Lost Worlds Page 19

  The pushing was easy and I felt a surge of special pleasure again that comes to travelers when they sense the adventure they longed for beginning to happen. I think the two Cunas picked up my mood and they smiled too as we eased the craft up the soft river bottom.

  The day drifted on, punctuated by periods of poling and pushing. The forest grew thicker now, although we saw occasional clearings of Indian gardens and, more ominously, the smoke from slash-and-burn fires that plague the western fringes of the Darien.

  You can hardly blame the peasants for wanting to be pioneer-farmers in this nation of go-nowhere poverty. But, in their thousands, they are decimating one of the last of the earth’s great wildernesses (great, that is, in ecological values, not size). And, as research has proven over and over again, they end up no better than before they began their machete-felling and burning and creation of small but very short-lived farms.

  It may seem odd, but in this fetid environment of teeming plant life, the soils are invariably ill-suited to intensive agriculture. The story goes as follows: Peasants are often driven out of other small farms well away from the rain forests by avaricious cattle ranchers who acquire their lands by fair means or foul to raise thousands of steers to satisfy the ever-increasing worldwide demand for beef. Driven eastward in their search for new land, they slash and burn into the forest perimeters and plant their subsistence crops of bananas, corn, and maize on poor soils nourished for a short while by the ash from the burnings. Within three or four years the soil nutrients are used up by the cultivated plants or are washed away by the two hundred inches of rain a year received by this region. So in desperation the peasants turn to creating small grass pastures, which they then sell to the land-hungry ranchers. Invariably this second phase ends with overgrazing. The leached soils are then abandoned as the process moves ever eastward, even into the foothills of the Darien and San Blas Mountains which form a four-thousand-foot-high wall between the threatened forest and the vast liquid landscape of the marshes fed by Colombia’s Atrato River and its tributaries.

  Denudation of forest in these foothills, plus overgrazing, leached soils, and ultimate abandonment, invariably results in unchecked erosion. The meager soils are rapidly washed down newly formed canyons and out to the Pacific via the Tuira River. It’s a sad and stupid cycle. Predictable, preventable—yet perpetuated by short-term interests driven by a desperate search for land by the peasants and easy profits for the ranchers.

  On a global scale, over two billion acres of tropical forest are being destroyed at a rate approaching fifty million acres a year (or almost one acre a second, if you prefer statistics in manageable form). The implications of this terrifying rape of the planet have been studied for decades. A recent U.S. government report, Global 2000, not only warned of catastrophic climatic changes as a result of forest denudation, but also the elimination of a million species of plant and animal life by the end of this century. Over half the world’s estimated five million species are to be found in these forests and the destruction of this enormous gene pool, vital to the future cultivation of new food sources, fibers, and natural medicines, is increasing every day throughout the developing world.

  To some, all this may seem like another one of those false alarms caused by the overanxious Birkenstock-and-bean sprout crowd whose frantic warnings of “greenhouse effect” and other headline-grabbing harangues eventually engender a “cry-wolf” attitude on the part of a generally confused public. Surely a few little fires in this remote wilderness of Darien could hardly be prejudicial to the future of mankind on the planet?

  I think back to the first time I flew down to Central America from the United States four years ago seeking out the magical cloud forests of Costa Rica’s Monteverde. We were skimming over Guatemala at the time and I became aware of a heavy haze across thousands of square miles of seemingly untouched jungle below me. When I looked closer through my binoculars I realized that this was no climatic quirk. It was a vast smoke haze, two or three hundred miles in length, caused by countless “controlled clearances” (milpas). I could see the forest quite clearly in places where the smoke haze was less thick. In fact it looked like an enormous patchwork quilt of dark untouched jungle broken by thousands of lighter slash-and-burn squares. Others on the plane saw it too and soon the sound of horrified gasps broke the martini-and-macadamia mellowness of the flight. People struggled to peer through the tiny windows and then pulled back in shock. Even the plane’s captain felt obliged to confirm what we were seeing. I’ll always remember his words:

  “I am from Guatemala. My family lives in Guatemala. Every day this haze hangs over our country and every week we lose another ten thousand hectares of forest. I see this every time I fly this route. I am sorry you had to see it too. It is hard to forgive the government for allowing this. I am very sorry.”

