Of snow on green branches

Last Saturday snow fell thick and sudden across the Northeast, and here (Pleasantville, NY) the fall up to this point had been so mild that most of the trees still had their leaves. Still green, many of them. So the snow that came down, so early in the season, hit hard. Bernd Heinrich has a wonderful essay on the material strength of trees in his book “The Trees in My Forest,” and he points out that unlike human structures, which are generally over-engineered for any stress that might befall them, trees strike a delicate balance between their investment in durability and their investment in growth. They engineer for the normal stresses, not for the extremes. And the strain of wet snow on top of fully expanded leaves is outside their normal purview. Limbs came down everywhere, smashing power lines and cars and roofs.

The day before the storm, I gave a lecture on climate change to my intro class. One of the things I mentioned was the intensification of precipitation. More heat in the atmosphere means more energy for evaporation, leading to heavier rainfalls and more intense snowfall. I hadn’t seen the forecast when I put the lecture together. Something about this snowfall did feel strange; the way it came down so heavy and swift, and the green branches bearing the weight. The world is changing. Every day I feel the urgency of communicating this truth, and fighting the causes.

This afternoon I was out in my yard—my very own yard, in my very own house; mortgaged to the hilt but mine on paper—cleaning up the limbs that had fallen from the big oak trees out back. I had a 12” bow saw. I prefer a bigger saw, but this one came with the house, and I still haven’t had the time to get to the hardware store for a better one. I’m usually at the office late, since I am teaching two new courses and a new lab this fall. I estimate that I spend 30-40 hours a week in prep time, above and beyond the time devoted to meetings, office hours, research, and actual teaching. It is exhausting and amazing. I love my students, with their multi-colored wild hair and their artists’ sense of the world as a canvas. I love my colleagues. I love the fact that everyone I’ve met on campus, in every job, is a genuinely kind human being dedicated to the school and to making things work. It may be too early to tell, but I really feel like I belong here. Enough that I bought a house. A little tiny suburban house with a backyard full of trees and a little lake down the block, ten miles from campus and about an hour up the Metro North from Grand Central. Come visit. But you might want to wait until I have furniture.

So yes, I was out in the backyard of my suburban home sawing branches with this little bow saw, when a branch under pressure snapped back hard and hit the guard over the handle. If that little bit of steel hadn’t been there, it would have done a number on my knuckles. As it was, the butt end of the branch dinged against the guard and brought my attention squarely back to what I was doing. It got me thinking about tools and design. The best-designed tools are those that do their jobs so well we don’t notice them. The saw fits well under my hand, it balances well, it cuts through the gnarled old branches; it protects me. I got to thinking about myself as a tool, honed and shaped by 24 years of education and now almost three years of experience to teach the scientists and policy-makers of the future. Can I hold up under the unaccustomed pressure? Can I do the right thing, say the right thing, to make a difference for my students? Can I reach enough people to make a difference for the world? Yes. Undoubtedly yes. And that answer, ringing through my mind, gives me the confidence to face the coming winter and finish out the term. I am doing what I was born to do. (Also I have met someone wonderful. More shortly, when time permits.)

Big news

I meant to post this yesterday, but internet connection issues got in the way. Ni modo.

We're already two weeks into the term, with 28 students. Thankfully it's a wonderful group this year; compatible personalities, hard-working, kind. Otherwise 28 would be a nightmare. As it is, it's kept me so busy that I haven't had time to sit down and make the announcement here, although I've been rejoicing on facebook for a month or so. But here goes: I have accepted a job offer. As of next fall, I will be an Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies at Purchase College in New York.

This all happened rather fast, and rather serendipitously. When I was at the Soltis center in the fall, having been forced out of Cabo Blanco by the storm and the bridge collapse, I got an email from the chair of the search committee at Purchase. He was trying to set up a phone interview, and only had a few time slots left. One of them happened to be during my few days off in November. If I’d been at Cabo, chances are that by the time I picked up the email it would have been too late.

