of center. In his inaugural address he had announced a cap on the interest payments for Peru’s staggering $14 billion national debt, a bold and unprecedented move that rocked the international financial community and established Peru as a leader in modern South America. (Soon thereafter, both Brazil and Ecuador went into complete default.) Peruvians, long accustomed to mockery from the outside world, were proud of Alan, Raoul especially so. He was a member of Garcia’s political party, the Alianza Popular Revolucionaria Americana, which in its sixty-one-year existence had never won a presidential election.
“But I am bothered by our debt,” Raoul said. “We should pay, I know, but we cannot pay if we have nothing to pay with. The answer is for you Americans to buy the things we manufacture, instead of stealing our oil and wood.”
“Peruvian products are poorly made,” Chmielinski said. “There is no market for them. They break.”
Raoul sighed. “You are right about that.”
“And if you get a lot of American money down here,” I said, “Alan will not be president for long.”
“You are right about that, too,” Raoul said. “We will be like Guatemala, or El Salvador.”
We had finished our dinners. We each ordered another.
“There is a joke we tell,” Raoul said as he filled our glasses with beer. “You Americans have a machine. You push a black button, you get coffee. You push a white button, you get milk. You pull a handle, you get apple pie. In Peru, we pull on a black udder, we get coffee. We pull on a white udder, we get milk. We pull the tail, we get cowshit. We sell you the coffee and the milk and we eat the shit.”
In the morning Raoul brought us fresh bread from the bakery and found a crew of boys to haul our boats down to the river. As we pushed off from the dock, he leaned close. “There is something I have wanted to ask,” he whispered. He looked around to see if anyone was eavesdropping. “What do you do for women? I have been married for twenty-five years, and if I did not have my little honey at night …”
“After twelve hours on the river,” Chmielinski said, “we could have the most beautiful girls in Contamana and we would only fall asleep.”
This was true.
Two hours later the sky suddenly turned gray, then black, a strong wind blew up, and I heard a rattling sound to my left and saw a field of wild cane flatten along the bank. Seconds later the river erupted in a white, pocked froth and choppy two-foot waves. My kayak bucked wildly and I couldn’t see ten feet. The squall passed in minutes, but in its wake, soaked and shivering with cold and fright, I found myself longing for clean, safe Contamana.
But Contamana proved to be an exception. Although I had often envisioned the Amazon as dark and gooey, on the river, at least, the light is immense and the sun shines, if anything, too long. And there are no mountains in the distance, no hills, no skyline—nothing to suggest the possibility of escape. It is flat, forgotten, suffocating country, mucky floodplain with long stretches of mud and sand and toppled trees. And so in the forlorn little river towns there is darkness of another sort, a darkness of the spirit, a giving up, a sense of utter defeat at the hands of the government, the weather, the insects, the river itself.
We paddled late into the night, until we arrived at Orellana, a town about the size of Contamana but not nearly as wealthy. Raoul had given us his card and the name of a friend. The friend wasn’t home, but his sister, her arm wrapped in a sling, let us sleep on the back porch of her creaky one-room shack. The porch hung right over the Ucayali, on four skinny stilts, and through the one-inch gaps between the floorboards we could see the river streaming past fifteen feet below.
As we erected our tents two dozen black-toothed men and slack-jawed youths climbed onto the
fragile porch.
“You will see!” one of the men yelled. “The rain is coming!”
Another said, “When that first wave hits you, you will fall right out of those silly canoes! The river will eat you!”
Without pausing in his work, Chmielinski asked, “What do experts such as yourselves recommend we do?”
“Jump out of your boats!” a third man yelled. “That is what this asshole did last week!” He pointed to the first man. “He fell out. Now he is afraid of the river!”
The other men laughed, nervously, then fell silent and watched us erect our tents and sponge out our kayaks. No one offered to help. No one asked questions. I had the uneasy feeling that our ambition angered them.
Chmielinski quizzed them. No one could identify the town’s namesake, Francisco de Orellana, no one knew where the river ended, no one could tell us the distance to the next town, although this last question did at least generate a discussion. “One day,” a man said. “Four hours,” another said. “One day and a half.” “Half an hour.” “Ten hours.” “Twelve hours.” “Two days.”
