Viva Jungle Love

All’s well that ends well.

What a year it has been. On this last day of 2013, looking back over all the major life milestones still visible in the rear view mirror, I want to give thanks for finally making it back here to my hometown in the southern Appalachians, reunited at last with my family at the end of a long and uncertain journey.

When this blog went offline at the beginning of the year, I had just left Iquitos after living there for three rollicking years. I left in February and didn’t see Corrina or Maverick again until the end of October– nine months later!  That’s a long time to be apart from your family, especially if you care deeply about them. Corrina joked that she could’ve made another baby in that time and it would have given her something to do while she was waiting for me.

As it was, I spend most of this year preparing camp for their arrival: I found a home for us, got a job and went to work. I also spent a lot of time fretting over a protracted immigration process that cast a long shadow over the summer and fall.

Ultimately though, her papers cleared, and with visa in hand, they got on a plane and we were together again. Except for the day my son was born, that was the happiest day of my life.

Not long after that, there was a wedding. That was a pretty happy occasion too! My entire family was able to be there to welcome Corrina into our family, including my 95 year old grandmother who had to be carried up two flights of stairs like Cleopatra when the elevator broke!

Reader, I married her.

Corrina and Maverick are adjusting well to stateside life, and getting a taste for southern culture. We’ve got a great little barbecue joint down the road, and the other day I taught her how to make collard greens. We go out to our local pub to listen to bluegrass and old time music, and sometimes we go driving in the mountains just to have a look around. Young Maverick, who just turned three, has amazed us all by picking up English in just two months. When he first got off the plane, he was speaking only Spanish, but now all our conversations are in English. It really is a whole new world to be able to interact with my child in my native tongue.

For me, this year has been an enormous hinge, bringing peaceful closure to our life in Peru and swinging open into a new life together in the States.  For all the stress and uncertainty, and for all the problems that yet remain, we’ve passed through a crucible of enormous distance and we are more fully formed for the experience. I think Corrina and I have become more grounded and mature people as a result of all these events, and we stand now as though on the threshold of a new place in the sun.  I think 2014 is going to be a very good year.

To all our friends in Iquitos, I hope you are feeling the same way! We will look forward very much to seeing you all again in the days and years to come, as I know now that in our hearts we will never be far from that noisy, ragged, chaotic little spot of bother deep in the Amazon. (Even now I can almost hear the motorcars.)  Iquitos was my finishing school, and grateful I am indeed for the lessons I learned there, and more grateful still for the woman and child who share its spirit, and who are with me now.

I still get contacted sometimes by people who happen across this blog while researching a trip to Iquitos. If you’re one of those people, I invite you explore the archives and to reach out with an email if you have any questions about any of the material covered here; I’d be happy to point you in the right direction if I can.

Happy New Year!

Building Community in the Amazon Jungle: A Guest Post by David “Slocum” Hewson

Everything changes, but nothing is lost.

(Editor’s note: Jungle Love is pleased to feature this guest post from David “Slocum” Hewson, the founder and owner of Amaru Spirit, a holistic healing center located in the jungle outside of Iquitos, Peru. Their website is here: http://www.amaruspirit.com. Regular Jungle Love readers may notice some similarities between Slocum and Chillum, a recurring character in the blog. These similarities are, I presume, not totally a coincidence.)

“Building Community in the Amazon Jungle”

A guest post by David Hewson

Many gringos come to the Peruvian Amazon with dreams of buying land in the jungle, building homes and perhaps even starting businesses. The natural beauty and abundance of the jungle seems like a paradise on Earth, and it is, until you try living there full-time.

As a kid, I loved reading about Daniel Boone, and the whole pioneering spirit. My great-grandparents first settled the land where my family in North Carolina still lives today. I guess on some deep level I always had that pioneering spirit too, and the past three years–buying jungle land in Peru and building a retreat center there–have given me the ultimate test of my pioneering skills! I have paid a lot of dues to get where I am now. While many gringos come here with similar ambitions, I’ve seen a lot more failures than successes during my seven years in Iquitos. So I’d like to share a few of my own learning experiences in how to build community relations in the jungle.

When I first bought my land on the Itaya river, it was completely undeveloped. In time I learned that I had inherited a border dispute between my neighbors and the former owner of my land. There’s this idea in the jungle that, if you are tending land, even if it doesn’t fall under the deed, it’s yours. But there are always going to be disputes when the map and territory itself do not align. After I bought the land, we discovered that government officials had taken an old map and used that as a template, but no surveyors had ever come out to properly survey it.

The neighbors had been fighting over a disputed swath of land from the people I bought it from– and sometimes they didn’t even know where the line was. There was a tree a meter over the line, but the neighbor tended the tree, so it’s theirs. In my case, the neighbors over-claimed what they actually had. But fortunately, some other neighbors with property adjacent to mine had actually done their surveying according to legal requirements, and filed it in the public registry. The government surveyors then had a problem on their hands–they were obliged to do their jobs properly. Otherwise the borders would have overlapped, based on the boundaries of my neighbors, which were already on legal record.

So the surveyors came back the second time, and it turned out that both neighbors gained land from what they had before on paper! And with that, the dispute was settled, and both sides were content, without the need to construct fences or make problems. This was a rare example where a dispute resulted in a win for both sides! Because where there there are no fences, borders in the jungle can get very fuzzy, and it’s always better to know exactly what’s yours.

When we began building the first structures on the land, I invited all my neighbors over for a minga. This is a day of shared communal labor. No one gets paid, but you provide a meal for everyone when the work is done, with the understanding that you will show up for your neighbor when it’s their turn for a minga. This event was chronicled here: http://www.jungle-love.org/2011/04/12/the-minga/

The minga is a great example of community in the jungle. It encourages social cooperation and trust between neighbors, which becomes extremely important when the time comes for the community to band together in order to deal with problems that affect everybody.

One of the greatest problems faced by this community, myself included, was illegal logging on all our lands. Thieves coming upriver from Belen were constantly entering the quebrada (creek) that gave access to this area, cutting down and stealing trees and whatever else they could take. I knew something had to be done about all these invaders, after I caught some thieves on my own land. It had been vacant for so long, people assumed it was free for the taking. This problem with wood theft really was so out of control that in the beginning, there were eighty to one hundred boats coming in on the weekends, dozens and dozens of people on a single day! Each one intent on sneaking in and hauling logs illegally out of the forest.

So I obtained a signed, notarized document stating that I had permission to control access to the quebrada, on behalf of the entire community. Then I hired a person from the community to be my guard, as he would know who was from the community and who wasn’t. I paid him a good monthly salary, because it was essential to be able to identify people as locals or strangers. Some of the people coming up the creek were harassing me, yelling crude and insulting things, but they weren’t strangers or thieves, they were locals from the village! Not everyone in the community thought it was a good thing to have a gringo in the neighborhood.

The other thing I did was buy some guns and make sure my guard was always well-armed, night and day. A word about guns: there are no police in the jungle. You are your own police. I never owned a gun until I moved to Peru. In the jungle, it is a necessity. Without that protection, eventually you’re going to be exposed to the risk posed by people who come onto your land with guns of their own. It’s just that simple.

Finally, I hired a painter to paint a big sign, stating that we had armed guards and permission to shoot on sight, complete with a pictorial icon of a person getting shot, so even people who couldn’t read would get the message. We posted this sign prominently at the entrance of the quebrada where it was impossible to miss. And after we did that, the traffic from invaders dropped immediately from dozens every week down to maybe one or two a year. The problem virtually went away overnight.

Even with that, I wasn’t accepted by a lot of the community. And I understand, I’m a gringo on the land, I have a different way of living, and they’re not used to it, they’ve never had a gringo try to set up stake among them. And that brings me to the Sunday morning meeting where everything turned.

Each Sunday morning around 8 or 9am, the community held a public meeting to discuss whatever issues were current. I found these meetings to be largely a waste of time. Besides, we worked on the land on Sundays, and often did ceremonies on Saturdays, so it was inconvenient for me to attend, although I was expected to either go in person or send a representative.

Meanwhile, the mayor was talking behind my back, sending nasty verbal messages through the locals, little birds coming to chirp that we’re going to fine you for not attending, little threats like that. It was just a situation like, how are we going to get money out of this gringo? We’ll fine him! I said to the little birds, I won’t talk to the mayor unless he sends me a signed, hand-written message with my name on it. If you want me to come, you have to give me a signed invitation. And so they did that.

