Tiputini
River, Ecuador: A Bitter Pill
By Meggan Dwyer
There has been a hatching; it is
near the sleeping huts by the big Strangler Fig. I’ve
been told there are at least fifty newborn Equis vipers
aimlessly slinking the damp earth around the root
system. They are furious at the moldering novelty
of their world and nervously lashing out at shadows
with untried venom. The Equis slid from their mother,
fully formed and legless, left to find their own direction
in the night rainforest. They are loose cannons. Unlike
their elders, they cannot differentiate between enemy
and innocent, so they react to everything as adversary
– wind, ants, the toe of a rubber boot. They have
no control over their venom, cannot weigh the costs
of using their precious reserves and therefore, are
at their most dangerous.
I have just arrived here too. I
am standing in the midst of the reptilian swarm, directionless
in the oppressive half-light. I have no idea where
the line is between enemy and innocent or if there
is one at all. The air is dark, crude - viscous and
smothering.
This much I know. It is three AM.
I am standing near the banks of the Tiputini River,
a tributary of the Napo River, which is a tributary
of the Amazon. I am in the heart of the Ecuadorian
Oriente in YPF Oil Block 16. -Huaorani territory,
malaria country, jaguar terrain. I am standing deep
in the rainforest in my underwear and rubber boots
in a sea of baby pit vipers and I’m lashing out at
shadows.
In my house in Quito, nine thousand
feet above sea level, I placed a chalk-white pill
the size of a lentil on my last molar. It melted onto
my tongue as quickly as the burnt milk flavored ice
cream they sell on the corner near my house there.
The pill is Larium, a man-made quinine. I read the
side effects and taste the cruel bite of tonic - nausea,
vertigo, ringing in the ears, headache, abnormal dreams,
insomnia, panic attacks, hallucinations, anxiety,
paranoid reactions, transient dizziness, paranoid
delusions, hair loss, circulatory disturbances, palpitation,
irregular pulse, muscle weakness, malaise, convulsions,
numbness, and itching.
Yesterday I flew out of Quito, cacophony
of sound, ascended into the silent space above the
Andes, and landed in Coca, an oil town roughed out
of the forest by the rugged hands of temporary villagers
who work for the oil companies. It is a frontier town
of quick, cement blocks that house the basic needs
– a grocery, a bar, a whorehouse, a clinic. Coca is
patrolled by Ecuadorian policemen carrying automatic
weaponry. Coca sweats thin beer and sickness and stagnant
water. Its inhabitants, citizens of an unofficial
internment camp, squint from the glare off whitewashed
cement. Coca sweats fear and aguardiente and the looseness
that alcoholism and poverty foster. Wing clipped toucans,
taken from the outlying rainforest, sit immobilized
on perches. Leering murals of naked women riding bongo
drums are painted on the cement walls. Dusty children
pick at sores and suck sugar water from bags like
captive hummingbirds. I step into a motorized canoe
and travel up river past small plantations of banana
and yucca lining the banks, later changing to a couple
of cultivated trees interspersed with clay trails
leading to huts further inland. Two hundred feet above
sea level, on the deck of a motorized canoe, I swallow
another bitter pill, the size of a mosquito, a conga
ant, the eye of a baby pit viper.
Further up river in Pompeya, we
reach a checkpoint and the entrance to the YPF oil
operation in Block 16. Men with yellow jumpsuits and
machine guns demand passports, proof of negative HIV
testing and inoculation against yellow fever. I sign
papers saying that if I am kidnapped by Columbian
revolutionaries or various indigenous groups, the
oil company is not responsible for me. I leave my
passport and documents in the hands of these men and
continue across land that is simultaneously inhabited
by an oil operation that sucks crude from the deep
jungle and the Huaorani people who have lived here
always.
Before coming here, I met a man
while hiking in the paramo outside Quito at 12,000
feet. He was a geologist who worked as an environmental
consultant for an oil company. As we labored over
the pillow-planted landscape, he told me how he and
his coworker had been kidnapped five years before
by an indigenous group who hoped to buy back some
of their rights. He was held in captivity for sixty
days in a remote village in the foothills. He said
they treated him fine, fed him well. As the fog rolled
across the paramo obscuring the trail, he fell silent
in his story and concentrated on peeking around corners
and watching his back. He shivered even though we
were struggling uphill. Later, when I returned to
Quito, I looked up his story and read that his coworker
had been shot in the head.
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