Mark leaned forward from where he was crammed, pretzellike, among the jumble of supplies. “Uh, anybody ever go over the edge?”
Boris’s voice didn’t change. He was concentrating on the mist-shrouded single-lane road ahead. “Oh, sure. All the time. When it’s a bus, it can be really bad.”
I looked out the window. It was starting to get dark, and I was glad of it. Now I wouldn’t have to contemplate the fog, or the nothingness that it masked. I envisioned dozens of decrepit, twisted, rusting buses lying in the deep ravine below the road like the carcasses of so many dead dinosaurs.
We spent the night at a plantation on the other side of the Alto Madre de Dios enjoying the comfort of real beds. Waking us were the raucous shouts of macaws, parrots, and, in particular, the greater and lesser oropendula, whose melodious bell-like calls sounded like a chorus of flautists tuning up to play Debussy or Ravel. Leaving immediately after a breakfast whose white veranda setting was straight out of Somerset Maugham, we started downriver. In the heavily loaded, attenuated, motorized dugout, the journey took longer than anticipated. It did not occur to me until much later that the weight of two extra bodies in the supply canoe might have played havoc with Boris’s calculations and accustomed schedule. If such was the case, he very diplomatically never said a word about it.
Powering up the Manú River after a brief stop at the wannabe town of Boca Manú, we soon began to encounter enormous logjams comprised of huge trees that had been swept down the river by the annual rainy season floods. The irresistible power of water was evident all around us. As we maneuvered to go around one such pile, movement on its crest caught my eye.
Standing at the apex of a two-story-high jumble of gigantic mahogany logs stood a huge Matsigenka. Naked save for a pair of donated and incongruously colorful shorts, he was holding a portable chainsaw in one hand and waving cheerfully to us with the other as we motored past. One of Boris’s employees, he was engaged in cutting wood for the lodge-to-be. I will forever remember him standing there, a shirtless black-haired warrior content to do solitary battle with immense tree trunks that had been thrown together like the pieces from a giant’s game of pickup sticks.
The sun falls fast in the tropics. Though forced to slow our speed because of the darkness, we continued upriver. Standing in the bow, Boris trained a spotlight the size of a half-gallon jug on the water ahead. From time to time, he would call out instructions to the boatman manning the tiller. A pair of eyes like gold coins flashed on the starboard riverbank, and our host quickly swung his light around. Caught momentarily in its glare, something small, swift, and spotted snarled softly at us before whirling to vanish into the jungle.
“Jaguarundi,” Boris informed us. “Not easy to see.”
There was nothing to indicate the turnoff for the lodge site: no sign, no mark on the seasonally shifting riverbank. But both Boris and the boatman knew exactly where to pull in. While the men who had been waiting for the dugout began to unload the small mountain of supplies, our young host plunged into the dark jungle. Guided by flashlight and despite our fatigue buoyed up by excitement, we walked, slid, tripped, and stumbled through forest that closed in around us like a wet, clinging green blanket.
After an hour’s walk, we emerged into a small clearing. In front of our exhausted eyes, an oxbow lake glistened magically in the moonlight: Cocha Salvador. The sharply defined silhouettes of tents stood out against the surrounding chaotic verdure. Directed to our individual peaked quarters, Mark and I collapsed on our respective sleeping bags. On, not in. The suffocating humidity rendered covering of any kind not only superfluous but intolerable.
Arising the following morning to the music of effervescent songbirds and the prehistoric caw of turkey-size hoatzins, we soon discovered that the bulk of Boris’s time was taken up with supervising the construction of the lodge. Just as he had told us, it was still very much in the initial stages of construction. Proudly, he showed us where the visitors’ rooms were going to go, the hygienic facilities, the meeting and dining center, the library. At present, every one of these was represented only by mahogany pillars that had been painstakingly driven into the reluctant ground.
“The whole complex is being built of salvaged mahogany.” He grinned. “It may be the only all-mahogany lodge in the world. Ecologically sound, because all of the wood is salvage taken from the river. Also, mahogany is the only local wood white ants [termites] won’t eat.”