I talked to my lawyer about it, and he said I was on private property. So long as the community is not indigenous, I wasn’t legally obligated to attend any of these meetings, and they couldn’t legally enforce a fine.

Armed with this information, I went to the meeting that Sunday with my wife and my child. I planned my words carefully in advance, so I would know exactly what to say in the heat of the moment, facing a roomful of villagers, some of whom had been publicly denouncing me. When I got up to speak, it was obvious that they were all charged up to harass the gringo. I began by talking about how we all faced a common problem, and pointed out the money I had personally invested in order to deal with it.

“I’ve spent a lot of money on this already, for example to hire an artist to paint these signs, warning people not to come into this territory,” I began.

How much did you pay? They wanted to know. I told them. And then they laughed. They were making fun of me for spending that much money on a sign.

“But if you don’t spend that much, so it looks professional, no one will take you seriously,” I said.

At that moment, what I really needed was for them to take me seriously.

So I said, “Who here feels safer now, because I have put up signs and bought guns and hired armed guards from your own community to police this area? Are people still tearing your trees down? How many people come onto your land now?”

There was a silence in the room as that sunk in. Then one man, a guy who had been one of the ones harrassing me before, spoke up.

“No one,” he said. “I have not had any problems since then.”

“Me neither,” another man said. “I don’t have invaders anymore.”

Then all at once, they collectively understood that the money the gringo was spending actually was benefiting the entire community, and the whole energy changed. They had to admit that the problem had more or less gone away. And they said, he’s exonerated from these meetings, we’re not going to fine him, and the gringo is OK.

“In fact,” I continued, “Each one of you has a right not to come to these meetings, you all have private property!” The mayor cut me off immediately. He got out a book and started reading the laws.

I said, “I don’t care what you’re reading, this doesn’t mean anything! It’s a tax system, and they make money each time you don’t come to the meeting, but you don’t actually have to pay it.” I made the mayor very nervous talking about individual rights, and once I mentioned my lawyer’s advice, he intervened and quickly changed the subject. In my opinion, this problem with meetings and taxation goes back to Fujimori, who put these meetings in place, to make sure regional authorities could keep track of what local villages were doing. They didn’t want any of these communities getting too independent.

After that Sunday morning, something shifted. As a show of goodwill, I agreed to send a rep to be there every week in my place. And we’ve never had any problems since then. They accepted me because they know who I am now, because I was willing to stand before them publicly with my Peruvian wife and child by my side to make my case, and because it’s not in their interest to mess with me. Now the whole community knows that I am a job provider, I’ve got a good business up and running, and I’m not going anywhere.

I even made a proposal to the town to raise the funds to plant coconuts along the road to the town, so people don’t have to drink sugary sodas all the time, they could drink coconut water instead. If we ever get the funds together, I’d still like to do that.

The mayor and I even started to get along after that. He was the one who made the ruling that I didn’t have to attend the meetings anymore. The mayor, you see, is also a shaman, and he had wanted me to drink ayahuasca with him for some time, but I wasn’t interested– he was too political, too slick, he had lived in different parts of Peru and knew a lot about life outside the jungle. I was wary of him–he was very charismatic, which can be a red flag with Peruvians–in my experience here, the most charismatic people are the ones to watch out for. So it was, I believed, with the mayor.

Ultimately, what really broke the ice between us was that I did drink ayahuasca with the mayor-shaman; or rather, he drank my medicine, at my place. And this veteran ayahuascero, who had worked with the medicine for decades and bragged about his ability to handle it, got rolled over by my brew and went unconscious for three hours. And I was the one tending to him. After that, I think we started to have a real understanding with each other, and there was mutual respect.

It’s funny how the people I avoided the most in the beginning are the people I’ve gotten the closest to now! The mayor is now employed as the head shaman at my retreat center, conducting regular ayahuasca ceremonies for my clients there, and he does an excellent job too.

One last observation. When I first moved onto the land, my cane field was burned. I found eleven witnesses who said it was the former owner’s cousin, who had kept an eye on the land, but never got paid for it. He wanted to scare me so that I would go away. He’s now one of my best workers. He’s the only one who will tell me in advance if he’s not coming in to work the next day! No other worker does that, they just don’t show up.

At the time, I confronted him, did you burn my cane field? I have eleven witnesses. He denied it. I said, well, because you burned the chacra where I’m going to construct a maloca, now I don’t have to do another minga! So I told him I wasn’t going to press charges, and I thanked him instead.

Under the Mistletoe

 

Some well-established mistletoe colonies.

Here’s another riff on the theme of how many cool things can be found right in your own backyard. Corrina and Maverick and I live in walled compound with a big garden in the back. We have lots of fruit trees—coconut trees that yield dozens of coconuts at a time, guanabana, cherry, avocado, acai, copoazu, cashew, and mamey, among others. But the garden’s most prominent feature is a grove of a dozen mature Brazilian guayaba trees, which were planted by the family a decade ago, and which prolifically produce large, luscious, bright yellow guayaba fruits on a daily basis.

Then one day I noticed these trees had some branches with differently shaped leaves. I pointed it out to Otorongo Anthony, and he identified it instantly as an invasive species of mistletoe. He suggested I remove them from all the guayaba trees by hand, the only sure way to rid the trees of the pest. They target citrus trees, which explained why I only found them on the guayabas. When I looked closely, I found that they had colonized every single one of the guayabas to some extent.

Phoradendron, the family of mistletoe, is well named for its parasitic properties: phora (to bear, carrying, producing, transmission) dendron (tree). Corrina and I wondered how this tree reproduced itself, and was transmitted from host to host. I figured the obvious answer was birds. Most of these growths occurred at the outer edges of the tree canopy, and tended to occur in clusters. Why were some trees afflicted with half their growth taken over by the parasite, while others had only one or two growths?

Sure enough, thanks to Wikipedia, I learned that this species of mistletoe produces flavorful berries with sticky seeds inside. Birds peck at the seeds, and then wipe their beaks off on the branches, leaving the seeds plastered on the branches where they can begin to propagate new territory. Occam’s razor is everywhere to be found in the jungle, and this is yet another elegant example of the simplest explanation being correct. The action of birds eating berries, and perhaps even wiping their beaks on a branch, is all that is needed for the opportunistic seed to find its host.

I also learned that these plants are known as hemi-parasites, because they do their own photosynthesis, but also depend on the host for water and some nutrients.

It’s funny, I scarcely noticed this imposter in my garden all this time. I mean, I did notice it, but it was growing out of the woody tissue of its host so flawlessly, I was all but fooled. The burls it raised where the parasitic root ran along the stem of the host have an incredibly clever design. In botany this root is known as a haustorium, and its function is to penetrate the host’s tissue and draw nutrients from it, just like that face-sucking critter in Alien. 

Come to think of it, phoradendrons remind me a lot of some of the characters who hang out down on the Boulevard. Except they’re trying to gradually attach themselves to your wallet without your noticing anything strange.

The differently shaped leaves of Phoradendron spp. obviously give it away, but it’s something you just don’t expect to see, that level of masquerade and trickery in the plant kingdom, an imposter hiding in plain sight.

So yesterday, I got the stepladder and went around the garden, meticulously removing every one I could find. I must’ve plucked out a couple hundred of them, and it took me most of the afternoon to do so. On closer inspection, up there in the canopy, I found that there were whole supply trains of ants focused around the contact points where the parasitic roots had attached themselves and formed nodes on the branches, getting sap or nutrients of some kind from these joints.

Which, by the way, is why they call this plant suelda con suelda in Spanish. It means to join together, in the sense of welding or soldering one thing to another, reflecting its method of joining itself physically to its host. Not only that, but suelda con suelda is well known in the jungle for its medicinal properties—particularly its ability to heal joint problems, dislocations and fractures! (Many people in the jungle pull down samples from the forest and transplant them onto citrus trees in their yard, so they can have a supply on hand if needed for emergency plasters and poultices.) You gotta love the symmetry of that . . . yet another great example of the medieval Doctrine of Signatures, which, like Occam’s razor, begins to appear everywhere you look in the jungle, once you start looking.