I spent the first couple days of my break revising a paper for submission and studying everything I cold get my hands on about Purchase and the department. I was amused to see a new dorm building on the campus map labeled "Fort Awesome." The fateful day came, and I thought I was prepared, but the first question threw me for a loop: “Tell us a little about your background and why you’re the perfect person for this job.” I had prepared for a whole litany of questions, but not this one. I felt for a moment as if the ground was giving way, and then I answered as best I could. I was able to calm my nerves and pull myself together, and the interview got better as it went along. I enjoyed the enthusiasm I could hear in the professors’ voices. When I hung up the phone I knew it was a place that I would love to work at, but I didn’t know if they’d want me.

Fast-forward to the last few days of the term at Palo Verde, in early December. This stint at Palo Verde was particularly difficult, given the lost student and other stresses of the end of the term. It was also difficult because most of the station buildings are under construction, and thus the only place I could set up as an office space was a corner of the classroom where all the students were working. I was sitting in my corner, trying to focus on a paper about plant reproductive output, distracted by the hum of the rickety air conditioner, various conversations, and the several varieties of rap music that leaked out from student’s headphones in the near vicinity, when my cell phone rang with an unknown number. It was the chair of the search committee at Purchase, calling with a few additional questions. I dashed outside. Standing among the muddy boots on the porch of Palo Verde, swatting mosquitoes and looking out over the marsh, I tried to give a good explanation of what exactly I do at OTS. Specifically, convince him that I actually do teach university-level classes.

I guess I must have done a good job, because they invited me to campus. The next day, when our TA Daniel was headed into Bagaces for a supply run, I went along and spent a good two hours on Skype at the internet café, most of it on hold, to change my ticket so that I could fly through New York with a stopover long enough for the interview.

Fast-forward again… in mid-December I landed in La Guardia a bit past midnight and caught a taxi into town, to stay with my dear friend Morgan. (Fortunately he is a night owl; my flight was supposed to get in at 10, but snow in Atlanta messed things up). We met during the first week at Carleton, bonding over an attempt (still unrealized) to gain access to the college’s steam tunnels, and we’ve been friends ever since. It was wonderful to catch up with him and meet his fiancée, Christina. They’re well-matched in their incisive intelligence and kooky, offbeat humor.

After a night on Morgan’s couch, I felt ready to take on the city, if not the world. My visit came at a good time: Morgan has been head-hunted by a new agency, and his old job ended the week before I came. His new job started in early January. Morgan and I wandered the neighborhood, and he showed me some of the delights of Manhattan: a park with sculptures made by local children; details in the carvings on the cathedral, like the atom bomb carried by one of the four horsemen; a street fair with antiques and textiles. I bought an extra scarf; it was above freezing, but the raw wind off the ocean was enough to make my tropically acclimated self decidedly uncomfortable. We ate lunch at an Ethiopian restaurant with another Carleton friend, Cheryl, who has been working as an editor for the past ten years. Our conversation reminded me of how free we felt in our college days, gathered around a table in the basement dining hall sharing ideas and making crazy plans. For the first time in a long time, I felt the return of that excitement: the future felt broader and more full of possibility than it had in years.

Thus fortified, I took the Metro North up to White Plains in the late afternoon, where I met my future colleagues for dinner. I'd asked dozens of people for advice, but as I stepped off the train into the teeth of the first snowstorm of winter, the only thing I could remember was my friend Scott saying, "don't interview during a winter storm. I interviewed at one place during an ice storm. Nobody showed up, and I didn't get the job." Fortunately the snowflakes abated while I enjoyed Indian food (almost impossible to get in Costa Rica) and a spirited conversation with George and Ryan. George is a marine ecologist and Ryan works on land use policy, GIS, and wetland delineation. I was encouraged by their forthrightness, friendliness, and senses of humor. Working with people who love what they do and are open to new ideas is such a wonderful thing, and I'm looking forward to it.

