Dispatch Number 75 -Amazon Run

The air was cooling in the early evening air as our boat motored up the Amazon river where the jungle always looked the same- high mud banks and settlements of wood plank houses, the land flat and dense with unvarying trees and plants. There was an occasional settlement in this road less country connected to the world only by the cargo boat for necessities of salt, oil and gasoline. Sweat beaded off my brow as I talked with Cindy an American on the upper deck of the Edwardo VIII. The deck was full of American evangelicals on their way to a revival deep in the Amazon jungle. The deck was all hammocks and over packed bags.

Cindy and her husband John came to Iquitos, Peru the largest city in the world without a road leading to it 28 years earlier directed by the voice of god on one of the most bizarre and incredible boat journeys I had ever heard. Originally from Wisconsin they bought a house boat in Michigan and began a journey south on rivers until reaching the Gulf of Mexico, then crossing the hurricane prone Caribbean in an ill-suited 58 foot houseboat with a mere 13 foot beam designed for lake travel, not the pounding swells of the open sea. As the seas grew more treacherous god's voice became stronger when one day off the coast of Venezuela John opened a mariners reference book in a sort of calling to discover a river route that led to Iquitos via Venezuela. This would make the journey much safer by avoiding the big waters of the Atlantic where the Amazon pours out in northern Brazil. They arrived in Iquitos five years after leaving the U.S..

The choice of boat, one expressly designed for smooth lake travel bordered on a loss of sanity when taken over the open sea.

John was the child of missionary parents and as a youth he yearned to break the yoke of the missionary orbit. He never broke it; first performing missionary work in Mexico and eventually in Peru. To John and Cindy taking the ill suited houseboat over oceans was in itself an act of god and explained they felt blessed all the way with the help they received. To Cindy everything was a god granted miracle, her enthusiasm bubbled through her short stocky rugby body.

Before meeting Cindy, as the Edwardo VIII prepared to leave the muddy banks of Iquitos I began to feel something godly, something great aboard this cargo ship when a lily white nubile teen with generic spectacles exclaimed from the stern, The water is so dirty with a matter of fact tone seeping with coldness and superiority. She had an authoritative way of speaking beyond her young mousy appearance. She went on with American impatience, I can't wait until we are moving. It was her last remark to a young companion that got me wondering about the specialness of my ship, See that cross? He strained looking for her abstract sighting. He acknowledged nothing and she went on to explain the shadow of the ship made a cross on the surface of the Amazon's cafe au lait waters.
I silently thought, We all see what we want to see.

True we were in the Upper Amazon, but it was the tame part, we were just passengers with bags and hammocks so when one revivalist strode the deck in disco era sunglasses and camo pants with a machete tied to his waist it was adventure on the Edwardo.

When I first met John and Cindy on the deck and learned they were from Iquitos, which produces and manufactures nothing, I asked with genuine curiosity what they did for a living. They were remarkably evasive to this question.
Together they stammered, Well, we are a part of the Fellowship of Mission Agencies or something similar and equally unrevealing.
I did not understand their answer since they replied by naming an organization rather than answering the question, what do you do?
They would not say they were Evangelicals or Baptists as I suspected, but chose evasive ambiguous language. I pressed. The what?
It is a charitable organization
So, you are part of a church group? I remembered the white girl with glasses proclaim she saw a cross. What did you call it? What do they do?
We are helpers, providing assistance to Peruvians.
Yes, I thought, it is the Peruvians that need help. So it is a religious organization?
Yes, oh yes.
They were not forthcoming. What religion or denomination?
We are helpers in a Christian church in Iquitos., came their begrudging answer.
Ah, I thought to myself, I have flushed out some Evangelicals and they are trapped on the boat with me.

Soon after John was saying they had to go, things to do, people to help; they were helping the group of revivalists that walked the decks with machetes and bibles. Later I learned they planned to build nothing, plant nothing, just have a revival in a remote part of the Amazon jungle. A holiday for seventy Americans in god's name. Never in our introduction did they use the words Christian or Evangelical. John cut the conversation short.

