Why are we worried about nature’s welfare? How did we get to be enamored of the outdoors? Just go into it for a minute, and no fair taking the indoors with you. Doff the little Donna Karan frock, that rumpus room for your torso. Shed those lacy Christian Dior knickers, gazebo for your butt. Eschew your Joan and David pumps, small personal floors for feet. Enter nature as you, indeed, entered nature. Then get arrested. Police, we mustn’t forget, are part of nature, too.
But let’s say you’re on your own land and properly secluded, and the kids are at camp, and the cleaning lady has gone home, and today isn’t the day the boy comes to mow the lawn, and your husband’s too busy watching ESPN to notice. Go outdoors and cavort. Scamper through the foundation plantings. Roll in the gladiolus. Vault the lawn furniture. Romp ‘neath clothesline and bird feeder. You’ll learn about yourself. And what you’ll learn is that you itch.
Ticks, lice, fleas, mites, poison ivy, poison oak, mosquitoes, blackflies, deerflies, horseflies, sunburn, prickly heat, allergies, rashes, and fungal infections … One thing that’s certain about going outdoors: when you come back inside, you’ll be scratching.
With me it was chiggers.
I was in an Orejón Indian village on the Sucusari River in the Peruvian Amazon. A few slapdash thatch-topped shacks were set around a weedy common. The jungle stood behind with its excess of greens: celadons, olive drabs, chartreuses, envies, gullibilities, golf courses, and Saint Patrick’s Day parades. The locals lolled in their hammocks. Midday hush obtained. The sky was a fine, light, equatorial blue with just a few tubby cumulus clouds as pretty as foam on a beer.
It was Eden, a scruffy Eden, Eden after the apple had been eaten but before anybody realized they’d have to go to work. Anyway, there was a one-room schoolhouse in the village and a beautiful schoolteacher barely out of her teens and very shy. I was thinking, if I were a younger man, maybe I’d get into this ecology stuff. With altruistic enthusiasm born of undying love, the two of us could save a rain forest and a half. And rescue mountain ranges. And give the Heimlich maneuver to an occasional small continent. While I was thus woolgathering, one of the beautiful schoolteacher’s tiny charges booted a soccer ball into my knee.
It was 95 degrees. I’m as old as the president of the United States. I have a body like a sack of gummy bears. And it’s been thirty years since I was a third-string forward on my high school’s JV soccer team. But such is male vanity that for the next half hour I was America’s one-man World Cup team battling a half dozen midget Pelés. Running through the verdure, I got chiggers. Who got the schoolteacher, I can’t say. She wandered away unimpressed.
I’d flown to Peru from Florida. There’s a corner of Miami International Airport devoted to off-brand Latin American airlines: Cha-Cha Air, Trans Mato Grosso, Malvinas National, Aero Tierra del Fuego, and so forth. American “eco-tourists,” seeking solitude in untrammeled wilderness and lonely communion with the natural world, jammed the ticket counters. There’s a look about these sightseers. They haven’t been out in the weather enough to get skin-cancerous, and they haven’t been in an office or shop for fourteen hours a day either. Theirs is the healthy glow of people without enough to do. They are in their thirties or forties but sit on the airport floor cross-legged as though they were fifteen. They touch each other a lot and make prolonged eye contact, and their conversations are filled with little noises of affirmation. The men are not actually unshaven but look as though they are nerving themselves not to shave. The women wear their hair plain and their faces scrubbed and go undecorated except for large pieces of “native” jewelry—that is, jewelry from cultures where women spend as much time dolling themselves up as they can spare from baby having and yam-field tilling.
Why do the eco-tourists have neon-blue hiking shorts? And fluorescent-purple windbreakers? Caution-signal-yellow sweat socks? Crap table–toned fanny packs? Hojo roof–tinted luggage? T-shirts the hue of sex dolls? What is the connection between love of nature and colors not found in ditto?
Ahead of me in line was an all-female tour group, bound for the Amazon, as it were. They talked about being an all-female tour group. This, they told each other, was meaningful. Also meaningful were herbal medicines, spiritual healings, astral projections, auras, and other things not subject to empirical observation or experimental proof. Natural creatures showing appreciation of nature by holding natural science in contempt—nature is mysterious.
“Party of ten women?” said the Peruvian airline ticket agent.
“Party of ten loud women!” said one of the women, loudly.
I’d signed up for my own Amazon trip more or less at random. I had a pile of tour-company brochures, each saying the rain forest was a marvel and all promising “experiences you’ll never forget.” I guess the people who write the brochures—or the people who read them—haven’t had many such experiences or the tour companies would tout “experiences you’ll wish you could remember more of,” those being the fun kind. The brochures also pointed out that I wouldn’t be exploring for oil or cutting down tropical hardwoods. In fact, I’d be doing the rain forest a kind of favor by going there and thanking it for sharing. And every brochure had a large picture of a poison frog. I don’t know why this was a selling point.
I hoped, of course, to be thrown in with, well, ten loud women, for instance. But no luck. News of coup attempts and Shining Path excesses had given Peruvian adventure travel too adventurous a name just then. I wound up with just four other people on a tour designed for thirty.
We landed in Iquitos, an old rubber boom city far back behind the Andes and reachable only by river or air. It was late at night and violently hot. The air was wet and immobile. We stood around in a cement-floored hall decorated with murals of Machu Picchu, which we were nowhere near, and ads for “Inca Cola.” The baggage handlers threw our luggage in all directions. A clutter of begging musicians played the Simon and Garfunkel Andes theme, leaving me with that “I’d-rather-be-a-hankie-than-a-snot” tune stuck in my head for a week.
The ten loud women were assembled by their tour guide and led loudly away. The guide for my tour, Julio, came to get us in a bus made of wood, like one of those arts-and-crafts-store toys that people without children give to kids. “The lush rain forest of the Amazon wilderness supports the most prolific and diverse array of flora and fauna found anywhere in the world,” began Julio.
“Where can we get a beer?” said Tom, an ex–rodeo rider. Tom turned out to be a Republican. His wife, Susan, may have been one, too. (Ever since the Republican party got overexcited about fetus empowerment at the 1992 convention, it’s been hard to get women to admit this.) If so, we were the first eco-tourist group with a Republican majority since Teddy Roosevelt explored the Amazon in 1913.
The fourth member of our party, Michael, was the executive editor of a publishing house in New York and had just commissioned a book from an old college friend of mine. “I know what you’re doing,” Michael said to me. “You’re writing an article viciously satirizing large plants. Don’t anybody do anything plantlike. He’s taking notes.” Michael was traveling with the marketing director of his company, Shelley, who’d come to the Amazon because of a lifelong fascination with three-toed sloths.
“Their top speed is 1.6 miles per hour,” said Shelley. “They sometimes spend their entire existence in one tree. They only come down to shit. And they only have to do that once a week. They lead a wonderful life.”