At the hotel that night, I went over all the materials I had prepared, making mental notes of recent grants received, publications, and research interests of everyone I was scheduled to meet. The biology department at Purchase is mainly molecular and cell biology, while environmental studies covers organismal biology as well as the policy side of things.

The day of the interview dawned chilly and snow-crusted, with a bitter wind. I wrapped myself up in my multiple scarves, drank some mediocre hotel coffee, and faced the day. I wish I could remember more details of it, to offer advice to future candidates. Mainly I remember a series of enjoyable conversations with professors and administrators, and a sense that this was the right place for me. A roomful of students came out to see my seminar, even though it was the middle of their finals week, and most of them stayed for a student-led interview afterwards. They asked good questions about my work and my plans, and they came across as bright, engaged, and committed to making the world a better place—the kind of students who have inspired me to follow this career path. And I know they weren't just there for the cookies; the box was almost full at the end of the meeting.

I think maybe the secret to a successful interview is remembering why you're there: not only to impress the committee and show them that you're the right person for the job, but also to see if the job is right for you. In this case, I felt like the answer was a resounding yes.

The day after the interview I flew to Maine, where a group of friends met me at the airport in high style: they brought their instruments (fiddle, guitar, banjo, and a giant washtub bass) and played a bluegrass set by the baggage claim while they waited for my flight. I was greeted by a rousing rendition of "The Wind that Shakes the Barley" as I came down the stairs from the gate. The evening just got better after that. We stopped by the liquor store on the way back to their house to pick up a few beers, and walked into a wine tasting that none of us had known about. We sampled the wares and enjoyed an elegant spread of cheese and crackers, while another dusting of snow made magical halos under the streetlights outside. Back at their house, we enjoyed a dinner of homemade bread and soup with locally grown organic vegetables, and then a bluegrass jam session that lasted until the very wee hours on the morning.

When the phone call came, offering me the position, it was all I could do to follow the advice of colleagues and negotiate. My first instinct was to say, "I'll take it!" then and there. But I did negotiate, holding out for some equipment that will be useful in the restoration experiment and some travel money for myself and students. I signed the contract and sent it in before the end of the year.

Today is my 32nd birthday, a respectable number, although I still haven't reached the hobbit age of responsibility. (One more year!) I feel somehow more grown up and younger, at once, than I have in a long time. More grown up, because I've accepted a job that could be permanent if things work out, and I am thinking about things like mortgages and retirement plans. Younger, because in the past few months I've felt my future opening up again. Thanks to all who have helped me on this journey.

Airborne update

Today's entry is brought to you by Google, which is providing free wi-fi on my flight from San Jose to Atlanta this afternoon. I'm flying to the US a bit earlier than planned, and stopping in New York for a few days for a job interview. Deep breath. More details will be posted when time permits. Suffice it to say that I survived the semester, more or less unscathed, and I am looking forward to the day when I can hang up my hat in a more permanent place.

Field update

One thing about being a professor for a field course is that life is never boring. Exhausting, hair-raising at times, wonderful at times, but never boring. I came back from Peru in mid-October and spent a few weeks at home working on manuscripts and resting up. Good thing I did, I guess; I hit the ground running on November 1st and it feels as though I haven't stopped. Tonight the students are finishing up and printing their final independent project papers, and I find myself for once with a few minutes to write.

The first site we visited was San Gerardo station in Monteverde, an hour's hike into the cloud forest on the Atlantic side of the continental divide. San Gerardo is one of my favorites among the stations we visit; the forest is beautiful and the station is managed by a delightful young couple with a three-year-old son who brings cute to a whole new level. San Gerardo offers a chance to study cloud forest conservation as well as some of the basic ecology topics that we cover. Mauricio and I talked about pollination, seed dispersal, climate change, tropical deforestation, gap dynamics and the maintenance of tropical diversity, soil seed banks, and the history of conservation in Monteverde, with walks and field activities linked to almost every lecture. Clear skies in the morning gave us a view of Volcán Arenal looming over the valley below us, and in the afternoon clouds rolled in with occasional thunder.