I felt like Peter Sellars in the film Lolita aboard this ship with my evasive Christians. Sellars was the police detective that suspected James Mason as the pedophile he was. I'd wait patient like Sellars did to talk with them again. When I bumped into them a short while later while standing idly John again hastened to prevent a conversation from starting. I'd have to change my tactics.

I watched my Peruvian hammock mates ignore informational signs that were pasted all over the ship reminding them not to litter with colorful phrases and characterizations, by chucking their plastic bottles overboard under the watchful presence of trash cans big enough to shoot baskets into. Yes, the river, to the shock of the Westerners on board, is in fact, a trash can. Ecology is a Western concept.

Later I met John alone on the lower bridge and made myself a companion in guy talk while we stared at the immense river and greenery before us. He had a well developed mid-western potbelly that contrasted with his semi-lean frame and slightly ruddy complexion of a vodka drinker. When he spoke one had the sense of under achievement, of hopes abandoned and lost ambitions. He held no job other than his generic description of a church helper who owned a lot of material possessions in a country where people own nearly nothing except their clothes and the pans in the kitchen. He owned an air boat and a hovercraft, a cargo truck and a room full of remote control airplanes he flew at his model airplane club. Life is simple in these parts and water transport is still done in dugout canoes and other vessels you are surprised can float, so the presence of John's watercraft in Amazon Indian communities would be the equivalent of having a UFO land in San Francisco's bay. The indigenous people have lived this way for thousands of years, why a hovercraft was needed was beyond my grasp.

On the other deck I found a hippie backpacker pair, they are not hard to spot with their long hair, ratty beards and vegetarian skinny limbs; this type earn their bread as they travel playing music for tips and making unoriginal woven bracelets. It is a hard living, they earn money one meal or bus ride at a time; to their credit they do work hard at it. This time it was a European couple doing the hippie hand-in-mouth thing playing guitar, reading and weaving bracelets in their hammocks while we idled along the Amazon river. On one of my many walks around the ship I caught him reading "Guide to Investors". To a hippie this is like a committed capitalist reading Karl Marx's The Communist Manifesto looking for another way. These hippies are notorious anti-corporate types finding fault in everything about the system they were nursed on. It was a shock seeing him reading Guide to Investors.

I thought, Man, if the other groupie-hippies saw this they would tear into him like the Christians did to the Pagans in the Roman days.
His whole credibility as a drop out would come into question. They might even begin to suspect his unkempt Che Guevara look and ask unpleasant questions like -is it real or cultivated?

Yes, I thought, less beer would be shared with him, fewer joints passed his way and they would have trouble finding cheap flop houses hippies have in every city.
He was counter-cultural to the hippie fashion itself. I have seen hundreds of them throughout Latin America and ask, why do so many hippie men try to look like the dead revolutionary, Che Guevara?

Below deck a dog wailed. Later I visited the engine room and the dog; I could see the dog but could not hear myself think against the pounding of the diesel engine. A serene duck watched us from his wood cage with all the calmness of Buddha. Before returning to my third class deck crammed with Peruvians I went above deck, lay on my back and stared at the creamy Milky Way, assigning no god or designer to its presence.

Cindy, on the other hand, was eager for conversation sharing her life story and faith in christianity. (faith is believing in something that is not real.). Her bright passionate eyes distracted from her thick barrel chest that hid her feminine features. She reminded me of an overgrown Oompa-Loompa out of Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory. She went on with a well rehearsed story about their sailing journey in the houseboat from Michigan to Iquitos and how god's hand made it a safe journey; to Cindy every aspect of that journey was a miracle. It was in this conversation she relaxed and began to use the term christian freely making distinctions between real christians and the ones who say they are. Religious extremism was rearing its head. When she said this her eyes fired with intensity that bordered on hostility.
I thought to myself, Were the children of god ever at peace with each other, let alone the rest of the world?