  I remember something else I once read which had in it the seeds of a solution. It was one of the other reasons I wanted to come to the Darien and to meet the Cuna tribespeople, whose attitude toward land and forest preservation is exemplary in an age of blinkered “progress,” a.k.a. planet pillage.

  The Cuna are one of the last tribal groups in Latin America to withstand the scourge of conquistadores, colonialists, and modern-day capitalists in a relatively unscathed state. Once rulers of most of the Darien region between the two oceans, they have gradually been corralled into a 150-mile-long strip of mainland and islands along the Atlantic coast, encompassing parts of the Darien Mountains.

  They have been labeled by anthropologists as “the last original democracy on earth” and still conduct their affairs in the heat of community debates, similar in many respects to the United States’ time-honored town meetings. Among their notable characteristics is an ancient and abiding love and respect for the forest in which they live.

  One story, which has now taken on an almost folkloric significance in Panama, illustrates their beliefs and principles. The notorious doyen of development and one-time ruler of Panama, the late General Omar Torrijos Herrera (the man who negotiated successfully with President Jimmy Carter for the return of the Panama Canal) once flew over the virgin rain forest of the Cuna reserves on his way to a meeting with tribal officials. When he rose to speak later in the day he is reported to have demanded angrily: “Why do you Cunas need so much land all to yourselves? You don’t use it. You don’t do anything with it. And you are always complaining if anyone does so much as fell a single tree.”

  After a short pause, one of the Cuna leaders rose to reply: “Please tell me this, General. If I come to Panama City and break the window of a pharmacist’s store because I need medicine, would you not arrest me and put me into your jail?”

  “Of course,” said the general.

  “Then I ask you to understand that our forest is our pharmacy. If we are ill, the forest provides all the medicine we need to cure us. It is also our pantry. The foods it gives us are bountiful and fresh. We Cuna need our forest, even though it is much less than we once had; unlike your people, we can take what we need without having to destroy anything.”

  Then there was silence in the meeting hall. Torrijos stared at the Cuna leader for a long time, saying nothing. Then he finally strode across the floor and hugged him like a long-lost brother.

  It makes a good story, although it didn’t altogether solve the Cuna’s concerns, especially when the general later became enthusiastic about a coastal road right through the heart of their reserves. So they reached out to international agencies for help and advice and were instrumental in establishing areas of perpetual preservation, both to protect their homeland and to enable outsiders to study these sanctuaries for medicinal, ecological, and biological purposes. A unique partnership is in the process of being established here linking an indigenous culture and informed international interests.

  And so, as we pushed and poled up the Tuira River, through the forest and eventually—if I was lucky—into the foothills of the Darien range, I looked forward to my meeting these wise (and
wily) Cuna Indians, who may have found a way to slow the seemingly unstoppable surge of slash-and-burn enthusiasts and land-lusting ranchers. Our last “lost worlds” are such frighteningly fragile places even though, from within their wildernesses, it is often hard to imagine their imminent demise. We urgently need more ideas and action to protect them—from ourselves.

  As I was to discover later in this journey, we have much to learn from these intrepid Cuna.

  Another eight hours of piragua travel through the increasingly dense forest brought us to the village of Boca de Cupe. Once again we were greeted by a bevy of shy children with painted faces and a generally disinterested populace.

  “Estampa,” one of my guides told me, and pounded his fist into the palm of his other hand. “Estampa. Muy necessario.”

  It turned out that the village was the place to get my papers stamped for entry into Colombia, even though the border was more than thirty long miles away, high up among the ridges of the Darien range.

