A loud whistle sounded indicating that the boat was about to embark on its two day journey down the Amazon river. I swung lazily back in forth in my hammock, crammed between two hundred other occupied hammocks on the deck of the boat. The mass of swaying bodies created the sensation that we were out at sea before the boat even embarked. As I turned the page in Mark Twain’s, Roughing It, one of his characters leapt from the page onto the ship, and approached me.
“'Scuse me,” I heard a congenial voice say. I lowered my book to find a fat, bald, middle aged man with a thick pair of glasses, smiling broadly. He introduced himself as Tim, and complimented me on my choice of reading.
I smiled back. “What books by Twain have you read?” I inquired.
He thought for a long moment. “None.”
“Oh, well, what do you like to read,” I asked. Tim stared out into the thick jungle.
“I don’t read much,” he answered. “I did read a book a couple years back. Name was Pitching for Pizza if I recall. It's 'bout a pitcher. He ain’t very good, but he’s got a pizza company as his sponsor, and he’s got to do well to make them happy. Great book. Hilarious book. I read it a few times. It was fiction.”
I liked Tim already. We spent much of the remainder of the day getting to know one another. Tim was a southern Baptist preacher who had been sent to the city of Chachapoyas in the Peruvian Andes by a small town church in “Ole Miss” to show these near-neanderthals the God-given superiority of the Southern Baptist interpretation of the Good Book. He had been living in Chachapoyas with his wife and daughter for almost six years when we met.
It was Tim's lifelong goal to explore either the Amazon jungle or the plains of Africa. Since he found himself in Peru, he decided the former was more practical. He had kissed his wife and daughter goodbye two days earlier and headed East to Tarapoto, where he boarded the boat bound for Iquitos. Since I was also there to explore the Amazon we agreed to team up. A bizarre travel companion perhaps, but I knew that Tim would make the adventure all the more unique, and disappoint me he did not.
Tim is of the delightful breed of southerner naturally endowed with the gift of ideal exaggeration, and the ability to spin a fun yarn from a simple situation. He speaks very few words of Spanish despite his six years in Peru, but is very generous with the few he does know, even when they are entirely inadequate to the task.
That evening, during dinner in the ship's cafeteria, Tim talked on and on about produce and farm life. He talked about sexing chicks, then crocks, even kittens, and though we had yet to see caimans he even speculated about how to go about sexing them too. With some animals such as alligators, I learned, you could even determine their sex before they leave the egg.
By the time we received our hot cocoa dessert Tim was going on about the castration of various animals—horses being among the bloodier and more difficult that he had performed. He even talked about a turkey he once owned that raped to death a duck, a chicken, then a rooster, before they finally had to kill it. All this, to our mutual dismay, when turkeys do not even have an observable sexual appendage.
Tim was, quite simply, a wealth of useful farm knowledge. He also grew up on a farm where he helped his dad care for 150 beehives, and had the delightful job of overseeing the production of more honey than a healthy human heart should pump in a lifetime.
If, throughout the course of this description, you have not come to establish a mental picture of Tim so coinciding with southern stereotypes as to make it seem farcical, than let me add that Tim never once changed from his single pair of overalls during the week we spent together.
That evening we learned from a local man on the boat that we would be stopping in the small town of Yurimaguas to exchange passengers and supplies later that night. The local also knew some guides in Yurimaguas who would be able to take us on a trip deep into the jungle. It would be much cheaper here, and more remote than anywhere else we could find. That night, with only this man's word to go on, I followed him off the boat, Tim sauntering in tow. The local man took us to a house where he introduced us to a woman who made all of the arrangements, outlining our trip on various maps, helping us acquire food, and collecting the money. We spent the night on the floor in one of her extra rooms.
In the morning we met our guides Alberto and Javier. The four of us drove for miles along muddy roads into the jungle, occasionally having to get out and push. After several hours we arrived at a small river where various canoes were docked along the bank. We chose two that did not have any holes in the bottom, packed them with supplies and provisions, and set out on our four-day journey.
It was the rainy season, and every two hours the sunny skies dimmed slightly, and let out a warm shower of rain. The constant precipitation had caused the narrow river to flood its banks and consume miles of land on either side. The entire rainforest was resting in two feet of water. This meant that we were totally free to wander in our canoes. We took shortcut after shortcut, veering from the river, and crossing through thick jungle.
The town of Yuri-Maguas Javier explained to me, got its name from the two largest tribes living in the region. The Yuris, and the Maguas.
“And which ethnicity are you?” I asked, first Javier, then Alberto.
Javier was a young man in his early twenties, fit and competitive when it came to staying in the lead. He shared the canoe with Tim, his strength meant to offset Tim's weight. “I am Yuri,” Javier answered proudly.
Alberto was older, in his late forties or early fifties, calm, stoic, enigmatic of the wisdom and skill that comes with age. He rarely spoke, but we quickly learned to communicate through our actions. “I am Magua,” Alberto answered proudly.
When I asked them about being from different tribes they laughed. Of course they share the same jovial sense of superiority and competition as neighbors anywhere, but their tribes had come to live peacefully, lovingly, with one another.
