Thrown Under the Omnibus, page 41
Iquitos has a feel, a very Estados Unidos feel, of being a place with no reason to be in that place, like most towns in … Illinois. Iquitos was founded in the mid-1700s by Jesuits in order to pester local Indians with religion. The Indians, of course, have long ago all been pestered, many to death. Modern Iquitos dates from the rubber boom of the late nineteenth century. The famous rubber baron Fitzcarraldo made a fortune here, or lived here, or passed through. Local history is obscure on the point. Anyway, Fitzcarraldo, the movie, was shot in Iquitos. “Signs of the great opulence of those rubber boom days may still be seen in mansions and edifices,” said my guidebook. By which was meant, I think, that there’s an old hotel with balconies and that some of the narrow, squat, fin de siècle stucco town houses have doorways decorated with Portuguese tiles.
Iquitos is the nethermost deepwater port on the Amazon, twenty-three hundred miles upstream. But not many oceangoing freighters call anymore. It’s a seventeen-day trip from the Atlantic, and there’s no pressing reason to make it. Rubber comes from factories now. Iquitos exports some Brazil nuts, some plywood, some tobacco, some mahogany, and photos of poison frogs. Most of the locals seem to make their living in the open-air market, selling each other the same enormous catfish—a shovel-nosed thing the size of a bunk-bed mattress and marked with the dun-colored camouflage that was used in the quite-different environment of Desert Storm. There is oil being looked for in the region, however. And some has been found already. Another boom approaches, perhaps. More decorative tiles and hotels with balconies are on their way. In fact a skyscraper was even started in Iquitos. But the contractors were building it between two of the eleven hundred tributaries that contain 66 percent of the earth’s river water, which means 66 percent of the earth’s river mud, and the thing began to sink. The empty shell stands eight or ten stories high, moldy and just slightly out of plumb.
Julio collected us in the clapboard bus and took us to the tour-company dock. Here we got on board a very long and narrow boat with an absurd palm-frond roof. The boat had a large outboard motor dropped in a well near the stern and a little steering wheel at the bow connected to the engine by thirty-foot strands of scraping, twanging coat-hanger wire.
We went fifty miles down the Amazon in three and a half hours, traveling not quite fast enough to water-ski but fast enough to dangle a hand over the side and not get it eaten by piranhas. The big sun and big clouds made dapples of Impressionist light on the water, and the breeze was as good as that moment in a noontime parking lot when the car AC finally kicks in. The fashionably earth-toned river complemented the green jungle verge. It was a scene of inordinate charm that stretched along the Amazon’s banks … and stretched and stretched and stretched—uniform, unvarying, same, and identical for fifty miles. Fortunately, the boat driver sold beer from a cooler.
And the boat had an interesting bathroom. It was a little outhouse past the stern of the ship, hanging over the water aft of the outboard motor. To get there you had to climb across the top of that outboard, its propeller churning horribly below. Then, when you pulled up the toilet-seat lid, you realized you were right over the engine’s rooster-tail wake—death douche.
Our tour company’s lodge was tucked up a creek in the jungle. Tree-trunk pilings supported a ramble of thatch and board buildings all roofed in the same manner as the boat. One tennis court–size screened area enclosed a dining room and a bar. Guitars leaning in a corner threatened folk music. The rooms themselves were just partitioned nooks, open beneath the roof. Mosquito nets covered the beds. There was no electricity or plumbing, and the showers were fed from gravity tanks full of river water more or less warmed by the sun.
Michael called the style of the lodge “primitive primitif.” Although this tour company is owned by an urban corporation, the people who run it and who built its facilities are either Indians or ribereños, the poor people who live along the riverbanks and are a mixture of Indian, Spaniard, rubber planter, river boatman, and whatever. It would be interesting to know what people who live in humble circumstances think of creating humble circumstances for people who live in luxury to visit. But they were too polite to say.