Julio looked confused. “The Amazon rain forest occupies over two and a half million square miles and includes major portions of nine South American countries,” he said. “There are eleven hundred tributaries to the Amazon river system, which contains sixty-six percent of all the earth’s river water. It has been calculated that the Amazon contributes twenty percent of the oxygen …”
It took us two days to make Julio stop this. We knew that we’d gotten through to him when he quit saying “Amazon rain forest” and started saying “jungle.”
“We really need some beer,” said Susan.
“Or some of that Peruvian coca-leaf tea,” I said.
“And we need to know how to get the little bags up our nose,” said Michael.
We had a few hours’ sleep in an Iquitos hotel that was trying hard to be clean and air-conditioned. Then we went to find coffee on Iquitos’s modest esplanade. We watched the sun advance in a giant sky over an immensity of water and herbage. It was a noble vista, grand and calm and reaching off past the two-mile-wide river into a vast distance. A blush of haze obscured the horizon, giving an impression of true endlessness, as though the earth really were flat and you could see all of it from Iquitos. It was like a vision of, to be honest, Illinois. It was especially like a vision of Illinois in the flooded summer of 1993.
Iquitos is not as majestic or as dull as its surroundings. It’s a mildly pleasant city of 250,000, fairly tidy and not completely impoverished. The architecture is low and pastel, arranged in an orderly grid with the houses blank and flush against the sidewalk, Latin style. Monument-filled plazas appear at regular intervals, although I don’t think anything monumental has ever happened in Iquitos. There’s one novel feature, a floating slum named Belén full of tenement rafts and pushcart boats and beer cellars on stilts. Belén is sometimes called the Venice of the Amazon, but not very often.
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.
The estuarine dolphins travel in pods and are more inclined to Greenpeace fund-raising antics. Unfortunately, we couldn’t find any estuarine dolphins, and after a couple of hours on the river we resorted to desperate measures. And here is some news about our friends the aquatic mammals—they actually do like Judy Collins. Michael started it. He sang “Who Knows Where the Time Goes,” and three dolphin fins appeared. Tom and Susan and I tried “Someday Soon,” and there was a blowing and bubbling astern. Michael and Shelley sang “Suzanne,” and a minute later, thirty yards off our bow, two dolphins launched themselves into the air with excellent hang time.
We tried “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” by the Platters. Nothing. “Can’t Help Falling in Love” by Elvis. Nothing. “Alley Oop” by the Hollywood Argyles. Nothing. But then all six of us (Julio knew the words in Spanish) warbled “Both Sides Now.” If dolphins had Bic lighters or a way to hold them or anything to stand up on, the dolphins would have been standing up holding Bic lighters and singing, “Fromupanddownandstillsomehowits-cloudsillusionsIrecall,” in squeaky, fast-forward voices.
“Time for a civilization hike!” said Michael. “Enough of bugs! Birds! Great big fish! We’ve got to get away from this hustle and bustle of nature and spend time in restful human society—get in touch with our outer selves.” Julio took us to meet a friend of his, José, a man in his seventies who lived on a farm along the banks of the Amazon. José had a few acres of sugarcane and a few acres of pasture for cows and water buffalo. He grew mangoes and bananas. And he had chickens and relatives everywhere underfoot.
Ribereño dwellings are built on posts about grandchild-high. Sometimes there is an enclosed room, but usually the home is open on at least three sides—all porch and no house. One interior wall separates kitchen from parlor. The construction materials are rough boards and tin sheets. There’s only a little furniture: a table, a bench, a couple of stools, and maybe an heirloom mantel clock. There is always, however, a framed marriage photograph hand-tinted in Amazon River dolphin color.
The kitchen stove is just cement or stones with palm wood burning on top and a grill propped over the coals. A catfish the size of a golf bag is normally roasting on this grill. The smoke goes any which way. There is no chimney. Tethered out front will be two or three dugout canoes of a pattern begging to be made into coffee tables and sold at Crate and Barrel. And, if the family is well-off, there will be a square-sterned, factory-made canoe or johnboat with an outboard motor.
Julio’s friend had a yet more prized possession, a fifty-year-old sugarcane press set up in a shed next to his house. The press was operated by a water buffalo pushing a tree-limb crank in a circle around the floor, the water buffalo being lured in this orbit with offerings of pressed sugarcane. The cane juice was collected in a bucket and the bucket was emptied into an enormous copper pan, the shape of a backyard television satellite dish and fully as large—probably the largest piece of metal this side of Iquitos that wasn’t a roof. The pan nestled atop a circular stone forge burning at a temperature I estimated to be almost as great as that inside my mosquito netting at night at the lodge. As the cane juice boiled down, José skimmed the impurities with an old spaghetti colander. What was left was molasses, a huge amount of it.
Molasses has only so many uses. I didn’t figure the locals were that fond of pancake syrup. I asked Julio a discreet question. And, yes, José did make bootleg rum, a huge amount of it. We could get some for a dollar a liter. We did.
After a long nap we went on an Indian Embarrassment Tour. We hiked ten minutes through the jungle to a muddy clearing. Here the tour company had paid members of the once fierce Yagua tribe to build a traditional communal house. It was a fifty-foot-long, twenty-foot-high, loaf-shaped construction thatched all the way to the ground. It looked like a big pile of leaves. There were no windows. The inside looked like the inside of a big pile of leaves. The Yagua were wearing skirts that looked like piles of leaves, too, sort of vegetable dirndls. They had streaked their faces with Max Factor, donned fish-bone and parrot-feather necklaces, and stuck Indian-type things in their hair. The women covered their breasts with something that resembled a large baby’s bib, made of cotton and not, I think, part of the original Yagua dress code.
We were supposed to “trade” with the Yagua. The tour-company brochure had been firm on this point. We were encouraged to bring “trade items” such as clothing, fish hooks, pocketknives, and the like. But we weren’t supposed to try to give the Yagua money. “Money is not of much use on the river,” said the brochure in a palpable untruth. We consulted among ourselves and discovered we’d all brought stupid T-shirts. I’d gone to my local gun-nut store and gotten some with big Stars and Stripes across the fronts and mottoes such as TRY TO BURN THIS FLAG, ASSHOLE! The Yagua brought balsa wood carvings and decorated gourds and various items of jewelry made from parts of animals that hadn’t been, our brochure was careful to assure us, killed or anything like that. “They do not kill animals for this purpose,” said the brochure, “but use the leftovers from their kitchen.”
The Yagua were bored. So, for that matter, were we. Michael grew up on the Texas border and speaks Spanish, or used to. He said his vocabulary had evaporated with years of living in New York and using his Spanish for nothing but reading the cigarette and hemorrhoid medication ads on the subway. Michael told a half dozen small Yagua children that Tom and Susan and Shelley and I were “bestias—no humanos.” He said they could tell because we were so big and old and still could not speak one word that they could understand. We came from a frightening place with little bitty rivers (“poquitos mini-ríos”). It was very far away and filled with T-shirts. And we ate—nouns failed him—cigarettes and hemorrhoid medication.