When the river opened up into a wide lagoon. Alberto held up his hand, motioning for us to remain quiet. He rhythmically smacked the side of the canoe with his hand. After several minutes a small spray of mist sprang from the water nearby followed by a large fin. Amazon river dolphins. They are smaller than normal dolphins, the larger females growing to a maximum length of about eight feet, and are one of the few dolphin species that live their lives in freshwater. One after the other their fins surfaced in response to Javier's ancient call. After a minute, they disappeared.
The next morning, as Tim, Javier and I awoke, Alberto came rowing up to the shore. “Where did you go?” I asked. He smiled slightly and dropped a five gallon bucket of piranhas at my feet. He had speared all of them before we even woke up. We lived off of those fish for the next several days.
Tim may have embodied many of the stereotypes people associate with America, but when it came to eating, he impressed even Javier and Alberto. Having grown up in poverty in Mississippi, Tim knew not to be wasteful. He ate every part of the fish. The eyes, the head, the bones. The only thing left with a fish by the time Tim got through with it was a hollow skull with a dangling spinal cord. Alberto and Javier nodded approvingly. Sometimes Tim even finished off the parts of the fish that Alberto, Javier, and I couldn't even eat.
Javier and Alberto's vision was supernatural. They could spot the tiniest of animals, even at great distances. Often times I never even saw them, not even with the aid of my binoculars. Were Tim not in the process of teaching me to become a good christian I would have been inclined to doubt the very existence of some of the animals that they claimed to see. But when time and again my doubt was proved wrong I came to think of Alberto and Javier's vision as its own biblical miracle. How could it be possible, without divine intervention, for anyone to spot an eight inch iguana in a green tree in the greenest of jungles from three hundred yards away? When we finally pulled up directly beside the branch holding that iguana, I still couldn't even tell where it was until it jumped into the water.
When it came to spotting animals, monkeys were their forte.
“That is the black monkey,” Javier informs us one day—a creature not much bigger than a squirrel. “It’s the smallest monkey in the jungle.”
Wow, the smallest monkey in the jungle, I thought to myself.
And the next day, kayaking along, Alberto points out another group of monkeys. “Those grey monkeys over there are even smaller than the black monkeys we saw earlier.”
“Even smaller!” I exclaimed in surprise. “This then, is the smallest monkey in the jungle.”
“Yes,” he assures me, hesitates, then mentions another we have yet to encounter that is smaller still.
We passed a lot of trees bearing fruits of various sorts, and each time I asked “Can I eat it?”
“No,” was Alberto’s sharp reply. “Only monkeys eat it. It tastes bad.”
“Can I eat it anyway?”—“NO.”
On a different occasion we parked our boats along the bank and went for a hike. Alberto pointed out a lot of plants and told us of their useful properties.
“This one is a medicine for infections.”
“Can I eat it?” I asked hopefully—“No.”
“This one is used to cauterize wounds.”
“Can I eat it?”—“No!”
“This is one of the strongest adhesives in the world.”
“Can I eat it?”—“No!!”
Later as we kayaked along, Alberto reached up, plucked a small black fruit from a tree, and handed it back to me. Finally something I could eat. I pried into its stringy, sticky exterior. After a few bites it quickly became apparent why Alberto and Javier had not joined me in the feast. Afterwards I stopped inquiring about edible fruits.
Despite the fact that the Amazon jungle hosts the greatest abundance of life of anywhere on earth, it seemed to be entirely inedible. I am confident that with all of the local knowledge of the jungle that I learned that if I were trapped out in the Amazon for five days I would not be able to survive for one of them.
One morning as we canoed along, Alberto pointed out a sloth in a tree beside the riverbank. We maneuvered closer and as the sloth slowly descended from the tree I was able to get closer to the sloth than any animal yet. It was about two feet tall with a black head, and thick greyish fur covering the rest of its body.
“Ya know, there's two types of sloths here in the Amazon,” Tim offered. “The two-toed sloth, and the three-toed sloth. Which do ya reckon that one is?”
Tim and I sat there speculating for a while, and about the time we gave up on a conclusion, Javier pulled them up to the tree, grasped his machete, and began chopping the tree down so that we could get a closer look!
“And the police don’t mind?” I asked Alberto.
“No,” he assured me. “We are authorized tour guides.”
Authorized to molest animals in a national park—I wondered what the exam was like to get that kind of certification.
When the tree collapsed, its trunk, and the sloth’s back, slammed forcefully against the surface of the water. The sloth hardly noticed. Javier balanced along the narrow floating tree trunk, and pried open the sloth’s determined grip. We proceeded to humiliate that poor sloth, posing with him in turn, making him swim for our amusement, and cling to the side of our boat. The sloth seemed more like a stuffed animal than a wild creature.
Tim couldn't resist sexing the creature and determined that he was of the ornery male variety. The sloth tried to defend his personal notions of decency by swiping at Tim with his deadly three inch claws, but his movements were always in slow motion, and there was plenty of time to move aside.
The sloth was a good sport about the whole thing though, and after a half hour or so we thanked him and found him a new tree. Turned out he was a three toed sloth and as we drifted away I could see he had two of them toes peeled back for us.
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