L O S T C A R G O
1.
It all started with a case of burnout. Or maybe it was just boredom.
I worked nonstop as a freelancer through COVID. For fear of my business drying up at any given moment, I said yes to every client and project that came may way. If there was a nickel on the table, I was going to grab it. Turns out my services were in high demand during those weeks and months, and I eventually found myself running ragged.
One day, as I was getting ready to leave the house and head to my studio, I stopped in front of the door. I didn’t want to step through it – I didn’t want to deal with anything that might lay in waiting on the other side. A sense of dread seemed to be creeping up slowly behind me. This, I figured, probably wasn’t a good thing.
Several days later I was talking about this feeling with a client-turned-friend over Zoom. She said I should take a week and just go lie by a hotel pool somewhere. “That sounds fucking horrible,” I told her. “All those screaming kids, all that noise.” She then asked me what didn’t sound terrible. I sat for a moment, not even really thinking of anything specific, and then blurted out, “I just want to walk into a jungle by myself, then walk back out a month later.” She asked if that was possible. “I have no idea,” I said. “But maybe?”
The next day I sent a message to my friend Manuel in Peru and asked If he had any ideas about where I might go to, in fact, get lost in the jungle. “You need gringo things?” he asked, meaning electricity and running water. No gringo things, I tell him. He says he’ll get back to me in a few days.
Later that week I do a guided breathwork session recommended by a friend. I’m not expecting much to happen. To be honest, I go into it pretty skeptical, not even fully sure what the hell it’s all about. But evidently I ‘drop in’ pretty quick. A lot happens during the session, but one of the most prominent memories is a sequence where I find myself on a trail leading through a dark impenetrable jungle. A jaguar suddenly appears in front of me and start to walk down a path. I follow. It starts to run. I run along with it.
Eventually we burst out of the forest and onto the shore of a broad muddy river. An old Amazonian man is standing on the bank; he’s been waiting for me. The cat dissolves away. The old man steps to the side and motions me to the river. I wade into the current and feel the sandy bottom fall away beneath my feet.
I lay suspended, floating in dark water.
The next day I receive a text from Manuel. “Hola amigo. I find a place you can go. Is on a river called the Tigre.”
I have been obsessed with the Amazon, and jungles in general, for as long as I can remember. The same way some kids are drawn to playing baseball or becoming business magnates, I become inextricably interested in frogs, fish and plants…particularly those found in tropical rainforests.
Where I grew up, in the dry eastern foothills of the Cascade Mountains, everything was a shade (or combination) of light brown, dark brown and tan. But in the rainforest? There were scarlet and indigo-colored parrots and pink river dolphins and jewel-like frogs so toxic that their skin was used to poison the tips of hunting darts. And when the rains came the river and its tributaries would flood their banks and begin climbing the trees, inch by inch, foot by foot, to create vast swathes of flooded forest where schools of piranha swam between trees.
I wanted to see it all with my own eyes. I wanted to stand in the middle of that great, mysterious menagerie.
The plan was simple: Manuel had a friend whose brother still lived in the village they were born in. He said I could stay with him for as long as I wanted if I was willing to help out around the place. I planned for three weeks and booked flights for either end of the stay. Nine months later I boarded a plane for Peru.
2.
Flying over the Amazon to Iquitos. So many trees, for as far as I can see. And so flat.
My mind wants to conjure mountains on the horizon - some sort of topography or break in the expanse, but the geography won’t allow it. It’s unapologetically even. There is nothing. Only trees and flatness.
The Amazon Basin is staggeringly massive.
It’s difficult for the mind to wrap itself around such a large spread of forest without seeing it for yourself. Nearly 90% of the lower 48 states could fit within the basin. India would fit, twice. Western Europe could fit with plenty of room to spare.
The Amazon River travels roughly 4,000 miles from the foothills of the Andes to the Atlantic Ocean, and over the course of that journey elevation only drops by 200 feet. That’s the height of a 20-story building across a distance wider than the continental United States.
I have flown over the Sahara multiple times. In a plane it takes several hours to cross from top to bottom. It’s larger than the Amazon Basin, easily swallowing the entire lower 48 states and then some. But for some reason thousands of square miles of desert makes sense to the human eye. But a forest that you can’t see through or beyond, let alone get high enough to view any sort of horizon line? That brain struggles to take in that much infinite complexity.
It’s not the sort of place you want to get into trouble. Help might as well be on either edge of the continent.
“There has been a change in plan,” Manuel tells me the moment we hop into his truck outside the airport. Maximo (the brother of the friend) has left his home village and gone further upriver to look for work. Some place called Intuto. Manuel says it will be a different experience than expected…and will cost me more money.
I feel a panic attack setting in. I feel like I should just fly back home and call it all a loss. There are so many more unknowns than I anticipated. Am I in way over my head? Is this adventurous or just fucking stupid – how thin is the line between the two?
I stay the night at Manuel’s house. I don’t sleep.
The next day is a slow morning at Manuel’s house. Breakfast is coffee (strong as hell) and toast and papaya. After eating we hop in his truck and drive to a market to get any supplies I might need that won’t be available deeper in the forest. I ask him if there is anything I should get, specifically. “You know,” he says. “Whatever you want.”
I buy 2 sleeves of crackers, 2 cans of tuna and 1 jar of peanut butter.
On the way back we pull into a parking lot where a man is sitting at a card table in a plastic chair. I exchange my U.S. dollars to Peruvian soles…but save $1 in USD. I’m not sure why I do this. I guess it feels like a deposit on my return.
Manuel drops me off at a station for my bus ride to Nauta, which is a river town where he says I will need to secure boat passage to Intuto. Before I get out of the truck he says, “Ron, just be a fierce gringo and you’ll be okay.”
The bus is an old VW van with more people than I’m sure the manufacturer recommended, crammed into the bench seats. The only empty spot when I hop in is in the middle row, by the open window facing directly into the exposed sun.
We drive roads through the country with ‘80s music playing: Queen of Hearts, Karma Chameleon, Tarzan’s Boy, Self Control. I feel like I’m traveling back in time, or maybe shifted sideways into some sort of alternate reality..
The driver has a car odorizer in the shape of testicles hanging from his rear-view mirror. They sway and bounce violently with every turn we make and pothole we hit. The afternoon sun is sweltering. I want to pull the window up for some sort of protection but it’s the only way to get air into the back of the van.
Somewhere in the blur of trees and vegetation, I catch a glimpse of a blackwater stream backlit at an angle through the canopy by the late afternoon sun. To this day that image is still burned into my mind with crystal clarity: the hue of the water, the cast of the shadows, the quality and color of the light.
We stop by the roadside where people are selling things. The driver looks at me and says, “Necessito azucar.” We pile out of the van and people purchase drinks and snacks. I need to use the bathroom and ask if there is a place I can go. A person behind the table motions behind the building. When I get back there I see a baby howler monkey with a rope tied around its waste, sitting on the half-wall next to where I start relieving myself. It screams at me. Over and over. The entire time I’m pissing.
I make it back to the roadside table and buy a bottle of Coca Cola. I can still hear the screams. “The monkey,” the woman behind the table says as she hands me a few soles in change. “He no like you.”
More to come…