Yanayacu River Journal, Part II - Movement & Grace

Late the other night I sat outside my apartment and smoked a cigarette after transcribing large parts of my Peru journal onto my computer. The night was cold and leaves rattled in the wind. The courtyard was quiet; none of the neighbors had lights on, and my mind was elsewhere. During these late night smokes I often think about hiking – where to go on my weekend, what the weather will be like, what the trail conditions are in the forests and mountains just east of here. On this particular night, I sat outside and struggled with my memory of different forests. On a day to day basis, I don’t think about Peru. I don’t think about the rainforest. I don’t think about what I saw and did and experienced. It’s not that my memory is bad. It’s that my normal life is active enough to preclude thinking about the jungle, and my immersion into a world so different from this that on my return to “this” world – Oregon, friends and family and coworkers, the reality of bills and rent and all the interests and activities I do to fill my time – on my return, I walked through my neighborhood looking into trees and expecting to see monkeys. Normal life has a way of appearing simultaneously more beautiful and more empty after an experience like Peru. And my journal, out of chronological order and glaringly remiss in many aspects of recording events and feelings and observation, threw me back that night into a place that will forever be vivid and meaningful and remote. There are no monkeys in Oregon’s trees. But there are words to summon them in my memory. If there are continuity problems in my journal entries, so be it. My journal is as jumbled as my reactions were to the Amazon. And I will continue to post excerpts here, in the spirit of telling the truth as true as I remember it.

September 9th, 2009

Woke this morning in the jungle. My cheap alarm purchased in Cusco woke me early and I sat on a couch in front of the main lodge, and smoked a cigarette while waiting for Hulber. The morning was already warm, and birdsong filled the air. The trees on the opposite bank of the Yanayacu glowed in the sun, and the river flowed lazy and brown past the floating docks where the canoes are tied.

Hulber and I set out looking for wildlife at 6:30am and paddled downstream in a tippy blue canoe. With the river so low, it’s hard to imagine the jungle at flood. Now, in the dry season, the banks are high and muddy and the long roots of trees stand several meters back and above the water. Hanging vines and water-marks on tree trunks show the reach of the flooding, and the amount of land that will be covered in water in just a few months time is incredible. I decided this morning not to waste my time using my camera – the unbalanced canoe and lack of a telephoto lens make wildlife shots impossible: no colorful birds, endangered river dolphins, troops of monkeys, casual sloths, flirty butterflies. I’m going to focus on the experience, not on the camera.

Hulber pointed out kingfishers, black-collared hawks, egrets, cocoi herons, fishing hawks, parakeets, long-nosed bats (Hulber pronounced it low-nosed bats), “Jesus” birds (wattled jacana, with long toes that allow then to walk on plants floating “on the water”), and squirrel monkeys moving in large troops in the morning branches. From the river, the jungle is a wall of green – brown river water covered in hyacinth and lily laps against steep banks tangled with roots supporting thick trees laden with vines and bromeliads. Finding animals is easy. You look for movement, and as you get used to seeing shapes within the dense forest, animals appear. I wear my little binoculars and scan the forest wherever I go.

As we paddled around the Yanayacu, we talked about the jungle, about the trees and plants the natives use for medicinal and material purposes; about the river, five meters deep and rising; about ourselves and the places we come from. Shoulders aching from early morning exertion and a stiff current, I thought of William Stafford on the way upstream – “In the canoe wilderness branches wait for winter; / every leaf concentrates; a drop from the paddle falls” – and Gary Snyder – “Gracias, xiexie, grace” (as I’ve recited so many times when things got tough).

But it isn’t tough here, unless you consider the heat, humidity, and mosquitoes. The temperature is in the high eighties most of the time, if not higher, and it’s so humid that it feels sometimes like I’m swimming in thick, heavily scented air. I sweat constantly and profusely. To prevent insect bites I practically bathe in repellent, which, coupled with the sweat and the requisite pants and long sleeves, means that I’m slimy all day long. The funny thing is – you just ignore it. It’s so humid nothing dries quickly: not socks, not shirts, not pants legs after being tucked into rubber boots. Everyone is equally affected, especially the guests. I can see how some people might suffer miserably. I just take it for what it is. Then I take a cold shower, and that first blast of cold water jolts my heart then spreads like heaven over my skin. Following which, of course, I can’t dry off and I put on clothes damp with perspiration. Oh well. I’m just going to get muddy and bitten, anyway. There are enough joys to make me forget these minor hardships.

