Being There: Current Adventures

Being There: Current Adventures

 by Charles Coleman

I have framed and hung some photographs in my study. In the 1930s my father was part of a team geologically mapping what was then Northern Rhodesia. In his picture he stands in the bush beside his team of 15 Africans. With their prospecting equipment they gaze at me from a distant time and place. Another picture I rather enjoy looking at finds me on a different continent, but also at the ends of the earth. I am in the actual space of my childhood daydreams. I stand beside the Madre de Dios river in the Amazonian rain forest, my face twisted in a Christmas-morning-age-six grin. My father often described his African adventures to me as I sat wide-eyed, paying rapt attention. Such was the impact of his stories that I have found myself enjoying my own adventures, and can easily slip back into the photographic moment above my desk.

There is the possibility of seeing a wild jaguar. Electric blue morpho butterflies flit by; I hear the liquid song of a bird I have not yet identified, and within me builds a feeling that somewhere nearby are the footprints of Darwin or Wallace.

As I move, my long pants stick damply to my legs and drag at my skin. I have buttoned my sweat-soaked long-sleeved shirt tightly at the throat and wrists, I hope denying insect access. Impatiently I push my sliding glasses back up my nose while grimacing at the internal turmoil that is last night’s dinner and probably some inadvertent river water. Several insistent mosquitoes hover and whine and I slap at them ineffectually. It is early in the morning; birds that will soon go into hiding are still calling and moving from branch to branch. I don’t have a headache, but behind my eyes I feel fuzzy, as if inflated with cotton wool. I think it may have to do with the anti-malarial pills I have been taking.

As I write about this scene at my desk in Colorado, the details of discomfort hesitantly return, and I have to search for them. What I felt then, and recapture with this writing, is a sense of excited anticipation. I am back in the Peruvian rain forest, about two and a half thousand miles up the Amazon at a point where it is a mere 40 yards wide. At its mouth, the river is more than 8 miles wide and pours such a volume of water into the Atlantic that for 100 miles out to sea the ocean is fresh rather than salty. The largest tankers can navigate 2,000 miles up the river to where the city of Iquitos is cut off, accessible only by plane from the rest of the world. The river is still two miles wide at this point, but no roads reach the population of 600,000 which has been isolated there since the collapse of the rubber industry in 1910. These people live close together with no real source of livelihood, but quick access to cholera, yellow fever, dengue and malaria. I flew in and got onto the river as fast as possible. From Iquitos to the coast, the Amazon is a superhighway filled with traffic and commerce, and its muddy cafe au lait water moves sluggishly.

Standing beside a tributary, the Madre de Dios, where the water moves quickly and is the colour of strong clear tea, I look up along the bank of the river. I can see a stretch of sand and a large black caiman basking in the sun, while just below me, a turtle is partially submerged and resting his front legs against a rock. Five of his friends are leaning against him in a conga line that resembles soup bowls stacked to dry. To add to the impact of this tableau, a large yellow butterfly sits on the head of each turtle. Who organized this composition? I fumble for my camera and lose my balance for a moment, sliding a little in the mud. With gentle plops, and one by one, all six turtles submerge and the butterflies circle over the water for a moment before they too scatter. On either side of the river the trees of the jungle canopy meet overhead to form a dark green tunnel illuminated by bright shafts of sunlight reaching down from where the sun pierces the foliage. “Damn,” I mutter, and then jerk my head up to a disturbance above. I am just in time to catch a glimpse of long furry black arms, legs, and tails in motion as two spider monkeys disappear into the treetops of the opposite bank. Hanging nests of the oropendula are set in motion and swing from the long wispy strings that broaden to end in the cantaloupe sized, bulbous nests. These birds are large relatives of the northern oriole and weave similar suspended nest hammocks for their eggs.