Whatever the employees’ opinion of their tasks, they accomplished them with grace. The lodge had ice for drinks, plenty of hammocks, fresh fruit, fried plantains, wonderful little Peruvian potatoes, and excellent (very large) catfish fillets. And, except for a biology professor from Lima and his assistant, we were the only guests. There was twice as much staff as us. A perfect wilderness adventure, or it would have been except Julio inveigled us into a nature hike.
Some people would think it odd to go all the way to the Amazon and never get out and take a close-up look at … Yow! Did you see the size of that bug?! Personally, I believe a rocking hammock, a good cigar, and a tall gin and tonic is the way to save the planet. From a recumbent, and slightly buzzed, perspective, Mother Earth is a fine specimen of womanhood. And the environment is something for which everyone should give his all, if somebody will go get my wallet.
I have accumulated a three-foot stack of books and articles about the rain forest. (Just think of the dead trees. And, by the way, do you send a decorative arrangement of cement to a plant funeral?) From this reading material, I gather that, if the rain forest disappears, we’ll have to get our air in little bottles from the Evian company and biodiversity will vanish and pretty soon we’ll only have about one kind of animal and with my luck that will be the Lhasa apso. The indigenous peoples will all become exdigenous and move to LA, and this will be tough on them because it’s hard to use a car phone when you’ve got a big wooden disk in your lower lip. Furthermore, we’ll never discover all the marvelous properties of the various herbal treasures that are found in the rain forest, such as Ben & Jerry’s Rainforest Crunch. Also, rain forests are disappearing so fast that by the time you read this they’re probably gone.
In my reading about the rain forest, however, I have found very little description of what it is like to be in a rain forest. You’d think something so wet, hot, and biological would stink like boiled Times Square, but it doesn’t. Jungle has a nice fresh scent, the reason being that there’s so much life in the jungle that anything which dies or is excreted or even gets drowsy is immediately a picnic for something else.
A tree keels over and it’s termite Thanksgiving. A termite slows up and it’s lizard hors d’oeuvres. The lizard takes a nap—kinkajou lunch. And so on up the food chain—and back down it. There’s a spider in the jungle so big it eats birds. The ravenousness of rain forest appetites is such that the floor of the jungle is nearly bare. If you don’t count ants. And you can’t. There are ants in numbers large enough to confuse the people who calculate national debt. There are ants all over every leaf and stem (not to mention every shoe and sock), ants all over the ground and around all the tree trunks, and ants climbing in droves up the jungle vines. Which is something they don’t tell you in the Tarzan books: he went ahhEEEahhEEEahhEEEahh as he swung through the jungle because he had ants in his loincloth.
There are ants as big as AA batteries and ants as small as, well, ants. Leafcutter ants regularly go forth in columns of ten thousand to pick up dime-sized bits of foliage and carry these back to their nests for the purpose, I believe, of making public-television nature movies. My guidebook asked me to imagine that the half-inch leafcutter ants were six feet long. I have my own fantasy life, thank you. Anyway, my guidebook insisted, each of these six-foot creatures would be capable of carrying 750 pounds and move at fifteen miles an hour. Which makes the leafcutter ant nature’s lawn tractor.
The intense, even NBA-like competition among living things in the rain forest means that almost every plant and animal has some kind of stinger, barb, thorn, prickle, spur, spine, poison, or angry advocacy group back in the United States boycotting your place of business. There’s a fierce competition for the nutrients in the ground, which is why rain forest soil is notoriously poor and easily damaged by horticulture. The tremendous hardwood trees of the jungle, rising 120 feet with prodigious rocket-ship tail-fin buttresses and trunks as big around as tract houses, are rooted in earth where you couldn’t grow petunias.
But what it is like to actually be in the rain forest is hot and sticky. When you get out of your hammock and go nature hiking, you’re immediately covered in sweat. Your underwear clings, your shirt clings, your pants cling, and things that EEK! aren’t part of your clothing cling to you. You’re also immediately covered in bugs. And the rain forest is, as its name would imply, rainy. Hence, WHOOPS! slippery. You’re immediately covered in mud too.
