by Joe Kane
He gave me a paper bag with half a loaf of stale bread, a candle, a hand-drawn map, and a note: “Joe—Meet you at border—Piotr.”
There were other uniforms to appease. Civil guard, customs, port captain. One rickety shack corresponded to each. I knocked on the door that said Guardia Civil. No answer. A little girl was watching me.
“Where are they?” I asked.
“Drunk,” she said. “Make more noise.”
I banged again, harder, until a young man opened the door and zipped his pants. Behind him, a half dozen bodies of both sexes lounged on cots, and empty beer bottles littered the floor.
“Kayak Two has arrived!” he announced, and one by one the bodies rose and came to the door and shook my hand. Someone gave me a list of boats that had passed the checkpoint. The last name on the list, written in Chmielinski’s hand, was Kayaka Dos.
I put my initials next to it, the man gave me a papaya, and I left. I knocked once at customs and once at the port captain’s office, received no response, and continued right on down to the bank and my boat. The boy who had shot at me did not ask to see my papers, but he did wish me luck.
“Why did you shoot?” I asked as I untied Kayaka Dos.
“Look,” he said, and pointed along the bank to a dock and, farther along, to two dugout canoes.
“What?” I asked.
“No boats.”
So that was it. Two canoes, but no real boats. The navy, the civil guard, the port captain. Here at the border, in the heart of cocaine country, none of them had boats.
But they had guns.
Not until I was well into the middle of the river did I stop shaking.
At sunset I beached near a big, stinking mangrove log, jumped up and down on it to chase out the snakes (with no proof that the act was more than superstition), dragged my boat behind the log, and erected my tent. I did not build a fire. Later, after dark, I heard voices and a motor idling in the water, but they moved on. I heard shooting all through the night but dismissed this as the unfettered joy of Christmas. I dozed. Twice I woke to a loud scratching sound beneath my tent, but whatever it had been was gone in the morning.
I felt strong and paddled all morning without a break. The river widened slightly. I passed wild, uninhabited islands and heard the wind-over-glacier roars of howler monkeys. I stuck to the Peruvian side until I miscalculated the current and got sucked around an island into what I had come to think of as the Godfather Zone, within shouting distance of one of the Colombian haciendas. I saw a dock with three powerboats and several men, and heard them laughing. I thought I saw one point at me.
Suddenly a motor-powered wooden dory heading upstream veered away from the Colombian bank, directly for me. I froze. But it was a boatload of Indians, and they waved as they passed.
At the island’s far end—I could not reach it fast enough—I cut back to the Peruvian side. My Peru! The wind picked up, the river grew choppy. Three men in a canoe drew alongside me. I was glad to see them. Chmielinski’s crude map had been useless.
The man in front grabbed my bow.
“Ello meester,” he said. “My frin.”
“Merry Christmas,” I said in Spanish.
He said, also in Spanish, “Do you have any brandy?”
“No.”
“Where are you from?”
“The United States.”
“Where are you going?”
“Brazil.”
“Why?”
As I described my trip it sounded frivolous. I felt sure these peasants would see it only as a rich man’s indulgence. When I said that I had been on the river four months, the man turned to his friends and gave a low whistle. He had not let go of my bow.
He said, “You are CIA.”
“No.”
“DEA.”
“No.”
I was surprised that he was so familiar with the acronyms of U.S. government agencies, but I should not have been. In 1982, under heavy pressure from the Reagan administration and with the assistance of U.S. advisers, the Belaúnde government had instituted several programs intended to curtail the coca industry. Drug barons and peasants had combined to oppose the programs, with predictable results—in one incident, nineteen anti-coca workers were murdered in their sleep. That the government campaign ultimately proved as ineffectual as it was unpopular was, on the whole, a function of economics. In 1985, Peru had an international debt of $14 billion, legal exports of less than $3 billion, and coca exports of $800 million. A peasant could earn about four and a half dollars a day picking coca, or three to four times what he could make any other way, assuming he could find other work. A coca farmer made five times what he would growing the next-most-profitable crop, cacao. And these were the people at the bottom of the drug pyramid. Profits for the narcotraficantes themselves were, of course, enormous.
“No DEA,” I said. “No CIA.”