Such maddening confusion wasn’t entirely ignorance. Linear distance means nothing on the river. Travel is measured in time and the number of river bends, or vueltas, between one point and another. A lot depends on how well a man paddles, or the strength of his boat’s motor, or on where his destination happens to be situated at that time. According to those men, only a few years ago, Orellana had stood on the opposite bank and there had been islands in the river.
The men hung around until we zipped our tents closed and blew out our candles. They returned at dawn. The one who had fallen out of his boat told us to leave the main trunk of the Ucayali and follow a long canal, the Puinahua, that he described as a shortcut to Iquitos. The other men corroborated this, and we made the colossal mistake of trusting them.
We spent four days lost in the Puinahua Canal, and at towns even more desperate than miserable Orellana. At Victoria (thatch huts, one-room schoolhouse, thin frightened men, suspicious women who herded their wormy, scabby-headed children away as we paddled up) we weren’t allowed out of our boats. The teacher was gone, and his nervous assistant said, “There are gringo terrorists around here,” ran into the schoolhouse, and slammed the door.
In Juancito, a group of men as silent and spooky as vultures shadowed us as we dragged our boats to a falling-down cook shack that had not fallen quite as far as the other dozen or so shacks that made up the village. A crude hand-painted sign declared this the “Hotel Sheraton.” An enormous woman was cutting waxed paper into napkins. She tugged at her underwear and screamed at the men to leave. No one moved. She served us plates of stale rice and fish fried in rancid oil. Halfway through the meal a storm descended and the men ran away. We were so anxious to leave Juancito that we did the same, hauling our boats down to the canal as fast as we could and paddling right into the middle of the black tempest.
In the deluge I quickly lost sight of Chmielinski and either bank, but he had taught me a few things after my previous encounter with river rain. I drew my spray skirt around me, tightened my windbreaker, and pointed the boat’s nose into the hooking waves. I was warm and dry and far happier than I had been in the Hotel Sheraton.
The storm lasted about twenty minutes, but waves continued to slap the noses of our kayaks for the next few hours, which noticeably reduced our speed. We met a riverboat stuck on a sandbar in the middle of the canal. It had been there two days, its beefy captain, six crewmen, and their wives and children running through the cases of soft drinks, crackers, beer, canned fish, and fruit they had intended to trade along the canal. The captain leaned over the rail and handed us each an Inca Cola.
“Where are we?” Chmielinski asked.
“You are lost!” the captain said. “So are we.” He did not know when the water would rise to lift his boat off the bar.
We paddled on. The only other person we saw that afternoon was a man in a suit beating upstream on a motor-driven canoe and broadcasting to the apparently uninhabited banks through a handheld, amplified megaphone. I heard only, “Tonight’s movie, the fabulous Tarzan,” before Chmielinski turned to intercept the man, who quickly put down his megaphone and accelerated away from us.
That night we camped in mud and the next day arrived at Bretaña, which in addition to the usual dozen shacks had a bodega. The owner, Emilio Rios Lozano, let us pitch our tents on the wood floor. He had covered the walls with pictures of blond-haired women in various stages of undress.
Here, too, sullen, meek men shuffled into the bodega, lined up against one wall, and stood and stared as Lozano opened two liters of warm beer for us. He had served nine years in the Peruvian navy and seen California, sort of. His boat had sat in port three weeks, but he had not been permitted ashore. In a fit of pique he had quit the navy and settled in Bretaña. Now he was too in debt to leave. “Fuck the navy!” he said.
The silent men stared and swatted mechanically at mosquitoes. Lozano exhibited more flair. When he had a point to make, which was every few seconds, he suspended his monologue and studied the feeding insect until all other eyes were on it. Then he dispatched it with a furious wallop, examined the corpse, and returned to his subject.
“What was I saying? Yes—why do we not have soldiers here? They have soldiers in the mountains, soldiers on the coast, soldiers on the border with Ecuador.” Slap. “No soldiers down here.”
