Jungle Dawn Chorus
The dawn chorus in the jungle has a particular bass beat, like a deep wave washing through the dense trees, or like the earth itself is exhaling. What is that, I wonder. I’m sitting in a dinky plastic pack raft on the Las Piedras River, cradling my camera, and straining to see something in the green on green on green that lines the river. I’ve set out with three others on this foggy dawn float, but they are already a bend and a half down the river so I feel alone. Alone with the caiman lounging on the sandy banks and the Pied Lapwings tip-toeing along the river’s edge. Alone with the Parakeets that flock across the river, screaming their destination and their joy. Alone with the Sunbittern and the Hoatzin, birds that seem created from an artist’s fantasy of a bird. Alone not at all.
The dawn chorus in the jungle has a particular bass beat, like a deep wave washing through the dense trees, or like the earth itself is exhaling. What is that, I wonder. I’m sitting in a dinky plastic pack raft on the Las Piedras River, in the Amazon of Peru, cradling my camera, and straining to see something in the green on green on green that lines the river. I’ve set out with three others on this foggy dawn float, but they are already a bend and a half down the river so I feel alone. Alone with the caiman lounging on the sandy banks and the Pied Lapwings tip-toeing along the river’s edge. Alone with the Parakeets that flock across the river, screaming their destination and their joy. Alone with the Sunbittern and the Hoatzin, birds that seem created from an artist’s fantasy of a bird. Alone not at all.
Swept into this stream, cradled by my boat, I feel embraced by the land as if at a big family reunion. Every bit of me is there, a perfect meditation that is not focused in on my breath, but out on the breath of the land. What is that? The sound, hollow, almost mystical, fills my bones and I lean back in the raft as I flush downstream in the silty river. And then I remember what our guides told me: the sound that is so deep is not birds, but howler monkeys.
At home in the Hudson Valley I bird mostly by ear. Once the spring leaves come in it’s hard to lay eyes on a bird so learning the bird songs is necessary if you want to know who is stopping by on your driveway or singing near the feeder or sliding out of the reeds in the Tivoli Bays. But the denseness of leaves in the Hudson Valley is a joke compared to the jungle where the green is often so dense it blocks out all light. In this denseness birds thrive, and I know they are out there: the songs punctuate the air. There is no attempt at harmony here, no overall tune, but rather it’s every bird for himself, a great crazy medley that leaves me delighted and baffled.
But on the river: you do get to see things, the little birds, the Water Tyrants, that come to the river’s edge for some water, a bug, a slap of sunlight. Or the Yellow-billed Terns that course up and down the river. Or the Amazon Kingfisher, cackling away on a fishing expedition. Hoatzin fumble about in the bushes, so clumsy, then pose for a photo.
Mid-float I arrive at a sandbar where on a drying log Sand Nighthawks are roosting for the day. I pull onto shore, and shove myself out of the boat (which is leaking just a bit, so it’s become soft; I do a bit of repair work with some duck tape and have faith it will get me back to the station). I walk close enough to the birds to see clearly and to take photos but I don’t want to disturb their day-time snooze, which looks, through my binoculars, like the perfect morning meditation. Are we all meditating out here, at peace with the self and the land?
Soon, the sun rises, more birds sing, and then I hear a motor on the river and it’s Paul, our guide on this trip. He’s in the long wooden boat with his mother, who is making her first trip to the jungle. “Isn’t it great seeing your son in his proper habitat?” I joke with her. But it’s not really a joke: Paul belongs here just as the Tapir and the Jaguar do. And I think it’s sweet that he’s taking her out for a morning boat ride. But that’s not his goal: he’s checking on me. Paul is the best of guides, letting people do what they want to do, giving us our freedom here in this big place. So I have to wonder: have I really been out here so long that even Paul has become curious of my whereabouts? I have. A float that should have taken an hour and a half has stretched to four hours. “You good?” he calls across the water, thumbs up.
I nod and smile and give a thumbs up that says, “More than good.” Excellent. Never been better. Happy. And off he goes to leave me with my happiness.
Four hours of meandering, of observing, of delighting. Four hours during which I am not thinking about breakfast that waits for me, or the mess that our country is in (in fact, for two solid weeks I had not a single political thought, which is a shift for a MSNBC junkie), I am not over-thinking a small heartache. And if none of these things matter, than neither does time, an hour just like four. And perhaps space either, the land here infinite, the land here precious down to a grain of sand.