The air is full of noise – shifting birdsong, from the chatter of parakeets to the deep, gulping cry of the horned screamer and the impossible to describe and impossible to forget call of the oropendula, which sounds like a drop of water falling through a synthesizer with the reverb set on high. Insects click and buzz and hum, frogs bleat and moan, and the forest cries and calls out constantly, constantly, constantly. I want to come back when the water is high and the wildlife clusters around high points in the flooded Amazon; I want to come back with a tape-recorder and a nice camera and several weeks to look and listen.

After the canoe trip and breakfast, two guides took four of us downstream (by motorized boat) and we hiked into the jungle to a lake. A path led over a creek, across a primitive bridge made from poles tied horizontally to other poles stuck vertically in the mud. It seemed rickety and unsafe, but it held, and no one fell or slipped into the swampy backwater that contained (or so it was claimed) piranhas. The trail led into a marsh filled with vines and tangled roots and the scent of decomposing leaves. Against a massive tree with wide, buttressed roots, the watermark from last year’s flooding stood another foot above my hand extended above my head. By the time we reached the lake, thick, sticky mud coated my rubber boots and my pant legs were damp with perspiration. The lake was almost entirely covered in floating plants, and one by one, we walked out on floating logs slick with slime and algae to get close to giant water lilies, Victoria amazonica, several feet wide and capable of supporting a small child. Two hoatzin perched in a grove of maquira trees on the opposite shore – through binoculars, it was easy to see how strange they are – large birds, almost prehistoric, with extra clawed digits on their wings that disappear as they mature. They barely fly, and one of their main food sources is a plant that contains alkaloids that make their flesh taste like a sewer. Even starving natives avoid hoatzins.

While making our way around the lake, we heard several loud booms, and looked up to see a big woodpecker high in a tree. The drumming was incredible – probably meant for communicating with other woodpeckers. I can’t believe how much I’m becoming interested in birds. I never gave them much thought before – but then, in Oregon, there aren’t as many large bird species, and the birds in general are dull in plumage and not as exotic as the toucans, macaws, hoatzin, and all the other birds I’ve been seeing here.

The boat returned us to the lodge and as we rode the river upstream I felt as if I were in a trance, as if a natural rhythm was coursing through my body and mind. The jungle passed by, thick with vines and full of birds. Floating plants bobbed in our wake. We slowed to pass locals fishing from canoes or steering peque-peques with twelve-foot long propeller shafts. Herons and egrets launched into flight as we approached and hawks watched us carefully as we passed. The breeze felt great; butterflies raced alongside the beam; and I removed my boots and leaned back and let the boat carry me further into the Amazon.

Thoughts Before Reading Nabokov's "The Original of Laura"

I’m holding in my hands the first edition of Nabokov’s Original of Laura, the author’s unfinished novel that, according to his last wishes, was to be destroyed and never published. Nabokov’s wife, Vera, could not bring herself to destroy the work, and following years of public indecision, Nabokov’s son and literary executor, Dmitri, found a publisher in Knopf.

That the work should have been destroyed raises a number of questions. Should Dmitri have followed his father’s instructions out of a sense of filial duty and respect? Did Nabokov wish the manuscript destroyed because it was unfinished, or because it was, in his mind, inferior to his other work? Or was it some other reason, one which we’ll never know?

As readers and critics, is it important to have access to this work? Will it cast light on Nabokov’s oeuvre; will it reveal something new about his writing and his writing process? Or does it just appeal to our sense of completeness, or to our desire to have as much as we can of a writer’s work? Is this selfishness more important than the writer’s final wishes?

