A Wolverine Is Eating My Leg (2 page)

Following the moments of transcendent concentration and the resultant endorphin-fueled euphoria is a calm so serene that Keyes believes the term stress seeker is “a misnomer. One of the main reasons for seeking stress is to enjoy the subsequent tranquility.”

All this is said with a good deal more poetry in Diane Ackerman’s book,
On Extended Wings
. Ackerman, a pilot, scuba diver, and horsewoman, writes that she likes “that moment central to danger … when you become so thoroughly concerned with acting deftly, in order to be safe, that only reaction is possible, not analysis. You shed the centuries and feel creatural. Of course you do have to scan, assess, and make constant minute decisions. But there is nothing like thinking in the usual methodical way. What takes its place is more akin to informed instinct. For a compulsively pensive person, to be fully alert but free of thought is a form of ecstasy.”

I suppose those salient factors—concentration, control, ecstasy, and tranquility—go a long way toward explaining the desire to scare oneself badly. They are, of course, the very sensations a man whose work has become a psychologically dangerous obsession needs to experience. If the work in question is a study in human evil, as mine was, the claustrophobia can become intense; the obsession soul-threatening. Reason demands that the escape must be equally intense.

And so it was that I came to understand that risk is a form of therapy. That’s what I’ll tell the interviewers next time around. The stories I’ve written about various adventures are among my favorites. In them, I’ve discovered you can put your life on the line in order to save your soul.

Which is why I want these loud, goofy, boisterous fellows at my party.

Tim Cahill, Montana

T
here is something a bit
humid
about the picture, something moist and mysterious, something vaguely erotic and tangled and malarial. It is a picture taken somewhere in a South American jungle: a white woman, naked but for what appears to be a pair of panty hose, and three male Indians decked out in Stone Age regalia.

I found it quite by accident about five years ago while poring over the files at the South American Explorers Club in Lima, Peru. It fell out from between two folders. No one at the club knew where it had come from or what it meant. And I guess you might say I sort of stole it.

In the years since then, I’ve traveled regularly to various Central and South American jungles. They scare me, these jungles. I find them dark and mythic, and I keep returning to them in the way that one returns to a disturbing nightmare. They are, finally, inexplicable in their chaos, but there is meaning in that, just as there is meaning in the picture.

Gold and diamonds draw men of varying degrees of desperation into the jungles of South America. Some of these
men, old-timers for the most part, can be found in and around Canaima. Formerly the exclusive haunt of adventurers, bush pilots, prospectors, and explorers, Canaima is, these days, a modern resort. Set deep in a Venezuelan jungle known as the Lost World, Canaima is only a day or two’s journey by outboard-powered dugout from Angel Falls, at the base of Auyan-Tepui, the devil mountain. The resort itself is situated on an immense lagoon formed by the Rio Carrao and fringed by soft, pink sand.

Everywhere there are orchids, and the fecund, slightly sweet odor of the jungle is amiable and caressing. At its deepest, the lagoon is black, somehow metallic, and great clouds float across it in reflection. Where it’s shallow, the water is clear and clean and brown, the color of strong tea or good bourbon. Such dark jungle rivers and lagoons carry organic acids and do not provide a good place for insects to breed. Piranha are seldom found, since they tend to live in slow, swollen, sediment-rich rivers, such as the Orinoco, whose surface is the color of lead. I have seen men fishing for piranha on the Orinoco banks, fishing for the sheer joy of killing. They would pull the piranha in and let them flop to death on the bank. The little fish looked like vampire sunperch.

But there are no piranha or insects at Canaima, and the tourists, especially the well-to-do Venezuelans, tend to wear those abbreviated swimsuits associated with Rio de Janeiro. For many North Americans, Canaima is a first taste of the jungle, and in the bar overlooking the lagoon, they may meet some of the old-timers and this is where the trouble sometimes starts. Legitimate businessmen in Canaima complain that it is almost impossible to get wealthy tourists to invest in aviation services or other necessary concessions. Instead, people want to drop their money into unlikely gold- and diamond-mining ventures.

And the tale is told of a bush pilot I’ll call Norman. Norman shouldn’t have been anywhere in Venezuela. His visa had been revoked over some serious financial misunderstandings, but he was in Canaima when two brothers from Houston arrived. Somehow, probably over drinks at
the lagoon bar, Norman discovered that these two big, good-hearted old boys owned a machine shop in Houston, and that they were doing very well. Norman decided to tell them about the diamonds. The stones were there for the taking, buried in the coarse, sandy banks of a river that flowed along the flat top of Auyan-Tepui.

Norman had bought the diamonds from a drunken miner near the Luepa army base. They were poor stones, small, discolored, and virtually worthless. Norman salted the sand with them on the devil mountain, and when he flew the brothers up there and showed them where to dig, each came up with a couple of the dark little stones.

The brothers went back to Houston, borrowed all they could on the machine shop, and sent Norman $25,000 to get started on their newly acquired diamond mine. Norman took the money and flew off in the general direction of Brazil. Now, in this area of Venezuela, isolated landing strips are everywhere, and many of them are uncharted except by those who conduct extralegal business. Norman had hired a couple of men to stock one of those strips with drums of fuel. Unfortunately for Norman, he hadn’t been paying his bills, and when he put down on the rutted, red-dirt strip in the middle of the jungle, he discovered there was no fuel. Because of his visa difficulties, he couldn’t land anywhere where fuel was legitimately sold, and so he decided to try for Brazil on what he had left in his tank.