While we were trying to remove the sweat, bugs, and mud with handkerchiefs, moist towelettes, and Deep Woods Off (in the environmentally friendly pump containers), Julio was showing us insects that look like sticks and frogs that look like leaves and moths that look like birds and lizards that look like anything they sit on. There seem to be problems with personal identity in the jungle.
The rain forest is not, however, scary, not even in the dark. Though the rain forest is dense, tangled, and filled with remarkably icky things, the conifer woods of Maine are spookier. Not to mention the bushes of Central Park. Maybe this is because anacondas aren’t really inclined to attack people (probably because we taste like towelettes and Deep Woods Off) and the ribereños have eaten most of the crocodiles. Or maybe it’s because the largest land mammal anywhere nearby is the capybara, a sort of giant guinea pig. But I think it’s the sound. The jungle sounds exactly like the jungle sounds in every jungle movie. There are even distant drums, though these turn out to be from popular songs being played on the lodge staff’s boom box. Even in the middle of the night, when you have no idea where you are, it’s impossible to believe there isn’t someone selling popcorn and Milk Duds right around the corner.
Actually, right around the corner was someone collecting bats. The biology professor was stringing fine mesh nets across the jungle paths. These are invisible to bat radar. The bats get as tangled up as jungle hikers who have come around a corner and walked into a fine mesh net full of angry bats.
The professor extracted the bats—and us—and held the bats with wings outspread so we could examine them in the light of Tom and Susan’s video camera.
Why do people spend so little time contemplating the ugliness of nature? How many ordinary humans can get all the way through even the most fabulous sunset without getting up for a beer or going inside to check the evening news? But you can watch an enraged Jamaican fruit bat trying to bite a professor from Lima for hours. A Jamaican fruit bat looks like a colonel in the rat air force. And it’s got a set of teeth on it that you could use to perform an appendectomy. If I were Jamaican, I’d keep the fruit out in the garage or maybe rent a mini-storage space. There was another bat, I didn’t catch the name, which ate pollen or pollinated plants or did something in the pollen line. Anyway, it had a tongue that was a surprise. If bats wore blue jeans, this fellow would be able to get change out of his hip pocket with his tongue. It must make bat date night interesting.
All these bats were furious, swiveling their necks and snapping their heads from side to side, trying to get at the professor’s fingers, taking thumb-sized chunks out of the air with their jaws. And all these bats were male; and, in the throes of their fury, they had erections—tiny, pink bat penises sticking out of their fur. Some feminist theory of something-or-other was being validated here, maybe. Susan and Shelley declined to comment.
For those of us who were not enraged male bats, however, the jungle wasn’t very sexy. That cannot, of course, be literally true, given the reproductive riot and galloping fecundity around us. But, for average norteamericanos, the prospect of romance was something like moving our beds into a sauna, dumping bug spray on the hot rocks, and making love under down quilts.
The gummy swelter of the rain forest only gets worse after dark. When the sun goes down, the air is becalmed, and a humid, gagging smother settles upon the body. Sundown makes the heat get worse, and so, for that matter, does everything else. When the rain comes, the air gets so dense you could serve it as flan. When the wind blows, the atmosphere is as horrid as ever; there’s just more of it. And, when the sun comes up again, it brings the heat of the day.
We got up early the next morning (or would have gotten up if any of us had been able to sleep) and went bird-watching, an activity I don’t understand. Watch birds what? The birds of the Amazon have wonderful names, however.
Undulated tinamou
Horned screamer
Laughing falcon
American finfoot
Wattled jacana
Plumbeous pigeon
Mealy parrot
Common potoo
Ladder-tailed nightjar
Pale-tailed barbthroat
Gould’s jewelfront
Black-eared fairy
Spotted puffbird
Lanceolated monklet
Yellow-billed nunbird
Red-necked woodpecker
Ocellated woodcreeper
Pale-legged hornero
Common piping guan
And these are very useful if, for instance, you’re writing an epic poem about the Bush administration secretary of the interior and need a rhyme for “Manuel Lujan.” But don’t ask me which birds are which. And don’t ask anybody else either. There’s always the horrible chance that they’ll tell you. And seventeen hundred species of birds are found in Peru alone.