We had (I cannot say enjoyed) our meals in a large communal tent that I quickly dubbed la casa de los mosquitos, because there always seemed to be more mosquitoes humming around within than without. The mosquitoes of Manú have their own happy hour, during which time they leisurely sample whatever purported insect repellent you happen to have ineffectually slathered on your poor, defenseless body in the faint hope of dissuading them from pursuing their natural inclinations to act like a thousand diminutive Draculas. Having sipped their fill of your inadequate repellent and no doubt compared its vintage with that of previous years, they then turn their attention to the evening’s main course: you. At such moments, I would grit my teeth and remind myself that the ferocious biting bugs of Manú are one reason the region remains relatively pristine and has not been overrun by prospectors and poachers.
Drenched in tepid perspiration day and night, we would have killed for a five-minute shower. As yet, the only showers at the site existed in Boris’s plans for the lodge. But there was an alternative, if one was fast enough and brave enough and desperate enough to make use of it.
We were told that the diurnal mosquitoes of Manú clock out at precisely five-fifteen p.m. while their nocturnal counterparts don’t report for work until five-thirty. This provided a fifteen-minute window—no more, no less—during which time every one of Boris’s workers flung off their clothes like a clutch of Wall Street bankers suddenly converted to nudism, plunged madly into the lake, splashed about like a bunch of demented day-trippers from a Lima asylum, erupted from the water, and hastily reclothed themselves.
In the course of our first evening in Manú, Mark and I observed this frenzied and highly localized ritual with a mixture of amazement, envy, and trepidation. This was, after all, my first time in the Amazon and I was . . . leery.
“I guess there are no piranhas in the lake,” I told Boris, who had chosen to forgo that evening’s collective ablutions.
“Oh no,” he corrected me cheerfully. “The cocha is full of piranhas. But they don’t bother you unless the water level is very low or there is blood in the water. All that crazed stuff you see in the movies: That’s just Hollywood. If you want, tomorrow we’ll go fishing for piranhas. They’re very good eating.”
Uh-huh, I told myself. And they no doubt think the reverse is true. By day three, however, the accumulated caked sweat on my corpus was making me feel like an Egyptian mummy imprisoned in a California sauna, and the promise of cool water had grown too tempting to be ignored any longer. So it was that Mark and I found ourselves anxiously lined up facing the lakeshore along with Boris’s milling mob of local indigenous and mestizo workers. Enjoying themselves immensely, they grinned at the two apprehensive gringos in their midst. I could understand but little of what they were saying, but their gestures were eloquent. Resolute but still uneasy, we smiled determinedly back.
The designated moment arrived. As if on command, the last biting insect vanished from the enveloping superheated air. And as though they had been vaporized, clothes slipped off swarthy, muscular bodies as twenty or so men of varying ethnic backgrounds and skin hues promptly plunged into the lake like so many naked schoolboys out of a bucolic Norman Rockwell painting. We all splashed about frantically, my friend and I in a delirium of delight as the almost chill water banished the accrued and all but crusted perspiration from our bodies.
Bathtime was up far too soon. Having been warned, we charged back to shore as fast as we had fled from it and hurriedly dressed ourselves—in the same sweat-soaked clothing from which we had just escaped. I felt like a moth forced t
o again take up residency in its icky, cast-off cocoon.
Twenty minutes later, we were again drenched in perspiration and glumly readying ourselves for another restless night’s sleep.
One of the worst experiences I have ever gone through in my travels occurred the following night when the lower portion of my insides woke me from a fitful and restless slumber. Nocturnal urination was not a problem. It was performed outside one’s tent, a few steps into the forest.
I did not have to urinate.
Fumbling through the darkness inside the tent, I found and checked my watch. My heart sank. It was a little after two-thirty in the morning. The living, breathing organism that was the Amazon was all around me. The sounds of the jungle at night are far more amenable when experienced in the comfort of one’s own home as they emerge from a movie soundtrack or a pleasant mood–inducing recording. In the isolation and feverish reality of the sweltering rain forest itself, those same curious sounds can be, by turns, provoking or sinister. As an accompaniment to a suddenly overwhelming need to go to the bathroom at two-thirty in the morning in the middle of untouched jungle, their overall effect tends to incline toward the latter.
