My stay in the Amazon is halfway over. There are some things that I will not miss when I leave here. I will not miss cold showers or only having one location in the entire station where I can get drinking water. I will not miss the beaurocratic snafu that left us eating nothing but potatoes, rice and quinoa for a few days. (Someone in an office somewhere decided that with less people at the station during the rainy season, the weekly boat wasn’t necessary. They failed to account for the fact that food as well as people arrived on the weekly boat.) Just as we were making jokes about starving slowly and surviving on Benedryl alone, someone finally took a boat down the river to pick up some meat and vegetables. We had a stirfry today for lunch that we praised as the best meal ever. The cooks even managed to make chocolate pudding for desert. Or at least I think it was chocolate pudding. After days of rice and potatoes, just about anything can pass for dessert.
But mostly I will not miss the insects and the constant itching. After an initial resiliency, the bugs have worn me down. Not a moment goes by when there is not something crawling on me, near me or threatens to crawl on me soon. There are things crawling on me right now as I write. I probably have about 300 or so bug bites. I tried to count once but after reaching 20 on one elbow alone, I gave up. In addition to mosquitos, there are chiggers that get into elastic on your clothing, sandflies and ants. There are roaches that don’t crawl on you but for some reason I keep almost sitting on them. The ants are the worst. I made the mistake of stepping onto a stream of ants while wearing sandals one day and I felt like I was being attacked with acid filled darts, which is kind of what they are. I ran gritting my teeth back to the cabin for boots. There is an ant here that is so large its almost the size of my thumb, its called a bullet ant.
After heavy rain, the ants are on the move in large networked streams that resemble urban traffic. Occasionally my cabin is in the way of these superhighways. Today was one of these days. I returned to my cabin after lunch to take a nap only to see what appeared to be a black tar running from the corners of my cabin criss-crossing the floor. No, not tar but ants. They run so fast it looks like dripping liquid flowing down the door frame. I considered sleeping through their hostile takeover since the bed was still clear but I was afraid to wake up in a swarm. Instead, I tried sweeping. No luck, ants find their way about by sensing the trail. After being scattered, it took less than 30 seconds for them to regain their little lines. Next I tried insect repellent on the worst areas. This worked well but threatened to just move the ants a few feet away. So starting at the center of the room and spraying outwards to the walls, I was able to convince them that my cabin was not the best hub for their travels. They were mostly gone in less than 10 minutes which is amazing to me given how thoroughly they had taken over.
Painting has been going well for the past few days. I decided that if I was going to get work done, I would have to stop stalking the monkeys and get to work. That’s really hard to do, the monkeys are really cute. I’ve mostly been painting around the station since hiking into the field is a lot of work and once I get to a nice view its invariably buggy. I decided that my last few days here, I will reserve for hiking while the paintings dry. There are a few trails here, one called Trocha 14, that are almost other worldly. The tree trunks are wider than my arms outstretched. The colors are a vivid intensity of dense greens and yellow-greens that seems to defy logic since very little light actually reaches the forest floor. Half the route is swamped with water requiring the use of knee high rubber boots. Even these are no match for some parts of the trail where the mud threatens to steal the boot while I walk on by. Adding to the Alice in Wonderland effect, I find myself constantly falling into holes, not rabbit holes but typically ant-eater holes. This usually means that I am sunk up to one knee, hurriedly trying to remove my leg before the creature that created the hole figures out that I just kicked in his front door.
Today the station is quiet. It is Carnival, which means that most folks took the boat to Boca Amigos, a nearby town, for festivities. Town might be a bit of an overstatement. I think there are 30 people who live there. They are essentially a boat-stop along the river. They have a telephone, a nurse, a bar and a place to buy food. At one time, it may have been possible to walk to Boca Amigos. In other words, we were on the same side of the river. But the river is wild and chooses its path according to its needs and not the needs of people. The river is surrounded by half-moon shaped lakes. Lakes that were once part of the river until the river began to flow via a different route. And when I say, “were once part of the river”, I mean that the path of the river changes monthly, possibly daily. Boca Amigos was once on our side of the river, but then the river changed paths. Now the town is across the river from us. Even that spot is precarious for them. People living closest to the river occasionally have to pull down their house and re-build at the back of the town as the river carves its way further into the land. Property rights is not a concept that works well in this type of situation.
The entire jungle is a process of constant change and adaption. One night, I awoke to a tremendous cracking sound which scared me frozen in bed. Being the New Yorker that I am I could only imagine that it was gunshots, that a gold miner was out hunting bushmeat and that I would be leveled by a stray bullet. I suddenly wished that instead of mosquito net walls, that I had a nice comfy deadbolt lock. (I considered hiding under the bed, but there are cockroaches under there.) After waking up a bit more, I realized that the sound was a tree falling. You come across tree fall frequently in the field. The trees are tremendous, stories and stories high. When they fall, they take out a huge chunk of the surrounding foliage, creating the few clearings in the otherwise dense canopy. The clearing is an opportunity for struggling plants to receive some precious sunlight and grow up tall. And so it begins again.
I have ants on me.