“Tell me,” he said. “What do you think of Alan?”
“He is intelligent and brave.”
The man smiled. Suddenly he gripped my wrist, hard. My spine stiffened.
“Good luck,” he said.
Then he and his friends turned upstream and paddled away.
For the next several hours I cleaved to the Peruvian bank and saw no one until the middle of the afternoon, when the bush broke to reveal a cluster of huts. I asked a couple of kids the distance to Puerto Alegría, the last military checkpoint before the border. I did not want to miss it. I had learned my lesson.
“This is Puerto Alegría,” one of them said.
“Joe!”
Chmielinski ran down the bank and hauled my kayak back up before I could disembark. He handed me a cold bottle of beer, and, as sometimes happened when he was excited, he lost the careful discipline of his English.
“I know you are not feeling so happy that night,” he said as he put my boat, and me, down. “So I try to leave you alone. You are singing”—he hummed Grabbed my coat, put on my hat—“and so I go little bit ahead. I fall asleep, I wake up. Where is that Joe? Nothing! I shine my flash—you are gone! I see lights, I go to this place where the people have the skin falling up.”
“A leper colony?”
“Yah, you got it that. Leperds! I wait three hours. I paddle up-strim, downstrim, no Joe. I see a canoa, I ask them they see you. This stupid guy grabs my boat. But very quiet-like I am holding canoa away with my paddle. Then this stupid guy he says he wants a present. He wants dinero. I say no.
“Then I see other canoa! Coming fast! I push first stupid guy away, but he will not let it that go, so I take paddle, and”—he made a motion like a man chopping wood—“I break it that stupid guy’s hand! He is screaming!
“Here comes other canoa. I am pushing on my paddle, and I cut between them. First stupid guy is yelling, ‘Grab heem! Grab that guy!’ But I am right for front of other boat. He thinks I am going to hit heem, but—ha!—I use rudder. I turn like it that fast to the left. Now I am really pushing, so fast they know nothing. I have twenty-meter lead. I am running for next hour and they cannot follow. Ha!
“When I am safe, I am thinking again, where is that Joe? I think there is not much for you I can do. I leave the map and bread, and then I am going for it. That is the right expression?”
“Yes.”
He had, in all, paddled forty hours straight through, taking catnaps in the boat when he could no longer keep his eyes open, and in that time he had traveled about two hundred and thirty miles. He had arrived here at the border at eleven o’clock at night, one hour before his deadline. It had been a terrible pace. Clearly I had had the better end of the deal.
“Joe, you are not making it here tonight, I am hiring motor to find you. I am not going into that Brazil without you!”
Puerto Alegría had barracks for five hundred men built on platforms and stilts and connected by duckwalks, the whole of it winding through the bush like a maze, but only twenty men were in residence, all of them anxious to leave. Most came from Lima and served this isol
ated jungle duty on one-month rotation. Still, it was Christmas, which meant hot soup and cold beer and snapshots and toasts.
Suddenly, the skies opened up. When the storm ended the soldiers hauled our boats down to the river and waved us toward the border.
“Good luck in Brazil!” the base commander shouted as we left. “All they do is dance and fuck!”
16 • The Solimões
Night was falling, and paddling away from Puerto Alegría we kept the black wall of a six-mile-long island, Rondina, to our left, blocking us from Leticia, Colombia’s only port on the Amazon. By reputation, Leticia’s sole industry is smuggling—mainly Peruvian coca paste (in), and processed cocaine (out), but also jewelry, counterfeit money, rare-animal skins, and just about anything else easily transported by boat up or down the Amazon and through the hundreds of local inlets and streams that make detection or pursuit almost impossible.
A mile beyond Rondina we corrected course for the flickering lights of Tabatinga, the Brazilian garrison town that abuts Leticia. An unanticipated reward awaited us. The Brazilian military runs Tabatinga’s best hotel (one of three), and Bzdak and Durrant, who had arrived two days earlier on a riverboat from Iquitos, had befriended the general. He in turn had given them the run of the kitchen. At midnight, having taken my first hot shower in five months (as I stood too long under the nozzle, Chmielinski, waiting his turn outside, fumed, “Joe, you are drowning?”), I sat down to a Christmas dinner of Polish sausage, roast chicken, borscht, potato salad, fresh tomatoes, Brazilian wine, and shots of Polish vodka.