I remonstrated with my bowels. I told myself over and over that I didn’t really have to go. I insisted to my intestines that they could wait until morning. With increasing urgency, my innards maintained otherwise. The brain disposes; the body imposes.
Crawling out of my tent, I flicked on my small flashlight. Its beam was distressingly short and narrow. Around me, the camp was completely silent. Locating the relevant trail that had been pointed out to us when we had first arrived, I began walking.
Few places on Earth are as dark as the rain forest at night. Like damp sheets, moist green-black walls close in around you on all sides. The forest’s leaf-fingers reach out to touch you, to caress you, to explore you as you stride hurriedly forward, trying to have as little contact as possible with the crush of overripe life. It is not a place for claustrophobes.
At night in the jungle, a different flourish of life emerges to eat—and to hunt. Spiders as big as dinner plates, snakes whose venom can kill in minutes, giant scorpions and centipedes are joined by all manner of biting bugs gravid with parasites and infectious diseases, some of which are so rare or new they do not yet even have names, much less antidotes. Things that crawl and slither and jump are everywhere, and outside the thin civilizing beam of your flashlight, you cannot see a single one of them. Rustlings, movements, small flurries of sound from all sides tease and confuse your hearing and your sense of place.
Was that a movement? Quickly, you swing your light around, and you see nothing save perhaps the slight bobbing of a branch or the up-and-down quiver where a leaf has been disturbed. A subtle cough reaches you—perhaps a jaguar, lord of the rain forest? I walked faster.
The single pit toilet that had been dug to service the workers had necessarily been sited a good distance away from the lake and the camp. The smell of it was unavoidable, but oddly not overpowering. There was no roof over the small clearing, no walls surrounding it. A single rough bench seat was all that held the visitor safely clear of the suppurating ooze that lay below. Sitting there in the middle of the Amazonian night, nervously trying to dissect every crackle and peep and hoot while urging my convulsing digestive system to hurry and finish its work, I was not worried about what might be moving silently through the dark forest around me, or waiting to drop down from the tangle of branches above. All I could think of, all I could try not to imagine, was what might be lurking and slithering and slipping through the accumulated organic morass beneath my partially naked, vulnerable body. I would far rather face an angry armed man.
Ever since that night, in whatever corner of the planet I happen to find myself, I always make it a point before the sun sets to pay a visit to whatever sanitary facility is available—no matter how crude or seemingly unhygienic it may appear to be.
Another couple of days were to pass before I was to make the all-too intimate acquaintance of a singular ant.
Having found a little time to slip away from supervising construction of the lodge, Boris was guiding Mark and me on one of our longer hikes through the rain forest. As we walked, he enthusiastically pointed out colorful insects, named trees and bushes, and struggled to identify birds according to their songs and calls, careful always to give their scientific as well as common names. It was another steamy late afternoon. Tomorrow would also be hot and steamy, as would the day after that, and the day following. Unless it rained hard, in which case it would only be warm and damp for a while. Once the rain stopped, it would inevitably turn hotter and steamier than ever.
Quite unexpectedly, we came to a clearing in the forest.
It was immediately apparent that this was no inadvertent open space. A single tree stood in the middle of a parklike circle some twenty feet in diameter. The tree itself was not particularly impressive. The clearing that surrounded it was. The site looked as if it had just been mowed by some especially devoted golf course groundskeeper tending to a particularly loved piece of turf. Despite being surrounded on all sides by a rich, loamy, decaying mat of sodden and nourishing rain-forest detritus, not so much as a single green shoot poked its hopeful head skyward from the cleared area.
“Palo santo.” Boris pointed at the tree that was thriving in the center of the inexplicable circle. “The ants that live in the tree keep the area around it perfectly clear. Within the boundaries, nothing is allowed to live that might take nutrients or water from the tree or otherwise harm it. If something starts to grow, they cut it down. If it moves, they kill it or drive it away. In return, the tree gives the ants a home.”
