Rainforest Ghosts

 My little Amazon diorama has reappeared on my desk.  The big fishbowl I found in Las Cruces sat there empty for a long time.  I liked the vessel's clarity and shape.  Then, recently, I saw a small fern I liked and soon afterward a miniature African Violet. I made a quick trip into the Sandia foothills for some moss; that and a bit of potting soil brought the terrarium back to life.

 Last night's PBS news included an interview with a Norwegian human rights investigator about the currently dreadful state of life in the Northwest Amazon where the tropical forest is being destroyed by timber harvesters, oil exploitation and agricultural clear cutting.  Drug cartels reign there now over vast areas with little effective resistance offered by national government forces.

Such a contrast to the time I was there when Colombia's perpetual violence was at a low level. At that point rubber harvesting had receded in importance, and the wisdom of indigenous tradition allowed the region's peoples to regain some degree of dignity and independence. 

The Best Possible Outcome

 Four Colombian children found alive in jungle weeks after plane crash

Reuters 

The Guardian  The Guardian(2)

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My own memories of the rainforest and indigenous survival skills.

An additional sad note reported on 6/11 in The Guardian was that the mother survived for four days after the crash and ultimately told the children to leave to look for help.  The wreckage was not found for two weeks after the crash.

Survival

 There was a great story this morning from Reuters: 

Colombian children found alive in jungle weeks after plane crash

The details of this epic story were slim, but the opening line contains the vital clue: "Four children from an Indigenous community in Colombia..."

That the children survived the crash while all the adults perished was a great stroke of luck, but their subsequent survival can be attributed to a lifestyle based on very early learning about the sustainable exploitation of natural resources.

As it happens, I am familiar with the area where the plane went down in southern Colombia  from a youthful adventure many years in the past.  I have written here several times about my travels there and one of those posts briefly deals with the indigenous survival techniques which are provided to children from the time they began to walk.  (I am reminded of the fable of Br'er Rabbit and the Brian Patch.)

The Reuters story has the makings of a great book or a film.  It would be nice should such a project be undertaken if some of the benefits could accrue to the children and their community.  The danger is, of course, that such exposure will ultimately result in an erosion of cultural traditions and a degradation of environmental integrity.

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UPDATE (5/18/23)

Well, it appears now that the story might not have a real happy ending.  An article in La Prensa says that the President of Colombia has announced the the children have not been found.  We'll just have to hope for the best...

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UPDATE (5/19/23 - La Prensa)

Los militares hallaron el biberón del bebé y encontraron huellas recientes de pisadas de los niños cerca de un caño. Según fuentes de la zona, hay esperanzas de que hayan sobrevivido debido a que están familiarizados con la selva y sus recursos. La búsqueda es aún más difícil porque la lluvia hace que los rastros se borren más rápido.

The military found the baby's bottle and encountered recent footprints of the children near a stream. According to sources in the area, there is hope that they have survived because they are familiar with the jungle and its resources. The search is even more difficult because the rain makes the tracks disappear faster.

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The children were found forty days after the crash with no injuries and in good health, thanks to the care and skills of the oldest girl.

Memories of the Rainforest

 

The Amazon Basin

A couple times a year some news item from the Amazon Basin brings forth memories of my own time there, now more than sixty years ago. Unfortunately, reports from the Amazon in recent times are most often alarming, and even horrific. Most recently, the headlines have been about the murders of the journalist, Dom Phillips and the indigenous expert, Bruno Pereira, who had been investigating the plundering of natural resources and the displacement of indigenous people. I believe the two men had been traveling at the time along the Javari River.

In 1960 I made a brief trip from Leticia in southern Colombia to the town of Benjamin Constant, Brazil, which is at the confluence of the Amazon and the Javari River. About all I can clearly recall now of that visit was the heart-stopping high speed ride there through a flooded forest in a canoe powered by a big outboard motor.

The Northwest Amazon

Most of the time I spent  in the Northwest Amazon was actually far to the north of Leticia along the Río Miriti-Paraná, a small tributary of the Río Caquetá. Getting to the Catholic Mission outpost which my four American friends and I used as our basecamp required hundreds of miles of travel on small river boats, first downstream on the Amazon, then upstream on the Japurá/Caquetá. The final portion of the journey was in dugout canoes powered by small outboards with additional paddle assistance to get through the rapids of the Miriti-Paraná.