I leave the riverbank and its dappled surface, making my way inland up a narrow muddy trail. Rotting vegetation covers much of the forest floor and there is an earthy, pungent stink of decomposition. I try to step on the carpet of leaves whenever possible because my boots slip and sink into the mud of the trail. My plan is to take macro pictures of some leaf-cutter ants I have seen on an earlier hike. I have imagined close-ups that will fill the frame with the ants carrying pieces of leaf on their backs, looking like insect wind-surfers. But they are further away than I remembered, and by the time I find them, my rumbling bowels have reached a dangerous crescendo. Sweat streams down my face as I lie on my stomach, baseball hat reversed like a teenager so that I can see through my camera viewfinder. Through the fogging eyepiece, I try to focus on the ants while at the same time paying close attention to my insistent and rebellious G.I. tract. Mosquitoes form a cloud around my head while a further bit of sensory input informs me that possible bullet ants are entering the ankle-pant-sock perimeter. They are called bullet ants because when they bite it feels as if a bullet has hit you. I am not sure of the caliber, perhaps .357 magnum? I do know that they are advertised as the most venomous insect known. Some call them 24-hour ants since the intense burning of their combination sting-bite lasts for twenty-four hours. Apparently they bite, and then add extra pain and insult to the injury, by transferring some venom from their tail area into the wound.

I try to focus the camera, but I cannot make my mind explain the details for selecting the camera’s macro feature. I call for information but receive only a sort of abstract humming noise and static from my brain. Is there a button to push while you twist the focus ring? Is that tickling sensation on my left ankle the bullet ant selecting a spot to bite? Is there going to be a sudden surprise in my pants? (I am sorry to be focusing on this detail, but it is part and parcel of the jungle experience.)

The insect repellant I applied has been effective in deterring 98 percent of the biting things, but this hasn’t stopped me having 67 carefully enumerated sand fly bites on one single, easily accessed forearm. Such are the numbers of the sand flies. Each night I lie awake in a frenzy of scratching, my whole body humming extravagantly with the bursting of mast cells and the subsequent flood of histamine through my system. Lying motionless for ten minutes can make the desire to scratch subside, but a chance caress on the shin by a stray strand of mosquito netting can set me on fire again. Eventually sleep returns, only to be followed by another agitated awakening. These flies can carry leishmaniasis, a very nasty disease. It is transferred by the sand fly, and one bite in about 10,000 carries the parasite which causes a sore that eventually spreads via the lymphatic system. It finishes by eroding the nose, lips and face. If it doesn’t kill you, it is sometimes cured by a month-long series of intravenous antimony drips. Happily it is rare where I am. Still, I have met a man who has had it and who showed me the extraordinary scars on his leg and arm where the remnants of what were volcano-sized ulcerations remain.

Many of the guides and other old hands have played host to the bot fly. These flies lay their eggs on mosquitoes. The eggs hatch on the mosquito and the larvae climb off and onto you while the mosquito bites. The larvae burrow under your skin and feed, reaching the size of a jellybean or larger. Sometime later they emerge through the skin and wriggle off to pupate elsewhere. I have spent time with a magnifying glass examining the bites I can get at, looking for the telltale snorkel that sticks out of the seeming mosquito bite, supplying air for the developing larval fly. "Just paint it with nail polish, wait eight hours and squeeze it out," says a guide. "Nothing to it." It is important that the larva is dead before you apply the squeeze because it must relinquish its hold on the bottom of the little nest cavity it inhabits under your skin. If you attempt to squeeze out a live one, the bottom end stays in and can cause a bad infection. Hence, the suffocating nail polish application. Of course those who spend a lot of time in the jungle use no insect repellent whatever. They consider the harmful effects of the DEET in Deep Woods Off to outweigh the possible chance of an insect transmitted disease. I wonder what these unspecifed harmful effects might be when I lather up.

Finally I take a few pictures of my leafcutter ants, but they are hurried and probably unfocused. My body, its interior and surface, are foremost on my mind. But these distractions: humidity, heat, internal discomfort, mosquitoes and their malaria, sandflies and their leishmaniasis, the bot flies and other assorted parasites, do detract a little from one’s comfort level. This type of trip is not for everyone. Even the enthusiast has moments of doubt, and then I wonder what I am doing here, and why it is my fourth trip into this jungle.