So it turns out that this pest is actually a healer as well, and I spent hours eliminating a plant that others in the jungle cultivate. One man’s parasite is another man’s medicine, I suppose.  I just had to laugh when I found that the mistletoe was itself suffering from a parasite, a leaf blight which I only found on its leaves and nowhere else. The guayabas too have a common leaf fungus of some kind, but it’s different from the one specifically targeting the mistletoe. So even the parasite has one of its own, and everything is eating everything else all the time, without sentimentality or remorse. A process that is neither good nor evil, but merely reflects the uncompromising need of all living things to survive and propagate by any means necessary. Which is to say, the law of the jungle, eh?

Jungle Love: Dolphin Edition

Hey baby.

Recently I was re-reading The Three Halves of Ino Moxo, by Cesar Calvo, and I came across a passage about the bufeo, the famed pink dolphin of the Amazon river. Calvo notes that “some native women, when pregnant or menstruating, avoid embarking on a fragile boat. They know that the bufeos get very excited by their odor and will ram the boat, trying to overturn it. Frequently there are cases of women who drowned, not because of the over-turning but because the bufeos dragged them to the bottom and fornicated with them. There are also many stories from fishermen who have captured female bufeos; they say that no woman can compare to them in the skills or passion of sex.”

How ‘bout them apples! This struck me as funny because I have seen something like this behavior before. When Corrina was six months pregnant, we went to the Quistacocha zoo, where they have a tame dolphin in a water enclosure. This dolphin was very excited to see Corrina, and doing his little trick of bringing her gifts of rocks balanced on his snout. The attendant came by and the dolphin swam right up beside us. The attendant rolled him over on his back to show us how turned on this dolphin was, if you know what I’m saying. I got a video of it and put it on youtube a couple years ago, and since then it has racked up over 30 thousand views . . .

“Disguised as humans, they come out of the rivers, especially during holidays and feasts, when they are protected by noise, confusion and dancing, and they court maidens and steal them,” Calvo writes.

The mythology of the male bufeo is kind of a reverse mermaid story—he changes himself into a gentleman and comes ashore to seduce unsuspecting young ladies, and then slips away back to the river. Later she discovers she is pregnant but Señor Bufeo is nowhere to be found. This always struck me as a rather convenient excuse for village girls who don’t know or don’t want to admit who the real father is—no, it must have been that trickster dolphin!

So, how can you be sure you’re not getting it on with a dolphin in disguise? Tell us, Sr. Calvo: “Bufeos also have their weak points: no matter what they do or how they appear, bufeos are doomed to always carry a hat . . . forced to breathe by that unavoidable orifice in its head. To recognize them or scare them away, all one has to do is remove the hat.”

Good to know. Come to think of it, there was this book, Wet Goddess, that came out a couple years ago, a sexually explicit memoir of a human-dolphin relationship that carried on for months. But in that case the male was human and the dolphin female. I guess if you’re gonna go there, might as well go all the way. Money quote:

“What is repulsive about a relationship where both partners feel and express love for each other? I know what I’m talking about here because after we made love, the dolphin put her snout on my shoulder, embraced me with her flippers and we stared into each others’ eyes for about a minute.”

Hahahahahahaha! Ehm, I mean, ew. Anyway, while I’m on the subject, did I ever mention the time I tried to make a love potion from a dolphin vagina? Well, it’s true. A love potion here is known as a pusanga, and it is taken very seriously. Apparently they really work, and there are people here, brujos and whatnot, who specialize in custom-making specific pusangas for various seductions and lovers’ intrigues.

Calvo notes that in making these love potions, “the female red bufeo is the most sought after. The sorcerers cut out the ring around its vagina, empower it by means of fasts, sing icaros to it, and with that ring make a pusanga, which is infallible in affairs of love.”

So, years ago when I was but a naïve tourist visiting Iquitos for the first time, I went down to Belen market for some last minute souvenir shopping and I happened across just such an item, a fleshy ring preserved in some kind of oily substance. I had heard about the whole pusanga thing, and I bought it as a novelty item, without thinking too much about it until later. Then one night, back in the States, I had a first date with a girl that I wanted to impress, and I noticed the little plastic vial in the medicine cabinet. I unscrewed the top, thinking I might experiment with a little pusanga, but when it opened I spilled some of this oily liquid on my hands and let me tell you, it stank just about as badly as you’d imagine such a thing would. Go ahead and insert the ‘smells like fish’ joke here, it practically writes itself.

Problem was, I couldn’t get the smell off of me, and I finally left to go meet this girl, and she noticed immediately of course, and she was disgusted by it. It made for a terribly awkward first impression, and yet that was nothing compared to the heights of sublime awkwardness we ascended to when I tragically tried explaining where the smell had come from. We never had a second date.

But at least I can laugh about it now. I don’t know what strange secrets those love potion sorcerers are privy to, but I can tell you that my ill-conceived dolphin ladyparts pusanga was anything but infallible in affairs of love.

Ordinary Madness

For some time now I have wanted to write about crazy people. I’ve found it a difficult subject to address though. There’s just no humor in it. It’s one thing to celebrate a city that historically has attracted the mad dreamers, the off-center explorers, and all the half-crazy, eccentric folks who wash up on the banks of the Amazon… but for those suffering the the very real and unbearable burden of insanity, I am at a loss for words. I can think of no fate worse than to be deprived of one’s good senses. I have had several personal friends who lost their bearings, and in some cases never found them again. My memories of those events are nothing but sad. So I have a lot of compassion for the outcasts I see on a regular basis, living hand to mouth on the streets. I’ve spoken to them, given them food and sometimes money, and tried to make sense of their plight. But there’s nothing for it. They’re on the bottom rung of society with no way of bettering their situation.

It’s also a challenge to learn how to balance the reality of the big bad world out there, with the reality we create for ourselves moment to moment. What I mean is that it’s callous to ignore the plight of those suffering around you, but neither can you dwell on it too much, and make other people’s problems your own. It seems just as much an error both to linger morbidly on the subject as it is to ignore it. I don’t know what the proper balance is.

To my knowledge there are no precendents for this in the rest of the animal kingdom, where creatures would quickly die off or be killed. Like many places in Latin America, the government support system in Iquitos does not get too involved in helping these people. It lets them remain on the streets, intervening only when there is physical danger to others and people complain to the police. Otherwise they remain out there, wandering the streets with the feral cats and the pariah dogs.

The first of these characters to appear on Jungle Love was the Trog, a memorable caveman who after years on the streets of Iquitos finally did get a haircut and access to medication. He hasn’t been seen in a long time, and I have a feeling somebody finally paid his airfare to go back to wherever he was from. In sorting out my taxonomy of the lunatics of Iquitos, I almost feel that I should nominate an heir to the Trog’s throne. Though crazy, he governed himself with an unquestionable authority; a feral, smoldering sense of danger so visceral that nobody messed with him. So it’s hard to choose a successor to someone who ruled their own private space with such ruthless authority.

But on that basis I would have to nominate the poor nameless Peruvian who hangs out on the corner near the hostel, clad in filthy rags and always covered in layers upon layers of ash and soot and detritus sticking to his hair. He’s as stark raving nuts as they come. When he gets worked up, he verbally abuses pedestrians and passing vehicles with a vicious, impotent rage, screaming obscenities compulsively. When he is calm, he is catatonic. I see him standing outside the bodega across the street, staring at the television, without moving for half an hour or more. Other times I find him in the Central Market, a pathetic figure, sitting cross-legged on the ground and absorbed in watching cartoons on a TV where they sell children’s videos as shoppers swirl around him. People tolerate him. This is the best that can be said, that he is not abused, but allowed to dwell on the margins of society.

It’s not enough, in my opinion. And that’s doubly true for the gringos who come here and lose their minds. Sure, you hear the occasional horror story of people who come here to drink ayahuasca and end up in crazytown. Every single case I have seen of this, when properly investigated, reveals that the person in question had a prior medical history of mental instability, and/or was on medication that contraindicated the use of plant medicines, which nonetheless always ends up getting smeared as the responsible party. In fact, rarely if ever is this the case. But, because these plant medicines attract all types, especially the chronically ill and mentally ill seekers who try it as a last resort, on some occasions things go sideways.

That’s what they say about Frank, a gringo and marginal nutcase who has been menacing the Boulevard lately. They say Frank lost his marbles at a retreat center, but that’s surely not the full story. Whatever happened, this Canadian national now prowls the Boulevard, drunk before noon on cheap aguardiente, abusing tourists and looking for trouble wherever he goes. He’s often shirtless, and the last time I saw him he was wielding a weird kind of Bronze Age totem made from various found objects stitched together, pieces of twisted metal and wood and bits of rope, like some primitive fetish fashioned by a self-taught sorcerer.