The indigenous peoples of he entire Amazon Basin have suffered a very long history of exploitation through debt peonage connected to rubber and timber harvesting, and mineral extraction. In the last half-century huge portions of the vast rainforest have been clearcut to make way for soy plantations, forcing the culture-destroying displacement of many indigenous people.

At the time of my visit the Yucuna people around the Miriti-Paraná still seemed to have a pretty firm grip on their traditional ways with only minimal intrusions from the military, religious and commercial institutions of the countries claiming sovereignty over the area.   Manioc cultivation on small slash-and-burn plots was supplemented by hunting and gathering to provide what seemed to be an adequate diet and a stable lifestyle. A few people had firearms, but poison dart blowguns and archers' bows were still much in use. Family coca plots were common, but I only saw the drug used for social and ceremonial gatherings.

Padre Norberto, who oversaw the Miriti-Paraná Catholic mission seemed to be a genuinely caring advocate for the local people. He engaged in no condemnation of traditional religious beliefs and ceremonies and his religious and teaching efforts seemed well received by the people in the area. The Padre was instrumental in gaining our group's access to attend and film an important annual Yucuna dance ceremony, along with a generally friendly reception when we visited with families along the river.

I wrote a few letters home to my own family about life around the Miriti-Paraná, but I kept no diary at the time. At this distance from those days, my memories are fragmentary and rather dream-like. One incident a do recall vividly is a forest stroll near the mission in which I was asked to accompany a group of children who were around six or eight years of age. I recall the children being barefoot and dressed very simply in shorts.

The children on our field trip led the way along narrow forest paths and seemed to take great pleasure in pointing out and naming plants and birds along the way.  At one point a fallen log was split open to reveal a harvest of fat, squirming grubs; the children ate some and offered me some as well. I declined the offering, which prompted considerable giggling.  I think the children guessed I would likely not accept their offer, and that in doing so I would betray the incapacity of non-indigenous people to do something as basic as feeding oneself from the natural bounty of the rainforest. I took it as a good lesson.

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Some Amazon Links:

* The Lost Amazon: The Photographic Journey of Richard Evans Schultes by Wade Davis (My brief review of the book)

* On Fábio Zuker’s “The Life and Death of a Minke Whale in the Amazon: Dispatches from the Brazilian Rainforest” (A review at the Los Angeles Review of Books)

* Tristes Tropiques by Claude  Lévi-Strauss (My brief review of the book)

* Seattle to Bogota (in a Piper Tri-Pacer)

* A lucky flight out of the jungle (in a Grumman Duck)

narco culture

I had the good fortune to visit Colombia in 1960 during a time when violence was at a low point for the country. Medellín then was a bright, tropical city. Bogotá was cold and gray by comparison, but the people were equally warm and hospitable.

Laura Restrepo's novel, Delirio, is set in a time two decades later when the country was in the terrible grip of Pablo Escobar's Medellín cartel.  Restrepo illustrates that story in the way it plays out in the lives of a couple living in Bogotá.  Aguilar is a former university professor reduced to peddling dog food.  His wife, Agustina, is beautiful and demented, condemned to endlessly sort through her memories of her family's entrapment and complicity in the drug trade.

I read and enjoyed Restrepo's early novel, La Isla de La Pasión, in which the author demonstrated her talent for weaving together plausible stories from bits of history and improbable fictional characters.

I put off reading Delirio for a long time, however, because Restrepo's vocabulary and stylistic choices make her writing something of a stretch for me as a non-native Spanish speaker. The inter-mixing of first, second and third person narrative modes -- often in the same paragraph -- also made this novel particularly challenging for me at first.

As often happens, however, plodding onward got me better in touch with the story line.  I also found it helpful to read some reviews including Terrence Rafferty's 2007 review in the NY Times and another from 2004 at BBCMundo.com by Roger Santodomingo.  Wikipedia provides a good account of the role in Colombia's history of drug kingpin, Pablo Escobar. The Wikipedia page on Laura Restrepo reads like a bad translation, but it does give a pretty good overview of her extraordinary life history which has provided inspiration for her writing.

