Las Amazonas: Days on the River

"Cuantos años tienes?"

The sway of the hammocks 

nearly touching

and definitely touching.

Hammocks in every possible suspended inch of air.

The London-Peruvian-Gringo, surrounded by niños—telling stories?

No.  Teaching a card game? Or was it a magic trick?

And is he charging them?  Or beating children a poker?

Largest gathering of niños I've seen on board.

Long lines wrapped around the 1st floor deck hall,

plastic bowls and tupperware in hand, awaiting the meal

meat and rice, again.

If you're lucky early, you might catch a little lentil, vegetable or sauce to accompany the meat and interminable rice.

The casual bathrooms: men, women, children.  Wash your lunch plate, take an Amazon shower, go poop:  the 3-in-one.

"Quieres probar esta fruta?"

Sharing fruit on our deck with the families headed to Yurimaguas.

Zapote: the sweet pumpkin-evoking fruit.

Throw the rinds and the pits overboard.  Feed the fish.  Just like

the fruit-dropping trees are doing now, many submerged in the rising river.

The rainy season is hard on fishing, the fish

already have plenty falling Amazon fruit to eat.

The woman who shared her fruit listens in on our conversations,

never joining in, except for her smiles and gentle silent laughter

curious and attentive.

The men who gather on the decks of the boat just watching.

Thinking? Sometimes talking.  Mostly 3½ days of watching.

The men who flipped their tops when I walked by in a swimsuit and towel -- I, hoping to swim in not too crocodile or pirana or snake or eel or any bity-itchy-electrocuty-infested waters.  I wasn't particularly human to the crowd.  I became pure body.  They became pure animal.

The Captain who fell for the clear blue eyes, like those in storybooks, and bought fried beatles for me to try.  Who heard my Bolivian Artist story and lowered our pasaje to 80 soles.  "I like you."

The two German friends we made: the Writer-Director (who knew the Amazon was such a thespian hotspot!) and the Pharmacist, who destroyed my natural assumption that all pharmacists belong to the most boring possible class of human beings.  His passion for drugs and the human body nearly enrolled me in pharmacy school.

Patricio, who spied on me from his hammock until we began a face-making game:  read a paragraph, entertain the child.  Read my book, find new contorted configuration with my mouth.  Smile at the dear niño.

These were our neighbors.  In our bedroom of 160 swinging people. 

I've never been so glad to get on a crowded boat--300? or 400? people, plus animals and cargo—boarding the river to leave loud, obnoxious Iquitos, where I was little more than a female, a gringa, a tourist, surrounded by piranhas of tour guides and taxis.  On the 3 day boat to Yurigmaguas I could be what I have forever most wanted to be.  Even in those 3½ days when I failed to shake off my femininity, my gringinity, my blue eye-inity.  More than all those definers, for 3½ days I became (only) human.

Those 3½ days we sat and ate and laid side-by-side and caught each others eyes and when we overcame our shyness we spoke, and we shared those 3 sunsets, those 3 sunrises, and we were our best curious simple selves.  Human.

The 5am cell phone, unconcious of his roommates (160 of them), the assumptive man with the stereo we're all inevitably "blessed" to enjoy.  The quiet mornings before the 6am bustle.

"Tienes un novio?"

A pregunta I've decided I'm done with. You're not going to be my 36 hour Peruvian boyfriend, nor does my dating status have much to do with my quality as a person, so the next gets a north american biting response.

Too many Peruvian men certain they want to find a gringa wife.  No, you don't.  After 3 days in Iquitos Machisma, I couldn't handle "letting it go" on the cab ride:  there are exceptions, but that machismo crap makes most of us vomit, as I explained to my driver.  We're not interested in insecure, desperate, I'm-so-afraid-of-seeming-feminine-that-I-can't-even-hug-my-male-friends-and-I-succumb-to-the-peer-pressure-of-treating-women-like-objects version of "masculinity."   Trust me, you don't want a gringa wife.