I had long read of such symbiotic ant-tree relationships. The fire ants that dwelled within the tangarana tree are called by the same name as their home: tangarana ants. They were not as widely known and did not have the same widespread malevolent cache as army ants or the dreaded isula ants, but they were feared nonetheless.
“Come, I’ll show you.” Boris started toward the solitary bole. Mark and I exchanged a glance and followed.
Up close, we studied the foot-thick tree trunk. There wasn’t an ant in sight. Unsheathing his machete, Boris reversed it and using the solid haft began tapping lightly on the wood. Within seconds, the trunk was swarming with hundreds of ants. Observing them, I relaxed a little. Despite the frenetic activity they displayed as they searched for the source of the disturbance, they were no more than a quarter inch in length. I had already seen and photographed at close range much larger and far more threatening army ant soldiers. Taking out my video camera, I began recording the activity.
Having stepped back and resheathed his machete, Boris was watching me closely.
“Be careful. Don’t let them get on you.”
“I’m all right.” Seen through the camera’s viewfinder, the ants appeared oddly detached from reality, as if I was already viewing them in finished, edited form. I moved the camera lens closer, confident that I could get good pictures without making physical contact. After all, wasn’t I already experienced at this? Why . . . I had already spent nearly a whole week in the Amazon rain forest.
An incredible searing pain shot through my left hand.
It seems that the enraged tangarana ants not only rush out to defend the trunk of their tree home—swarming into the branches, they fan out into the leaves to drop down onto any intruders below. I had been savagely attacked by a quarter-inch-long parachutist armed with a built-in hypodermic and a toxin that burned like fire.
Jumping back from the tree, I managed to hang on to the camera with my right hand while furiously shaking my left as I launched into an unscripted, unchoreographed, and exceedingly vigorous jig. Back home in the States, such a reaction might well have prompted laughter from any bystanders, or even gained me a few seconds on America’s Funniest Home Videos.
Boris wasn’t laughing. He had also, I noticed through the excruciating discomfort, retreated well back from the tree, taking
my wide-eyed companion with him.
Realizing that no one from the New York Ballet was around to grade my potential and wholly involuntary audition, I stopped jumping about like a madman. Clenching my teeth, I searched for the source of the fiery pain. In the center of the back of my left hand, one of those tiny ants was busily screwing itself abdomen- and stinger-first into my flesh, rotating its entire body like a tiny organic drill. It took several forceful shoves with the edge of my other hand to finally dislodge the ant. While the miniscule arthropod that had inflicted the pain had been dealt with, the fire remained. It did not go away, in fact, for a couple of days. Not until the inflamed red spot the size of a dime that marked the injection site finally faded from sight.
Coming over, Boris eyed the angry-looking redness appraisingly.
“I have some salve if you want to put something on it.”
“No, I’ll be all right,” I told him. What I didn’t say was, I’ll tolerate it for as long as it lasts in order to remind me of my arrogance.
It is said that when the local natives want to severely punish someone, they tie them naked to a tangarana tree. I feel safe in presuming that if the miscreant so condemned doesn’t die, they are suitably chastised for the rest of their life. I know from experience what one sting can do.
I prefer not to imagine what a hundred or so would feel like.
* * *
Northeastern Gabon, January 2007
IN THE MOUNTAINOUS NORTHEASTERN CORNER of the central African nation of Gabon, in a region noticed, if at all, by the rest of the world for its occasional headline-making outbreaks of the deadly Ebola virus, lies an Eden-like clearing in the jungle called Langoué Bai. Made famous by National Geographic explorer J. Michael Fay in the course of his trail-blazing mega-transect of central Africa, Langoué Bai is home to forest elephants, sitatungas, lowland gorillas, and other fabulous beasts. My sister, Carol, had always wanted to see gorillas, while I dreamed of seeing elephants on a beach. Gabon is the only place in the world where the latter encounter is reasonably possible. Having successfully encountered the surreal sand-loving pachyderms on the coast in Loango National Park, we were now on our way inland to Langoué.