Everything seemed to be running smoothly at San Gerardo until the third day, when an invited professor brought news of the outside world in the form of La Nación, Costa Rica's major daily newspaper. The front page was full of stories about tropical storm Tomas, which had slammed into the Pacific slope of Costa Rica, leaving bridges out, many towns without water or electricity, and dozens dead in landslides. On the Atlantic side, we hadn't even noticed a change in the weather. We were fortunate to escape from the major damage. The road to Cabo Blanco (our next study site) didn't escape it, though. When we called the main office to check on the logistics for the next segment of our trip, we found out that a major bridge and several kilometers of road on the way to our planned site had washed out. There was some possibility of getting the group in, if we hiked 5-6 km, but no way to get enough food in, and—with more rain predicted—some concern about getting the group out. Also, our planned activities at the study site were mainly snorkeling and tidepooling, and the waves were still too high and the water too murky to make either one feasible. So, plan B.

Over the phone with Erika, who had planned to meet up with the group at Cabo Blanco, we formulated a new plan. She was able to find a field station that could accommodate us for four of the five days, and Mau was able to get us an extra day at a field station near Monteverde and line up some biologist friends as invited speakers. He lived in Monteverde for years, so he's well-connected in the area. And my job? Redesigning curriculum. The field station that Erika found, the Soltis Center, is a new place built by a Texas A & M alum (much to the discomfiture of Erika, a UT graduate!) and donated to the university, at about 400 m elevation on the Atlantic slope, in forest quite similar to La Selva. Obviously, the planned lectures on marine ecosystem ecology and Pacific coast fishes were out. I didn't have my computer with me at Monteverde, since we hiked in, so I planned as best I could with the resources at hand. The minute I jumped out of the bus at Soltis and Erika handed me the backpack with my computer, I set to work. I expanded a lecture about my research into two separate talks and developed a new lecture on tropical forest succession. On the first full day at the station, while the students were in orientation walks, I visited a nearby eco-lodge and fortunately found enough secondary forest of different ages to be able to put together a field trip. I guess this is the kind of story I can tell in job interviews when they ask, "what kind of setbacks have you faced?"

After Soltis I went back to my apartment for a few days of so-called rest. It turned out to be less than restful, as I had to take care of the resurgence of the termite problem on my back porch, finish up a manuscript for submission, and review two manuscripts for coauthors along with the usual host of things that need to be done when one is home once a month. I didn't get to see any friends except Amaris, who lives right next door.

And then to Palo Verde. In the dry season, Palo Verde is magnificent—the hard dry wind over the grass, the wood storks winging over the marsh in slow motion like creatures lost in time, the forest bright and strange with the sunlight pounding down between the bare branches of low, sculpted trees. In the wet season, which seems likely to extend into December this year, Palo Verde is the proverbial green hell. Welters of mosquitoes descend on any exposed flesh. Sticky mud cakes itself over your boots, each step adding more layers until you lumber on Frankenstein feet. About half the trees near the station are acacias, bearing sharp thorns that house the nests of stinging ants. Bushwhacking is less than pleasant.

At Palo Verde the students do their second independent research project. I was working with three groups of students, two with relatively straightforward herbivory/reproductive allocation projects and one group that ran into all kinds of trouble. Their first project idea was to look for spatial segregation of the sexes in a dioecious tree species. (For the non-scientists out there, briefly, most plants have both male and female reproductive parts on the same individual. In dioecious [die-EEE-shuss] plants, each individual bears only male or only female flowers. In some species, it's been demonstrated that the males and females occupy different habitats, keeping individuals from competing as much with members of their own species.) It was a great idea... but of the three dioecious species that might potentially be found flowering this time of year (the only way to tell the sexes apart is through flowers or fruits), none could be found in large enough quantities to work with.

