‘All memory is present.’ -Novalis

‘We are, all of us, pilgrims who struggle along different paths toward the same destination.’
-Anthony de Saint-Exupery

“To tune the spirit when someone is trampling it is called control.” -Don Juan

‘…but to traverse the world for years on end of his own free will, in order to get to know it, to plumb it, to understand it? And then, later, to put all his findings into words? Such people have always been uncommon.’ -Ryszard Kapuscinski

‘The past does not exist. There are only infinite renderings of it.’ -Ryszard Kapuscinski

The rest of the voyage was harrowing, to be pithy. Let me set the scene. A river boat with three hundred Peruvians of the jungle and myself, the amorphous gringo. Three decks, the first for cargo, including fresh-cut hardwoods from the Amazon, livestock, a motocarro destined for a circuitous route in a town with no roads leading out. The second two decks for passengers, long, open-air spaces where each person hangs a hammock, like rows of eyelash specimens in every combination of color. Eyes that never stopped looking, observing, checking. Voices that whispered and shouted and laughed and cried. The sinks and showers pumped brown river water which cooled after it was allowed to run for a few minutes. Showers and toilets in the same rooms, four of them per deck, about three feet by four feet each, with poor drainage so that at any given time in the day four inches of brown water, mixed with unimaginable substances and dead and dying insects, stood stagnant on the bottom of each stall. The metal housing of the boat made it boil in the daytime sun and freeze at night. I befriended everyone I could, which amounted to about twenty people, mostly men my age and elderly folk. Thieves walked around regularly, as the boat stopped at small river towns and villages where a few thatched roofs hovered over the wall of foliage on the banks of the Ucayali, snaking things from unwary passengers and disembarking in the night. Stops were frequent, at all hours. When the boat stopped in a larger town, scores of indigenous women and children would board the boat vending tapioca, manioc, yucca, gelatino, water, soda, pre-made meals, cigarettes, chiclets, lollipops, fruits, and fried fish. The few men who were in the groups of vendors where the only ones who sold cigarettes, something I assigned to the ever-present machismo. It was better not to look at the toenails - though sometimes I did, drawn by a terrible fascination. Every ten minutes of continuous propulsion the boat, which roared when it was at ease, would pick up volume, the engine chattering the metal casings of the entire ship into a rising crescendo that sounded as if a jet was hovering overhead. This happened throughout the night, framed by the continuous and incredibly loud music the night captain played each night, emphasizing his favorite points with wild shouts at the Southern Cross. The boat woke at five, and it was impossible to stay asleep afterwards. The food - cooked by a gay man who seemed incredibly unhappy and who only left his cabin to make the food, returning immediately after he’d served it - was at times not so bad, but other days it was truly inedible. I blamed those days on the whistles and catcalls the poor man got from some of the younger men when he would walk to the shower in the evenings - his only other venture outside. The problem with those days is that the inedible food would be served for all three meals. I sweated buckets. The Paiche I was served on the boat, with more salt than it seems possible for a creature to have in its body, belonged to the inedible variety of food, though with my sweat flowing freely I was glad for the electrolytes and ate what I could swallow.
I ran out of water a couple of times, and then the boat ran out of water, and everyone was drinking soda. For most of the day people lined the sides of the boat or hung in their hammocks and simply stared, when they were not collected in an appraisal of me and my things, my behaviors and my concern for hygiene, which was uniquely comical to them. Often one would be sent towards me like a projectile from a group to ask why I tip-toed into the bathrooms.
On the second day, we ran aground in the middle of the river. Another boat passed us and the captain, fresh on the scene and feeling cocksure and invincible, did the same thing a bit further in. Eventually we pulled our boat out of it and found the narrow channel of flow on the far side, leaving the ready captain of the other boat still churning the waters browner. A father with his child next to my hammock played throughout the day, and the child was struck by my presence, my book, my skin, the uniformity of early consciousness holding the world within, beholding a new piece to add to itself. A woman boarded on the third day with a monkey on a leash, dressed up like a hairy little girl in shades of pink, replete with the mannerisms of an effete, timid senorita. The eyes were constant, always on the banks and myself. I tried to imagine it all through their eyes, the great trip upriver, the lone gringo reading and writing in his hammock, always wet with sweat. An ancient woman who looked like a shaman, with vestiges of red dye rosing her face, boarded on the fourth day and simply looked at me the rest of the trip, expressionless.
Some of the friends I’d made played a card game they called casino, much like the game tunk in America. One young man simply sat at the back of the boat all day reading the bible in the sun, sweating like me though I believe from a different ailment. Amidst laughter over my forced use of the toilet, I was told “Peruvians have the kitchen in the bathroom!” Along the banks the slivers of shadows between all that green tangle invited my mind to fill them with its own shadow-beings.
I remembered the split, and saw it between the innocent world-ego of children and the enculturation that gradually follows with age: how the complexity of culture incrementally distances us from the original oneness, the rejoicing and acceptance of newness-as-beauty. The culture driven complication regards the new and other as dangerous and, forced to operate over the love of the new-as-beautiful slowly edges this original perspective out; thus leading those revelations and recognitions of new-as-beautiful to make themselves increasingly less possible with their own mechanism. Without interruption or informed effort, culture takes over the complexification of humans from our inherent love of newness, co-opting the drive to seek newness and replacing its targets-abroad with a homely placebo - the paleness of cultural advancement. Culture can be seen, in this way, as fear of other that grows over love of other, through the subversion of our tendency towards awe for some mysterious ulterior motive - though perhaps that is a very limited view.
The journey.
Every day the rain, every night the lightening on the horizon. Once the rain came so quickly it sent us all scurrying for cover. Reaching in my pocket I found the stinger of a bee. He had been searching for cover as well, and did not seem keen on sharing my pocket with my hand. The variations of light on the water of the river and the vapor of the clouds kept me fascinated for hours at the beginnings and ends of the days. Clouds opened upwards at night like a hand’s fingers uncurling in offering. Then the stars erupted, the lights of the boat fired up, and thousands of insects were called to them, dancing tethered by their love of the brilliance. We floated south.
The pirates came late in the night on the fifth day, armed with shotguns and intent on plunder. They motored up in a tiny dinghy and fired twice. When the men of the river boat fired back with shotguns of their own, a brief exchange occurred, clamorous, frightening. The dinghy sped away, someone in it screaming.
Other nights, between the roar of the engines and before the night captain put on his soundtrack, the cries of birds sounded like a squeegee being raked on wet glass. I saw that butterflies live at constant right angles, and felt the approach of the other in everything my senses perceived. Sounds, objects, tastes, smells, textures all had their own being. By dividing all of it into a progressive infinity of levels of being, I was able to see that it all has to come together as well. I was at the boundary of my awareness, and I was learning from what was ahead. It was an incredible trip.
Disembarking from the four day turned seven day voyage, I evaded a group of men who were planning on robbing me by feinting and striking out in a different direction, using a crowd to block me and jumping in a motocarro.
My infirmities included a cold, congestion, a mangled toe, multiple bites, a sore ear from something unknown, diarrhea, jock itch, dehydration sickness, chafed nose, and general hunger and fatigue. But the journey inspired me, and let me look into a different world, and seeing made me live it.
I took a flight to Lima for eighty dollars, reducing the past five weeks journey to an hour in the air for the price of a day’s labor in my country, and it was a revelation of difference. There was even coffee on the plane.
And now, I’m recovering.