at the river
I am in Iquitos on the banks of the Amazon. I was going to come here on a riverboat, taking three to five days, slowly sailing up the squiggly Rio Ucayali till it turned into the Amazon. But I heard in Pucallpa that the river was so low it was taking nearly a week at the moment, and I´d already lost a couple of days in Lima, so today I caught another little local plane. Iquitos is a cool little city full of grand buildings with dark blue tiling, left over from the rubber boom.
After checking into the Hobo Hideout hostel I walked a couple of blocks down to the riverside. The sky was grey, broken by patches of rusty light, the air was shifting around expectantly as though it was about to storm. Thousands of birds were flocking around a bunch of communications masts in the Plaza de Armas. Then I came out on to a high promenade that looks out across a sweep of lush vegetation and wet fields to the broad silver curve of the river, and the forest beyond it. There was a thick steel-grey curtain of rain coming in from miles away, with distant thunder and lightning. And now the whole sky was swirling with birds, all kinds of birds from sparrows to big scruffy buzzards, some flicking through the air just above my head, some so far up they were just tiny flecks.
People were strolling on the promenade or making out or selling sweets. A children´s play was going on in a little amphitheatre. I stood and watched the rain coming closer for a while, then all the birds suddenly vanished and I knew from the smell of the air that I only had seconds before it rained. I ducked into this netcafe and moments later, outside the open door, bringing a smell of hot wet concrete, the sky fell.
I was going to explain my thing for rainforests. The place is filling with insects again, and there´s a small child dangling off the booth who keeps bumping into me as he watches what his friend is doing on the next computer, but let´s see if I can concentrate.
I think it started when I saw The Emerald Forest when I was 11. It´s a John Boorman movie about a stolen American child who grows up in the rainforest, and his father´s search for him. In a way, certainly for the second half, it´s just a dumb action movie, starting when the village women are kidnapped by the rather one-dimensional Fierce People. I wasn´t very discerning at 11. But the first half was about the boy´s life in the forest, hunting and hearing legends, finding his spirit condor and chasing the girl he liked. Whenever I watched it I wanted the first half to go on for the whole thing and the silly action/conflict stuff never to happen.
Something about it crawled into my brain. I read everything I could get my hands on about Amazon tribes, which wasn´t much - a few pages in one book in Swords library, some dry anthropology in the Encyclopaedia Britannica - and when I was imagining things to music with my eyes closed, which I did a lot, I kept going back to the image of a bird gliding across a world of misty trees. Yes, it´s corny, but I imagine most people´s childhood mental furniture is a bit corny. The forest became a metaphor for all kinds of things, the place I went when I daydreamed. I made a Plasticine forest with a little tribe of people living in it, by a waterfall. They had their own language and their own calendar. (All I remember about it was that there was a month when everything flooded and they all had to live in the trees.) I used to stand in front of the mirror imagining some other self looking back out, tough-soled and feather-haired and wild, against a background of tangled plants. I was trying not to think about the awkward bits, the strict gender roles and restrictions on who you could marry I´d read in the encyclopaedia, not to mention infant mortality and stuff. It was an imaginary, idealised forest. But it was important, and it´s always been there, part of my mental landscape.
And now I´m here.
The jungle around Pucallpa was scrubby, just the fringes, not the really old-growth forest with the huge ancient trees. Here, though, or at least 100km or so out of town, it´s the real thing, and I´m going there. In a few days I´m heading down the river on a boat and then hiking into the forest, and if they still have space on that bit of the tour I get to climb high up into the canopy, where a science team have hung a walkway for people to stand and watch birds and animals you can´t see from the ground.
It´ll be a delicious irony if I get eaten by an anaconda or something while I´m out there. But I don´t expect nature to love me back. I´m just glad to be here.
After checking into the Hobo Hideout hostel I walked a couple of blocks down to the riverside. The sky was grey, broken by patches of rusty light, the air was shifting around expectantly as though it was about to storm. Thousands of birds were flocking around a bunch of communications masts in the Plaza de Armas. Then I came out on to a high promenade that looks out across a sweep of lush vegetation and wet fields to the broad silver curve of the river, and the forest beyond it. There was a thick steel-grey curtain of rain coming in from miles away, with distant thunder and lightning. And now the whole sky was swirling with birds, all kinds of birds from sparrows to big scruffy buzzards, some flicking through the air just above my head, some so far up they were just tiny flecks.
People were strolling on the promenade or making out or selling sweets. A children´s play was going on in a little amphitheatre. I stood and watched the rain coming closer for a while, then all the birds suddenly vanished and I knew from the smell of the air that I only had seconds before it rained. I ducked into this netcafe and moments later, outside the open door, bringing a smell of hot wet concrete, the sky fell.
I was going to explain my thing for rainforests. The place is filling with insects again, and there´s a small child dangling off the booth who keeps bumping into me as he watches what his friend is doing on the next computer, but let´s see if I can concentrate.
I think it started when I saw The Emerald Forest when I was 11. It´s a John Boorman movie about a stolen American child who grows up in the rainforest, and his father´s search for him. In a way, certainly for the second half, it´s just a dumb action movie, starting when the village women are kidnapped by the rather one-dimensional Fierce People. I wasn´t very discerning at 11. But the first half was about the boy´s life in the forest, hunting and hearing legends, finding his spirit condor and chasing the girl he liked. Whenever I watched it I wanted the first half to go on for the whole thing and the silly action/conflict stuff never to happen.
Something about it crawled into my brain. I read everything I could get my hands on about Amazon tribes, which wasn´t much - a few pages in one book in Swords library, some dry anthropology in the Encyclopaedia Britannica - and when I was imagining things to music with my eyes closed, which I did a lot, I kept going back to the image of a bird gliding across a world of misty trees. Yes, it´s corny, but I imagine most people´s childhood mental furniture is a bit corny. The forest became a metaphor for all kinds of things, the place I went when I daydreamed. I made a Plasticine forest with a little tribe of people living in it, by a waterfall. They had their own language and their own calendar. (All I remember about it was that there was a month when everything flooded and they all had to live in the trees.) I used to stand in front of the mirror imagining some other self looking back out, tough-soled and feather-haired and wild, against a background of tangled plants. I was trying not to think about the awkward bits, the strict gender roles and restrictions on who you could marry I´d read in the encyclopaedia, not to mention infant mortality and stuff. It was an imaginary, idealised forest. But it was important, and it´s always been there, part of my mental landscape.
And now I´m here.
The jungle around Pucallpa was scrubby, just the fringes, not the really old-growth forest with the huge ancient trees. Here, though, or at least 100km or so out of town, it´s the real thing, and I´m going there. In a few days I´m heading down the river on a boat and then hiking into the forest, and if they still have space on that bit of the tour I get to climb high up into the canopy, where a science team have hung a walkway for people to stand and watch birds and animals you can´t see from the ground.
It´ll be a delicious irony if I get eaten by an anaconda or something while I´m out there. But I don´t expect nature to love me back. I´m just glad to be here.