So, plan B. They decided to look at seedling distributions relative to the position of adult trees. There's a plot of old-growth forest with all the tree locations mapped, about 6 km from the station on a poorly-maintained woods road. It's passable in the dry season, but in the wet season the Toyotona got about 100 m into the forest before we came to the first downed tree. Beyond it, we could see a mudpit that looked too deep to cross. So, plan C.

We returned to the station and I helped them find a species that was abundant enough to work with, and they finally started collecting data. Of the four days of data collection, though, they had already spent one entire day in a fruitless search for dioecious plants.

Everything seemed to be running smoothly again, which I guess I should know by now is a worrisome sign. On the last day of the project, which is generally set aside for writing up papers and presentations, one student from this group decided to go back to the field and get a few last data points. She had been feeling sick, and I tried to dissuade her, but she assured me that she felt fine and would be right back. Cue the ominous music.

When she wasn't back in an hour and a half, another student from the group went to look for her. He reported finding her backpack and camera at the edge of the site and no sign of her. Imagining the worst, I told the rest of the staff what had happened and we formed a search party. With a park guard, our TA, and the other two students from the group, we headed into the forest where her backpack was. We saw puma tracks in the mud. I thought about all the possible outcomes, and it was grim. The only student death in the history of OTS occurred at Palo Verde, when a student was trapped in the rocks while trying to outrun a swarm of killer bees. We shouted her name into the buzzing green thickets. After ten minutes of searching we heard a weak answer. Still imagining the worst, we fought through the vines and stinging ants to find her, disoriented and dehydrated but otherwise uninjured. Apparently she had followed a family of coatis and lost her way back to the plot. I don't know if I've ever been so grateful to see anyone in my life.

For some reason these things always seem to happen in Palo Verde... last time here, I spent the night at the hospital with a student who had possible appendicitis symptoms, and the next day I had to explain how to conduct three-dimensional chi-square tests to a group of undergraduates on less than three hours of sleep. Fortunately they were stellar undergraduates, as is the group this time around. The students are what keeps me going.

OK, time for bed. Whatever misadventures tomorrow will bring, I'll be better equipped to deal with them after a night of sleep and a cup of coffee.

Part V, the last

After a few hours on the river, we ended up back at Puerto Infierno, which was resolutely not living up to its name. Even the second-growth forest around the docks and the souvenir stand looked full of promise and mystery, and the green shade under the mango trees was delicious. We caught a taxi back to Puerto Maldonado and found a halfway decent hotel, and set out to explore the town.


About half the streets of Puerto Maldonado are paved. The others, in the dry season, throw off a constant fine grit that adheres to everything, kicked up by the constant passage of motorbike taxis. The town is at the confluence of the Tambopata and the Madre de Dios, and John took me down to a park overlooking the two rivers. Blaze-orange pylons, strung with flags like a used car dealership, mark the place where a bridge will soon be built over the Madre de Dios, the last link in the Interoceanic Highway across South America. This bridge will be the floodgate for illegal logging, illegal gold mining, settlements, poaching—the end of wilderness. I had heard about the project, but seeing it first-hand, so close to completion, struck me like a physical blow. It was hard not to see those bridge pylons as gallows. I feel at once so fortunate to have seen this part of the world while it was still wild, and so desperate to do something to keep it that way, and so powerless. People need livelihoods: if it comes to a choice between cutting the last tree and letting my family starve, I know what I’d choose. And who am I to impose my developed-country values on other people who are struggling to survive? But it seems such a desecration to see that forest, that primeval, ageless, self-renewing miracle, give way to gas stations and fast-food restaurants and the craziness of more-more-more that infects our society. I think about that moment of joy, alone in the canoe. That’s what wilderness gives us and no city will ever provide.