One old man had pulled out all the stops in the authentic-dress business. He had a grass skirt so elaborate he was lucky he hadn’t been declared an endangered ecosystem from the waist down. The old man produced an eight-foot blowgun and some darts made from thin wooden splinters as long as a hand, with a little cotton wool wrapped around one end and the other end dipped in a poison frog—devil’s Q-Tips. The blowgun itself was crafted from a thin, ruler-straight sapling that had been split and hollowed and bound back together with rattan. The old man took the blowgun, aimed it at a tree, and missed six times. Tom said he’d like to try and hit the tree on first puff. Then we were truly embarrassed. I only hope the Yaguas cheated us hugely on the T-shirt deals. As we left, the children lined up and waved happily. “¡Adios, no humanos!”
We walked around the corner to where the Indians really lived—in wood and tin houses like everyone else. A radio playing mariachi music was hooked up to a car battery. They were all wearing stupid T-shirts.
The next morning we took our big thatched boat, our water-borne Trader Vic’s, and went downstream to the town of Orellana at the mouth of the Napo River. Orellana was named for Francisco de Orellana, one of Pizarro’s captains and the first European to travel the length of the Amazon. He left the Andean foothills of Ecuador in 1541, made his way down the Napo to the main river, and reached the Atlantic over a year later, having a terrible time the whole trip. The members of Orellana’s expedition nearly starved to death, which means they must have been bad wing shots, inept nut gatherers, and remarkably poor fishermen. Or maybe, being good Catholics, they thought they were supposed to eat fish only on Fridays. Anyway, they raided Indian villages for food. Orellana’s tales of village women who fought back (he made them out to be very large women, inasmuch as they managed to kill some of his soldiers) are the reason for the river’s “Amazon” name. The Spaniards were eventually reduced to eating the soles of their boots “boiled with herbs,” and they should have been glad Nikes weren’t invented.
The town of Orellana has a population of four hundred, electricity for a couple of hours a day, a muddy plaza with a concrete monument to shoe-nibbling conquistadors, an ugly modern clay brick church, and a few stucco buildings painted with swimming pool paint. In the plaza a dozen men were cutting boards from jungle hardwood, or, rather, one man was cutting while eleven or so watched. A log fifteen feet long and a yard in diameter had been laid on the grass and a chain saw had been turned into a handheld lumber mill. One horizontal lengthwise cut was taken off the log. Then a series of parallel lines about two inches apart were drawn on the level surface. The chain-saw operator began to take fifteen-foot-long slices off the log, freehand. The other men stood around holding their noses. The log was from a moena tree, a relative of the rosewood, and it smells like a fart when it’s cut.
The moena is not, for olfactory reasons, one of the trees causing the rain forest to be cleared by greedy lumber companies. Interesting that a tropical plant should equip itself, probably hundreds of thousands of years ahead of time, with a defense mechanism against Danish modern furniture makers.
The real industry in Orellana is gathering tropical fish. The rain forest is the principal source of kissing gouramis, neon tetras, marbled hatchetfish, and suchlike. It is a little-known fact that the bottom of the Amazon is covered with small plaster castles, toy treasure chests, and miniature deep-sea divers who make bubbles.
Michael and Tom and I discovered more bootleg rum. There’s a great variety of rum in the Amazon—there’s trago and agua ardenté and cachasa and mezchal del caña de azucar. Sometimes the rums are flavored with fruit juices and vine saps. The specialty of Orellana was a rum mixed with fermented wild honey. This makes an alleged aphrodisiac called rompe calzon, or “bust underwear.” Maybe it was my age or maybe the damp, prickly, rash-inducing nature of the underwear that was supposed to be busted, but rompe calzon had no effect on me, though I tried it in ample dosage.
After another long nap (the boat having meanwhile traveled up the Napo and into the Sucusari River), we arrived at the tour company’s second camp. Here a really sophisticated effort at simplicity had been made. The camp was nothing but one large, wobbly bamboo platform with a roof of palm leaves. Narrow mattresses lay on the platform with a little tent of netting over each. And there was a poison frog in the washbasin.
It was a male frog, said Julio. He could tell because of the eggs. The eggs of the poison frog are carried on the male’s back. It’s a nineties, caring kind of poison frog.
The Sucusari camp was decorated with twee balsa plaques carved by previous tourist groups. (Balsa isn’t a tropical hardwood. It’s very soft.) The plaques bore the names of the travelers and memorialized principal incidents of their travels—“Remember the time the canoe tipped over!”—and often contained brief poems on the order of
Though the bugs made noise,
Our trip was full of joys,
Because the monkey howls,
And the wise owl hoots,
Taught us that it’s,
Bad to pollute.
A pet capybara named Margarite was kept at the camp. The capybara is the world’s largest rodent, a four-foot-long, hundred-pound member of the guinea pig family. (Note that no one ever claims he or she is being “used as a capybara.”) Margarite had about as much personality as a guinea pig. Although the camp cook said that sometimes when visitors were swimming in the river Margarite would jump in the water and nip female tourists on the rump.
“Last one in gets to live to maturity!” said Michael. Margarite didn’t molest Susan or Shelley, and Julio assured us that the piranha of the upper Amazon aren’t really dangerous. They hardly ever eat anybody, he claimed. Indeed, at Orellana we’d seen half a dozen kids swimming in the river. Of course, we don’t know how many kids there were to begin with. Another rare thing, said Julio, was an attack by the candiru catfish. This is the famous tiny, spined catfish which swims right up a part of the male anatomy that just thinking about makes me wince too hard to type, and it can only be removed by surgery. “That almost never happens,” said Julio. He didn’t get in the water himself.
Tom and I tried a dugout canoe, a small one—a difficult craft to maneuver, especially since, with two well-nourished North American males aboard, the whole thing was underwater. A dugout is much superior to a conventional manufactured canoe because you can get soaking wet without bothering to capsize it.
But we were coming perilously close to having fun, and that is not the point of eco-tourism. So we went to the Orejón Indian village and I got chiggers.
Chiggers are a kind of mite or, rather, the larvae of a mite, and they are only a hundredth of an inch long. It’s hard to keep an eye out for them. They crawl on your body and find some hot, damp spot (which, in the Amazon, is everyplace) where your clothes are tight (I have apparently grown too fat for my socks) and there they release an enzyme, the evolutionary purpose of which is to make you tear your Friends of the Earth membership card into small pieces, these being what the chigger larvae actually feed upon.
The only thing you can do about chiggers is not scratch them. And you can drink three six-packs of beer and not take a whiz while you’re at it. No Sirens calling to Ulysses, no Lorelei enticing Rhine boatmen to destruction, no pink dolphin maiden breathing heavy through her blowhole at the local swains ever produced a desire as overpowering as the yen to scratch a chigger bite. By comparison, a sailor in port after six months at sea has a mere partiality to feminine companionship. Madonna has half a mind to get some publicity. And politicians are this way/that way about getting reelected. And never has there been such delight in surrendering to a temptation or achieving a goal. The next thing you know, you’ve been scratching for two and a half hours and your legs are blood salad.
