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.
Sandhill Cranes
When I first heard the rattling call I was walking along a small lake in Ontario, east of Sault St. Marie and West of Sudbury. I’d been driving my little camper for eight hours, after getting up in the lovely Two Rivers Campground in Algonquin Provincial Park. Since I was tired and since it was late in the day I thought: you are hallucinating. There can’t be Sandhill Cranes here in the far north in early September.
When, at 3 in the morning, I again heard that distinctive call I thought: this is a dream, no cranes.
In the morning, I emerged from the cocoon that is my little camper and scanned the range of RVs in the tidy campground, the set up mobile homes for those who came through the season, the more portable campers that were there a night or two. My eye was drawn to a bird feeder tempting in Goldfinch set up near one of the mobile homes. And there stood two cranes. Not plastic statues of cranes, as you might imagine in such a campground, real winged, breathing birds. They tip toed as delicately as a long-legged bird can, inspecting the short grass and only half-wary of me and a woman walking her dog. Cranes. In Canada.
I’ve always seen Sandhill Cranes in Arizona, the desert, and so think of them as birds that love the heat and dry. They fly into Wilcox, east of Tucson, by the hundreds, thousands, landing and taking off all flailing legs and wings. But there never seem to be actual collisions. I’ve stood, mesmerized by the loud, purring sound of the birds, and by the sheer numbers, all come to spend the winter there where it’s warm, where there’s food.
When I first heard the rattling call I was walking along a small lake in Ontario, east of Sault St. Marie and West of Sudbury. I’d been driving my little camper for eight hours, after getting up in the lovely Two Rivers Campground in Algonquin Provincial Park. Since I was tired and since it was late in the day I thought: you are hallucinating. There can’t be Sandhill Cranes here in the far north in early September.
When, at 3 in the morning, I again heard that distinctive call I thought: this is a dream, no cranes.
In the morning, I emerged from the cocoon that is my little camper and scanned the range of RVs in the tidy campground, the set up mobile homes for those who came through the season, the more portable campers that were there a night or two. My eye was drawn to a bird feeder tempting in Goldfinch set up near one of the mobile homes. And there stood two cranes. Not plastic statues of cranes, as you might imagine in such a campground, real winged, breathing birds. They tip toed as delicately as a long legged bird can, inspecting the short grass and only half-wary of me and a woman walking her dog. Cranes. In Canada.
I’ve always seen Sandhill Cranes in Arizona, the desert, and so think of them as birds that love the heat and dry. They fly into Wilcox, east of Tucson, by the hundreds, thousands, landing and taking off all flailing legs and wings. But there never seem to be actual collisions. I’ve stood, mesmerized by the loud, purring sound of the birds, and by the sheer numbers, all come to spend the winter there where it’s warm, where there’s food.
To see the birds there in Canada, on their migratory path south, perhaps to Wilcox, was to witness one of the great events in the natural world. Scientists have spent a lot of time studying migration, and still it remains a half secret (some aspects of how birds navigate are understood). I like this. I prefer when we don’t know, the natural world remaining a wondrous mystery, something to appreciate rather than master. Whenever I encounter a migrating bird—spring and fall—I marvel over the intersection of our lives. How was it that these Cranes, on their precarious path south, had landed here at this campground by a northern lake and that I had as well? The odds seemed fantastic. I already felt lucky that I had managed to spend the night in a clean, quiet, beautiful campsite, now I felt double lucky that it came complete with Cranes.
This, it turns out, is my favorite sort of birding: to travel some place beautiful and to be surprised by what I find, what I see, what I hear. If you bird in this way—with no expectations, with eyes and ears open, ready to see what you can—you can never be disappointed. The disappointed birder is the one who goes out looking for Cranes and doesn’t find them. That I wasn’t even hoping for, or expecting the Cranes, made it feel not like a bird sighting but a miracle sighting.
As I pulled out of the campsite, a woman who had been photographing the sunrise, shared a smile and an appreciation for the Cranes. “Keep an eye out when you drive West,” she said, “there are fields of Cranes.” And she was right.
Enjoying the Spectacle
I wasn’t ready for the mass of screaming gulls, or for the piles of Horseshoe Crabs along the shoreline, the males riding tight to the females, tails spiked toward the overcast sky. With each wave, another batch of horseshoe crabs washed up on Reed's Beach near Cape May, NJ, and what ensued was a wave of screams and hollers, whistles and hoots, a frenzy of the Laughing Gulls and Herring Gulls, and those remarkable little shorebirds, the Red Knots, fresh in from Tierra del Fuego.
Cape May is always good birding. On my few visits there, I’ve always left a bit dazzled by the sights. Once was a flock of hundreds of Sanderlings swooping the shore, landing, then circling out to the ocean in a choreographed movement that took my breath. Now here I had stumbled onto one of the great events of migration, witness to more feeding gulls and shorebirds than I had ever seen on one slim beach.
I wasn’t ready for the mass of screaming gulls, or for the piles of Horseshoe Crabs along the shoreline, the males riding tight to the females, tails spiked toward the overcast sky. With each wave another batch of horseshoe crabs washed up on Reed's Beach near Cape May, NJ, and what ensued was a wave of screams and hollers, whistles and hoots, a frenzy of the Laughing Gulls and Herring Gulls, and those remarkable little shorebirds, the Red Knots, fresh in from Tierra del Fuego.