One other story that comes back to me now as I write this: the first night at the lodge, when we were exploring the dark forest. So many marvelous creatures came to light, and such diversity; entomologists are good at spotting the small and often startlingly beautiful denizens of the world. John told me about a group of students he had brought to the lodge some years ago. He asked them, “why are there so many different kinds?” This question, in some form, has been asked by scientists and philosophers for centuries, and we still don’t have a good handle on it. But one of the students answered, “porque se puede!” Because it’s possible. As good an answer as any. And as good an answer, I suspect, as we will ever have.

This trip has given me much to think about. Hope and beauty, and the sense of transcending the limits that I imagined around me. And at the same time, the sense that time is running out for the Amazon forest. How is it possible to balance personal happiness in the face of such an impending loss?

This was something that John and I spent a lot of time talking about. He has suffered his shares of slings and arrows, and ended up, I think, the happiest nihilist I’ve ever met. He doesn’t have much hope for humanity in the long run, but in the short run he has a keen appreciation for the wonder of being alive. On the way out to the lake, we stopped to look at the nest of a harpy eagle, now abandoned. He said the female had been seen at the nest calling for a mate for several years without success, and then she vanished. Harpy eagles are hunted here, for no good reason. (One of the guides had told us that a friend of his had killed one, at a logging camp where they were working. He said the bird was the size of a child. He had kept one of the talons, but he lost it somewhere.) John and I started talking about life and love and loss, there in the forest under the empty nest, and to my embarrassment I found myself crying. Thinking about the harpy eagle, the bad decisions in my past. He touched my shoulder. “Life is beautiful,” he said gently. “Look around you.” And it was. And it is.

Part IV: A tapir, almost...

After dinner John, Jon, and I hiked out into the forest to see colpas, mineral-rich areas where all kinds of animals gather to get nutrients that are scarce elsewhere in the forest. The most famous colpas are the clay banks where parrots and macaws gather, usually along rivers, but the flat-ground colpas in the forest are impressive to see as well. As we headed off into the dark forest, the trees around us buzzing with hidden life, I wondered what we would see. The night before, walking near the campsite, we’d found John’s favorite snake, Imantodes (cat-eyed snake), a slender, striped nocturnal snake so tranquilo that it puts up with being handled and photographed. Non-venomous, of course!

The first sign of a nearby colpa was a fine spatter of gray mud over all the leaves on the trail for nearly 100 meters. “Peccaries,” John said, pointing out how the leaf litter was churned up and muddy. These were white-lipped peccaries, larger and reportedly more aggressive than the collared peccaries at La Selva. They move in larger groups, too; up to several hundred. We had smelled them in the forest the day before—a heady, thick rotten-garlic funk even less pleasant than the old-gym-sock odor of the collared peccaries.

The peccary tracks led us to the first colpa, the source of the gray mud spattered over everything. The colpa was an open mud wallow, puddles of soupy gray denuded of vegetation by the constant passage of large mammals. The cloven footprints of peccaries stippled the banks. A hint of their scent still clung to the vegetation, and an overpowering odor of mammal urine rose out of the mud. We spotted footprints of a few species that had passed by after the peccary herd: coatis, something that might have been a medium-sized cat, and the unmistakable three-pronged track of a tapir. The name of the lake, Sachavacayoc, means “place of the tapir” in Quechua (well, a hybrid of Quechua and Spanish; sacha = wild, Quechua; vaca = cow, Spanish; yoc = place, Quechua). I’ve never had the chance to see a tapir in the wild—footprints and scat, yes, but never the beast itself. I had high hopes.


We decided to walk out to the next colpa, further down the trail. John, walking ahead, spotted something in the underbrush. He motioned to me and Jon to follow. Something large went crashing away, and John hissed, “Tapir! Tapir!” I strained my eyes to follow the beam of his headlamp, but it was gone before I could spot it. We heard the noise as it hot-footed up the ridge and out into the night jungle. So I guess I still haven’t seen a tapir in the wild, but I came close.