Chiggers are supposed to drop off after about four days. But mine seemed to migrate north instead and establish themselves in a less socially acceptable area for scratching. And my chigger itches persisted for weeks so that, when I was back in the real world, engaged in the ordinary activities of adulthood—giving a speech, visiting a museum, serving as an usher at a friend’s wedding—I would be suddenly overwhelmed by an uncontrollable desire to thrust both hands down the front of my trousers and make like I had a bad case of Arkansas pants rabbits.
I blame my chiggers on Theocritus, who invented the pastoral poem in the third century BC. Theocritus was from Syracuse, the large, urbane Greek colony in Sicily, and he spent his career in Alexandria, the most cosmopolitan metropolis of the ancient world, the capital of arts, ideas, and sophistication, the Seattle of its day.
Theocritus was a city boy, but as a youth he lived for a while on the Aegean island of Cos. A school of medicine had been founded there by Hippocrates in the fifth century BC, and various cultural institutions had grown up around the school. Cos was, in effect, a college town. Like many of us who went to college in a cute place, Theocritus had fond memories of amusing locals, of young love in wholesale quantities, of long, gabbing walks in the woods with friends, and of how idyllic everything looks when you’re supposed to be in chem lab. Hence:
Ah, sweetly lows the calf,
And sweetly the heifer,
Sweetly sounds the goatherd with his pipe,
And sweetly also I!
—“Idyll IX”
This type of lyric, with its remarkable lack of percipience about barnyard noises, folk music, and self, was brought to full development in the first century BC by Virgil.
Oh, if you’d only fancy life with me in country poverty …
And shepherding a flock of kids with green hibiscus!
Piping beside me in the woods you’ll mimic Pan
—“Eclogue II”
From Virgil a line of direct descent runs for two thousand years to John Denver.
Virgil had, at least, grown up on a farm, though not an unprosperous one, and actual labor was done by the slaves. He spent most of his adult life as a court favorite of the emperor Augustus.
Successful men of affairs (or, in the case of the modern ecology movement, their children) customarily spout nostalgia for simple times and places—catching bullhead with dough balls on bent pins, sprawling in the hayloft atop the milkmaid, running through meadows barefoot, stepping in things. To this piffling wistfulness, Virgil added the element of utopian idealism. He envisioned a pastoral Eden.
The carrier too will quit the sea, no naval tree masts
Barter their goods, but every land bear everything,
The soil will suffer hoes no more, nor vines the hook.
The sturdy plowman too will now unyoke his team,
And wool unlearn the lies of variable dye.
—“Eclogue IV”
Christians have traditionally interpreted “Eclogue IV” as predicting the birth of Christ and the new age that will follow (hence Virgil’s role in Dante’s Inferno as the only good pagan in hell). But advocates of a very different kind of New Age like Virgil’s idea even better. Edward Abbey wrote a novel, The Monkey Wrench Gang, about pro-bucolic activists who wreck construction machinery to stop progress. Abbey would be a saint to environmentalists if saints got recycled instead of going to heaven. In 1986 Abbey said that he had “hope for the coming restoration of a higher civilization: scattered human populations, modest in number, that live by fishing, hunting, food gathering … that assemble once a year in the ruins of abandoned cities for great festivals of moral, spiritual, artistic and intellectual renewal.”
Of course, Theocritus, Virgil, and people who put sugar in bulldozer fuel tanks don’t hold Western civilization’s majority brief on nature. At least they didn’t used to. There are 305 mentions of wilderness in the Revised Standard Version of the Bible, none of them laudatory. In the Old Testament, six Hebrew words are translated as wilderness. The literal meanings of the words are “a desolation,” “a worthless thing,” “a sterile valley,” “an arid region,” “a haunt of wild beasts and nomads,” and “an open field.” In the New Testament the two Greek words for wilderness both mean “lonely place.”
The terms we have inherited for paradise don’t indicate that our ancestors had any inclination toward eco-tourism after death or even in their daydreams. Paradise has its root in the Old Persian word for “enclosure.” Eden comes from the Hebrew “delight.” Valhalla is “Hall of the Slain.” Olympus is a ninety-eight-hundred-foot mountain in Thessaly that nobody had bothered to climb or they would have known the gods weren’t up there. Heaven doesn’t have anything to do with earth at all; it’s the firmament. And, to borrow a term from one of those non-Western cultures that’s supposed to be so in tune with the ecosystem, nirvana means “extinction.”
While paradises tend to be alfresco, they are not at all wild, except for Valhalla, which is wild but indoors. The traditional Muslim seven heavens sound like a visit to Van Cleef and Arpels followed by an encounter with paparazzi flash cameras: (1) Silver, (2) Gold, (3) Pearl, (4) White Gold, (5) Silver and Fire, (6) Ruby and Garnet, and (7) Divine Light Impossible for Mortal Man to Describe.
Until very recently ordinary people spent most of their time outdoors—farming, hunting, gathering nuts and berries, pillaging the countryside in armed bands. The more contact people actually have with nature, the less likely they are to “appreciate” it in a big mushy, ecumenical way. And the more likely they are to get chiggers.
James Fenimore Cooper was the son of a wealthy land agent. He went to Yale. He lived most of his life in Scarsdale except for seven years spent as the American consul at Lyons. Cooper wrote the Leatherstocking Tales idealizing pioneer life and particularly the life of that pioneer ideal Natty Bumppo. In Cooper’s 1827 book, The Prairie, Bumppo says, “They scourge the very ‘arth with their axes. Such hills and hunting grounds as I have seen stripped of the gifts of the Lord, without remorse or shame! … how much has the beauty of the wilderness been deformed in two short lives!”
Cooper’s contemporary President Andrew Jackson was an actual backwoodsman. Jackson, in his 1829 inaugural address, says, “What good man would prefer a country covered with forests and ranged by a few thousand savages to our extensive Republic, studded with cities, towns, and prosperous farms, embellished with all the improvements which art can devise or industry execute.”
The concept of “nature” is itself, so to speak, artificial. Are RingDings elf food? Is Wal-Mart part of the spirit world? For people who live in what we would call “the state of nature”—for Yaguas, Orejóns, ribereños, me when I’m fishing in Michigan—nature is nothing in particular. It’s meat locker, wastepaper basket, patio, and toilet.
Perhaps I should say nature is nothing in general. Man alone in the wilderness—with nothing but a camper-back pickup, a cooler full of Bud Light, and a cellular phone between him and the raw power of the elements—is not thinking of nature as an abstraction. His interest in the natural world is highly specific: “Shit, I’m out of ice.”
When those who have a purpose for being outdoors encounter those who are outdoors because of how earthy the earth is, some conflict of interest ensues. Witness the strained relations between loggers and owl enthusiasts or between k. d. lang and pot roast. At the very least the lover of shrubbery will get kidded. Roderick Frazier Nash (author of Wilderness and the American Mind, eminent environmentalist scholar, prominent spokesman for ecological ethics, and a man so devoted to nature that he read enough James Fenimore Cooper and presidential inaugural speeches to find the quotes I used above) was fed a line and swallowed the hook, the worm, and the bobber.
