When I was a kid, I was fascinated by “My Side Of The Mountain,” the award-winning 1959 book by Jean Craighead George. It’s the story of Sam Gribley, a twelve-year-old boy who runs away from his family’s New York City apartment to survive in the wilderness of the Catskills. He faces many challenges along the way, and the book is filled with dozens of small details on how Sam manages to survive. From making his own fishhooks, to identifying and gathering edible plants, to capturing and taming a falcon, his greatest struggle turns out to be learning how to reconcile a life of freedom in nature’s solitude with a desire to also live among the companionship of family and friends.
When I visited Otorongo Lodge, the pristine Amazon jungle retreat built and managed by Anthony Giardenelli and his wife Ivy, I felt like I was back in that story again. Many twelve-year old boys, myself included, daydreamed about running off to the wilds and carving out a life of substance and meaning, in tune with Nature and its rhythms. Well, Anthony actually did it. And he’s not burdened by Sam Gribley’s dilemma either, because his wife, who is from Iquitos, loves spending time at the lodge as much as he does.
Built from scratch over nearly seven years, Otorongo is set back from the Amazon on the banks of the Oran river, just above the town of the same name. It is two hours by speedboat and a world away from the city. If Iquitos is the edge of the frontier, Otorongo is a way to find what lies beyond it– a forward operating base for close encounters with all kinds of wildlife. “Otorongo” means jaguar in Spanish, and there have been jaguars detected (but not seen) close to the lodge. Seeing a jaguar in the wild is like the holy grail of all jungle tourism, but they are the ninjas of their native habitat, almost never seen in the wild. Just knowing they’re out there is enough for most people.
Tuning into the wildlife is what Otorongo is all about. Anthony’s knowledge of the plants and animals of the Amazon is encyclopedic (birds and fish are particular specialties), and he holds his guides to the same standard. He puts a premium on a dynamic, interactive experience between his guests and the jungle. To do this he employs a rotating staff of bilingual guides, so that there’s never more than a ratio of two people to one guide. Which means that, wherever you want to go in the jungle, at any time of day or night, there is someone there to show you the way and tell you what you’re looking at.
His guests clearly appreciate this level of personal attention. Otorongo is near the top in Trip Advisor ratings, and his online reviews speak for themselves—they account for most of his lodge bookings now. He told me that, in the peak season of June through August, he’s hosted as many as 28 people, with enough guides to accommodate the desired activities of every single guest.
Which may not sound impressive, when you compare it to the industrial-sized tour operators in the region. But for an independent operation, it’s quite a feat. He’s running a profitable business in Iquitos—that alone sets him apart from countless other gringos that have come and gone here!—and he’s doing it without ever losing the personal touch.
When I visited Otorongo in early March, it was just at the end of the slow season for Iquitos tourism, and the lodge was more than half full. The vibe there was very casual and relaxed. Two American guys I’d come on the boat with were preparing to set out for a two-day canoe trip upstream into even deeper wilderness. A retired couple from San Francisco were getting ready to go out with a guide by canoe to have a look at the many caiman, snakes, lizards and tarantulas that are all active at night. Other guests were taking advantage of the chance to simply lie in hammocks and catch up on their reading.
The creature comforts at Otorongo are all in the details, and they are indeed expertly observed. Solar panels powering LCD lights in every room. Mosquito-proof common spaces with beautiful views of the jungle. Creative, abundant cuisine coming out of the kitchen. And modern, tastefully built bathrooms—in the jungle, that counts for a lot!
Anthony seemed to be everywhere at once—one minute joyriding around the lagoon in his small boat with guests, the next minute hanging out in the lodge’s dining room, riffing on the behavior and frequency of poisonous snakes in the area. He was dropping little bits of knowledge all over the place. I commented on a plant with large elephant-shaped ears growing outside the lodge.