On the way back to camp, we spotted a lovely little owl perched on a branch above the first colpa. If the small mammals are as partial to the place as the large ones, it must be good hunting.


After eating a few more Brazil nuts for the road, we walked back to the lodge on the riverbank on another glorious day—sunny but with an occasional cool wind out of the understory, and birds and butterflies gloriously alive everywhere. I delayed our start for a while, trying to take a picture of one particularly gorgeous butterfly near the water’s edge, with brilliant blue wings and a maddening tendency to close them in response to my camera shutter. But I finally managed.

The last day that I stayed at the lodge, John had some work to do preparing for the group’s arrival and sorting his insect samples, so I went for a hike by myself. I walked out to Lago Condenado, the old oxbow lake filled in with reeds where we’d almost seen an anaconda. It was late afternoon, and the jungle filled up with a quiet golden light. Monkeys chirped back and forth in the high branches. At the lake, I stepped into the dugout canoe. John had made it look easy to paddle one, but it was anything but. For someone who grew up on the Maine lakes, maneuvering featherweight 17’ Old Towns with a featherweight paddle, this was a new experience. The boat, built out of a single hollowed trunk with the edges shored up with planks, must have outweighed a tapir, and the paddle, solid wood carved out of a thin buttress, probably weighed a good few kilos itself. Clearly, the dip-and-swing method was out. But I had watched John’s technique (and watched him have a good laugh at one of the guides, who didn’t know how to “remar como un peruano,” zigzagging his way across the cocha by switching sides with every few strokes of the paddle). I copied what I could remember: keeping the blade of the paddle in the water always, turning it sideways to move it forward and then turning the flat of the blade to draw water, and making a little outward flick at the end, like a more active J-stroke, to keep the boat moving more or less in the right direction. I wasn’t elegant, but I managed.

Somewhere in the middle of the oxbow lake, watching the sun go down behind the Mauritia palms, I was overcome by a feeling I haven’t had since I stood on Katahdin almost a decade ago: peace, joy, pride in my accomplishments. A deep and abiding contentment. The feeling that whatever has transpired has been worth it, to bring me to this place. The last golden light was touching the reeds at the water’s edge, lending them the fragile, transient, hopeful green the of first new beech leaves unfolding in spring, and the sky overhead was pure and limitless, a color without name. Macaws flew over and hoatzins in the bushes croaked out their prehistoric hosannas. I was in the middle of the Amazon, by myself in a canoe in the middle of an oxbow lake in the wilderness. As long as I live I will remember this.


Early the next morning we had to leave. The Tambopata was flowing blood-red from eroded clay upstream. I tossed my duffle bag into the boat and took one last look back at the lodge. Who knows if I will ever be back. Two weeks earlier, I never would have imagined being there at all. But something has changed in me, this trip. Suddenly I feel again that everything is possible, that the only limits to what I can accomplish are the limits I set for myself.

Part III, in which we meet the giant anaconda

We hiked into the forest to spend two nights at another oxbow lake, miles from anywhere, camping on a thatched-roof platform close to the water. When we arrived, guides from another lodge were just leaving with their group of tourists, and they told us about an enormous anaconda hauled out on the far bank, apparently digesting a large caiman. John and I jumped into a dugout with two Peruvians, Jon and Isaac, to go look for it. We paddled stealthily along the lake margin, under tall stately Mauritia palms. I saw something that looked to be the right color for an anaconda, hauled out on the bank, but my first thought was that it was far too large to be a snake. I could feel my brain undergoing an odd sort of rearrangement then, redefining the mental category “snake.” It reminded me of the first time I saw a giant sequoia in California, when I was 16, driving up a mountain road with my parents. We had come around a bend in the road, and up ahead I could see that the road curved again to go around… something monumental, colossal, columnar, shaggy brown, that my brain slowly expanded the category “tree” to make room for. And so it was for this anaconda, something so far outside my previous experience of snakes as to necessitate that shift.