I had the opportunity to talk, through an interpreter, with a man who hunted and gathered in the jungles of Malaysia. I tried without success to discuss wilderness. When I asked for an equivalent word I heard things like “green places,” “outdoors,” or “nature.” Finally, in desperation, I asked the interpreter to ask the hunter how he said “I am lost in the jungle.” … The interpreter turned to me and said with a smile that the man had indicated he did not get lost in the jungle. The question made as little sense to him as would asking an American city dweller how he said “I am lost in my apartment.”
Personally, I have been lost in my apartment any number of times. I have a friend, Gilbert, who is a hunting guide in New Brunswick and a member of the Micmac tribe. One day he and I were lost in a vast alder bog on one of those overcast days without shadow to give bearing. Gilbert said, “Indians never get lost—although sometimes the path wanders.”
For most of history, mankind has managed to keep a reasonable balance between thinking nature is adorable and thinking it wants to kill us.
Virgil’s soppy lyric to his true love aside, the original Greek Pan was born completely covered in hair, with a goat’s beard, hooves, and horns. His mother, the nymph Callisto, was so frightened that she ran off and left him to the care of whatever welfare agencies Olympus had. A sudden spasm of fear in the wilderness is supposed to be caused by a glimpse of Pan, hence the word panic. Many of the traditional attributes of Satan are traceable to Pan. Our image of Pan as a frolicsome, pipe-tooting gadabout in need of a leg wax is a late classical invention. And the notion of Pan, as a nature deity, being more or less the God of Everything—“pantheism”—is the result either of a misidentification with the Egyptian god who created the world, ram-headed Chum, or of etymological confusion between the name Pan, which means “pasturer,” and pan, the neuter form of the Greek adjective pas, meaning “all” or “everything.” Pan’s actual position in mythology was something akin to baby-brother-of-the-president-during-the-Carter-administration.
The wild Anglo-Saxons were, if anything, less fond of wildness than the Greeks. In Beowulf the monster Grendel and his rather more monstrous mother are said to “dwell in a land unknown, wolf-haunted slopes, windswept headlands, perilous marsh-paths, where the mountain stream goes down under the mists of the cliffs.” We’d declare it a national treasure and lobby to have it protected under the Wilderness Preservation Act. Loss of habitat is threatening endangered monster species everywhere.
Our own pilgrim forefathers didn’t enjoy camping, were not exhilarated by fresh air, and found little fascination in contact with indigenous cultures. Pilgrim leader William Bradford, in his History of Plimoth Plantation, writes of arrival in the New World.
They had now no friends to welcome them nor inns to entertain or refresh their weatherbeaten bodies; no houses or much less towns to repair to, to seek for succour … what could they see but a hideous and desolate wilderness, full of wild beasts and wild men …
Gardens provide a clue to a society’s attitude toward nature. The first mention of a garden in Western literature is in the Odyssey, where Homer describes the palace grounds of King Alcinoiis of Phaeacia. These seem to have been covered entirely in fruit trees, grapevines, and vegetable plots—more a greengrocer’s than an arboretum. The early Greeks didn’t garden. They farmed, but not for fun. Cimon planted the first pleasure garden in Athens in the fifth century BC. The early Romans didn’t think much of herbaceous borders either. In the third century BC Cato the Elder recommended growing cabbages. Nothing like a “naturalistic” garden would be seen in Europe for another two millennia.
Art, also, gives us some idea of what people consider worth noticing in the world. Pure landscape painting was known to the Romans, but apparently as a novelty. Pliny, in his Natural History, goes out of the way to mention a painter in the time of Augustus who introduced a style that included “sacred groves, woods, hills, fishponds, straits, streams and shores, any scene in short that took his fancy.” But pictures without people, gods, or important animals in them didn’t recur in Europe until Dürer made some watercolor sketches in the fourteenth century, and it was another three hundred years before anybody sold a lumpy mountain prospect, an overdressed sunset, a big wave getting a rock wet, or a quaint stretch of cart-track mire with gnarly tree nearby.
From the very beginning of the Renaissance, however, there were dangerous stirrings in that wild, untamed segment of nature, the intelligentsia. In 1336 Petrarch hiked up Mount Ventoux, near Avignon. Supposedly, no one before him had made such a trip just to see the view. Once on top, Petrarch opened a copy of St. Augustine’s Confessions (obviously, a different kind of climbing gear was carried in the Trecento) and happened upon the passage where Augustine rails against those who “go about wondering at mountain heights … and to themselves they give no heed.”
Suitably abashed, Petrarch scuttled back downhill. But during his brief sojourn upon the Ventoux peak, the poet stood astride the medieval and modern ages—the first European to climb a mountain for the heck of it and the last to feel like a jerk for doing so.
A mush-pot sentimentality about things natural was growing. Loon-June-Moon infected the best minds. By the 1500s Montaigne was raving about the natives of lately discovered America, calling them “men fresh sprung from the gods.”
Montaigne had a servant who had gone as a soldier or a seaman to Brazil and probably to the Amazon basin. The Indians’ dwellings are described as “very long, with a capacity of two or three hundred souls, covered with the bark of great trees, the strips fastened to the ground at one end and supporting and leaning on one another at the top … whose covering hangs down to the ground and acts as the side.” This is the communal house that the Yagua don’t want to live in anymore. And the servant says he never saw Indians who were “palsied, bleary-eyed, toothless or bent with age.” Probably true enough. In Stone Age societies such venerable folks are what we call dead.
The rest of the information from Montaigne’s source sounds like wishful thinking or a crib from “Eclogue IV.”
This is a nation … in which there is no sort of traffic … no name for a magistrate or for political superiority, no custom of servitude, no riches or poverty … no occupations but leisure ones. The very words that signify lying, treachery, dissimulation, avarice, envy, belittling [are] unheard of.
The whole day is spent in dancing.
They live in a country with a very pleasant and temperate climate.
And Montaigne believed every word. He says:
What we actually see in these nations surpasses not only all the pictures in which poets have embellished the Golden Age and all their ingenuity in imagining a happy state of man but also the conceptions and the very desire of philosophy.
From this bosh it is but the jot of a pen nib to the twaddle of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. In his Discourse upon the Origin and Foundation of the Inequality among Men (1754), Rousseau converts Primitivism from a telling of tall tales into a theory of political science. “Let us begin therefore, by laying aside facts, for they do not affect the question,” says Rousseau with a frankness rare among modern political ideologists. Rousseau then gives us a picture of au naturel man “satisfying the calls of hunger under the first oak, and those of thirst at the first rivulet … laying himself down to sleep at the foot of the same tree that afforded him his meal; and behold, this done, all his wants are completely satisfied.”