I pull out the stash of avocados, fruits and vegetables that we brought on board to supplement another boat meal of meat and rice, which I find surprising since neither seem particular native to the Amazon.  Despite one of the most proliferous ecosystems in the world, the jungle buds with malnutrition.  But many residents assert that no ever goes hungry: "There's always chicken, and there's always rice."  But bellies bulge with malnourished want: for the vitamins and minerals crowding the immediate land and water.  Western influence pulls the natives away from centuries-old culinary, nutritional and medicinal practices. 

A dear friend who recently stayed in one of the villages I passed while heading up-river felt the crisis of conscious during her jungle stay: health and medicine being taught to those living in the richest natural medicinal area in the world. Western doctors visit and medicate rural jungle inhabitants.  Reinforcing the system of western-dependence, a line of patients eagerly awaits the all-knowing doctor's diagnosis and prescription drugs.  "Could I have some more to bring back to my brother too? He is also sick."  The western medical patient-doctor system is new to them—why shouldn't a doctor visit include a handout of drugs for the entire family?  They have no idea what the small pills do, really – the risks involved, the chemicals, the side-effects.  Just give me something to fix this. Do your magic, medicine man. 

These good-intentioned service trips are rarely done in partnership with local traditional medicinalists, even though these local healers lead tours of hotshot New York researchers visiting the same jungle for botany tours to learn about the healing jungle plants.  They carry plants back to their pharmaceutical labs.  Perhaps in 20 years they will sell them back in pill form to sick jungle communities.

Dinner number two on the river:  meat and rice.  Like lunch.  I wait till the end of the line, so I miss the paltry serving of vegetables.  But there's still plenty of processed white rice.  Good news that we're two days in and I almost feel that time on the slow-boat is going too fast.  This peaceful slow boat, crowded pleasantly with regular people on this endless river.  Endless river.  Endless jungle.

The upper deck crowds at sunset, todos attentive to the sun.

3½ days by boat in the Amazon, with nothing to do but

to make sure you pay attention 

to sunsets.

Las Amazonas: Second Attempts, Second Sunrise

A waving flashlight from shore

and this enormous boat, multiple times the population of

the Amazon village with a flashlight,

pulls ashore

Or close enough

So we can lay a plank to the approaching canoe

its goods and its passengers become ours

two more hanging their hammocks

two more gently swinging their days and nights

I try to imagine the handful of citizens in this palm roof village, awaiting the occasional passage of a boat--the event of the week when all stops and citizens line to the shore to watch the floating world connecting two Amazon cities.  The hopeful passengers wake before sunrise on the day of the boat's passing, on the chance that we'll pass by at 4, at 5, at 6, at 8.  Waiting. Ready.

The 3½ day boat to Yurimaguas.

 When we boarded early to hang our hammocks we asked ourselves "on which side will the afternoon sun attack on a river that heads West to East in the Southern Hemisphere?"  But there's little "straight" west in the winding Amazon.

I am the only one on the top floor of the boat, which they close at sundown – either for safety or to ensure a bit of quiet below for those choosing to sleep below on the schedule of the sun.  At 5am no one notices me climbing the stairs to the top deck. I take in an hour of quiet before the 6am rowdiness begins with the rising sun. 

The birds and the sounds of the jungle are starting to awake.  A young boy—an early riser—hovers over my shoulder wondering what I'm writing, wondering why I'm writing. In what language?  Perhaps he's reading these very words now. Perhaps he can understand them.  Perhaps he can decipher my handwriting.   WHY is someone--a woman--a gringa--sitting at sunrise with notebook and pen? 

Hello sun on my face.  Hello you who make the morning.

Hello jungle.  Hello endless horizontal sky. 

No mountains nor valley not even a hill cutting you off.

I think the sunrise is what I am trying to pray.

For my parents, for my brother, for my sister-in-law.  For K and D, V and W and L and T and G and D and T and L and G.  For K and T and B.  For R and C and J.  For W and S and R and S, for K, M, J and J.  For U and SL and A.  For J, M and C. For J, C.  The sunrise is what I'm trying to say in my choked unprayerfulness.  I am trying to pray the fresh hope of a predawn glow.  I am trying to pray the redeeming glimmer of first orange spraying the sky.  I am praying the quietness and spacious serenity.  The audacious generosity.  I pray the awaking hum and the joy of the birds in their luminous first day flights.  I'm praying the bright colors that seem renewed, which matters more than if they are.  The new sun has gifted us with new eyes.  New mercies.  New rested bodies, new rested hearts.  New rested hope.  So the jungle shoreline nearly identical to that we saw yesterday is a new maravilla.