Cinnamon-rumped foliage-gleaner
Black-spotted bare-eye
Ash-throated gnateater
Screaming piha
Amazonian umbrellabird
Lesser wagtail-tyrant
Black and white tody-flycatcher
Golden-crowned spadebill
Bright-rumped attila
Social flycatcher
Violaceous jay
Orange-fronted plushcrown
Cocoa thrush
Giant cowbird
Short-billed honeycreeper
Variable seedeater
Purple-throated fruitcrow
I did like the flocks of parrots. They’d all sit together in a tree saying, in unison, “I’m a pretty boy!” No. But I don’t see why, with patience, they couldn’t be trained to do so.
It was strange to see parrots, toucans, macaws, and cockatoos flying around without perches, cages, or a jungle covered in newspapers. Actually, the toucans and macaws weren’t that wild. They were hanging around the lodge, squawking and begging. A macaw ate the shutter release off Shelley’s camera, and one of the toucans stuck its huge beak into Michael’s coffee cup, slurped the contents, and got jittery and irritable.
When we came back from bird-watching (a bit irritable ourselves), Julio found a sloth for Shelley. It was in the top of a cecropia tree reading a letter from Bill Clinton asking it to come to Washington and help reinvent government. Really, it was doing even less than that, although it was doing it upside down, which I think should count against the sloth’s slothfulness. I find even getting upside down fairly laborious.
Shelley had never seen a live sloth. They can’t be kept in captivity because, although sloths eat the leaves from some thirty kinds of trees, any given sloth will eat leaves from only a couple of those kinds, so you’d have to take thirty giant rain forest trees around everywhere with your captive sloths. Tom had a telescope, we set this on a tripod, and Shelley looked through the lens. “Oh, he’s beautiful!” she said. She was wrong. The sloth had a long, awkward, gawky body of the kind basketball players had before steroids were discovered. Julio gave a sharp whistle, and the sloth turned its chalky face—very slowly—in our direction. A green smear of leaf slobber was spread around its mouth.
Sloths move at the speed of congressional debate but with greater deliberation and less noise. Shelley’s sloth stared at us for half an hour and, having decided we were a surprise, headed for cover. One triumvirate of sloth claws came unhooked from a tree branch and a sloth leg swung down like fudge batter dripping from a spatula until another tree branch was languidly encountered and methodically grasped. Then a second sloth limb repeated these motions, then a third, until at last the sloth had all its appendages located elsewhere and thereto the sloth head and body proceeded at a stately pace.
Our notions of grace have been so influenced by slow-motion videotape that sloths seem to be graceful. In fact, they’re just slow. But Shelley disagreed. She wants to start a Sloth Circus. “This is a circus strictly for adults,” said Shelley, “very soothing—Windham Hill calliope music. The clowns are all dressed in business suits. They don’t fall down, they get tripped up by little clauses in contracts. And all the stunts are leisurely. On a high wire in the center ring, the circus sloths sleep late on Sunday morning, then read the New York Times.”
We, too, had a leisurely morning, although Julio had a long list of experiences we’d never forget and were supposed to be having. We finally consented to go in a small speedboat to look for dolphins. There are two kinds of dolphins in the Amazon. Estuarine dolphins look like slimmed-down versions of the Sea World type, as if Flipper’d been doing extra laps and had given up leaping for fish between meals. Amazon River dolphins, however, are pink, a too-vivid parody of flesh, like the Crayolas of that name. You don’t get a good look at pink dolphins because they don’t jump. They just roll to the surface, presenting an indistinct mass of plump tissue—drowned and bloated corpses given unnatural animation, scuba zombies. The ribereños say that the pink dolphins sometimes take human form and appear as beautiful maidens who entice young men (“Want to go out for sushi?”). The dolphin maiden lures her prey to the riverbank. Then the fellow disappears forever. The ribereños consider it bad luck to kill Amazon River dolphins. And even worse luck to date them.