The part we could see of the anaconda was at least five meters, and its tail trailed off, hidden under palm leaves. It must have eaten recently; a bulge in its body about two meters long and almost as thick as the palm trunk beside it indicated the final resting place of a hapless caiman. Jon and Isaac edged the canoe up beside it so we could take photos. I was nervous about getting too close; I had seen an anaconda about a quarter the size of this one take a nasty chunk out of Franklin in the serpentarium in La Virgen de Sarapiquí. (As my mother later remarked, that snake was a good judge of character.) But this wild anaconda on the bank of an oxbow lake miles from nowhere was more interested in basking and digesting its prey than in taking a chunk out of anybody, and gradually we brought the canoe closer. Eventually I stepped out on the half-submerged palm log that served as a convenient jetty, and got probably closer than was wise in the interest of photography. But you only live once.

At sunset, we went to look for monkeys. John heard them from halfway across the lake: squirrel monkeys, whistling and chattering in the treetops. “A waterfall of monkeys,” he said, and it truly was. Squirrel monkeys travel in troops of several hundred, and they bounced through the canopy one after another just like their namesakes. A troupe of brown capuchins, maybe 30, followed after them. Monkeys are magical to see in the wild; their little faces, so expressive, almost human and yet so alien; their fluid movement through the trees. We watched them climb up into the Mauritia palms to spend the night, going hand-over-hand up the vines like sailors climbing ratlines.



We woke up in the gray light of 5 am, the forest coming alive, and bolted our morning Nescafe. Down to the dock again, and a quick paddle over to the far end of the lake as the sky went from opaque gray to pearly silver-pink. The macaws were just waking up in their treetop nests and heading to the forest for the day. We watched flocks of them go overhead, always in pairs, arguing back and forth in their cackling voices like bickering couples. One pair stayed around their nest in a hole at the top of a palm snag, popping in and out of view, muttering, and preening each other. A light mist rose out of the water, vanishing as the sun came up.






In mid-morning we took a walk through the forest on the far side of the cocha in tierra firme forest, the area above the periodic rainy season floods. On the high terraces, Brazil nut trees spread out their tall and elegant silhouettes above the rest of the forest. They are emergent trees, some of them edging towards 50 m tall (165 ft) and nearly 2 m (6 ft) in diameter. Some of these trees have been estimated at >1000 years old. I always feel reverent in the presence of trees that venerable, especially when they are also lovely to look at. And delicious to eat—we found a few old seed pods on the ground, which John hacked open with his machete to reveal the seeds nested inside. Fresh Brazil nuts are nothing like the ones they sell in stores, roasted and salted within an inch of their lives. Right out of the shell, in the middle of the forest, they taste heavenly, like fresh coconut or sweet corn right out of the garden. We gathered a few to take back with us.

Back at the camping platform, we spent the afternoon in a fruitless attempt to fish for piranhas. Apparently the last group of guides had hidden fishing poles near the camping platform, but they hid them so well that our repeated searches turned up nothing. Well, we found a few poles and a bit of monofilament line, but no hooks. It would have been a matter of two hours, probably, to hike back to the main lodge and get some, but we were feeling lazy and MacGyver-ish in equal parts. Jon found a length of wire somewhere and hammered it into a hook shape with his machete. John cut down some paca, with its hook-like barbs, and I tried to rig up something from one of the smaller branches. We baited our improvised hooks with bits of leftover chicken skin from the previous night’s dinner. The bait vanished in short order when our hooks were dropped into the murky water, but the fish were so stealthy we couldn’t even feel them nibbling. Smart piranhas. We were reduced to a dinner of boiled pasta with no sauce except ketchup, and the sempiternal Nescafe.

Next up: a tapir! or at least its disappearing hind end…