Her passive obedience was a curiosity to me and I encouraged her to go on and tell me of miracles. Oh, the time I was in charge of the kitchen services here in Peru and the cook found kerosene in the igloo drinking water tanks. Cindy, as kitchen boss, glossed over the problem and explained that kerosene was natural and to serve the water anyway.
Christian compassion., I thought.
Later when they re-examined the tainted water the kerosene was gone and explained away as a supernatural occurrence. Another was a boy born with a rare condition without bones in his legs; at a revival his bones were restored and he walked thereafter.

The Bible, what a great book., she started in without encouragement from me, It has everything. I started reading it when I was seventeen.
She waxed and wained this way for a while suggesting I should consider reading it. Curious as to what her other spiritual influences might be I asked what second book she would recommend after the Bible. She launched into a long explanation of how busy she has been as a mother of forty-five raising three children, the demands of missionary work, And, well, my second, third, fourth, fifth and sixth choice is the Bible.
Yes, I thought, The Bible, the world's all-time best seller is all we need.

Her unwavering belief in the only book she had ever read and faith in the marvelous and supernatural held me in wonder that a person could be satisfied going through life this way. Cindy was a goldmine. I had only seen her kind on tv, and now, before me I was talking with one. She was a prodigy that confirmed the lame walked, the blind saw, the sick were healed, the dead were raised, daemons were expelled, and the laws of nature were frequently suspended for the benefit of the church.

Those who live the god-fearing life are educated to believe natural disasters are connected with human affairs, paybacks for human misdemeanors rather than the Law of Nature that gives us plate tectonics and volcanoes. I chuckle when they attach our "sins" to the level of cosmic significance. Is there any other way to describe it, other than extreme egocentricity when connecting humans to natural events.

In fresh morning air while the boat stopped to unload goods at a river settlement I watched black and tan waters mix where two rivers met, pink dolphins swam in and out of the contrasting waters.

Later, the seventy or so evangelical revivalists held a service on their deck with a portable MC system, I heard plenty of Hallelujahs through the port hole while a loner from the group strode the open deck full of piety with bible in hand that gave her an uncomfortable constipated look. Had I seen the machete wielding man I would have asked about his visionary hope of a miraculous deliverance. What I had long suspected and often treated as a joke, was very real to this group, that acts of nature are acts of god, such as floods, fire, saltine crackers, our boat sinking and rainfall.

In the middle of the night I watched a remote fishing village receive its twice weekly ice to preserve their catch that is stored in old refrigerators set like coffins packed with ice and covered with banana leaves that took six men to maneuver onto the ship. A Peruvian small business woman, America was the owner of those crates of fresh fish who went on to explain that if she took them to the next big town she could sell them for twice the price. Her route was: our ship every other week to buy fish, then cargo trucks to the interior to sell them wholesale, then back on the ship to repeat the process dragging empty refrigerators around.

Morning fog shrouded the banks of the Marañon, the Sun looked like a ball on the horizon as we approached port after nearly three days on the water. The journey on the Amazon was over as we approached Yurimaguas the last city with a road going to it; anything beyond it was limited to boat travel, which was how I traveled for six weeks covering nearly 1,700 km (1,000 miles) of water ways in a variety of ships, speed boats and dugout canoes. At one point I spent two weeks with guide, Rudber paddling the waterways of a nature reserve in a leaky dugout canoe camping in deep jungle spotting all sorts of animals; we covered 250 km (155 miles) this way.

The evangelical christians disembarked in the middle of the night in a remote area for their jungle revival. Unlike the christians aboard the Peruvians were applied to their form of living disembarking their produce: of lumber, fish, green bananas, cattle, scrap metal and sacks of rice and sugar.

All materials are loaded on and off ships, trucks and docks by hand. The cargo loaders, lean compact men with Indian features work in tattered filthy clothes carrying unbearable loads that buckle their legs, up to 200 pounds, over wood planking and muddy banks. To watch them is to watch ants work. And this is how Iquitos' half-million people are supplied, every case of beer, box or bag of food is trans loaded by hand.
My journey down the Amazon River was coming to an end.

David
Huaraz, Peru