Not only are all his wants satisfied, he’s taking great care of his body. “Man … in a state of nature where there are so few sources of sickness, can have no great occasion for physic.” Since the complete requirements of human health and happiness can be provided by a tree and a creek, Rousseau concludes that the whole rest of history has been a waste of time: “It is evident … that the man, who first made himself clothes and built himself a cabin, supplied himself with things which he did not much want.”
Shack and shift are bad, says Rousseau, because we become convinced we can’t live without them even though he, Rousseau, has just proven to us that we can and that we don’t like getting dressed or going indoors anyway. Therefore all progress and even thought is wrong. “As there is scarce any inequality among men in a state of nature, all that which we now behold owes its force and its growth to the development of our faculties and the improvement of our understanding.”
Nobody likes to take responsibility for himself. Our troubles are always someone else’s fault. Rousseau perfects this idea. It wasn’t just another person who did us dirt, it was every other person since the foundation of Ur. Civilization is to blame.
Any person who has spent time outdoors actually doing something, such as hunting and fishing as opposed to standing there with a doobie in his mouth, knows nature is not intrinsically healthy. Kill an animal and inspect its hide and innards. You’ll find it has been prey to ticks, lice, fleas, and all the other things that, at the beginning of this chapter, I predicted would assail a naked suburbanite. You’ll see that it has been the victim of injuries and diseases as well. Nor are people who live in places without electricity, sewage treatment plants, penicillin, and dental checkups as Rousseau’s imagination or Montaigne’s household help would have them. European male oppressors may have brought smallpox and VD to the Third World, but they did not bring malaria, yellow fever, sleeping sickness, river blindness, plague, or chiggers. And what kind of person sleeps under an oak tree filled with ripe acorns, spending the whole night being pelted with rock-hard nuggets falling from fifty feet in the air? As for eating those missiles, my encyclopedia says, “The Acorns of the oak possess a considerable economic importance as food for swine.”
William Rose Benét, scholar, essayist, and founder of the Saturday Review, defined primitivism as:
… a persistent tendency in European literature, art, and thought since the 18th century … to attribute superior virtue to primitive, non-European civilizations … Later primitivism expanded to include among the objects of its enthusiasm the violent, the crude, undeveloped, ignorant, naïve, non-intellectual or sub-intelligent of any kind, such as peasants, children, and idiots.
It’s interesting how many of these words—other than “violent”—apply to Henry David Thoreau. Montaigne was a naff and Rousseau a screwball. But it’s Thoreau who’s actually taught in our schools. And it is into the wet, dense muck of Walden that Roderick Nash, Edward Abbey, and the party of ten loud women have dipped their wicks.
Thoreau took the bad ideas and worse ideals of the primitivists, added the pitiful self-obsession of the romantics, and mixed all of this into transcendentalism, that stew of bossy Brahmin spiritual hubris.
The transcendentalists were much devoted to taking the most ordinary thoughts and ideas and investing them with preposterous spiritual gravity. They saw the divine in everything, even in long, boring lectures about how everything is divine. Any random peek into the essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson will show you the method by which “Don’t Litter” has been turned into an entire secular religion.
In 1845 the twenty-eight-year-old Thoreau (having failed to read Rousseau closely enough) built himself a little cabin near Walden Pond in Concord, Massachusetts. The land was owned by Emerson and was about as far out of town as the average modern driving range. Thoreau frequently went to dinners and parties in Concord, and, according to his list of household expenses in Walden, he sent his laundry out to be done. Thoreau lived in his shack for two years devoting his time to being full of baloney.
I had three pieces of limestone on my desk, but I was terrified to find that they required to be dusted daily, when the furniture of my mind was all undusted still, and I threw them out the window in disgust.
I have always been regretting that I was not as wise as the day I was born.
Or maybe he was on drugs.
My head is hands and feet.
We have here the worst sort of person, the sanctimonious beatnik. Thoreau is the progenitor of the American hipster arrogance we’ve been enduring for the past century and a half. And he is the source of the loathsome self-righteousness that turns every kid who’s ever thought “a tree is better looking than a parking lot” into Saint Paul of the Recycling Bin.
But I have since learned that trade curses everything it handles; and though you trade in messages from Heaven, the whole curse of trade attaches to the business.
Our inventions are wot to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things … We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate.
The New Hollander goes naked with impunity, while the European shivers in his clothes. Is it impossible to combine the hardiness of these savages with the intellectualness of the civilized man? [Thoreau died of TB.]
All of the above is from the first hundred-odd pages of Walden and I defy any thinking adult without an airsickness bag to go further.
Being pathologically high-minded can have unfortunate side effects. The painter George Catlin, who traveled in the American West in the 1830s, was one of the first advocates of creating large national parks. But Catlin was so fond of things just the way nature made them that he thought Indians should be put in the parks, too.
One hundred and sixty years later, in a Sierra Club book called Lessons of the Rainforest, Kenneth Iain Taylor is arguing that the Indians of the Amazon should be subjected to the same zoo-animal treatment. “For the wisdom necessary to save the rainforests is contained only in the complete traditional systems that these people practice,” claims Taylor. “Nor can we expect these ancient ways of forest preservation to be continued by acculturated, integrated, or assimilated people stripped of their traditions and crashing around the forest with firearms and chainsaws and outboard motors.” Waterskiing tournament at three. Natives not eligible.
Among the unfortunate side effects of high-mindedness is the Amazon ecology tour, which Michael, Shelley, Susan, Tom, and I were still on. And we were thinking deeply about the whole business of suffering extreme discomfort in the interests of personal pleasure. Psychology has a name for this.
Julio was meanwhile pointing out that the rain forest is upside down. That is, jungle vegetation is so dense that sunlight, growing space, nutrients in the form of decomposing plant matter, and even rain itself are most available at the top of the rain forest, in the canopy. Usually, if you want to see a profusion of disgusting life-forms, you look under a rock. In the jungle you climb a tree. Plants called hemiepiphytes germinate in the treetops, then send roots down to the earth instead of branches up to the sky. True epiphytes never touch ground at all. Their roots just dangle in the air creating a messy snarl and collecting detritus—making their own potting soil. This humus may get thick and rich enough to host a colony of earthworms, and the tree upon whose limb this natural window box is sitting will sprout roots from its branch (grow a foot on its arm like Thoreau had heads on his feet) to take advantage of the soil. Orchids are epiphytes. If we lose the rain forest, we’ll lose the earth’s principal source of prom corsages. Think of all the poor girls getting bouquets of genetically engineered celery pinned to their spaghetti straps.
With such profuse herbage occupying the sky, snakes, lizards, bugs, and the more agile mammals have moved there too. And Julio was determined that we should see them. Some well-meaning foundation (not the American Acrophobia Association) has built a system of platforms and rope bridges in the jungle canopy. We hiked for an hour from the Sucusari camp and arrived at a great big tree with a staircase around it, the kind of thing Scarlett O’Hara might have descended in Gone with the Planet of the Apes. At the top of these stairs was the first platform. It was about high enough above the ground to test the thesis that a cat always lands on its feet, if you didn’t care about the cat. From here we were supposed to walk a rope bridge sixty or eighty feet long to another big tree with stairs, climb these, cross a second rope bridge, climb more stairs, traverse another bridge, and so forth until we were 120 feet in the air and consumed with nausea, vertigo, terror, and the nagging worry “Is it sweat or have I wet myself?” I say “we” but just Susan and I were doing the worrying. Altitude didn’t bother Michael, Tom, Shelley, or Julio. And they had that kind sympathy and solicitous attitude that people who aren’t afraid of heights always show to those who are.