I have watched Captain Bill run Frank off many times, with remarkable civility. Just today, Bill has had to run him off twenty times or more. He keeps coming back, compulsively re-tracing the same physical loop that has him going around in circles in his mind. These are the kind of people who, if you are a business owner on the Boulevard, really truly test your patience. Aggressive, abusive, toxically obscene, a menace to public health and decency, they would never last in a public park for five minutes in the hometown in the US. Next time you want to complain about the cops in the US, think about the fact that dealing with these kind of people is part of their daily job description. (Peruvian cops, of course, can’t be bothered, unless you pay them to be.)

Before Frank, there was Canadian Terry, who had multiple personas and costumes to match. There was the jungle adventurer (gumboots and machete) the pirate (hoop earrings, bandanna and cutlass, complete with parrot on the shoulder) and several others. Canadian Terry was the kind of guy who got his kicks by waving a bowie knife in front of the tourists at Bill’s restaurant. He was disarmed by none other than Chupo, a legendary jungle guide who happens to be a little crazy himself, on that occasion. Canadian Terry also once threatened to thrown Capt. Bill off of Bill’s 3rd floor balcony, after crashing a birthday party and helping himself to a scoop of birthday cake with his hand after being denied a slice. Later, he slept on a bench at the police station for three days and nights, thinking he was under arrest, because he spoke no Spanish. In fact he had only been briefly detained, and finally after three days the police were able to communicate that he was free to leave, and they wished he would do so.

There’s a literary tradition, a trope dating back centuries, in which the crazy person encountered on a journey babbles cryptic nonsense that is later revealed to contain true and accurate prophecy. It’s as if God, or whoever is up there in the control booth, is in on the cosmic joke by hiding His divinations right there in plain sight for anyone to hear. Because of this, I almost always take the time to listen to the ravings of lunatics. Unless I am late for an appointment, I always pause to sample what’s on tap. By and large it’s worthless nonsense, but once in awhile you can glean a few golden nuggets from that murky stream of verbal trepanation.

An aside: one of the gems I truly treasure came from just such a situation, a couple of decades ago when the filmmaker Edward Tyndall and I were braving the wilds of back-alley Carrboro NC. Back then, in the early nineties, there were some truly sketchy places where university students dare not venture, until they were in search of bad things themselves, and on a night when just such a wild hair popped up, we decided to do some exploring. In a vacant lot near the power plant, where a track crossed over an open stretch from some nearby public housing projects to the nearest liquor store, we met a strange character who was keen to chat. I remember at one point Edward quoting a Roman poet, and upon realizing that the man had no concept of Rome, began to sketch out a summary of the history of Rome to him, for about twenty seconds, before the folly of condensing such an impossibly complex subject became apparent. How do you summarize Rome in twenty seconds? We laughed about it. Our new friend picked up on the theme and announced to us that he was a poet, too. You don’t say? Well, let’s hear a few lines of your verse.

He shifted his stance. It was improv time. He looked around. And he said, “I look around me, seeing the things I see. I breathe the free air. And I look up and and see the moon opening up in the sky like a big … pussy!”

“Wow,” I said. “You really are a poet.”

We chatted with our new friend for a spell, until a huge hulking man emerged from the shadows and, ignoring us completely, robbed our poor friend of his freshly purchased cold cylinder of malt liquor. He was as despondent as a high school weakling who’d just lost his lunch money to a marauding bully.

Then there are those who seem trapped in a web of words, and compulsively try to explain the world straight again. I think of Maria, a woman in Iquitos who I have seen all over the city, walking by the roadways and in the markets, always talking, arguing, and urging on a continual debate with someone or something that only she knows about. She stops and argues with puddles, shakes her fist at the wall. She is fully contained within her own imaginary world, and it does not seem like a very happy place.

Corrina knows Maria’s family, they live in Punchana. And they let her wander around freely, because she is not a threat to anyone. And so she walks and walk, ranging across the entire city, haunting the byways and market stalls in every corner of town like a living wraith. Her family, according to Corrina, thinks that Maria might be the victim of brujeria, or witchcraft, because she was normal and raising a family until about ten years ago, when she changed permanently, and without any apparent inciting incident. Corrina always greets her in the street, but she never hears. To me it’s unsettling to contemplate. I just assume that being of sound mind is our natural right. You’d never think twice about it unless it was taken from you. And by then it would be too late.

Each time I see one of the people I have described, it reminds me to be grateful for what I have. Simple, but I think it is good never to take the basics for granted. Nature owes us nothing. To be of sound mind and in good health means you are already winning without even realizing it.

It has been character building, to say the least, living in a place like Iquitos, which reflects back all the visceral suffering and sadness and chaos in the world like a giant mirror. The contrast between the economically thriving city itself, and the grinding poverty all around it, is wretchedly incongruous in a thousand subtle ways. You can’t ignore it (I can’t anyway) nor have I really made my peace with it. My education continues. I think of Siddhartha passing outside the castle walls for the first time. He knew he could never go back to such blissful ignorance again, but after seeing what was out there, he didn’t want to. Seeing the crippled and the ill and aged and insane was the beginning of the path that led to ultimate acceptance, the precursor to enlightenment.

After I finished writing this, I left the house to go post it online at a cafe. While I was waiting for a motorcar, Maria, whom I had just finished writing about, walked right by me. I couldn’t believe it. Her perpetual expression of pain and sadness and resignation. Shaking her withered finger at the world. And as always, carrying on, as one must.

Then a motorcar pulled up. All the motorcars here have either names or slogans painted on the back to individualize them. This one had a hand-painted message across its canopy: “Solo Dios sabe mi destino.” Only God knows my destiny. I watched Maria walk into the distance, down Quinones, the city’s main thoroughfare, oblivious to the world as it was of her. Finding it impossible to ask if there was some higher meaning to be known here. Feeling sad about her, and the whole theme of the day which had culminated in this odd synchronistic crossing of paths, but also knowing I would soon be carrying on myself, and go on to the next thing, as one must.

Since we will always have a suffering world, wrote the poet David Budbill, we must also always have a song.

The Making of a Maverick

I want to tell you all the story of how little Maverick got his name. (OK, it’s really his middle name, but still.) It has no relation to a pro basketball team or characters played on film and TV by James Garner, Mel Gibson or Tom Cruise, and certainly nothing whatsoever to do with politicians from Arizona or Alaska. No, in choosing Maverick I drew on its original meaning, signifying someone who is independently minded, named after Samuel Maverick, a 19th century Texas lawyer and rancher.

Because the cattle ranged over a wide area of open land, ranchers branded each cattle with an identifying mark, usually a symbol or letters signifying the name of the ranch. But Samuel Maverick did not brand his cattle. So whenever cattle strayed into adjacent ranches, the cowboys would say, that one there has no brand on its hide, it must be a Maverick. Thus in time his name became synonymous with one who refused to be branded– bucking the rules, going one’s own way, not part of the regular herd.

When I first met Maverick’s mother, we dated for a couple of months and then had a series of conversations about what it might be like to have a child. She and I were the same age, both in our mid-thirties at the time, which is a highly unusual profile for Iquitos, in which I would guess the average difference in age between male gringos and local charapa girls is at least twenty five years. And that is being generous. I’ve seen May-December romances here that are an embarrassment to both spring and winter.

Also, Corrina had consciously chosen to delay having children, in stark contrast to the culture here, in which girls commonly get pregnant as teenagers and are often grandmothers by the time they hit their mid-thirties.

No, Corrina waited so long that, at thirty five, the clock was ticking. I remember that when we started dating, she had a white rabbit named Harvey who lived in the backyard. Corrina fed him lettuce and carrots like you would feed a baby from a bottle. In fact her mother and friends teased her about how she was treating this rabbit like a baby, for lack of a baby of her own. Harvey, you may recall, is also the name of the invisible, two-meter-tall rabbit from the Jimmy Stewart film of the same name. (A coincidence.)