In the morning, the four of us walked through dusty Tabatinga, which looked about like any small jungle town, and crossed the border into Leticia, which did not. Smart boutiques sold French dresses and Italian shoes; other shops displayed Jack Daniels whiskey, Japanese cameras, and American chocolate bars—“Sneekers! The best!” Chmielinski exclaimed, and bought two cases. Down on the waterfront, sleek fiberglass speedboats outnumbered the peque-peques and Johnsons, and men in silk shirts, designer blue jeans, and strong cologne strolled the dirt road along the bank or paraded in four-wheel-drive Chevrolets and Jeeps. The rates at the city’s one hotel, the Anaconda (built by an American adventurer suspected by the DEA to be a drug trafficker), were five times those in Tabatinga.
We stopped for beer in a waterfront shanty run by a young Brazilian, João, who had been raised in an orphanage in Manaus, nine hundred miles downriver. When he was thirteen he had heard his mother was in Tabatinga, and had come looking for her.
“All I found was this,” he said in English, gesturing at the shanty’s warped cardboard walls. “I have to get out.”
“Why?”
“Too much matando,” he said, and made a shooting motion.
The next day, Chmielinski worked a lucrative black-market deal with the Brazilian general, who for a pittance in American cash forgot that we had stayed in his hotel. He also let Chmielinski use his telephone, through which we learned that the residents of Casper, Wyoming, the Poles’ adopted hometown, were raising money for us to complete the expedition.
With that windfall looming, we decided to invest the bulk of our remaining funds in a small boat for Durrant and Bzdak, so they could accompany us downriver for a few days. They had seen little but towns and cities for the last month, and Bzdak wanted to photograph some wilder sections of river.
Bzdak hired a Johnson captained by a wily, mustachioed man named Felix. I say wily; not until we were twenty miles downriver did Felix admit that his fifteen-foot dory was, in fact, “borrowed.” Meanwhile, for a fraction of what Bzdak had paid him, Felix in turn had hired a mechanic and driver named Ramón, a quiet boy who wore rags but could break down and reassemble the seven-horse outboard in an hour. Felix, for his part, was to spend most of the journey honing his own particular river skills, which ran to drinking, smoking, and sleeping.
The Johnson shot ahead of the kayaks, stopped, drifted. We caught up and passed it, it passed us and waited again. In this herky-jerky manner we proceeded two days into Brazil.
“You hire me,” Felix said that second afternoon, “but you ride in those things.” He pointed to the kayaks and shook his head. “While I drink beer.” He rummaged on the boat’s floor.
“Can I swim here, Felix?” I asked. “Is it safe?”
He threw his cigarette in the river and peered over the side of the boat, looking for I don’t know what—the water was far too brown to see anything at all.
“Sure,” he said, and opened a beer. “You can swim here.”
“Why don’t you join me?”
He took a long swallow and thought for a moment. “No thanks,” he said. “Who knows what the hell is in there?” He leaned back against the stern and took another swallow. “Why make problems?”
During those two days the four of us regained much of the closeness we had felt on the raft. That second night, my birthday, we bought a ten-pound catfish from a fisherman (for about a dollar), made camp on a pretty beach, and cooked the fish for dinner. Later, Durrant and Bzdak gave me a machete and a beautifully worked leather scabbard they had purchased in Leticia. It was a gift as practical as it was handsome. After our harrowing Christmas, Chmielinski and I had decided we should carry some sort of weapons.
The next day we reached São Paulo de Olivença, a small town about a hundred and twenty miles from the border. Felix returned to Tabatinga, Durrant and Bzdak checked into São Paulo’s two-dollar-a-night hotel to wait for a passenger ship, and we made a rough plan to meet two weeks downriver, in Coari.
At the dock that afternoon, before we left, Durrant took me aside. “Don’t let Piotr push you too hard,” she said. “He’s setting a mean pace. I’m worried the two of you will burn out.”
“You should tell him.”
“He won’t hear it. So take care of yourself, okay? And keep an eye on him. I think he’s more tired than he lets on.”