But there are experiences and sights that make it worthwhile for me. On my third trip, I saw a jaguar’s fresh footprints. It was midnight, and I was on my way to see a nocturnal tapir when my headlamp picked out these exciting paw marks on the trail in front of me. The jaguar had crossed my path very recently, and the edges of the indentations were sharp and flecked with adhering mud fragments. There was still more excitement that night. I continued along the jungle trail for two hours, eventually reaching a spot beside a stream where the tapirs were said to come to eat mud. This mud, like Kaopectate, helps with the digestion of some toxic fruit or vegetable they insist on eating. I lay on my stomach engulfed in a suspended mosquito net, waiting in the pitch dark. With the foliage overhead blocking out any moonlight, it was as dark as the inside of a tapir. "How will we know they are here?" I whispered to the guide, who lay in his net next to me. "Shhh," he replied. Then I heard it, the squelching sucking noise of big feet being lifted in and out of heavy sticky mud. On with the torch and there he or she was, standing 20 feet away, blinking in the beam, caught eating the mud that dripped from the long flexible snout of this rhinoceros relative. Was it possible that the tapir looked a little embarrassed? It continued to snort and squelch about in the mud for a while, then turned to leave, revealing a chubby round behind and a silly small tail that twirled.

I have seen tapirs in the zoo where beside enclosures of lions and tigers and elephants they seemed like pretty small potatoes; kind of like tall dazed over-sized pigs with strange noses. "Ho hum, let's go to the polar bears." There in the jungle on my stomach in full sweat, that rather poor view by flashlight was electrifying. I can't explain exactly why. It’s a little like the difference between flying over Greenland, as I once did, and noting to yourself, before returning to the in-flight magazine crossword, that they have huge Alp-like mountains down there. Compare this with actually climbing one of those Greenland crags after crossing the barren glacier ice by dogsled. There is a difference.

Another South American memento: a white baseball-sized sea urchin’s spiky “test” or skeletal remains, sits on my desk. This came home with me from the Galapagos Islands where I have now  spent six summers in the cradle of evolution, swimming off the shores of San Cristobal, studying the creatures made famous by Charles Darwin. When I pick up the urchin, I easily return to the sharp black lava rock that borders the path to the sea. I move carefully by the spiny cactus, note the lizards that dart out of my way, and hear the scream of the gulls. I look up at the frigate birds that circle overhead, and then down at the aquamarine waters of the bay.

Sharks are always initially alarming I find, and there had been one just at the periphery of my vision for some time; whenever I looked up I would catch a glimpse of one of those peculiar opaque, wide-set eyes staring blankly, perhaps at me. At first I had thought there were several sharks, but then I decided that it was most likely just the one, circling. I have been assured that shark attacks don’t happen in Galapagos waters, and that the white-tip is docile. All the same, I found this seven foot presence disconcerting and distracting. I tried to put him out of my mind as I hung suspended in the water over my selected little table mountain. About 20 feet below me was my area of study, a flat-topped rock about the size of two ping-pong tables pushed together. It was elevated fifteen feet from the sea floor, its surface covered by a mat of green algae, chewed and nibbled in spots by at least three different persistent herbivores. The pencil urchins were the size of oranges, reddish brown and covered with the blunt pencil-like spines that give them their name. They were in charge of the northwest half of the algae field. The green urchins were a similar size, but fitted with short sharp spines. I knew their north Atlantic relative well, the urchin that delights in the longest scientific name of all:  Stongylocentrotus drobrachiensis. These two urchins were new to me, as were all the bizarre flora and fauna of the Galapagos. A third herbivore, the damsel fish, darted from its lair in a slight overhang to see off any other fish who might drop in for a snack. I wondered who dictated the rules about who got to eat what and when, and I spent two hours in the water every day for a month taking notes on a clip board trying to find out.

My girlfriend often helped me, sort of. She would corkscrew around my body, starting at my toes and arriving at my head, where she would blow a stream of bubbles into my face. One day she arrived at full speed and made a grab at my clipboard. I clutched it, lost count of my urchins, and watched my pencil float upward to the end of its string tether. She twisted back and came at me again, this time stopping abruptly a few inches from my mask, from where she stared into my eyes for a moment before swimming off. Female sea lions weigh about 130 pounds, and in those waters, they are playful, affectionate and mischievous. This one joined me most days for at least part of my observation time. She had an actual boy friend who was rather alarming, being essentially 600 pounds of aggressive testosterone. He would investigate me as well, but confined his attentions to powering by me at full speed, disappearing quickly from sight. I never got used to his appearances. His bulk pushed the water aside so that I rocked in his wake. There followed a fraught moment when I felt “Oh god, it’s the shark!” and it would take a while for me to settle down and get back to work after one of his appearances.