One day in early December, Harvey died. I had some vague associations of the term bouncing around in my brain, like with Elmer Fudd, kill the wabbit, kill the wabbit. It was Chillum who pointed out that killing the rabbit was a 19th century colloquialism, a slang way of suggesting a woman was pregnant. Before there were pregnancy tests available in drugstores, a woman could test herself by injecting her urine into a female rabbit and then cutting the rabbit open a day later. If the rabbit’s ovaries were swollen, it was because certain hormones in the woman’s urine caused the reaction and was a sure sign that she was pregnant.

So the rabbit died. It was a sign, as much as such auguries exist at all, though I did not see it until later. Not long after Harvey passed on, we went to Cusco for a vacation. I had joined Chillum and his girlfriend as the guest of a friend who lives in a magical ensconced garden on a plateau above the city, on the route of the old Inca Trail. It’s hard to say enough good things about our host, who in addition to being a successful business owner was also a highly accomplished San Pedro shaman. We were all having a great time hanging out and exploring the city, so I called Corrina, who was in Lima visiting family, and bought a flight for her to jump across the Andes and join me.

One day not long after her arrival, our host gave us San Pedro, and we spent a memorable afternoon at a spot called the Temple of the Moon. It is a place of somewhat uncertain origins, though I have heard some say it was and is associated with fertility. A rocky outcropping obscures a cave beneath, which contains a stone altar around which can be found carvings of snakes, condors and other animals etched right into the rock. There’s a palpable feeling of awe you get in places like this, where so many sacred ritual have taken place across the centuries; the entire area exudes mystery and magic.

We also did a circuit of the Sacred Valley travelling with Chillum and Yoli, going the back way into Machu Picchu which entailed gut-wrenching, altitude-puking bus rides over the Andes, and even a classic, death-defying Peruvian minibus ride, which you’ll never want to do again once you find yourself barreling and sliding along mud-choked roads carved into sheer cliffsides, with thousand-foot drops to the river below. After the stress of that misadventure, we found ourselves being refused passge by the conductor of the tourist train leaving from Santa Maria into Aguas Calientes, simply because the train was full and we did not have proper tickets in hand–one of only a very few times in Peru in which I have witnessed the outright rejection of a reasonable bribe.

So the train departed without us, leaving us to walk the four miles into the dark to reach the town of Aguas Calientes, a fetid little hole designed to extract tourist dollars with maximum efficiency. But we did get to see Machu Picchu, and that was more than worth all the trouble we’d gone through to get there. (Years before, a friend of mine actually found an original Incan trinket all but buried in the soil, submerged there for unknown years and having eluded both archaeologists and tourists and for a century . . . and he’d had it made into a necklace pendant, and wore it around Cusco, never telling anyone its true origins.)

I relate this Cusco trip because it all seems intimately tied to what happened next . . . ten days after leaving Cusco’s galvanizing influences, Corrina got pregnant. I remember the night well. It was at the apex of her window for the one month we agreed to roll the dice and see what happened. No sooner did we ask than we were rewarded. I will always remember this, in contrast to many friends of mine who have struggled for months or years to conceive into a family environment where any child would be lucky to be born. The instant response of the Universe, to provide me with a child as soon as I asked for one, lent a certain cast of clarity to Maverick’s entrance into the world.

He was to be the first child for both parents. Being the last of my family line in namesake, the fate of the surname itself hung in the balance, until a male heir was produced to keep the name alive. Everything about his circumstances, from conception to birth, had this strange kind of iconoclastic quality that I can’t quite describe. None of it happened in a conventional way. Seeing that he was a child of two worlds, who would have to learn to navigate cultural and linguistic divides without any precedent to show him the way, I named him as I did to recognize and encourage the unconventional path he had been on ever since the moment of his conception, and even before that.

Now, at twenty six months, the kid is a force to be reckoned with. He is charapa and gringo blended to a fine consistency. Although he is only two, I can already see that he has passion and precision in equal measure, and both seem to come naturally to him. I am secretly proud of shaking up our bloodline with such unexpected panache. He is a delightful fusion of contrasts, and he looks like no other child in Iquitos or Asheville, both of which he will be able to call home. He is in many ways the first of his line as well as the last . . . a true original, a Maverick.

This Baby Red Uakari Monkey Is Just One of The Reasons To Visit Pilpintuwasi, The Butterfly Farm

Here’s something fun. A baby monkey! It’s just a month old.

Cute. Very cute.

My friend Gudrun Sperrer shared these photos with me the other day. She is the founder and owner of Pilpintuwasi (Quechua for ‘Butterfly Home’), the most popular tourist attraction in Iquitos. The Butterfly Farm is many things: a nature sanctuary, a wildlife rescue center, an educational outreach facility, and the most ethically organized zoo you’ll ever see.

Gudrun has been out there at her center, in the jungle on the outskirts of the little village of Padre Cocha on the Nanay River, for several decades now, and in that time she’s developed something really unique. Locals bring her all varieties of orphaned and stranded wildlife that would otherwise not stand a chance. Recently, one of her workers showed up with a baby sloth, Benji, whose mother had been killed for food. The baby was still clinging to the mother’s side, and the worker made a plea with the people to take it away and let it have a chance to live, rather than be cooked for dinner.

What, me hurry?

Here’s a photo of another rescue sloth. Lucy is not actually from Iquitos; she was discovered on a roof in a suburb of Lima and rescued after the police were called to remove her. Word got out after a local radio DJ got wind of the story and announced it on air.

Now Pilpintuwasi welcomes their newest resident, a baby red uakari monkey.  Red uakari monkeys are listed as a vulnerable species; their entire territory is limited to flooded forests in the upper Amazon regions of Peru and Brazil. Not too much is known about the breeding habits of this particular species—the gestation period is about six months, though they seem to reproduce only once every two years at most.  Gudrun told me that the baby (who does not have a name, until its mother lets Gudrun close enough to determine the baby’s sex) was conceived against the odds.  The male and female uakaris are kept separate—the females run free, while the males are caged, and are only allowed out on Mondays (The Butterfly Farm is closed to the public on Mondays), and even then they are monitored. But even with this limitation, Nico and Princesa managed to find a way to make some Hot Monkey Love.

Mondays are the best.

The males are monitored so closely because they are apparently jealous of human couples who visit the center. Normally amiable and peaceful in their demeanor, they can get a little worked up when they see a human female canoodling with her boyfriend! If you thought there was a lot of machismo among Latin men, that’s nothing compared to the red uakari, whose jealous tendencies extend even beyond their own species.

Gudrun told me that Princesa, the mother, went up into a tree when it was time to give birth, and brought her down later, stealing into Gudrun’s bedroom to leave her a little gift—Princesa ejected her placenta onto the bed. Adorable! I’d venture to say that’s an occupational hazard very few of us have faced, coming home in the evening to find a fresh monkey placenta on your pillow.  The fact that she just laughs about it shows you how much Gudrun is in the right line of work.

A howler monkey hanging out at Pilpintuwasi.

Gudrun has a lot of other pretty cool animals too. Besides the enormous circus-tent enclosure filled with butterflies, which is awesome in itself, she has howler monkeys, titi monkeys, pretty much monkeys everywhere you look. But my favorite reason to visit Pilpintuwasi has always been to see Sr. Pedro Bello.

Oh, hi there.

Pedro is a healthy, happy, bad-ass jaguar. He lives in a big enclosure and he is one of the very few big cats I have ever seen in captivity who don’t look like they’ve already died inside from boredom. This is the point in most tours where zoos become depressing, but in fact Pedro looks like he’s in top form. They feed him fresh red meat in front of the tour groups, so you get to watch him eat, and let me tell you, it’s intense. To see an apex predator like that up close inspires chills in a deep-down, ancestral-memory kind of way. When I see Pedro chowing down on a piece of raw steak, I think: but for this chain link fence, that could be my leg.

So, to sum up: jaguars, sloths, and baby monkeys, not to mention caimans, giant rats, crazy looking birds, and of course, lots and lots of butterflies.

Big thanks to Gudrun for the photos and the stories, and much appreciation for being such a strong voice for animal rights and a righteous force for education and community outreach these many years here in Iquitos.

Apocalypse Now and Then

What’s all this then? The apocalypse upon us already?! I haven’t answered any of my emails! And I was going to learn how to speak Mandarin one day. On the other hand, I guess I don’t have to worry about all those piles of dirty laundry, or wearing a condom tonight. I’m going to go ahead and eat everything in the fridge, and drink the liquor cabinet dry, on the off chance it’ll all go to waste.