“Ah yeah, paticina negra they call it, black arum or elephant ear arum. The locals believe the presence of it enhances your dreams. My brother in law doesn’t like to sleep out here because he thinks this plant gives him strange dreams.”
I asked him how the fishing had been lately, and he mentioned that that one of his guides was fond of noodling for armored catfish eggs. Noodling is a technique that requires either bravery or foolishness, or whatever you want to call it when you swim down and stick your hand into the submerged holes under the riverbank, feeling around for the nests where these catfish lay their eggs.
“They really are delicious. Like caviar from the Amazon. But you go poking around in holes like that, you could come up with coral snakes or piranhas. Not so much fun.”
That reminded me of the electric eel that Anthony caught when the people from National Geographic were at his lodge. They asked him in advance to try to catch one for them, and he did. It was more than six feet long. Check out the most excellent video footage of this feat on youtube:
So what happened to it?
“It died. I kept telling them we need to let it go. Just half an hour, they said. But by then it was dead. I took it out to the Amazon and split it open, little fish were eating it.”
Electric eels here in the Amazon can generate up to six hundred volts, enough power to kill a man. Why don’t they electrocute themselves?
Anthony also caught a huge stingray last year, so big it made news in the local paper.
Anthony vs. the giant stingray
“Yeah, short-tailed stingray, 155 pounds (70 kilos), took me half an hour to get in the boat. I got a hernia from it. I took it to Oran and weighed it, then chopped it up and gave it out to the locals to make for dinner.”
You can see that Anthony is completely in his element at the lodge, spending every day looking for wildlife and exploring the jungle, and being able to share that with people who are almost all seeing it for the first time. Every time I see him in town, he’s either coming back from or going out to the lodge. He’s always itching to get back out to the jungle, and now I understand why. He is Sam Gribley, all grown up. He’s found his side of the jungle.
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Anthony is originally from upstate New York, which is where the Jean George novels take place. (She wrote several sequels, more than thirty years after the original classic was published.) Anthony often wears a baseball cap from the Upstate New York Falconry Association, and he can imitate hundreds of birdcalls on cue. He’s a true bird geek. I mentioned at one point that he reminded me of that self-taught survivalist Sam Gribley, the boy falconer, thinking he’d surely have read the novel at some point in his youth. Anthony laughed when I mentioned the comparison. Not only had he read it, Ms. George wrote him into one of the sequels!
As a teenager, he worked and studied with a master falconer named Jonathan Wood, founder of the Raptor Project, the world’s largest traveling raptor exhibit. Jonathan Wood is also based in the Catskills, as is Ms. George. Through that association, he earned a passing mention in the third book.
“In the book, Sam has to give up the bird to a rehabilitator,” Anthony said. “’So Anthony from Altamont was taking care of the bird,’ I think that’s how the line goes.”
At Otorongo, Anthony has two eagles that he is rehabilitating. They truly are noble creatures to see up close. And much as one would like to see such animals outside of a cage, he told me that they would not survive on their own in the wild. A self-proclaimed bird psychologist, he explained how keeping them caged was the only humane option.
“These birds are generally caught young, and not properly fed,” he told me. “And one of these eagles was obviously abused at some point. The locals here often give them very severe treatment in order to ‘tame’ them. They do things like stretch its neck almost to the breaking point, to break its spirit. They tie them to stakes and actually roast them over a fire. They do it to other birds as well, smoking live owls over a fire, things like that. It’s incredibly cruel, and these birds can get permanently shocked and stressed as a result.
“Normally you would train birds like eagles with hunger, but one of these eagles has mental problems, and training with hunger is not fair. Even when I release live food into his cage, he stands on his perch looking at it. You can see him thinking, “should I go, or not go?’ He can’t make up his mind. Everyone has to get out of the way for him to finally go after it.”
From time to time, locals will bring captured birds to Anthony’s lodge, hoping he will buy them, and often he does. And sometimes they stick around. He bought and released a screech owl once, but it didn’t go far. It sits and sings over his room all night long.