Delirio won the Alfaguara Prize in 2004 and the book is available in ebook format from that publisher.  I would like to have read it that way, but I'm just not willing to put out 8 euros for ephemeral digital bits.  I'm reading the paperback edition for free from the Albuquerque Public Library.

the last flight

I won't win any prizes for my model of the Grumman Duck bi-wing amphibian, but building it has been a nice way to tease out some memories of times long past. The Duck was the last single-engine plane I flew in.



The one I made my last flight in, like a lot of other old war birds, went to South America as war-surplus to haul cargo. A half dozen versions of the Duck were produced, the last having a 1,050 hp air-cooled radial engine.



In early 1960 I found myself just north of Colombia's southern boot heel at a mission outpost on the Mirití-Paraná River. I enjoyed my visit immensely, but after a month there I needed to get back to Leticia on the Amazon where I could get a plane back to Bogotá. The up-river trip in a series of increasingly smaller river boats had not been so enjoyable, and I was not looking forward to repeating that ten-day ordeal down to the Caquetá, and then up-stream on the Amazon to reach Leticia.



By good luck a tropical fish exporter based in Leticia was just then experimenting with the old Grumman Duck as a means of hauling his fish out of the rain forest so that they could be sent on to Miami, usually by means of some converted WWII bombers which made regular stops in Leticia. When the pilot of the Duck offered a ride to a friend and I, it was too good a chance to pass up.

(My memory of the flight's beginning is a bit fuzzy.  The Miritiparaná River is too narrow at the mission location to permit landing the Grumman Duck there. On giving it some further thought I recall a downstream trip from the Miriti mission to the closest town of La Pedrera on the Caquetá.  I remember the river being muddy and shallow, and we had to get out to drag and push our riverboat for a long way, thinking all the while about the stingrays that lurked below.)

We rode down in the cargo compartment, accessed through the square hatch just behind the lower wing. We shared the cramped space with some water-filled plastic bags for fish, and one large up-ended turtle. It was difficult to see out during the ride, but the view was not very interesting anyway -- just the unbroken green canopy of the tropical rainforest. With a cruising speed of 150 mph, the Duck got us to Leticia in a bit over an hour.



Judging from the Google Earth view, the place hasn't changed much in half a century.

a plane in every garage

A lot of people learned to fly during WWII. That fed nicely into the idea promoted by small plane manufacturers that one day everyone could enjoy the freedom of flying their own plane. There was in fact a great development of air travel and personal flight opportunities, though the details and diversity went far beyond what was imagined during Flight's first half-century. As it turned out, commercial and technical developments, along with societal changes, pushed small planes toward ever-increasing performance and price. By the mid-'50s the Piper Cub had morphed into models with several times the range and capacities of the original. One of my last flights in a single engine aircraft - and by far the longest - was in a Piper Tri Pacer.

In my second year at the University of Washington, my studies seemed to be taking me nowhere, so when an opportunity arose to join a project to make a film in the Amazon, I jumped in along with three other students. The group's leader was a tough little Greek guy who had just barely survived the Korean War and had ambitions to produce TV adventure stories. The photographer was a musician/biology student who happened to own a Speed Graphic and a 16mm Bolex. Transportation was provided by a pilot who had put in about four hundred hours in his Tri-Pacer. Since I had managed to struggle through several years of Spanish in my pre-college days, I was designated the interpreter. That was a good tip-off about the prospects of success for the venture.

Ahunt-Wikipedia

As it turned out, the plane trip was the best part of the grand adventure. We took off from Seattle in December of 1959 with the objective of reaching the Amazon River in southern Colombia. Stops along the way included Mountain Home Idaho, Panguitch Utah, Nogales Mexico, Mexico City, Merida, Managua, Panama City, and Medellin in Colombia.



When we got to Bogotá aviation authorities there quite sensibly concluded that our going in the Tri-Pacer over hundreds of miles of rain forest to Leticia on the Amazon was a recipe for disaster. So, we left the little plane behind in Bogotá and made the final airborne leg of the trip in a C-46. From Leticia, we traveled a thousand miles by river launch up tributaries of the great River and did our filming along the way. But, that is another story, as is my very last flight in a single-engine aircraft.