I mean, seriously, people. Let’s just take a moment here. This whole End Times hysteria has worked its way up to a fever pitch, and I’m ready to be done hearing about it. You know who is going to be affected by the whole Mayan Apocalypse tomorrow? Those who already believe something radical is going to happen. For them, it will be a self-fulfilling prophecy. For the rest of us, it will just be another day.

If you are intelligent and know how to Google, then you already know that the infamous Mayan Long Count merely means a starting over, like flipping the calendar on New Year’s Eve, and not the end of the world. Nonetheless, it’s important to note who has really done well from this Mayan End Times thing– the media-entertainment complex and the travel industry. Yes, many millions of books and movie tickets have been sold exploiting the public anxiety over Dec. 21, and so have many cruises and End Times-themed packages tours. Personally I have witnessed the selling of many ‘spiritual’ tours to Peru, including sacred plant ceremonies, in which people have paid thousands of dollars to travel to Peru and have the honor of tripping balls on sacred ground when the End Times come. Sounds like something I might have done in college, if I’d had that kind of cash.

In all seriousness, I don’t mean to belittle the sincerity of those seekers who are looking to receive something profound from the events of 12/21/12, but let’s look a little closer here. In my own personal sphere, there are three schools of thought on this event. The first is that Dec. 21st represents the dawning of a new age in which human consciousness begins to refine its frequencies–the fine tuning of the human mind to cosmic frequencies, as it were. This to me is the most plausible. If some are going to become more awake, merely by paying attention to the Frequencies That Be, some movement towards a Fundamental Vibration while others begin to spin more wildly on their axes, well, why wait until now to go on about it? Why haven’t you put more time and energy towards refining and sharpening your senses in daily life up until now– why wait until the Mayan Apocalypse to do it? You were expecting a half-off sale on higher consciousness, perhaps?

To be frank, I can see a scenario in which the human mind graduates upwards in response to its gyroscopic attunement with higher cosmic frequencies, learned over time and through effort and study and reflection. I just don’t think we need the invitation of a media-fabricated holiday in order to begin the process.

The second scenario is a darker vision, in which war, rumours of war, mass shootings, public anarchy, martial law, and other human-made events converge with natural disasters to form a total vision of the world going to hell. To these people I say, there have always been hurricanes and earthquakes. And if people in the Stone Age had had Bushmaster rifles, we wouldn’t even be here right now. Crickets and toads would be running the show. So be thankful for what you’ve got.

The third scenario is the most pernicious. Zealous religious types who have dwelt one too many hours before the kiln, re-reading the Book of Revelation and whatnot, want to tell us that the end is nigh. It inspires fear, and fearful people are easy to control. Anyone who lived through the W. years in America knows that script very well, whether they know it or not.

Well, OK. That dog won’t hunt, and let me tell you why.

I want to go back to a series of conversations I had a few years back with a friend of mine here, a gringo whom I like and respect, who runs popular ayahuasca workshops with mestizo shamans for a living. I ran into him out at a retreat center in the jungle, where he had been doing intensive ayahuasca sessions. This friend, who I’ll call Charles, also has a strain of evangelicalism to his thinking (that was true of his shaman as well), which is not necessarily bad, but makes for an interesting worldview when you combine those two perspectives. That day, we got into a bit of a spat because he was telling me, among other things, that Barack Obama and George W. Bush represented essentially the same thing. (this was just after the outcome of the 2008 election was decided.) I told him that he was naive. He responded that the powers behind each candidate, the people who really made the decisions, were like two heads of the hydra– the same basic malignant force behind different masks. This was boilerplate political conspiracy fare for me, so OK, but even still, anyone who lived in America in those times knows how stark the differences were between the two candidates, and how different America became as a result of Obama’s election (Charles was not living in the US during that time.)

Then Charles told me that, I might laugh, but that did I know who was really the controlling force behind television? I give up, tell me. It’s Satan. That’s right, Satan is behind the impulses that cause people everywhere to create and air television programming.

Again, Charles is a smart guy, and he clearly believed this. So I was willing to listen.

So Charles tells me, you better prepare yourself. Because I have seen in ayahuasca visions that Obama was going to be assassinated near the end of his first term, at the end of 2011, and that martial law would result. He said this with such certainty that I held it in my mind for years afterwards, waiting for the day that I could safely refute it, and happily, that day has arrived.

Charles went on to tell me that he had foreseen in his recent visions how the 2102 Mayan Apocalypse was going to go down. He believed that an Evangelical Christian, “Left Behind” style Rapture was going to happen on Earth on Dec. 21st, 2012. He said that true believers were going to be swept to the sky, and that those resonating on lower frequencies were going to be left behind on Earth with the rest of us dullards and drunks.

I said, “you mean people are going to literally disappear and be swept up into the sky?”

And Charles answered, “yes, righteous people are going to be literally vaporized, and disappear from the Earth in an instant.”

Charles also told me, on a different occasion this past December, that he had foreseen that his wife was going to get pregnant with their first child the following month, so he was making all the preparations to be a father. He says all of these things with utter earnestness and sincerity, and he is a likeable guy so you are inclined to believe him. But this to me is the ultimate presumption. If there is any decision in all of human life that is left up to the forces of Nature/The Creator/God/What Have You, it is when and if a woman gets pregnant! We accept it as a miracle/blessing/gift/major life expense, and we move on. As it happened, his wife did not get pregnant.

And so, after tomorrow has passed, I will relish the first opportunity to point out to him that I did not see anyone vaporize and vanish into Heaven, and that Obama is about to start his second term in office, and that everybody knows that Satan has an exclusive contract with Fox News.

So prophecy is a tricky business. You might have had a vision that seemed So Real during ayahuasca, or while you were floating in the sensory deprivation tank, or while you were climbing that mountain or having a stroke or banging a movie star, but the truth is that very, very few of us have the skills to hang credibly in this game, and the rest of us should show some good sense and keep quiet, in the opinion of this prematurely cranky old man. And stay off my lawn!

Really though, I think it is important always to take a moment to point out everyone who is wrong about predicting the future, so we can keep the hucksters in check. Otherwise they kind of get away with it, no? It’s like the difference between writing a huge check, and sticking around for the moment when it bounces.

These past few weeks, I have been fond of pointing out the long and vainglorious history of those who have tried to predict the End Times. It goes all the way back to John of Patmos, and even before. And across all the centuries and differences in language and culture, you know what all of those soothsayers had in common?

They were all wrong.

The so-called Rapture, by the way, is a recent invention. Most people associate it with the Book of Revelation, or (more accurately) with 1 Thessalonians 4:17, in which “we who are alive and remain” will be “caught up in the clouds” to meet the Lord. Rapture theology has developed over the past 400 years, from the early rumblings of Cotton Mather among 17^th century American Puritans to modern-day Christian eschatology, but it really only came to prominence in the 1830’s, developed by John Nelson Darby and the Plymouth Brethren. So the Rapture is really a very modern appendage in the context of Christianity’s two thousand year evolution.

The linguistic origin of Rapture, derived from that phrase ‘to be caught up in the clouds’, wants closer inspection. The Latin Vulgate translates from the Greek as ‘rapiemur’ from the verb ‘rapio’ meaning ‘to catch up’ or ‘take away.’ This is the same root word from which we get the words rape and raptor– signifying a seizure, a kidnapping, a carrying-off, smartly describing the hunting method of an eagle or some other bird of prey. Later English versions of the Bible have translated it variously as ‘rushed,’ ‘suddenly caught up,’ or ‘snatched up.”

After these Biblical precedents, as well as rock stars like Nostradamus (who claimed that his prophecies in fact extend through the year 3797), comes a wealth of contemporary examples.

William Miller’s failed predictions (he changed the date, claiming to have miscalculated Scriptural numbers, but got it wrong twice) resulted in the Great Disappointment of 1844, but it failed to prevent the Adventist movement from ultimately gelling together as a religious movement.

The upper management of the Jehovah’s Witnesses unsuccessfully predicted End Times would occur during 1914, 1918, 1925 and 1942. Finally they learned their lesson and just left it as an open, undefined date, to occur sometime soon, very soon, so don’t slack off!

An unhealthy obsession with the Book of Revelation seems to be endemic to the American Evangelical tradition, to whom both of the above examples belong. But there have also been many more examples from the 20th century as well. So what happens when tomorrow comes and goes, and we are all still here? What date will we look to as the next end of the world?

