March 7,1996

By midweek on the January Amazon trip, the roster dropped to four of us, a private charter, so to speak. As mentioned, "The Discoverer" was equipped to serve 16 passengers. So our luck ran high on sharing the bathrooms and receiving extra attention on the excursions out in the jungle under the privilege of a small group. Single supplement charges of a trip are as much as 50 percent higher than the per person double rate. I was delighted to be traveling in a private cabin and paying the price agreed for sharing a berth.

Docking on the big river drew the natives from the forest, especially children. One of the mornings, a small girl in a bright yellow dress came down to the banks to fetch water in a black tea kettle and a galvanized bucket. She negotiated the muddy clay bank as competently as a school girl crossing the playground. Up on the knoll, her mother stood in a soiled kimono thing, as forlorn as if life had finally brought her down.

I remembered a man who stayed out of cigarettes abroad. Every time he saw a person in pain, he'd pitch them a pack. "Tobacco in all its horrors, lends comfort to the poor," he'd say. Once in the India, he nearly perished from a self-induced nicotine fit.

No old people ever appeared. Unlike southeastern Asia, toothless wretches weren't seen sitting on a mat, mortaring betel nuts to feed their habit. South Americans do chew cocoa leaves spiked by a caustic lime of ground shells, but symptoms of degeneration are hard to catch. Upriver, a boy fishing from a canoe reeled in two oil drums lashed together. However, the drums turned out to be refined cocaine worth millions of dollars and a big disappointment to the boy's family, who hoped he had found fuel for their lamps. Jails overflow with drug dealers and poppy farmers in Peru, we were told. To alleviate the problem, the Peruvian Air Force bombs any farm they spot in the jungle. The guide said, "if it is convenient, the crew checks later on to see whether the crop was corn or poppies."

The sailors and the villagers showed a strong attachment. The visits are not staged. Yet, the communities have no money, so they have to believe a boatload of souvenir hunters might float in some day. At one docking, a lad showed up carrying an Anaconda four feet long around his neck, surely not by happenstance. Further along, a family displayed a prehistoric turtle that looked like a smashed salamander. The Spanish name for the turtle is mara mara. Close as the book comes is an Amazon River turtle. He should be called "a side neck" because of the way he brings his pointed head under his shell horizontally, instead of vertically. These impromptu snake and turtle shows are interesting, nevertheless, tourism destroys cultures by handing out coins and candies to kids, turning them into beggars, and later on thieves.

One outpost was a favored trading stop. Before we landed, the cloths had been spread displaying handmade jewelry, decorated by porpoise teeth and porcupine quills, guaranteed to throw a customs officer into a rage over importing natural artifacts. Harry Pearson, my travel partner, knew ahead of time to bring along T-shirts they call "polo". The other two passengers, a mother and son duo, must have raided a New Jersey discount store for trade booty. They had packets of sacking needles, tins of fish hooks, and kits of hand tools I'd like to have to use at the ranch. But the Scout knife I carry on trips wasn't sharp enough to carve a monkey's head, or skin out a bullfrog to stuff for a mantlepiece, or I'd have whipped up an offering.

The woman wanted to trade a handsaw for a blow gun eight feet long, adorned by two four-inch boar's tusks to bring to her grandson. I suppose granny's intent was to teach him to shoot steel arrows across the swimming pool in the park and liven up the homeless element sleeping on benches. Her chrome handsaw in a hard leather case was perfect to tip a cow's horns. She asked whether the blow gun qualified as a weapon under U.S. Custom laws and the restrictions on importing wild boar tusks. I assured her if she'd put a few fishhooks in her hat, mount a casting reel on the blow gun, and stick red and white corks on the tusks, she'd pass through customs smoother than the famous Biblical story of the parting of the waters of the Red Sea.

Harry agreed to take four paperback books and a travel pillow for his shirts to give the blow gun trader for the saw. However, the American backed out when the lady refused to include a quiver of steel points on the deal. I sure wanted to bring back the saw as a souvenir to show those herders around Mertzon the bounties of travel...