It is a ticklish matter, crash landing a light plane in a jungle. You want to glide down as slowly as possible; you want to snag your plane in one of the trees that rise like monstrous stalks of broccoli above the lesser vegetation. These trees can be more than one hundred and fifty feet high, and most bush pilots carry a rope for the final descent.

Norman ran out of fuel near Santa Elena, a town about twelve miles short of the Brazilian border, and he was taken into custody. Meanwhile, the brothers were back in Canaima, asking around about Norman, and they didn’t seem so good-hearted anymore. Just big. And determined.

That’s the end of the story, as the old-timers tell it. No one saw the brothers again. Several years later, Norman
showed up in Canaima. The old-timers couldn’t help but notice that he had no fingers on his right hand. They were all gone, cut off neat and clean, just as if the job had been done in a machine shop.

M
ost stories involving precious stones and jungles end poorly. The Muzo mine, about one hundred miles north of Bogotá, Colombia, is the source of 80 percent of the emeralds sold on the world market. Bulldozers strip the hillsides while about twenty thousand prospectors wade through the river below, panning for emeralds loosened by the machines above. The prospectors are not allowed to move above the riverbanks, and armed guards on the hillside fire at them if they do.

After years of gangland slayings in the jungle, the Colombian government has rented the mine to “the Heavy Gang,” which won control of the mine from “the Goose Gang” after at least one massacre and uncounted assassinations. The government’s lucrative decision to cooperate with the gangsters has eliminated much of the violence associated with Muzo. Officials recently told Warren Hoge of the
New York Times
that the mine has been “pacified,” but Hoge quoted an outside observer who said he had counted twenty-four corpses in twenty-one days at Muzo. The observer said that some prospectors had taken to swallowing their emeralds when confronted by thieves, and some thieves had taken to disemboweling their victims.

Two of the most popular bars in the area are called the Seven Knife Stabs and Where Life Is Worth Nothing.

T
he law of the jungle seems to be this: there is no law in the jungle. Which isn’t to suggest that there aren’t a lot of policemen and soldiers around. There are, and one reason for this is that boundaries are difficult to establish. There are border disputes everywhere: Peru and Ecuador, Belize and Guatemala, Guyana and Venezuela. The less populated an area becomes and the deeper into the jungle one goes, the more forms there are to fill out and checkpoints to go through. One may be obliged to show a passport, a visa, or permits; to state age, marital status, occupation, reason for being in the area; to explain one’s very existence.

In certain areas of Peru, one may have to first report to the Peruvian Investigative Police (PIP) before checking into a hotel. Miguel Zamora, the man who heads up PIP in the northeastern town of Chachapoyas, did not seem to trust the three of us. The expedition had been launched in search of a pre-Incan culture known as the Chachas. We were also making our own maps, and these, Zamora decided, might be of assistance to, say, an Ecuadorian military expedition. Every other day that we were in town, Zamora called us in for another little talk.

On the other hand, the chief of police, the commandant, seemed to like and trust us. He had sent his daughter to a school in Lima, where she studied English, and she had taught him an American song.

“Heengalay bales, heengalay bales …”

We figured it out more from the tune than the words, and so, on a hot July afternoon in Chachapoyas, which is located in the eastern foothills of the Andes, on a plateau that drops off into three thousand miles of jungle, we joined in with the commandant.

“…  jingle all the way, oh what fun it is to ride in a one-horse open sleigh …”

Every time we saw the commandant, he reminded us of the fun we had singing “Heengalay Bales” together. He
wore a hat something like an American policeman’s, except it was three times as high and had gold braids on it. It looked like a hat that a loony dictator would wear in a slapstick film. The commandant learned more about our reasons for being in Chachapoyas in one hour than Zamora did in the half-dozen chats he had with us.

As it turned out, we found a number of forts and stone cities of the Chachas. They were set deep in the forests in a mountainous region known as Ceja de Selva (“eyebrow of the jungle”). We had used a sixteenth-century Spanish text as a guide, and the cities were as described in
The Royal Commentaries of the Incas
. We camped for days in some of those vegetation-choked ruins and tried to imagine the lives of a people long gone. I suspect these should have been humbling days, but an intense euphoria overwhelmed all other emotions.

It was as if the jungle had drawn its breath and sucked these people back into its darkness. There were ceramic artifacts one thousand years old and more, and the potsherds sometimes lay in company with human remains. We left this evidence for the archaeologists and marveled at the power of the forest. It had sent roots snaking through the interstices of the great stone forts and had swallowed the culture whole. Standing in the ruins, I imagined uncontrolled natural forces at work: it was like walking through the rubble of a hurricane-ravaged shoreline. The ruins had taken on the syrupy odor of all that triumphant vegetation. I was standing on the scene of some slow, choking horror, and I was alive, I would survive, and these thoughts left me feeling blessed and giddy.