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There’s a feeling that you get in the jungle, that you just don’t get anywhere else. It’s tranquil, but never quiet. Life happens ravenously, insistently, and with more brilliant diversity than you can begin to imagine, even after you see it up close. The jungle is absolutely riddled with living things, great and small, all intertwined together in chaotic, impenetrable curtains of green foliage. This curtain extends just to the perimeter of the lodge, and then suddenly civilization takes over. The grass is cut and there are orderly gardens and fruit trees, macaws in the trees and hot coffee waiting in a thermos night and day. I sat on the porch as dusk, drinking a cup, and pondering the hundreds of plant and animal species to be found within just a few hundred yards of the lodge. The air was dense with the perfume of flowers and rich with oxygen. It sounds funny to say it, but it smells like air that’s never been breathed by anyone before—air that has just been born. The flowers of wild ginger planted all around the lodge gave off a strong aroma of honey, adding to that effect of preternatural sweetness.
After dark, many of the guests retired to their rooms or headed out with guides to canoe upstream. Anthony showed up with rubber boots and a headlamp, and asked me if I wanted to go out and do some night fishing. I said, hell yes.
I thought we’d go down to the river where he kept his boats, but instead I followed him down a trail leading further into the jungle behind the lodge. It was completely dark by this time, and the circular halos of our headlamps scoured a path before us, revealing a steady stream of creepy crawly critters—highways of ants working the night shift, termites, lizards and chameleons skittering up and down trees, and spiders—everywhere, spiders. One of them, a hairy, scary variety the size of my hand, skated off on the surface of the water when we approached it.
“Wandering wolf spider,” he said.
“Great name.”
Anthony was shining his light along the water’s edge, scouting for cyclids. These fish, a species known as Aequidens, have over two hundred varieties, most only three to five inches long. They like to slumber right next to the shore where they are safer from predators. Most predators, anyway. Anthony saw one, slowly enclosed his hands around it, and plucked it right out of the water. “This one is called bujurqui rojo,” he said. “Not much meat on these little guys, but you catch enough of them, they make a pretty tasty soup.”
We went on along the water’s edge, through flooded forest and dense undergrowth. The rainy season continues in the Amazon from November through April or May, and the water was still rising. Anthony saw another fish by the water’s edge, a shuyo rojo (Erythrinus erythinus), but this time he swung his machete and cut it neatly in two. “This species eats other fish, I don’t mind killing ‘em,” he explained.
So I have to say that our fishing trip was a success, though we had no boat or fishing poles. Anthony seemed content using a machete, and his bare hands. Further on, he stopped and pointed at what looked like a large, submerged leaf. I looked closer and saw that it was in fact a frog, the strangest looking frog I have ever seen. It was floating motionless in shallow water, perfectly camouflaged.
“Suriname toad,” Anthony said. “Pretty cool to see those in the wild. It’s a male, and see, its carrying eggs on its back. Otherwise I’d try to catch it.”
Suriname toad, with embedded eggs
We continued off-trail, with Anthony aiming his light up in the trees. He was looking for snakes. He stopped and pointed something out to me. I didn’t see it at first, but when I looked closer, I saw snake scales stuck to a leaf at eye level. The imprint was perfect, a whole section of multi-colored scales stuck to the leaf like some kind of conceptual art project.
“That’s a rainbow boa,” Anthony said. “And it’s fresh. You see how it rubbed against the leaves to shed its skin. It might still be close by.”
OK, that was kind of cool. Now we were forensic detectives, hot on the trail of a big snake. We went along following the waterline, deeper into the jungle, when something ran by us, a lizard, right between us and on into the water.
“What was that?”
“A golden tagu. We surprised it. It ran into the water for safety. Of course, it’s not safe there either. This is prime hunting ground for the jergon, right along the waterline at night.”
