Tiputini River, Ecuador: A Bitter Pill (cont.)

After the checkpoint, I am taken by open-air bus to the Tiputini River where I get into a smaller canoe that carries me upstream. Here the banks are closer. I can almost touch the vines that hang down from the trees along the edge of the forest. The only foreign sound is the motor, other than that, there is just the noise of the forest - the crackle of parrots and insects whose buzzing can be heard above the outboard. A white neck heron pilots us into the jungle and thatched Oropendula nests hang from high trees, swallows dart overhead and water bugs skitter the surface of the river. Morpho butterflies, the color of polished turquoise in the intense sunlight. On the banks there are glimpses of small people. I am told that they are Huaorani and that they used to shrink heads. They boiled the severed head in a potion of roots that caused the skull to dissolve but the skin to stay intact. Then they sewed the mouth and eyes shut with black string. After the oil companies came to the territory, the people were pushed to the edges of the new roads. Some retreated further into the forest and avoid contact with outsiders. Their faces are impassive and brown eyes follow our boat without expression. The children do not wave. Their hair is cut into severe bowls and they wear cast-off t-shirts. Disjointed baby dolls with dingy synthetic snarls hang from their hands. There are few adults, or rather they are there but amorphous in the shadows. They could be man or woman, reptile or cat.

At the Tiputini Biological Station, a man named Ben stomps through the night forest with a sonar detector and headphones listening for the bats that live under tents built of leaves. He tells me there is a white fly that can give you leishmaniasis, a disease caused by a protozoa that burrows into your skin and then, ten years later, eats away at your cartilage so that eventually all the parts that need support, are left hanging. I have a scar on my chest where a sand flea bit me – a reminder of how long the forest can lurk inside – a place where people turn into jaguars at night.

I am jerked out of sleep into this, the “nightmare of my choosing”: black oil, overflowing the banks of the river, lazily threads through tree trunks.

My bunk is a floating raft; the night sky replaces the wood ceiling of the sleeping hut and the tree limbs above drip vine nooses. Dingy, plastic-faced baby dolls fall from the trees. Their obscene, putty lids snap shut as the nooses jerk tight around articulated doll necks. Their mouths are sewn shut with black thread. Their falls are mine, cut short again and again. Something is watching.

I have fallen into a place where the distinction between reality and hallucination becomes blurred. This much I know: I am lying in a pool of sweat. My right side is numb and I am blacking out regularly like a weakened fish being rolled onshore over and over in the ocean waves. I am conscious enough to wonder if I am dying and should do something about it. My heartbeat is irregular and fast. I feel weighed down by my inability to explain what is happening. The prospect of my own absurd death in prideful silence loops through my mind. In the end, I do nothing.

A nighttime of fear collapses back into daytime. My existence here in this tropical autumn once again seems bearable. In the end, my unease is never explained, a lesson never learned, a metamorphosis initiated but never completed. It is as if the two lobes of my brain, normally held together by magnetic attraction, are reversed and now repel each other. The space in between is peach fuzz. In the end, something is lost – lost to the journey itself, stolen by the forest itself. Dark understanding in hidden suggestions, “words heard in dreams, phrases spoken in nightmares.” slim insight from the disparity between a sense of belonging and a temporary loss of place.

At 5:30 am, the howler monkeys begin an eerie roar that sounds of bellowing cattle. It is the mourning sound of solitude. The noise resonates from a specially adapted pouch in the throat of the male that concentrates the sound and causes it to ricochet around the forest. I spend sunrise on the 120-foot tower overlooking the canopy and watch the forest go on and on. The light brings every drop of water on every leaf into bright, painful detail. The huge Ceiba tree support is just one of the thousands that houses flocks of raucous birds, screaming insects and garrulous frogs. There is the soft thud of fruits hitting the ground - warm and heavy as a duck shot out of the autumn sky in a place far from here.

All quotes from The Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad.

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