Cape May is always good birding. On my few visits there, I’ve always left a bit dazzled by the sights. Once was a flock of hundreds of Sanderlings swooping the shore, landing, then circling out to the ocean in a choreographed movement that took my breath. Now here I had stumbled onto one of the great events of migration, witness to more feeding gulls and shorebirds than I had ever seen on one slim beach.
I felt lucky to be witness to this as I had read about, heard about how the Horseshoe Crabs come to shore for a few weeks in May, lay thousands of eggs—up to 80,000 each— enough for the shorebirds and enough so that the horseshoe crab continues is prehistoric life. Unless. Unless the horseshoe crab is taken to extract its blue blood—which is used to produce a remarkable healing agent, Limulus amoebocyte lysate (LAL). These Horseshoe Crabs are returned to the waters, most surviving. But many others are gathered by fishermen and cut up to use as bait for fishing in the Delaware Bay. Mature female crab populations dropped by 86 percent between 2001 and 2003 due to this take. The correlation in Red Knot populations was quick and evident. Between 2000 and 2002 the populations of Red Knots dropped by 50%. How was it that the spectacle of such abundance in front of me was, in fact, a story of loss? Of decline? Unaware of all of this at the time, I let the sounds and smells of all the birds wash over me. I just enjoyed the spectacle.
Red Knots are an extraordinary shorebird. In Moonbird, the writer Phillip Hoose describes the migration of this little shorebird with a red chest that makes its way with "luck, navigational skill, and physical toughness" from southern Argentina to the Arctic every year. The bird of his story—B95—is banded in Tierra del Fuego in 1995, and was most recently sighted in March of 2015. This little bird flies 20,000 miles a year—so in its nineteen plus years of life has flown the equivalent of flying to the moon—and back.
When B95 was banded, scientists estimated about 150,000 Red Knots existed. Now, 25,000 fly the globe. This means that in this one bird’s lifetime, populations have dropped 80%, making its long life even more exceptional.
I did not look for B95 as the birds swept the beach. I stood, slightly dazed by the raucous, as the gulls hovered over the water, then plummeted, wings raised as they hushed to the ground and began foraging between the Horseshoe Crabs. A flock of Red Knots raced by without stopping, little bullets with red chests on a mission to somewhere. The Horseshoe Crabs looked liked war-torn soldiers, barnacles clinging to the base of the domed shell, spikey tails pointed high as they tumbled in with the waves. Some of the Horseshoe Crabs flipped over, spindly legs helplessly clawing the air. I wanted to run out and right them, but the beach was cordoned off, protected by a volunteer. “At night, we go out and flip them back over,” she explained. For now, the beach was for the birds. All of those birds.
Gambling
I write this sitting in the town of Pahrump, outside of La Vegas. So this is a rich perch from which to think about gambling. I always say I’m not a gambler—I’ve bought a Lotto ticket or two but I wouldn’t know what to do in a casino. Yet the truth is, we all gamble all the time—when we decide to take this job and not that one. When we decide to go to dinner with this person we will fall in love with and not that person. If you leave money out of the definition of gambling, replace it with, for instance, birds, then it reads like this: playing games in order to find birds. I gamble in this way all the time.
I write this sitting in the town of Pahrump, outside of Las Vegas. So this is a rich perch from which to think about gambling. I always say I’m not a gambler—I’ve bought a Lotto ticket or two but I wouldn’t know what to do in a casino. Yet the truth is, we all gamble all the time—when we decide to take this job and not that one. When we decide to go to dinner with this person we will fall in love with and not that person. If you leave money out of the definition of gambling, replace it with, for instance, birds, then it reads like this: playing games in order to find birds. I gamble in this way all the time.
When I left my motel in Lee Vining, California, I wasn’t thinking about gambling on birds. I was revisiting the past. In 1980 I hitch hiked with Michael, my boyfriend at the time, to Lee Vining. We camped by the tufa towers of Mono Lake and dreamt of the summer to unfold before us rock climbing on the granite domes of Tuolomne Meadows. I am a bit haunted by that summer, the one I refer to as “the best summer of my life.” And it began in Lee Vining. I wanted to walk through a piece of that past.
As I strolled down a creek side trail I soon snapped out of my daydreaming. A Dipper could be frequenting this stream, I realized. And so I went on high alert, in hopes that one of these gray, cheerful birds would sing for me. The Dipper, often called the Water Ouzel, was John Muir’s favorite little caroler, and in his day, not a stream in the Sierras was without one of these songsters. I scanned the water, knowing a Dipper bobs about, but in general presents as gray on gray, as polished as the rocks in the stream.
As I looked for the Dipper, it made me focus outward and I started to see the lovely small canyon: sandy soil, running water, rock outcroppings. Not part of my memories, but more beautiful. And as I admired the world, I noticed a…Christmas tree bulb in the tree. I pulled up my binoculars and looked at the round, speckled little owl. A Northern Pygmy Owl. I stopped. The owl swiveled its head, showing its large “eyes” on the back of its head, then turned to look at me again. It sat, nonchalant, unaware how it had cheered my day.
After spending time with the owl, I bid him goodbye on his happy perch and continued on. Soon after, I heard the song of the Dipper, a musical medley that rose above the movement of the creek. I scanned the water for this joyful little bird, and found him bobbing in the creek.
I had not gambled, and yet I’d still won. Maybe I should gamble on not gambling. I often feel as if the birds I stumble on are the most special—special because I saw them and special because so utterly unexpected. Unexpected, just like the adventures of that summer spent in Tuolomne in 1980.