Well, there was this one fellow, Adam Clarke, a Methodist theologian, who came up with 2015 as a possible End Times date. And he proposed that in 1825.

Not convinced? How about the proposal of none other than physics genius Isaac Newton, about as far from a New Age kook as you can get. Newton proposed that, based on figures available in the Book of Daniel, that the Apocalypse could happen no sooner than 2060. I’ll be 86 then. Maybe I’ll still be around to mock Sir Isaac when nothing happens, and pooh-pooh his faulty math right into my adult diapers. I’ll look forward to that dubious honor.

Finally, if you are reading this in US Eastern Standard Time, the actual, precise mathematical moment of the solstice is scheduled for 6:11 AM. So get up early, have some coffee, look to the sky, and hope for an uneventful Mayan Apocalypse. Who knows, maybe you’ll experience spontaneous enlightenment? Anything’s possible. It’s a marvelous thing to get caught up in the clouds, as long as you keep your feet on the ground.

Today Is Tomorrow

Here we find Jungle Love, safely back again in Iquitos, after several weeks traveling and visiting family back to the States.  Going back after an absence of almost three years gave me a lot of insight on what’s so great about both places. In Iquitos, the joke is that every day is Groundhog Day, the same basic template playing itself out over and over with minor variations. I realize now why that analogy is so perfect. Iquitos is an island in the wilderness, surrounded by a vast jungle sea. It is geographically isolated from the rest of the world, and there’s not a whole lot of cultural diversity as a result.

Their culture is vibrant and expressive, but it occupies a narrow bandwidth. The radio, for example, plays the same dozen or so pop songs over and over. I’m not kidding, I’ve been here for almost three years and they are still playing the same accursed songs everywhere. I’ll be hearing them in my nightmares when I’m ninety. You go to public events or dance clubs or backyard barbecues, and you will hear those same songs. There’s never anything new. That’s why it seems like Groundhog Day here—there’s something essential about this culture that is comforted by the familiar, and not looking to expand its horizons.

The States, on the other hand, is obsessed with the new. Everyone is always looking for the next interesting idea, the latest app, listening to the new band with that one song that just came out, there’s layers upon endless layers of new stuff always coming out and competing fiercely for the bandwidth that makes up the great riotous diversity of cultures and voices in the States.

It’s like one big culture generator, which it refines and then exports all across the globe. I never properly appreciated this before; I must admit I took it somewhat for granted.  Not to mention the clubs and restaurants and pubs and bookstores and movies and overstuffed supermarkets bulging with flavorful morsels from every corner of the world, and best of all, there is high speed internet everywhere you look, and everybody has a smart phone, and they’re all plugged in for maximum multi-tasking efficiency and the world is moving fast, man.

Life back stateside is efficient, orderly, and governed by rules that are enforced. The streets are safe and clean (at least in my hometown), the trash gets picked up regularly, municipal services function like they are supposed to, and there are schedules and timetables and appointments and everything generally happens on time, and when it doesn’t, there are consequences.

It’s sleek and well designed and yields a thrill like driving a sports car compared to life in Iquitos, which in comparison is more like a jury-rigged Rube Goldberg device that never works properly because the pieces keep getting stuck or misplaced.

On the other hand, rules and consequences have their downside. After driving that sports car for the first time in awhile, I remembered that it was not OK to pass that highway patrolman on the highway, lest they think I am an uppity driver and pull me over, wherein I’ll have to act earnest and deferential and hope my signifying act will get me out of a ticket that will cost time and money that I do not have.

I laughed, thinking of how blithely and carefree I pass motorcycle cops in Iquitos, sometimes crossing into the other lane to do so, and not only to they not care, they don’t even notice. I think of how I’ve never met a roadblock in Iquitos that I haven’t sailed through without even deigning to glance to either side or make eye contact as I ignore the half-assed cop whistles that chime in my wake, knowing full well that none of those dozen or so cops can be bothered to do much more than blow their whistles, much less get on their bikes and chase after me.  Try that one in the States, and see how far you get!

So there is a great deal to be said for the many small personal freedoms that Peru does so well. No helmet, no license, no registration? No problem! Here’s twenty soles, see you later. I have come to love, in a perverse way, the fact that cops won’t get involved in actual lawbreaking incidents unless you pay them to do so. If you go to the station and demand an officer investigate the case, you might get a reasonable pantomime of police procedural work– some paperwork will be shuffled, and you might get a few comforting words. If you want real justice, you have to pay to play. I used to despise this aspect of the culture, the utterly cynical and unfettered corruption that seeps into all aspects of life here, but now I kind of appreciate the purity of it, the fact that you get exactly what you pay for, no more or less.

I love the low-key, laid-back, mañana attitude here, the ‘you won’t have problems if you don’t ask questions’ approach. I love that successful thieves get beatings while successful con men get respect.  And sometimes I even love the disorder and the chaos. You might look at a diseased, mangy, scab-crusted dog in the market and ask, what’s going to happen to this dog? Who is responsible? But Peruvians already know the answer. No one is responsible, and that’s why that dog looks like it does. It’s not your problem, so why should it matter.

Life here is not exactly cheap, but neither is it precious. Peruvians have an acceptance of this on a soul level that is incongruous with gringo culture’s worship of youth and beauty and its pathological obsession with good health. Perhaps the people of Loreto have seen too much suffering already, if generational memories preserve them. They see children die, they mourn them, and then they make more children, and life goes on. I saw a funeral procession going down my street the other day, with a tiny little casket, and the expressions on the faces of the mourners just slayed me. No hysteria or lack of composure, but every face an image of solemn, grim acceptance. Not stopping traffic, which squeezed the lanes to make room for them, motorcars on their way to business as usual and no one even slowing down to look.

Not that the people here care any less about their children, or their futures. There’s just a fatalistic acceptance of the larger forces in life here that is in sharp contrast to the gringo way of ceaselessly trying to dominate reality through willpower and ideology.

One of the most refreshing moments I had while I was back in the States was when I went into the AT&T store to activate a phone. There were several people waiting, and only one clerk. She noticed the line, announced that she was going to summon help, and when she returned with another clerk, she pointed out the order in which we had come into the store so that we would be waited on in the proper order. And then she apologized to us for the delay.

That, friends, is customer service. I almost forgot how good it felt! That is what the US of A is all about. You will never in a thousand years experience even one of those points of service in Iquitos, I promise you. Walk into a store in Iquitos, and one of two things will happen—you will be peppered with questions about what you are looking for, after which then the clerk will proceed to call out by name all the other items for sale in the store, as though the mere naming of the thing will compel you to buy it—or you will be ignored completely.

And an Iquitos sales clerk actually considering the order in which people are waiting in line… hilarious. No, you’re on your own, don’t expect any help from the employees, the best service goes to those who want it the most by cutting to the front of the line, which is elevated to almost an art form here. Jungle Love has often commented about how living in Iquitos makes even nice people into just a wee bit of an asshole, because you are forced to be aggressive when people cut in front of you in line, or else you remain silent and just sit there and take it, in which case you are a spineless wuss.

Which brings me to my latest customer-service-moment of knowing not whether to laugh or cry. I stopped at a soda counter to order a Coke, and while I was asking her how much, another woman walked up and demanded a refresco to go. The clerk stopped actually diverted her path to the soda cooler and went to get the woman’s drink instead. Unbelievable.

“Look,” I said to the clerk, “I was here first. Put down that refresco and get my coke.

She did.

“And you, señora, can you not see that there is a line here?”

No answer.

“There is a line here, si or no? Do you see me waiting in line ahead of you?” (This, the script I have rehearsed and perfected by employing it in a thousand such encounters here in Iquitos.)

After pressing the point several times, the woman finally said, with exaggerated slowness: “I don’t understand your language.”

Oh, it’s going to be like that. So it’s on, then.

“Lady, you can wait your turn. If you don’t understand my Spanish, I’ll have to shout at you.”

No response. I needed to show her that ignoring me was not a good strategy.

“You don’t want to understand me,” I said, squaring myself up for confrontation. “That’s different from not understanding.”

The clerk handed me my Coke, chuckling at the way I was calling this lady out.

“And you!” I said to the clerk. “Pathetic. You’re almost as bad as her! Next time, stay on task a little better.”

“Go on then, get out of the way,” the lady said.