Swimming with my Fears
I’m grateful that it is only on the third day that Paul tells me that the Las Piedras River, where we have been boating, floating and swimming, my clothes perpetually wet from the afternoon plunges, is swimming with Piranhas. I knew about the Caiman, Spectacled and Yellow, that I’ve seen lounging on the banks, and scoot off whenever the boat comes near. I’ve tamed my response to snakes—an embarrassing nerve-jangling recoil—by understanding that every snake is more afraid of me than I am of it. But Piranhas, that’s news. I laugh and say: cool.
I’m grateful that it is only on the third day that Paul tells me that the Las Piedras River, where we have been boating, floating and swimming, my clothes perpetually wet from the afternoon plunges, is swimming with Piranhas. I knew about the Caiman, Spectacled and Yellow, that I’ve seen lounging on the banks, and scoot off whenever the boat comes near. I’ve tamed my response to snakes—an embarrassing nerve jangling recoil—by understanding that every snake is more afraid of me than I am of it. But Piranhas, that’s news. I laugh and say: cool.
This is the jungle me response, one that I never could have anticipated as I planned for this trip to the Amazon. I prepared for this trip as I always do: I read (Oh, and I also fretted over yellow fever shots and hep A and typhoid vaccines). I read books like Tree of Rivers and The Lost City of Z. Both of these wonderful works fed the images I had of the jungle: a dangerous place. If the Bot Flies didn’t take up residence in my flesh, then for sure a Candiru fish was going to swim up my vagina. And then I read Paul’s book Mother of God.
Paul is a smart, passionate man who needs room to move, think, be. He walks barefoot through the jungle, eats with his hands, and enjoys his bug bites. He runs towards snakes and caimans with the love of a teenage boy and the intelligence of a man who wants nothing more than for all of us to love these creatures as he does. Underneath his muscled jungle-man bravado is someone who is wounded every time a tree is cut in the jungle. To protect this world he loves he has formed an ecotourism company with his wife Gowri (one of my former students at Bard College) and others called Tamandua. And he has also formed a nonprofit to protect land in the jungle: Junglekeepers. Before spending intense time in the jungle with him I am already in admiration of the work he’s done and am worried he’s also sort of an asshole, like most focused, driven men who are confident they are right.
Roy serving me more coffee!
The more you know about a place, the safer it becomes. At Paul’s side is JJ, a man who knows the jungle because he grew up there. The two walk with machetes in hand as they take us—a group of eleven family and friends—on walks near the station where we sleep and are fed delicious meals prepared by Roy, who greets me every morning with excellent coffee and a warm hug. Having such comforts in such a remote place feels like a forbidden pleasure. I drink way too much coffee.
Knowing the jungle as he does—fourteen years of spending months here since he was eighteen—Paul makes the jungle not a play ground, but a place where we can play. I climb a massive Kapok tree, hugging the vines that strangle up the tree and pressing my bare feet against the solid smooth bark. My feet are cut, my legs bruised, but is that not a small price to pay to sit in the crown of an ancient tree, to see the world as the birds do and to feel from a different vantage the massive power and fragility of this ecosystem?
And, I swim in the ever-silty Las Piedras River that carves around the station and leads downstream to Puerto Maldonado, eventually joining the Madre de Dios and much further on the Amazon. Almost every day heat, sweat, sore muscles are washed away by jumping into the water and floating downstream. With Piranhas.
Everyone on this trip was challenged in one way or another and I think about how rare that is, especially as we get older. I watched as Paul took his mother-in-law by the hand and offered her the caiman he caught, asks her to bundle up her recoil and touch the beautiful creature. One by one he explicitly or implicitly pushed us to take one step more than we thought we were capable of to walk or swim into this rich, amazing land. I smile through it all, allowing that Paul is right.
I didn’t swim into my fears; I’ve swum with them. And how intoxicating that is, a kind of freedom found in few places, in few moments. By the end of the trip I am covered in bug bites—sand flies, ticks, mosquitoes, I’ve succumbed to jungle fever, my legs are bruised. This, of course, is Paul’s goal. Not that I get sick but rather that I get sick and not really care. Nothing matters—not politics, work, or the line of bites that march up my groin. What mattered was being there, seeing the Trogon, the Sunbittern, the Tapir swimming toward shore; what mattered was being overwhelmed by green. While my body is marked, my spirit is soaring higher than it has in a long time.