Well, that’s just great. I wish he had not said that. Because there’s a folk wisdom here that you tend to attract the thing that you dwell on in your thoughts. So try not to think about the poisonous snakes that are probably active and hunting for their dinner all around you . . . The fer-de-lance (Bothrops atrox), or jergon as it’s locally known, is one of the deadliest snakes in the Amazon. Its bites are often fatal. As we walked along, Anthony explained that most adult jergons will conserve their venom, and not actually inject it when they bite. Another trick they have is that they do a warning strike first. He described walking along a trail, when a curled-up jergon right by his foot struck out in front of him, intentionally missing, like a shot across the bow, as if to say: next time, it’s for real.
fer-de-lance
“That’s why the young jergons are more dangerous than adults. They haven’t learned these tricks yet. They feel threatened, and they’ll inject their whole load of venom into you. And that means trouble, even though they may be only babies. One of my workers was walking through the jungle, carrying a load of yucca back from his farm, and he got bit on the foot by a baby jergon, less than eight inches long. He thought he’d be fine. Well, by the time he got here, we had to evacuate him to Iquitos on the speedboat. He’s lucky to be alive.”
I was suddenly very self-aware of every awkward and loud movement I made as I went blundering through the underbrush. “Don’t worry,” Anthony reassured me, “with rubber boots, you’d need a jergon about thirty inches long to be able to strike above the knee. Besides, sometimes I go for weeks out here without seeing a single jergon.”
Only weeks?
But in the end, after an hour of actually looking for snakes, in those ideal conditions, we didn’t see a single one. And that was fine with me. Lightning was blinking on the horizon, a celestial strobe making flash pictures of the jungle as we walked, and big thunder was right behind it. Rain was coming soon. We turned back, and before we even got back to the lodge it was pouring down. Ever the accommodating host, Anthony cut me a banana leaf to hold over my head, but I didn’t mind the rain. I was just sorry our walking tour was over so soon. There was so much more to see.
I returned to the same area early the next morning, right about daybreak, and it was teeming over with subtle activity. Frogs, lizards, birds, and monkeys were all around, and every square meter was revealed, on close inspection, to contain worlds within worlds. Life was happening everywhere you looked. The sheer density, the intricate details emerging everywhere from undiscovered spaces, the almost at times alien nature of such complex biodiversity—it’s exhilarating.
More people who live in cities should experience the Amazon like this, at close range. It can really shift your perspective, because nothing about it is man-made. It happened all on its own, we had nothing to do with it. And it is infinitely more weird and complex than we ever have cause to imagine, until we dare to venture out into it, up close and personal–especially at night! Then the truth of it is undeniable—there’s a whole other reality out there, a biological treasure-trove of astounding variety and creative expression, and all of it engaged with itself in a constant struggle for survival. To spend even an hour out there, at night, among the hunters and the prey, can expand your horizons in a dramatic way.
As I said, I can understand why Anthony spends so much of his time out there. It’s where the wild things live.
UPDATED May 17, 2012
Ms. George passed away this week, on May 15 at her home in upstate New York. She was 92.
Two weeks ago, I e-mailed Ms. George in order to send her a link to the above article. I thought she might enjoy reading it, and I wanted to communicate the effect her books have had on people like Anthony and myself. I noted in the email that:
“By the way, this is the first ‘letter to an author’ I have ever written… But I felt compelled to contact you, so you can see one example of the way in which your stories continue to inspire young people to live a life close to the Earth and in tune with Nature in all its forms.”
To my surprise, she responded the very next day, thanking me for sending her the article. She then wrote,
“My life changed after I wrote that book, I divorced, But I knew I could do it on my own, even with 3 children to educate and send to college — and did. The kids and I have camped, hiked, canoed wild rivers and my two sons are Ph. Ds in mammalogy and ornithology. My daughter is a writer and young peoples librarian. I am replete. The tree in the forest though, is still my home when things get rough.”
RIP Jean Craighead George. Thanks for all the great stories.
Jungle Love 