Max Brod thought so, when he published Kafka’s work after his friend’s death and against his explicit wishes. Dmitri Nabokov thinks so – or perhaps it was, though he’d never admit it, money, fame, and power that drove his decision to publish. Many posthumous novels litter the shelves at bookstores; not all are good, not all are critically important, and not all enhanced our understanding of that writer’s career. But literary executors, agents, editors, and readers all salivate at the prospect of the unfinished masterpiece interrupted by death, the final words of a literary hero.

Dmitri Nabokov could have published The Original of Laura years ago; desire for money and fame are not the reasons this book is appearing now. In his introduction, he marginalizes those who can’t believe “that a doomed artist might decide to destroy a work of his, whatever the reason, rather than allow it to outlive him.” I agree; Nabokov had his reasons, however inscrutable. He worked on the manuscript right until his death, obviously caring for it and hoping to complete it. He once tried to burn a draft of Lolita – clearly, Nabokov was an artist who wasn’t satisfied with less than his best.

In 2666, Roberto Bolano describes how the fictional and reclusive author Archimboldi enjoys a popularity that owes greatly to his reclusiveness. It is, indeed, unknown as to whether the author is even still alive. Bolano writes that authors often win attention after their death, particularly in America – a prescient thought foreshadowing his own critical reception and popularity in this country following his passing. But Bolano’s are finished novels, published in his lifetime in Europe and South America, and Bolano was popular before he died.

All these thoughts are immaterial. I’m holding in my hands the first edition of Nabokov’s Original of Laura, the unfinished novel that wasn’t destroyed. Now the question is: what to do with it?

Knopf skirted some of the controversy (admittedly, a narrow controversy confined to literary and publishing circles) by producing a spectacularly beautiful book. The Original of Laura is Nabokov’s own title, appearing on the first of the many numbered note cards that constitute the text. These note cards are replicated in the published book – the pages are cardstock, with each note card perforated at the top of the page and a text transcription below it. The reader, if they wanted to, could punch out each card and hold in their hand a copy of the novel exactly as Nabokov left it.

The note cards themselves reproduce the author’s handwriting, his edits, his scratch-outs and erasures, his questions and quotes, notes and insertions, all the things that make a draft a draft. He leaves words out, adds them, misspells them, makes lists. Sometimes Nabokov writes precisely and purposefully, and his pencil is dark and flows across the thin blue lines. Sometimes, his handwriting seems hurried and sloppy, or seeking direction as it floats across the cards. He writes in both sure cursive and steady print. For a serious Nabokov fan or scholar, this is intense stuff.

I am not a serious Nabokov fan. I respect the hell out of him, for his talents and skill, for his imagination and daring, for his intelligence and craftsmanship. But he’s not one of my favorite writers, perhaps because, despite all his powers as a writer, I find his reputation outweighs the joy I look for when reading a novel.

I’ve read Pale Fire, which describes the slow writing of a 999-line poem on sequential note cards. I didn’t finish Lolita, but that says more about my ambition as an 18 or 19 reader not quite ready to tackle Nabokov’s prose. When I say I look for joy in a novel, I only mean pleasure – is what I’m reading something that I enjoy reading, something that I find pleasurable? My readings of Nabokov have been both stimulating and intellectually challenging, but I didn’t race home from work to read the next chapter; I didn’t bring it with me to work read on my breaks; I didn’t talk endlessly about the books to my friends. Great books? Yes. Emotionally gripping? No.

But that’s my reading of Nabokov: highly intelligent and incredibly well-written, linguistically dazzling and brilliantly layered, but not the sort of thing that made me angry, or weep, or cry, or laugh, or walk around in a daze while trying to sort out how the book made me feel. Others are free to disagree – many will disagree, especially those who’ve read far more Nabokov than I.

