October 26, 2010 - I’m typing this inside of a cube of mosquito net. I can feel the wooden floor of the field station beneath my sponge mattress. Filling my ears is every frequency of cricket song; clicks and clucks echo in the woods like there’s percussionist out there trying to create mood. The generator is humming too, giving us one more hour of power before the lights shut off. It’s 7:52, but it feels much later. The sun goes down early.
My first day in the field with Project Amazonas. I'm staying at Santa Cruz Reserve, about a two hour trip outside of Iquitos. The reserve is a protected chunk of land on the Mazán river which is home of to collection of villages and some property owned by Project Amazonas. This week we will be visiting these villages to deliver mosquito nets. Mosquito nets are perhaps the most effective preventative measure against the spread of the insect-borne illness malaria; victims usually are infected by "sacaduro" mosquitos which bite them in their sleep. Just this month, three villages of Yanomami indians on the Venezuela-Brazil border were reportedly wiped out by malaria epidemics, according to the Associated Press.
This morning I met up with the two researchers from the University of Chicago, Ben and Steffy, at La Pescana. They are staying at the Santa Cruz field station while collecting ant specimens for their research. Fernando showed up and we took taxis to the port at Rio Nanay, and from there we rode a motor-boat 45 minutes down the Amazon River. It was an overcast day, with the wind blowing, me sitting up front, the other two behind me. For the first half of the ride the water was dirty, with patches of yellow foam.
We arrived at a muddy little beach and several porters began eagerly unloading the boat and carrying our many supplies up a steep hill. We all tried to pitch in but like imost of the time, the idea of gringos doing work was deemed unnecessary. Our backpacks sitting behind us, we rode about 15 minutes down a “highway” through jungle farms. It was a ten foot wide concrete path and the moto-taxi lunged up and down hills without staying in a lane.
We drove into a bustling little port town, weaving through flocks of primary school uniforms, plantain vendors and pigs. The town Mazán is at the confluence of the Napo, which flows South from Ecuador, and the smaller Mazán, which emerges from the West. Soon we reached the boardwalk, a “Boulevard,” like Iquitos has, with banisters made of stone, making them look antique, elegant and ironic in this grimy, ramshackle town. The porters began unloading the taxis and this time we didn’t try to help, we stood above the steep and muddy slope that led down to the Napo and the long, skinny boats. A dark brown, silver-haired, grinning old man was trying to get my attention, motioning toward the bag of knobby sticks that sat at his feet.
“No thank you,” I said. He smiled at nodded like we were old pals and it was no problem. “What type of wood is that?”
“Ayahuasca.”
Ben and Steffy were the first gringos I met here who did not know what Ayahuasca was.
After loading the boat, we set off up the Mazán. Up front, Fernando joked and laughed with the old man, and I couldn’t hear anything over the chugging of the motor. The banks of the river were long muddy slopes, dramatically revealing the low state of the river, at the bottom of which women washed clothes or baled out the pecky-pecky boats that were moored there. Twenty, thirty feet above were large, thatched roof houses. Kids standing outside, stock still, watching us.
The sun was starting to come out. The motor was humming. All there was to do was sit hunched over, the bones in my ass rubbing painfully against that same wooden plank. I put my head in my hands...I asked the cook if it was alright I stood up. I stood up and felt a little better. The truth is I hadn’t slept much the night before.
Finally we arrived at house on the edge of the Santa Cruz, and at about the same time a family in another boat pulled up. We unloaded our supplies and then started deciding who would carry what on the 25 minute hike that lay in front of us. There was a tree next to the house. One of the women propped a ladder against the trunk, climbed up with a large stick in her hand, and started shaking the branches. Clusters of small purple fruit fell to the ground.
“This is like a grape,” our guide said, peeling away the skin to reveal a white glossy globe. It was delicious: juicy, mildly sweet, with an oily core in the middle as big as an olive’s. We each ate a dozen of them. A started talking to the family.
An old man leaned against the railing. “Your first time in the jungle?”
“Yes.”
“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“Muchas hembras.”
“Hembras?”
“Females.” Laughter all around.
The walk to the field station drenched us in sweat but it wasn’t that bad. It reminded me of walking through humid woods in summertime NC.
The field station is two wooden houses, a kitchen and a dormitory, both slightly elevated as is the custom here, but not open-air. The bottom half of the wall is wood, the upper half screen. At night you hear everything that passes outside. There’s a toilet/shower structure as well. All this in middle of clearing with a few mango and papaya trees, another plant that has small orange fruits. The yards are patrolled by chickens and three deer-like little girls. When we look in their direction, they freeze, stare at us, and then, at the prompting of who knows what, they turn and bound away. We try to talk to them they are mostly speechless. They are the daughters of the caretaker, Dennis, and his wife, Elba, who is almost as quiet.
Tonight, while I was taking a shower the dark, I looked up through a gap between the top of the wall and the roof, and I saw the most stars I think I’ve ever seen. When I walked outside I saw a ceiling of black marble speckled with powdered sugar, a dome full of constellations I didn’t recognize. There was no moon. It was so bright. For a second I felt dizzy; I felt like for a second I detected the turning of the earth. I said to myself, “This is the greatest thing I have ever done.”
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