Sometimes, when I would climb out of the water and relax for a while in the late afternoon sun before stripping off my wetsuit, the female would hop up beside me and sit there, nuzzling my shoulder with her extraordinary whiskers, gazing at me with her huge, expressive and luminous eyes, while breathing her fishy breath in my face. I will admit to being in love.

I met another large and playful animal in the Peruvian jungle. I paddled up to giant otters and watched them gambol like their diminutive Scottish counterparts of Ring of Bright Water fame. But with this behavior the resemblance ended; they are enormous, over six feet long and sometimes more than a hundred pounds. I was able to approach to within twenty yards of where they would stick their heads out of the water to make threatening grunting chirps. In every way but size, they are like standard-issue playful otters. Their long sleek bodies seemed to glide effortlessly through the water. Several times I saw one surface with a large fish, climb onto a broad log and chomp it down with much audible crunching and lip smacking. They are at the top of the food chain with no enemies apart from man. Even jaguars turn tail when the otter approaches. Unfortunately their fur coats have proved irresistible; there are few left. They are found in the oxbow lakes that over time have split from the Manu River. It was a thrill to see them huffing and puffing after a long dive, whiskers twitching and noses straining to pick up my scent. When they tried to get a better look at me, they would rise straight up out of the water, revealing white-stripped necks.

Reeds covered the margins of these lakes that extend into swamps, so the birds living there differ from those found on the faster moving river. I watched a secretive limpkin picking his way through the reeds. My favorites were the prehistoric looking hoatzins. These chicken sized birds look like avian punks with their staring coats of feathers jutting in all directions and bright red eyes. More than any other bird they resemble that fossil first bird, Archaeopteryx. They intrigued me because they are the only birds, that like cows, employ bacteria in their gut to digest their cellulose diet. I had to get close to them to discover for myself that they do indeed smell like cows.

My trips to South America have rewarded me in different ways. I have crouched for hours on a floating blind in the middle of a river watching the cliffs where the macaws come to eat clay. Their reasons for doing this are similar to the tapirs’. I was rewarded by flights of mealy parrots, white-eyed parrots, blue-headed parrots, but the macaws were wary and stayed in the distant treetops. Once I visited something called “Parrot Village” near Miami. Macaws were everywhere. One even pedaled right up to me on a very small tricycle, dismounted and pecked at my toe. In the wild, I sat for four hours in silence in cramped quarters with a full bladder, waiting for them to fly down to a position forty yards away where they would eat some clay. Why do I enjoy the discomfort of the jungle, the proximity of the white-tip shark? Why have I returned four times? My behavior might not make immediate sense, but as with many explanations in life, you had to be there. And that is what I have been doing in my travels - being there. It has made all the difference.

I return from the photograph and am back in Colorado at 8,000 feet where the temperature is warm but the atmosphere dry. I have a terrible nose-running, raw-throated, head-pounding summer cold. In between nose blowing and Tylenol, I wonder if these might be the early symptoms of leishmaniasis or some other plague I have brought home as a South American souvenir. Last night I had a fever of 103, but this morning I feel better. My nose is running like a tap, but I am thinking clearly. Red bites that no longer itch still dot my body. The metaphorical itching to go exploring has also been thoroughly scratched for the time being, but like its insect induced counterpart, I expect this itch will return and I will be off again.  

In the picture of my father, the African veldt of 75 years ago stretches out to the horizon behind the posed crew. The subjects are in focus, but the background is blurred slightly by a heat haze. I can see thorn trees and a bird I can’t identify sits in one of them. It is a view of the living world that was Africa of the 1930s and the inspiration for my obsession. My father has taken a moment from his rocks to stare into the camera, unaware of the passion he will kindle in his as yet unborn son.