“See how the ropes wiggle when I do the Boogaloo!”
“Ever read The Bridge of San Luis Rey?”
“If you look straight down, you can see the puke from the last group that was up here.”
Mankind is supposed to have evolved in the treetops. But I have examined my sense of balance, the prehensibility of my various appendages, and my attitude toward standing on anything higher than, say, political principles, and I have concluded that, personally, I evolved in the backseat of a car.
“Ninety percent of the rain forest’s photosynthesis is taking place here in the canopy,” said Julio. Susan and I were certainly green. “More than half of the rain forest’s species live in the canopy.” But I didn’t see any. All I saw were two carefully placed feet—my own—and ten white knuckles gripping things. “Twice as many insect species are found here compared to ground level.” Which is great news when you haven’t got a hand free to swat them.
Our tour company had a third jungle camp near the canopy walkway, and as soon as we got there, Michael, Tom, and especially I began looking for more bootleg rum. This time we turned up something called haya huasca instead. It came in an old Coke bottle with a wooden plug in the top and was made from herbs and bark and such. Michael said that, as best he could translate, it was supposed to “make us throw up and see the future.”
We didn’t get sick and we certainly didn’t see the future, or I would have kept my eye on yen fluctuations and would be rich. It was a mild drug, producing just a few sparks of light and some glowing auras at the edges of the field of vision and delivering a minor inner bliss, a little psychic wet kiss. That is, I thought it was a mild drug until Susan and I began urging everyone to climb back to the top of the canopy walkway and “dig the sunset.”
And it’s amazing up there when you’re looking at something besides your fingers and shoes—like swimming through the tops of trees, like riding green surf. Sure the rope bridges sway, but so do Mother’s arms. I even looked down, though there was nothing to see. The jungle is so thick, I don’t think you could fall through it. (I was talked out of trying.) If you did fall, you’d probably become an epiphyte human with all your roots—wife, kids, the mortgage—dangling in the air.
I went so far as to examine how the canopy walk was constructed, that’s how filled with courage I was. Each rope bridge was made, not with ropes, really, but with four steel cables—two to form the footpath and two to be used as handrails. Rope crossties ran between the cables at intervals, like ribs in a ship hull. Nylon mesh netting was strung between the crossties, then ordinary cheap Home Depot aluminum ladders were laid flat between the footpath cables with wooden planks over the ladder rungs, and that was it. The cables were attached to the trees by half hitches and clove hitches, oregano hitches, sheet and pillowcase bends, and knots you couldn’t get ZZ Top beards into. It looked like hippie engineering to me. I’m a veteran of the Whole Earth Catalog era, and I’ve watched a lot of geodesic domes and yurts and such flop over on their sides and go fttttt. But with haya huasca, who cared?
Besides, there was a sunset the color of eco-tourist hiking shorts. And, with dusk, all those species Julio had been talking about arrived: fat, black lizards with butts shaped like canoe paddles, big yet nearly invisible Esmerelda butterflies with perfectly clear wings, iguanas the size and shape of scaly green dachshunds, a thousand tree frogs saying “Wyatt Earp,” dragonflies as lacy and complicated and rather larger than Victoria’s Secret lingerie, and hummingbirds that could actually carry a tune. Well, maybe that last was the haya huasca. I’ll bet Thoreau really was on drugs. It certainly is the easy way to make the ecosystem better, at least to look at. And drugs would excuse sentences like “I have always been regretting that I was not as wise as the day I was born.”
I was beginning to get a few insights of that type myself. I started looking at the multitude of insects, the astounding number of them, the great smacking gobs and oodles, the scads and lashings of bugs galore. They wandered all across each other and every surface and right through the air across no surface at all and all over me. I decided that God had created the world for bugs. Whatever we have in the way of Old and New Testament was plagiarized from some original buggy text. It was bugs who lived in the Garden of Eden (full of rotten fruit and dead animals). And the bugs had probably eaten … everything, the whole damn tree of knowledge included. By sheer weight of numbers they are obviously God’s chosen creatures. There had, no doubt, been a little bug Moses. What would the Ten Bug Commandments be? “Go forth and multiply,” certainly. Maybe, “Thou shalt find a porch light and bump into it for hours.”
About then the haya huasca began to wear off. This was probably a good thing. Unfortunately, it wore off before Susan and I managed to get down from the canopy walk. And there we were in the pitch dark, frozen in terror like a pair of reverse suicides with the whole police and fire departments (Shelley and Michael and Tom) urging us to step out on a ledge.
Haya huasca made me believe strange things but no stranger than the things more sensible Americans believe cold sober. Susan and Shelley were excited to discover that one of the Orejón Indians who had helped build the canopy walkway was a brujo, a male witch or shaman. Shelley’s family had been Jewish for five thousand years, and Susan’s, Christian for two thousand. About these creeds they were reasonably skeptical, but the brujo they’d met ten minutes ago … I’m being unkind. The brujo seemed to be a nice man, very dignified with sad and commonsensical eyes. I’m sure he was, in his way, as devout as ever was Reverend Lackland, the incredibly boring pastor of Monroe Street Methodist Church, which I attended as a child in Toledo, Ohio.
In fact, the brujo’s spiritual cleansing ceremony was at least as tedious and lengthy as Methodist Sunday school. Most religious services seem to be so. Is ennui the sacrifice God wants us to make to Him? Is He pleased by an offering of fidgets, guilty dozings, and daydreams of releasing white mice in the choir loft? Wouldn’t we better glorify God by enjoying the blessings of His creation, by, say, getting on the green in three and two-putting? Of course, there aren’t many golf courses in the Amazon.
The brujo sat each of us on a stool. Then he took a little bouquet or broom made of dried leaves of the shacapa plant and flicked us all over while softly whistling something that reminded me only a little of Simon and Garfunkel. He finished by blowing cigarette smoke all over our persons. Susan and Shelley looked blissful, though they are ardent nonsmokers.
What we had experienced was “like a dry shower,” said the brujo later, Julio translating. The fellow had been a brujo for thirty-five years. You become a brujo by altering your diet, by “leaving out all pleasure foods,” and by fasting. “Your visions become your lunch” was Julio’s literal translation. Also, you drink haya huasca.