So what to do with The Original of Laura? It can’t be unpublished. It will be read. I could take a stand of some sort and not read it as a way of honoring Nabokov’s wishes – but that would just betray my intellectual curiosity. And to me, intellectual curiosity is everything Nabokov stood for. I said that the Knopf edition is beautiful; beneath the dust jacket, on the book itself, is a reproduction of one of Nabokov's note cards that reads "efface expunge erase delete rub out wipe out obliterate." That was the intended fate of this novel. It didn't happen. Dmitri Nabokov finally opened his father’s box of index cards, and for years after, was haunted by the story they contained. That story is ready to be told. I’m holding in my hands the first edition of Nabokov’s “Original of Laura,” the author’s unfinished novel that, according to his last wishes, was to be destroyed and never published. And I’m going to read it.

Yanayacu River Journal, Part I

Hulber is in a hammock, reading an English-language anthology of science writing. When I walk over he asks if I have any questions about from the day’s activities. I do, of course, and I grab a beer and sit down on a deck chair while he sways slowly in the evening heat. I opened my journal and set the beer glass on the arm of the chair. A puddle of water quickly formed beneath it.

We talk about the species we’d seen: three-toed sloths, hanging from the upper limbs of acacia trees; crimson crested woodpeckers making huge booming noises in the canopy; porcupine palms at the edge of a lake covered in hyacinth and floating plants and Victoria amazonica, massive water lilies 3m across; dark maquira trees with massive, buttressed roots. We talk about nature – he asks about the forests in Oregon and I draw him a map of the state explaining different climate regions, and we discuss soil depth in Oregon and wineries and how annual flooding in the rainforest leaches the nutrients from the thin soil and contributes to falling trees; we talk about logging and language, about provincialism and the difference between Lima and Iquitos and the nearby village of San Juan; we talk about conservation and teaching, ecology and tribes, about books and sense of place.

Inside someone lights the kerosene lamps and we slap at mosquitoes in the gathering dark. I light another cigarette as the jungle comes alive with the noises of insects. Hulber absently scratches a huge welt from an insect bite above his knee and motions to a nearby palm. “Hey Jason,” he says. “Look at that huge tarantula.”

A spider the size of my outstretched hand moves slowly down the bark.

Can’t get too comfortable here.

***

Hulber Rioja is a university-trained naturalist and freelance guide in Iquitos. He speaks English very well; Spanish, too, of course, and several local tribal languages. As the only primarily English-speaking guest at Muyuna, I got to know Hulber very well over the next 5 days. Conscripted into the Peruvian army, he fought in a war with Ecuador, and afterwards earned a degree in biology. He was born in the jungle – he’s a member of the Yagu, a tribe of former headhunters, and his family lives a long day and a half boat-ride from Iquitos, far up the Napo river. His curiosity and his humor are infectious; one minute he’s pointing out a toucan high in a tree along the river, and the next minute he’s joking with a native fisherman passing downstream in a canoe.

***

The afternoon I arrived at Muyuna, several guests and I hiked into the high jungle in search of poisonous tree frogs. High jungle doesn’t flood in the rainy season and provides the ideal habitat for the frogs. We went downstream on the Amazon for an hour before landing at a homestead at a steep, muddy bank, with mud several feet deep. The rubber boots Mick rented me are possibly the best investment ever. The landowner (actual owner? Property rights – ask Hulber) led us down a path to his house, built on stilts and thatched with palm. He and his family live in the house, which consists of one “room” sectioned off by fabric screens and a few exterior walls. His wife sat with several children who watched us below, while chickens, dogs, and a small pig roamed loose between the stilts. I didn’t take photographs out of respect – somehow their lack of privacy made me feel intrusive, even though we were tipping the man for his guidance into the jungle.

We looped through the jungle on an hour hike – no luck on the frogs, but we did have a great ethnobotany lesson. Thick vines that prodigiously drip water when cut (Urticaria tomentosa: tastes like wet wood, used for hundreds of years as an herbal remedy); trees with wood that tastes like chicken, but with a use I can’t recall; fields of cleared slash and burn. Back at the house, we ate the flesh of a cashew fruit – very soft, slimy, leaves a strange dry sensation on your tongue – then returned to the motorboat as the sun fell on the wide Amazon.