  We decided to make camp here, and after my tent was pitched I went off to find the stamp man, who turned out to be a multifaceted official—mayor, chief of customs operations, military attaché, and local grocer. He was sleeping in a hammock outside his store but rose with dignity, shook my hand, and performed the necessary formalities in a friendly—if sleepy—spirit.

  “You are going where?” he asked.

  “To the mountains. To see the Cuna people and then down to Turbo.”

  “Ah, Turbo.” He sighed and shook his head. “Bad place. Much gambling, drugs, women. You must be careful in Turbo. It is like your American Wild West.”

  “I don’t plan to stay there long. It’s just the place where my journey ends. Where the Pan American Highway ends too, I think.”

  He laughed. “And I hope it always end there too. They say they will build the last piece through the Darien in ten years, but that will be bad. Too much people. Too much drugs. Too much bad cattle.”

  “How do you mean, bad cattle?”

  “That is one reason we do not want the highway. The cattle from the south—from Colombia and other places—they have diseases and they kill our cattle.”

  “I hadn’t heard that before.”

  “Ah.” He smiled, sliding back into his hammock after performing his official duties. “Maybe there are many other things you have not heard also.”

  I wondered what those “other things” might be, but it was obvious that he was anxious to return to his reveries. He had also noted the word “writer” on my passport and possibly decided that caution on his part might be preferable to revelations or comments on the post-Noriega government, still sensitive to overt criticism.

  We were off again early the next morning, as the gold dawn light filtered through the trees, turning drops of dew into diamonds necklaced along the edges of fat green leaves. Roosters croaked as if clearing their throats before letting blast with the full force of their morning oratory. Dogs barked sleepily and without rancor. A few pigs—small peccaries—grunted around the bamboo and thatch huts, and my two guides chuckled together about something that had happened the previous night. I was tempted to ask details, but, although they were friendly enough to me, we hadn’t established the camaraderie I often found with other guides in remote places. Possibly they knew our journey was relatively short and they’d never see me again.

  In other places—India, Thailand, China, Nepal—I’d felt that a significant spur to friendship with guides was their hope of future assistance from me. I was a “bankable” item—someone to help them if they ever realized their dreams, usually expressed in the phrases “I would very much like to come to your country” or, more ambitiously, “When I arrive to your country I will come to you.”

  My two Cuna Indians seemed to need nothing. Their mysterious trading activities and their lives deep in the forest provided all they required. They were not at all curious about my travels. They expressed no interest in the United States or any hope of one day moving there or anywhere else. I sensed a completeness in their lives and an almost European reluctance to reveal much about themselves.

  I accepted their polite reticence and enjoyed their quiet company anyway. And their cheerful endurance too, during what was becoming an increasingly arduous pilgrimage for me into Cuna country. The river had narrowed now and became petulant in the shallow places, putting large boulders in our way, making us get out and push the piragua for much larger distances in the increasing heat of the forest.

  If only there was a breeze once in a while. Anything but this perpetual, energy-draining steam-room humidity. Occasionally a wind high up in the overhanging canopy rustled the upper branches and vines and sent birds and monkeys into cacophonies of screeches. But down here, among the roots and dead trees and leg-scratching snags in the stream, nothing moved except the water itself. No breeze. Not even a scintilla of a sigh. Just thick gooey rot-reeking air that oozed out of the shadowy recesses and hung like a shroud—maybe for weeks at a time, who knows?—over the river.

  Hour after hour we edged our way upstream. And now there were mosquitoes too—big brazen bastards with proboscises like knitting needles—leaving trickles of bright red blood running down my arms and legs. I sprayed on the familiar range of Deetladen repellents, but those spitfires of the sky always managed to find an untreated spot or merely waited in a hungry haze of buzzing wings until a combination of sweat and river water had washed off prior applications and opened up my bodily territories again to their pernicious probing.