I promised to do that, and Chmielinski and I resumed our routine. The following morning the alarm clock blasted me awake at three-thirty—I had been dreaming that one of my brothers and I had been sentenced to prison—and when I tried to make breakfast, I could not get the dirty stove to light. When it finally went off (I did not see the puddle of fuel collecting at its base), it went off like a fireball, followed by my curses, the squawking of terrified birds, and a wild-eyed Chmielinski bolting from his tent and screaming, “Joe, don’t kill yourself now!”
At the border Brazil shares with Colombia and Peru, the river becomes the Solimões, and from there zigzags east some twelve hundred miles through the state of Amazonas. Brazilians consider Amazonas their Wild West. About the size of Alaska, with fewer people than Philadelphia, it contains some 20 percent of Brazil’s land mass but less than 1 percent of its population; aside from the cities of Manaus and Tefé, and a few small towns like Tabatinga, São Paulo, and Coari, it is nearly uninhabited. Given that, the proximity of Iquitos (which has a duty-free port), the influence of Leticia, and the hefty taxes Brazil levies on foreign goods, a comfortable living can be made running contraband boat engines, transistor radios, hand tools, stereos, televisions, clothes, motorcycles, and crates of produce along the Solimões. A smugglers’ code governs life on the river.
That morning, seeking directions, Chmielinski overtook a dugout canoe. It raced for the bank and a man jumped out and shouldered a rifle. He relaxed when Chmielinski explained himself, but as we left, he yelled out, “Be careful! The river is full of bandits!”
After that, when we met traffic I hung back in my kayak, secured my paddle, and put my hands under my deck. If Chmielinski felt at all threatened, he mentioned that I was armed and nodded in my direction—a signal for me to squint into the bush as if sighting a target. Though nervous during these charades, at times I had to fight to keep from laughing out loud. I had not touched a gun since I was a kid.
The forest along the Solimões may be the lushest on the Amazon. The trees tend to be tall, well over fifty feet, and the bush thicker than any I
had seen in Peru. Our second day below São Paulo we paddled dawn to dusk without spotting a single hut. The river itself was perplexing. In the parlance of the Amazon, the Solimões is a “white” river, thick with Andean silt, which gives it a coffee-and-cream color. The silty deposits have made the várzea, as the Amazon floodplain is known, a jigsaw puzzle of natural levees and ditches (variously called furos, paranás, and canals). Navigation can be confusing, and there are few beaches on which to camp.
That night, New Year’s Eve, we traveled until dark before picking up the lights of a cattle ranch, but the frightened owner would not let us stay. We pitched camp on the bank below the ranch, in a fetid puddle of mud and clay. The air reeked of manure and mud stuck like paint to anything it touched. Blackflies competed fiercely with mosquitoes for their pound of flesh.
We took what comfort we could from the routine of making camp. We erected tents, stretched a line between them, hung up life jackets and rainsuits to dry, drew water, brewed tea, sponged out our boats. Chmielinski cooked chili, and the two of us sat on a muddy log and ate it.
“In Poland this is the biggest day of the year,” he said. “In Krakow everyone is dancing. The relatives are together eating a big dinner. But never are they eating chili.”
“Do you miss them?”
“Yes. And they are missing me. Every year for six years they are leaving one plate empty on the table.”
“For you.”
“Yes.”
“Someday maybe it will not be empty.”
“That is something I cannot think about. It will make me crazy.”
“Have they ever been able to visit you?”
“No, but they are remembering me.”
“I’m sure they are.”
“Happy New Year, Joe.”
“Happy New Year, Piotr.”
After dinner we heard distant gunshots, and that night we slept with machetes at our sides, though I did not know what I would do if I had to use mine. Frogs croaked, nightbirds yawped, bats whirred (Durrant had given me a three-shot rabies prophylaxis against these), and though I dove into my tent as fast as I could, had the netting unzipped for perhaps fifteen seconds, an insect zoo managed to establish itself on the underside of my tent ceiling. By candlelight I saw two enormous red ants, a winged ant that looked like a termite, a squadron of gnats, two black moths, and three fat mosquitoes that became red Rorschach blots on page fifty-two of my third notebook. The disturbed survivors flitted and buzzed until I settled down to sleep.