With emphatic gestures he divided my tent top into Peru’s mountains, coast, and Ecuadorian border. There were soldiers all over it. The Amazon basin was somewhere down the side of the tent, soldierless and forgotten.
Slap.
“Why do you need soldiers here?” Chmielinski asked Lozano.
“You could be bandits.”
“But we are not bandits.”
“But you could be.”
The other men nodded in agreement and continued to swat.
“And the floods,” Lozano said. “They fuck up everything. They come too early, they come too late, we can grow nothing but yucca. Yucca. Here in the great jungle. I puke on yucca.”
But the floods that destroy these people also sustain them, enriching the notoriously poor jungle soil with Andean silt. Of course, when the floods come too early or too late, which is often enough, the corn and rice and plantain crops either drown or wither.
Lozano’s wife brought us a plate of fried fish heads and hissed at her husband. I had trouble with the meal—the fish seemed to be staring back at me. I recognized the look. It was the same one the men were wearing.
Lozano pulled three more liters of beer from the shelf. His wife hissed again and disappeared behind a curtain at the back of the shop.
“At least I have my women,” he said.
“Your women?”
“Nine. I have nine women. And” —he fumbled with his fingers—“forty-seven children. No, forty-eight. One more last week.”
He said this so matter-of-factly I believed him.
We left Bretaña at dawn. Chmielinski propped a magazine on his deck, a four-month-old copy of the international Time he had purchased in Pucallpa, and read while he paddled.
“What does this mean,” he shouted to me, “ ‘mob connections’?” That was a story on Frank Sinatra. There was an interview with Paul McCartney, about John Lennon: “What is ‘maneuvering swine’?”
As he read, his head down, his boat veered back and forth and he paddled a third again my distance, which about evened us out. My wrists were healing, but I was not yet strong. At night my fingers swelled and my hands curled, and I had to sleep facedown, arms extended at my side.
But Chmielinski did not seem to mind my slow pace. I was thankful for that. Although the towns between Pucallpa and Iquitos were generally awful, the long empty stretches between were wonderful, and I wanted to take time to enjoy them. The green jungle wall was faceless, but not silent. We paddled along it as if eavesdropping. Birds chattered, howler-monkey troops roared loud as jet engines, dolphins breac
hed and blew, and every once in a while a mulelike shrieking sliced the humid air. The day we left Bretaña I asked a man in a dugout canoe about the shrieks. He said they were made by a ronsoso, which he described as a wild pig. (I asked him to pronounce the name three times, thinking he may have meant a ronsoco, or capybara, which is the world’s largest rodent and is sometimes referred to as a water pig.)
Every few miles the bush broke and opened onto a fine white beach. Racks made from driftwood and twine rose from the sand like skeletons, the wood gnarled and bleached like bone, and across them hung layers of fish caked in salt, drying to a marblelike consistency. Plastic sheets stretched from the racks to the sand, and beneath these fishermen hid to keep from baking as dry and hard as their catch. That afternoon, when the sun grew so hot that touching bare skin to the kayak blistered my arms, we stopped and crawled into one of the plastic tents and sat with a quiet man named Rogelio.
He had beached his lancha. The fishing was poor that day, he said, and he had chosen instead to read a fotografía, a sort of comic book with white bubbles of dialogue superimposed on black-and-white photos, often of men and women in passionate embrace. We broke out crackers and canned fish from the kayaks and read with Rogelio.
“What is this word for?” I asked, pointing to a panel.
Rogelio said, “It is where a woman keeps her melons.”
“And this?”
“When you want a woman so bad you are like a dog.”
“This?”
“A man hurts you so you hurt him worse.”
Rogelio said he had been camped on the beach, alone, for a week, and that he would store half his catch and sell the rest in Pucallpa, where he lived. He was in no hurry to return. This was his secret place, and he had food and the pretty beach and a dozen fotografías.
When the sun was lower we readied our boats for the water. Like most river men, Rogelio found our canoas strange but muy lindo— very pretty. He administered the universal test—a rap on the hull—and nodded approval.