  Why? Why do you do this kind of thing? I heard the old hedonistic me again—the one who is not at all averse to long, lazy days paddling aimlessly about on the lake back home, letting the hours pass languorously while I read about other people’s tormented travels, and break off to drag my poor overworked wife down from her studio to the decadence of frosty cocktails on the deck as the sun sinks down behind the purpling mountains….

  Why do I keep coming back to this kind of masochistic mess—pushing my overpampered body to its limit and beyond, inviting perils that are undoubtedly prejudicial to a healthy longevity?

  Because you love it, my better half responded.

  Oh, yeah! Sure, I love it! The lousy food; languages I can’t even begin to understand; bugs, bites, and biliousness. Banging my head against padlocked doors of self-discovery and self-knowledge. Seeking wisdoms and insights that would lift my life onto a higher, more ethereal plane—yet invariably coming back to the limitations of my own psyche and my prejudices and my low resistance to pain. Yeah—sure, I love it!

  Something smiled inside and nodded with the annoying certainty of an understanding father—or a personal sadhu. Do we all carry our sadhus within us, our “better selves,” our inner god, our “soul”? I suppose we do. I’ve come to know mine pretty well during the craziness of the last twenty or so years and I suppose I love him dearly. Only why do I have to keep grappling with this other me, or me’s? Why can’t I just soar into a permanent sadhu state and remain there forever—centered, focused, all-knowing, all-understanding, all-accepting?

  Because you’re a human being, the voice replies with a gentle giggle. And because you’re you.

  Fine. But there are times like this when I’d like to be a different me. I get tired of all this tiredness.

  Just look around, you dummy, my sadhu says. So I do and he’s right again. It is so incredibly splendid. This whole trek: the forest, the river, the guides, the rough-edged tree-trunk boat, the sounds, the great extravaganza of emotions and beauty and insights and pain and—yes—even the itchy mosquito bites. All of it. It’s all as it should be!

  And just look at it! Behind the delicate groves of bamboo that edge the river are towering guilpa trees, whose smooth trunks soar from a tangled ground cover of roots and rotting branches into the canopy to explode in a riot of stubby leafless branches; snakelike lianas and vines are curled and coiled around trees or hang like guy ropes, holding upright the vegetation they had killed in rotting splendor; evergree
n palms, wild banana trees, mango bushes, six-foot-long elephant-ear leaves, spiny palms, all creating an impenetrable mass that no one in his right mind would think of entering. A wonderful wild place!

  And yet it’s sometimes hard to keep a right mind in this place. During the day it isn’t so bad. The forest broods; sounds cease as the heat increases, unless we disturb a gathering of banana-billed toucans, bright green and red parrots, or howler monkeys, whose racket echoes through the gloom for a while and then fades as the threat of our presence diminishes. However, as night eases into the thickets and we make camp beside the chittering stream, the symphony of insanity begins again. First come the birds, thousands of them, each presumably declaring its occupancy of territory; then the cicadas, whose leg-scratching racket rises and falls with a surflike rhythm; and finally the invisible tree frogs, whose high-pitched chattering hits a shrieking crescendo and never seems to waiver. Even plugging my ears with cotton wool pulled from the top of my ubiquitous aspirin bottle only serves to reduce the intensity of the sound but not its nerve-shattering pitch. Fortunately, I am usually so worn out by the day’s boat-pushing activities that I slip into a deep sleep before insanity finally hits.

  Oh, yes—the little sadhu inside keeps telling me—but it’s still wonderful and you’ll miss it all so much when (if) you leave this wilderness and return home to your quiet lake….

  After a meager breakfast of fried plantain and mangoes gathered from bushes around our campsite, we set off on what my Cuna companions told me would be our last day together.

  The biting bichos were out again in the early morning. Nipping spiders, ticks, ants, chiggers, mosquitoes, and little black gnats somewhat similar to Maine’s no-see-ums. Sweat ran down my body and the salt irritated every bite.