We spotted the pink and gray river dolphins just before entering the Yanayacu River. The young native teenager cut the motor and we drifted as Hulber whistled to attract the dolphins closer. A slice of rainbow appeared in the billowing cumulonimbus on the horizon, and the acacias on the riverbank turned golden as the sun set.

The dolphins were all around us, arcing from the glassy water and disappearing before I could get a photograph. I soon gave up and removed my rubber boots, let the wind blow across the water and watched the dolphins surface and dive all around me. I let my eyes scan over the water towards the far shores, and I relaxed into the evening as dolphins broke the surface, pink sides strange and alien and out of place, somehow, and and sharp dorsal fins describing a curve above the river that disappeared almost as soon as it was drawn on the heavy air. It was incredibly relaxing, and it took a long time before the clever reality of everything washed over me - this isn't normal activity. Twenty minutes later, the sun dropped below the horizon, the dolphins swam away, and we motored slowly into the Yanayacu.

Bats swooped overhead, hunting insects, and Hulber attached a searchlight to a battery at the bow to guide the boat and to search for caimans, frogs, birds, anything he could find in the darkness. Soon, he waved us in to shore and suddenly plucked a small green kingfisher from an overhanging tree. It was motionless in the bright lights, and Hulber set it back in the tree after we all had a chance to look at it. That was pretty wild. What came next…

The stars came out – unfamiliar constellations and the milky way blazed overhead, while lightning flashed behind us and in front, to the left. Lightning bugs flashed like stars against the dark horizon, and we cut the motor and the searchlight and drifted down the river, listening to the orchestra of the jungle, watching the lightning and the lightning bugs and the tracers of insects below the cathedral sky. I’ve never experienced the stars like that, the weather, the joyful volume of the forest, the intensity of sense when all is dark and the breeze is the only sensation on your skin, and the ancient stars and the dance of storms and wildlife the only things you see, and the rhythmic pulsing of the jungle the only thing you hear. I smiled in the darkness, overwhelmed.

Iquitos Journal – September 7th, Part II, and September 8th, 2009

September 7th, 2009

Now just past 10; will breakfast at 8; don’t know how I will sleep in this heat. Unbelievable, unless you’ve been here.

I imagine not all that many people have been here.

I haven’t been downtown, the core of Iquitos, but from what I’ve seen – passing the Plaza de Armas on my way to the hotel – this city is like Mos Eisley. Lucas, look no further. It weighs heavy like – like a bad metaphor. Transparent, see-through, a farce not at all thought out but carried to extremes. The smell and the humid air are almost too much to stomach. My sense of smell has been heightened in Peru – threw up outside a bomb-sight shitter on the Inca Trail, gagged on the smell of my hotel room sink drain this morning, and the sick/sweet scent I smell right now is as thick as syrup.

[The scent turned out to be a fragrant wood, cut and processed at the neighboring plywood factory]

Makes me miss that high clean Andean air… and the repetitive noise I hear is not the fan vainly trying but some insect or amphibian outside the window, lost in some ancient genetic mating call.

I can’t wait to get to the jungle proper, where the influence of man is lost among the orchids and vines, where the jaguars hunt and the roads are overgrown with flowers.

Must remember: I came here voluntarily. And the fan past the light strobes shadow down in time with the rhythm of frogs.

***

Now packed, last beer from the fridge is open for business. Karma be damned, I killed a large ant on the floor. All I have to do now is sleep, rise, and head out to the lodge. I have no idea what that will be like – who will be there, what kind of people they might be, how the excursions will be run, and so on. Doesn’t look like I’ll be able to communicate with the outside world for a few days. Maybe not until I get home.

***

Midnight. Too hot to sleep – don’t want skin touching anything. Nothing on TV and nothing I haven’t already read. Will try to rest. Missing S…

And so to bed.