“I’m not done here,” I replied. “You don’t have any patience, lady. What’s the hurry? There is no hurry in this life. There is plenty of time.”

“There is no hurry,” she agreed. “There is plenty of time.”

She repeated this last part in a drone-like, affectless way. It was weird.  I suddenly decided to drop it altogether, so I stepped aside and watched as she got her drink and ambled back to . . . the evangelical church across the street, which was in mid-thundering-revival! She had left the church service to go get herself some refreshments! It was a conservative Adventist service, and as historically focused as they are with the End Times, I guess that lady really did have the courage of her convictions, that there’s no hurry, as she had plenty of time for a petty quarrel with a stranger outside in the street though the Rapture cometh soon!

Gardening with Abita

The Spanish word for ‘hobby’ is pasatiempo–a pastime, a way to make the hours go by faster. My favorite pasatiempo in Iquitos is gardening. Now, I used to think that gardening was for day laborers and geriatric types wearing cotton gloves. In fact it is a wonderful form of therapy, and it’s practically free. To plant something and watch it develop is enormously satisfying, whether it’s flowers or ideas or children or anything else whose nature is to grow. It makes you realize that life is never static, it is dynamic and always changing.

I love to walk out in our garden in the morning with Maverick and observe the subtle changes that have happened during the day. The maracuya vine tendrils reach a bit further, the cashew fruits ripened a bit more from green to yellow, the bougainvillea flowers are a slightly richer hue. You can grow anything in the Amazon, with its great wealth of sunlight and rainfall, and things grow quickly just as they decay quickly. The iris that bursts through its seal today will be wilted tomorrow–Old Time it is a’flying!– but more will come, and the arc of life continues on in an infinite loop, through birth and ascendance and decline, flowing on out of sight beyond the horizon, and dwarfing any attempt at comprehension.

Our suburban backyard– the don’t make ’em like this anymore.

We live in a walled compound in what you might call the suburbs of Iquitos, and the back garden is full of mature fruit trees and open spaces. I have spent a great many hours back there planting, trimming, mulching, mowing, and maintaining. It feels like time well spent. I love a garden with defined borders, especially in contrast with the anarchic riot that is the wild jungle, because it is a small but sure way of impressing order upon chaos. It lends definition and formality to feral spaces. Being in control of one’s space is what is so satisfying about the whole process, of making things just so, because in so many ways a person’s character is defined by their environment. In this sense, gardening feels effortless to me, even when I am sweating and laboring under a burning sun–the work is not work at all, but an extension of character that grows out of a desire to be surrounded by beauty.

Corrina’s mother, Abita, owns this compound where she has lived for decades. Abita is Maverick’s name for her (that’s his pronunciation of abuelita which means ‘grandmother’). Abita and Corrina’s father planted the towering coconut trees years ago, along with the big ginda cherry tree and the grove of Brazilian guayabas that drop big fat yellow fruits daily upon the grass. When we moved there, the space had these wonderful mature fruit trees well established–the foundation of a potentially great garden space was already in place.

The rest of it needed some work. There were big piles of stone and rubble, trash heaped in the corners, and bald patches where no grass grew. There was no design for drainage, so the back of the garden flooded after every rainstorm. Over the course of months, I meticulously transplanted the sod in neat squares, I hired a worker to haul off the rubble, and I built trellises where climbing vines might give some sex appeal to the homely bare brick walls. I designed a system of drainage slopes and ditches, and trucked in the soil to build them. And when the flowering vines and lianas proliferated, and the grass knitted itself together into a proper lawn, and newly mulched and fertilized trees began to produce fruit for the first time, I was content in my work– the Great Arborist’s humble steward.

One day, I was on my morning ramble with Maverick, and I came across a pile of burnt leaves and scrap paper. Someone had burned trash right on the thickest, most emerald green area of the lawn, leaving a black ring burnt right down to the soil.  I was scandalized! Abita had been burning her trash on the lawn. This is what people in the jungle do, where there is no garbage pick-up. But we live in the suburbs. I asked Abita not to burn any more trash on the lawn. Look, I said, the grass is finally filling in. Could you at least burn your trash where the grass is not already growing? And she just shrugged, and said, the grass grows back quickly here. What’s the big deal? Soon it will grow over and be gone.

Which is true. But it still looked, well, trashy. And it bugged me that Abita was merely amused by my fussiness. Her perspective on the garden was simply: everything grows back. So why worry about it.

In the months following, I found several more little trash piles. It bothered the hell out of me. But it was Abita’s garden, after all, so, oh well. But then I began to discover food waste, leftovers, tossed aside at the bases of trees where I had neatly mulched them. To see piles of rice, banana peels, fruit skins and chicken bones sitting there rotting was, well, also a little trashy. I had even dug a pit for organic composting in the back of the garden, but nobody used it. Again I asked for some cooperation. I pointed out the aesthetics of a formal garden, and asked Abita, can you not see how this food waste is kind of out of place here? And Abita’s response was, this is all compost, right? You put mulch down here. This is just more mulch. It’s all going to decay. What’s the big deal.

Again I gritted my teeth, and later I found myself scooping up the piles of food waste as though it was dog crap, and taking it out to the compost pile. I tried not to let it bother me. I reasoned that Abita’s perspective was enlightened, in a way, because she didn’t get caught up in the aesthetics or overthink things. She enjoyed her garden and she burned her trash and she threw away her leftovers, and it was all very informal. But still it bothered me. I thought Abita was a little bit myopic and stubborn in refusing to acknowledge the garden as a formal space, or keep it clean. And she thought I was being fussy and uptight. I suspect there’s some truth there on both sides.

Then came the Construction. Abita decided to put walls around her gorgeous outdoor kitchen, and add on an apartment there. The construction went on for weeks. When the workers ripped out the concrete to re-do the floor, they piled it right on the lawn under the coconut tree. I protested, but Abita said they were going to use the chunks of concrete when they paved the back part of the house, and there was no other place to put it in the meantime. So I held my tongue.

Months passed. Construction finished, Abita decided she had run through her budget, and didn’t want to spend any more to re-do the concrete. So the big piles of construction detritus remained there, smack in the middle of the lawn, looking just trashy as hell. It taunted me every day when I walked by. But it clearly didn’t bother Abita at all. Her thinking was that she would still make use of it, one day in the undefined future whenever she had more money for fixing the place up, and it could stay right where it was in the meantime. This is also the same sketchy logic by which old pickup trucks and Camaros end up on blocks as permanent landscape features in the expansive backyards of rednecks all across the American South, where I am from. Eventually they’re not temporary anymore, they’re there for good. And I knew the same thing would happen with any such pile of crap given temporary squatting rights in our garden.

These concrete chunks actually have value. The word in Spanish is cascajo, and it is used to help fill in the cement when new concrete is laid down. There is a secondary market for cascajo, because it can be recycled again and again for new construction. Several of Abita’s friends remarked during a visit to the house that they would like to have the cascajo, and if we decided to get rid of it, would we deliver it to their house? But nobody wanted to pay the cost of transport, which would require hiring workers with a wheelbarrow to move it to the roadside, as well as hiring a three-wheeled pick-up truck to deliver it.

Finally, I decided that I had had enough of the cascajo. I would pay for its removal myself. I hired a worker to start moving the big chunks to the road, hoping that the Iquitos recycling program would be effective in removing it. The recycling program in Iquitos is more effective and efficient than any other city I’ve ever seen. This is how it works: you leave stuff that you don’t want by the roadside, and other people come along and take it. You’d be amazed what people will haul off. Scrap metal, scrap wood, dirt, rocks, just about anything really. An hour after my worker left for the day, I went outside to check on my roadside cascajo–a big pile of concrete chunks the size of basketballs–and it was all gone. Only dust and pebbles remained.

But the other half of the pile remained inside, and the wheelbarrow work was so hard that my worker didn’t come back the next day to finish the job. So I hired more workers and they came and loaded up their vehicle. This ultimately ended up costing me a hundred soles (about thirty five dollars) which in Iquitos is a lot of money to spend just on getting rid of a pile of rocks. But it was worth every penny.

Abita’s friend noticed this and said again how much she would like to have the cascajo. So I had the guys drive over and dump the whole lot in front of her house, and she was very happy. I was too, because now it’s her problem. And our garden is once again free of piles of crap, which is really the first step in any gardening project. Everything beyond that is just a bonus. I think Abita and I can both agree on that much.