orinoco
A Place to Paddle
“Venezuela”
7th Century
Pelted with speed-stinging force, we glimpse the expanse of thousands of miles of delta stretching away from the coast below us. Holding each other tight, we down-line into the mud-brown estuary water, bruised, disoriented.
A large leatherback turtle nudges us gently.
“You okay?” Skelele asks.
“Yes. We’re close.”
“I love you.”
We let ourselves sink slowly.
This is a strange thickness. A small-eye hammerhead shark ushers us against the current. Below the silty seabed, we sense the magnetism of oil reserves. As we soften with fresher water, our naniki becomes a sacred sea cow and “giving-beast,” manatee.
I feel a tear on Skelele’s shoulder-fin. “I love you too. But you know …”
“I know, my Egbe told me too.”
The current is turbulent and stronger. This is the way — we think we know, and still have naniki guiding us. Strange naniki and Ni Ara are floating past us though, streaming out to open sea coated in brown, green, slime. Muted. Unrecognizable. We press on.
Thick crouching mangroves gather now in river islets. Glass-water. And in this mirror maze everything seems something else. The sky reversing its altitude in the quicksilver of now. The poetry of future writers wraps this world around us as if trying to lose us, trick us, like the mimicry unfolding. Lapis lazuli … brightly striped in yellow imitating the splashes of sunlight … flowers that are really leaves … fruit — insect-eating plants.
We glide with our heads above water, barely rippling the stillness. Light … from above or below? Was the sky or the earth water? We slide through primeval slime, all of our combined senses ready.
Through the bushes we hear a tapir crashing, a dead tree creaking before thundering down. A kaiman moans, frogs croak, and a shaman’s laugh is a thousand flutes of two differently tuned notes … mimetism — magic — rhythm … surrounding us.
We hear rain too. And then it arrives, drowning everything, submerging us.
Brown the roil
of river
dragging trees
masses of rotting leaves.
Hordes of creatures
seething and churning.
Dragged apart
pulled
deeper.
We surface together again and push harder upriver. Canoes and swollen dead forest naniki, anteaters, sloths … are streaming out, bouncing in the torrential gush. Ke Ara tribes, fleeing from something, shoot arrows at us and we duck only to miss the zap of electric eels.
The current bubbles above and rolls on with its catch, a tugging brown sky over silty beds.
Skelele’s arm is grabbed, and he disappears under. It is Bogotá, the unseen Amazon Queen. Now Cicañcohora, the amphibious men who slept … at the bottom of lakes,19 drag me against the roil. Pre-legends live in this slime, before they were written. Their touch is like the gelatinous smudge they make in the water.
They tug us down into saturation depths and release us, disappearing.
Deep in this murky waterdust, we detect the glitter of gold and both feel a navel pull. A giant tilapia signals deeper into the mud. This blank, thick brown is the mouth of a cave.
Opaque.
Silt out.
Are these “The Lost Steps”? The way? Is this the eternal source, or search, that inspired migration, expedition, imagination? Do steps to another world even exist? Is there a way?
The sludge thickens and squeezes tightly, pulling us into its folds.
“No farther!” A mud ancient’s voice resounds. Squeezing tighter, it thunders in Warao, “Why, why do you think that your ancestors’ path, from the Amazon to the Caribbean Sea, is yours? Find your own way. Go!”
Throttled and flushed out. We are expelled in a gushing flood of a tropical storm. Choked. Knocked. Lashed by huge waves and flung apart.
Land folds into torrid sea
Returning earth to water
Despite the clash
The downpour slides
Feeding river’s greed
Blankness
Driftness
Back in a sea of deadness
Floating
Blind to terrified naniki
Clinging to forest debris
Blindness
Without each other
River’s twang
Now echoes hollow
In mud flats of despair
Baring chords of wreckage
Seeking to repair