Amazonía Dangerously Beautiful
Mist ripples over the bow of our dugout boat as, overhead, the call of exotic birds and hidden creatures compose the morning song. A kaleidoscope of habitats, the Colombian Amazon Jungle is bound in bio-diverse mass and mystery unlike any other tropical rain-forest on this planet. Something old, discoveries new. A great deal of this spectacular wild remains unexplored by modern society, while in its depths, remote tribes still live unconnected to the rest of the world. Tribes with tradition much older than memory. The color, sound, and general wonder of this extraordinary environment has shaped the societies courageous enough to live in and around it.
Our guide Daniel interrupts the trance of beauty in Spanish. His delivery is serious. “We put the old mother in laws in the back of the boat.”
“Oh, yeah? Why is that?” Asks a friend sitting in the back of dugout canoe.
We are all smiling at this point knowing a joke, un-joke is about to be told, the kind only told to half an audience who will actually understand. We thrust our paddles into the water propelling the canoes forward.
“The truth?” Daniel says with a smirk yet honest as can be, “its who the crocodiles go for first. Or like we say in the Amazon, the anacondas.”
I burst out laughing, this is quite possibly the best thing I’ve heard in days especially knowing both crocs and anacondas are in the area. The past week, our team had been collecting water and fish samples throughout the Amazon River, cataloguing every detail and noting every drop or spike in readings. The results were devastating. Diversity of species and the health of the water was being choked out. The reports were bad. So was the news we found from village to village. Not only the economy was crashing, but noticeably so was the health of people living around the river.
Deforestation and farming pesticides were causing the death of life in and around the Amazon along with the people who had lived there generationally without issue before. They could no longer support their homes and families from the river or the forests. They now had to rely on tourism through scamming, prostitution, the illegal catching and trading of exotic animals/wood or honest means by selling paltry trinkets. Men who were once healthy hunters, scavengers, farmers and foragers became hollow shadows of what they once were. Desperate and willing to do anything to feed their families’.
The deeper we went into the jungle, overgrown wild and alive, the better the readings got. The team waded through electric eel infested waters, nets at the ready. We trusted Daniel absolutely. He just smiled and grinned saying the only danger was if they felt threatened. We all knew them to be capable of 800 volts, a pretty shock. Some of us tried to dispel our nervousness and quipped about the scene in Princess Bride with the notorious André the Giant thumping the eel on the head. After a moment of wading we all grew silent, feeling with our legs and feet. Listening with our touch. Daniel dipped his hands into the side of the river bank feeling around, slowly, methodic. Then like a lover lifted his hands gently from the water, electric eel in hand. Our hearts stopped. It protested very little as he looked it over, smelled it, and sensing it was done being examined, he slid it back into its mudhole in the side of the bank.
“Very small, but healthy.” He declared non-pulsed, “This area has not been touched so much.”
So why does this happen? How is it in a world that is becoming so connected, so very disconnected by how choices impact the lives of others?
I spoke with doctors, club owners, grocers, street venders, restaurants, hunters, homeless peddlers, boaters, dancers, motor taxis…people. People trying to live in an environment they could no longer recognize or understand. I thought I was gathering numbers for proof, for science. Science doesn’t translate suffering, struggle, injustice, hopelessness or loss. And as a collective their voice was one of despair.
The river IS dying. We know this.
We switch from dugout boats in anaconda infested waters after lunch to an engine propelled boat that heads up the main river. Daniel suddenly slows the boat, points, and starts crying slowly then sobs. Everyone is looking where he is pointing and we see nothing. He points again. A spout of water irrupts from the brown churning river. Then it breaches pink and brilliant.
Daniel is excited and crying, but hushed as if the moment might shatter. “I have not seen one in many years…” he says this both out of joy and sorrow.
A Pink Amazon Dolphin kept several clicks ahead of the boat. Daniel called for the captain to ease back, to give it space. We sat in silence for a time, each in our own thoughts watching the mythical pink dolphin guide us up the river several more kilometers before disappearing. Daniel swore it to be a sign. A sign of what, no one wanted to ask.