The new is what God is trying to tell me—the me stuck in yesterday, me in used-up hope.

This day is unique.  It is the only one.  I stutter at what more than the sunrise to say in my morning prayers, except the obvious, which God, if  there, already knows.  So Beloved Maker, please let your sunrise speak in my silence.

My joyful absence of words. 

New day.

Las Amazonas: Attempts at Prayers

Upriver on the Amazon.  Morning #1 on the trip to Yurimaguas.

I came up here at dawn—the top floor of our large boat—to pray.  Or meditate.  I struggle at 'los dos.'

Start to pray.

Overwhelmed by "Really?  You're listening?"

"Really? It matters?" 

How shall I crawl back to the foot of Your sweet presence not knowing if you're really there?  It seems to be beauty that pulls me away from You and beauty that pulls me toward You.  I read Eva Luna or experience a dinner or a symphony and ask "Why would I linger in cold prayer and brittle scripture when there is a lush world?"  But it is that song, that sunset, that novel, the praise of love-making, that cold fresh morning that proclaims and celebrates Your existence.  So I sit here, trying to join them.

I try to pray.  For K'd decision and lonliness.  For D's well being, and the words he makes that change us.  For Gs and C.  For D' broken heart. For precious J and for D.  For A and E.  For V and W. For Gs.  For U—as individuals and their brittle marriage.  For S and W and C and…T.  And.

Maybe it's more to take my heart off myself.

Or in search of something I swear I once knew how to do:

To pray, convinced.

Or in search of that sliver of life that is about more than me, in 24 hour days dominated by my tyrant happiness.  

Not everyone will change everything on a global scale.  So I look at my quaint perimeter: of people, of compost, of justice, of speaking the truth in tender love.  Lord, I don't know how to be a Christian "like I once was."  I don't know how to "buy it."  And why does it always seem like there's something being sold?   But I ask that you keep me in your hand, keep pulling me closer by whatever means and by the best means.

I feel like it's slipping away.  Not that I've found some intellectual block or invalidator or even suffered some personal crisis negating it all (though perhaps South America has been all those things), but like I'm falling out of love--the enamoration fading.   Someone "I will always love" nonetheless, at least in memories.   What I mean, my Beloved, is:  I'm not exactly sure where You are, nor how to get there.  And the road--be it silence or dancing, Christianity or Taoism--is not that essential to me.  I want to be where you are.  (If you are that close.)  Where your love permeates and invades and where perhaps I am capaz --to love you, to love others—as much as myself.  That fantasy world.

Open me up.  Cut out this heart of stone and replace it with one of flesh.

Las Amazonas: Jungle Wooing

Hard to know what of this mood is the sensuality of Isabel Allende's Eva Luna--which has finally engulfed me--or the broad bright magic of the river.  The Amazon.  Here among the weed water—land doused in mile wide water: our world's largest river.   Whether the book or the jungle or the river wind in my face, I'm a bit in love today. 

Curiosity walks me to the back of the boat where the Approachable Fat Man in white reclines on a cooler. "Do you live on the river?" I ask.  "A donde va Usted?"

He does.  He's headed home.

"En que trabajas?"  he responds.

"I'm an artist." 

He extends me his hand as if it were my own, applauding my brave declaration.  And somewhere in this mélange of literary, waterway, South American love story, I find myself.  I shake his hand and am OK being what I am.  This artistic vein of mine, is mine, and far too grown now to weed it out.  He is a painter.  He hands me his card, and his boisterous thick cheeks smile.

Wind in my face.  Jungle and stilted houses at the periphery.  River, river, river.  Like it's only me and her, and the man driving the boat, who could be God, or my destiny, who does not mind when I sit out front on the edge.  "Not too close" though he says, "because if I'm responsible for you falling in, they'll..."