Julio said he’d fallen into the Amazon once while wearing knee-high rubber boots. The boots had filled with water and pulled him under, and he’d nearly drowned. He went to a brujo who cured him of being frightened of the river, a cure that apparently lasted longer than my cure of being scared of heights. Of course, I was using haya huasca without professional supervision. Also, said Julio, his mother had once begun to lose weight, and a brujo informed her that Julio’s father had secretly married another woman and that the second wife was putting a curse on Julio’s mom. I’d think a secret second wife would pretty much be a curse in her own right. Anyway, the brujo removed the curse, and I bet he was cheaper than my divorce lawyer. A team of brujos could do no harm in matters like the Woody Allen–Mia Farrow custody case.
The next morning, spiritually dry-cleaned and tuned in to that great National Public Radio station which is nature, we went for a last peek at the ecology. We took one of the square-sterned canoes equipped with a small outboard and half-paddled, half-motored up a narrow inlet to a lake with water the color of espresso.
The jungle loomed over us in the most looming sort of way. We saw some disgusting insects and some awful lizards and a snake, albeit a small and phlegmatic snake. Snakes are my least favorite thing, not counting rope bridges 120 feet in the air. Tom was contemplating a spider the size of a Bass Weejun. “Nothing dies of old age around here, does it?” said Tom.
“These black water areas are the habitat of electric eels,” said Julio. “They grow to be six feet long and can generate six hundred volts of direct current at about one-half to three-fourths ampere, enough to stun a horse.” We are all hoping for the development of wind- and solar-powered eels soon.
“Julio,” I said, “does the Amazon have any legendary monsters—Yeti, Bigfoot, Nessie, the Jersey Devil, anything like that?”
“No,” said Julio. So maybe the Amazon natives recognize the essential benevolence of nature even in this most violently competitive and sanguinary biological niche. Or, maybe when you’ve got six-foot electric eels and tiny catfish that swim up your pecker, you don’t need legendary monsters.
And yet I was surprised again by the unscary, nonmysterious, sub-threatening nature of the rain forest. The fake-seeming safari noises, the floral arrangements growing on tree branches, the Disney World–like lack of odors, the angelfish in the minnow nets, and now, looking around, I realized the jungle was filled with houseplants. Most of the greenery on our windowsills was bred from tropical stock. Terror is difficult to experience surrounded by ficus trees, dumb cane, Christmas cactus, spider plants, philodendrons, and Boston ferns as though you were visiting the overheated apartment of a maiden aunt.
On the lake we motored between lily pads two yards across. According to my guidebook, these can “support the weight of a small child,” although there are certainly laws about trying that. Then we crossed a dozen acres of white water hyacinths, our outboard prop getting thoroughly tangled in beauty and fragrance. Several trees along the shore were filled with the hanging nests of oropendolas, a tropical oriole that makes its own birdhouses from woven vines and twigs. And they are no better at it than kids taking a crafts program at summer camp. Oropendola nests look like oversize sheep scrotums. Another tree was full of saddle-backed tamarind monkeys bouncing around like flying puppies. It seems the more evolved an animal is, the more time it spends playing. Which does not explain why I’m at the typewriter, unless it does. Or maybe we don’t know what worm fun and snail recreation look like. They may be having a riot. And in one more tree we saw a pair of speckled owls, perched on a branch, asleep with their heads leaned together, cuter than thrift-shop salt-and-pepper shakers. Then came the best sight of all, a blue morpho butterfly, a big hand span of a butterfly in an indescribable tint—a Day-Glo pink of a blue, an international signal orange of a blue. Eco-tourists in the Miami airport wouldn’t wear this blue. A color not found in nature was finding itself in nature right in front of us, floating in that scatterbrained way butterflies do, just beyond our bow.
We came back from the lake and down to the mouth of the Sucusari River and out into the mile-wide Napo. Here black drapes of rain approached in the sunshine. Wide fields of clear sky appeared between vast storm clouds. There were lightning strikes and a rainbow at the same time. It was an encyclopedia of weather.
The rain swept toward our canoe, and we made for the nearest house. It was a one-room shack but a big one, and this was a good thing because it was a big family that owned it, and all of them had run inside, too. Thirty of us must have been in the shack, and “rain” does not describe what was happening outside. The difference between a downpour in the temperate zone and a downpour in the tropics is the difference between stepping into the shower and being thrown into the pool. Or, rather, having the pool thrown on you.
The shack was humble even by ribereño standards. The only furniture was a table. A few newspaper ads decorated a wall. But they had rum, and Michael and I had cigarettes. And they also had a liquor called clabo huasca. It was not quite as potent as haya huasca, but it did cast a happy glow upon the scene. The kids brought out their pets to show us: a bat (cute as bats go, certainly cuter than those we’d seen in the bat professor’s hands), some puppies, a baby peccary that looked like a cross between a hamster and a wart hog, and a flock of chachalacas, noisy little jungle turkeys. The parents beamed. The young men turned on a boom box. The young women flirted a bit. We drank more rum and clabo huasca and smoked more cigarettes and had a little fiesta until the sun came out.
Our hosts were migrants from the impoverished and rebel-bothered mountains of Peru. They’d come as squatters and cut a little homestead from the jungle. Julio’s parents had come to the Amazon for the same reason and so had many ribereños, and many more are on the way. It is these decent, hardworking, hospitable, pleasant people who are destroying the rain forest. They are not doing it in quite so rapid or spectacular a manner as the timber companies or the big Brazilian ranchers. But there are a lot more poor people in South America than there are well-capitalized corporations. Knotty pine will make a comeback and mahogany will go out of fashion. Everybody will die of high cholesterol from eating too many hamburgers and beef prices will go down. The timber companies and the ranches will disappear, but the poor will still be there.
I have a photograph taken in 1887 showing my grandfather, his parents, and his nine siblings lined up in front of a one-room unpainted shanty on a forty-acre dirt farm in Lime City, Ohio. The roof was made of wooden shingles instead of corrugated tin, and due to climatic differences, the shack my great-grandad built had more in the way of walls, but other than that, the old O’Rourke plantation was indistinguishable from the mansion of our hosts on the Napo.
I’m sure great-grandfather Barney O’Rourke would have liked to move to a passive solar bungalow in the Berkeley Hills, carefully recycle his trash, use only appropriate technology in his certified organic garden, and bicycle to his job at the university teaching a course in Sustainable Development. But it wasn’t an option. Among other things, I don’t think Barney could read.
When we were back in the Iquitos airport, waiting for our plane to Miami, the ten loud women reappeared. I gathered from their loud chat that they’d been on a tour boat docking at various places along the river, probably the same places we’d seen. They seemed to have had a meaningful time, full of auras and so forth, and heck, we’d seen some auras ourselves. But one of the women was carrying a polished wooden box with a glass front, and inside the box was a dead and mounted blue morpho butterfly. I looked again, to make sure my imagination wasn’t creating a too-perfect irony. But Michael, Shelley, Tom, and Susan saw it too.
“Oh, yes,” said Julio, “the ecology groups are always bringing back snake skins, animal pelts, caiman skulls, all those sorts of things.”
Theocritus, Virgil, James Fenimore Cooper, Montaigne, Rousseau, Edward Abbey, Henry David Thoreau, John Denver, and ten loud women—quit pestering your mother.