***

September 8th, 2009

I left Iquitos in the morning, and I was not impressed. It looks odd, thrown together, with little infrastructure and that which exists is unmaintained. In the Plaza de Armas, there's a multi-story hotel, half-finished and abandoned for decades, and the Iron House, made by Gustav Eiffel during the rubber boom years and then left to fall apart until recent reconstruction. The people see to be either unconcerned with how the city functions, or they’re too focused on the tourists to care. I was approached, aggressively, twice by the same cigarette vendor. No, I don’t want your cigarettes, so go the hell away already. I’m sure I’m not giving Iquitos a fair shake – but I’ve been warned often about pickpockets and I’ve seen enough to plant a strong impression.

A van from Muyuna Lodge picked up early in the morning and took me to their tour office, where I paid my bill and waited with two other guests for the speedboat’s departure. Above the lodge office is Mad Mick’s Trading Post, a jungle supply store and dorm run by a gregarious Aussie. I rented rubber boots and then had a cup of coffee across the street at The Yellow Rose of Texas, a tourist bar with enough “Texas” décor to fill any twelve bars in Austin. The waitresses wear cowboy outfits and the waiters wear orange “Hook ‘em!” shirts.

The dock was a riverbank reached by concrete steps. When we arrived, a crowd of children selling cold drinks stood at the door of the van, waving bottles in our faces. The entire experience was strange and for some reason my guard was up – maybe because other people were handling my bag, and handling it casually. Children tried to help carry it – of course, they expect a tip – and I didn’t allow it. If I can do it myself, I will...

From Iquitos, it was a 2½ hour journey in a cramped speedboat to the lodge. The heat and humidity were lessened by the breeze, but the sun burned down on my exposed left arm. Along the way, we picked up and dropped off several people. Little docks and communities of houses on stilts line the Amazon – a very wide river, with steep banks on one side and wide, sloped beaches on the opposite shore, and lots of river traffic – old riverboats, speedboats, canoes, motorized canoes called peque-peques for the sound the engine makes, and butterflies in the middle, a kilometer from either shore. Rafts of trees torn from the banks float slowly downstream, half-submerged navigational hazards. The water runs brown, gray, blue, green, depending on tributaries and the effects of the sun, and it’s a strange sensation to drift off to sleep to the roar of the engine, and wake to find yourself further up the Amazon, and to dip your hand into the river and scrub your arms and face with river water that has traveled a thousand miles already.

After a few hours, we reached the Yanayacu River, narrow where it joins the Amazon and a rich, coffee-and-cream color. But the Yanayacu - Quechua for "black water" - slows and widens, with reeds and overhanging trees, and half the dark water filled with hyacinth and lily. Mercifully cleaner than the Amazon – Iquitos harbor is a depressing cesspool filled with trash and sewage, and the rusting hulls of forlorn ships – the Yanayacu is a cool, shaded, and peaceful river with high muddy banks and deep forest along its length. Half an hour later, we docked at Muyuna Lodge, set on stilts some distance back from the river and approached by a long wooden walkway with a thatched roof. We were handed cold juice and led into communal dining area, where I met Hulber, my guide for the next five days, and had a welcome cigarette in the rainforest heat.

Iquitos Journal – September 7th, 2009, Part I

I don’t know what to expect, so I have no idea what the hell I’m getting into. The jungle… I don’t even know what that represents in my mind. Parts of this trip have been so completely different from what I thought they would be that I’ve almost given up expecting anything. Whatever happens, happens, and whatever comes my way, comes my way. And that’s a great place to be in - I can worry about money, or disease, or pickpockets, but I won’t die, and whatever adventure I have will surely be worth living.

From above, the jungle, the selva, the green hell, a blue-green expanse, completely flat. But on the ground, it’s probably impenetrable, except by river, or native path. And maybe that’s my fascination with it – a truly wild place, where there are no paths, no directions, no choices, just inwards, inwards, inwards, always inwards except where the slow and winding rivers run out.

***

15 minutes before I land. A massive river appears, serpentine with huge channels and oxbow lakes, while cumulus glows orange and purple over the green jungle.

***

I think Iquitos is hell.

I’ve never seen anything so… different… in my life.

Arrived to a blood-red sun on the horizon, 90F, and humid as hell. Sweating immediately, got my bag, met my driver, and from there…

There is no law here but there must be something in control. There is certainly no law on the roads, and no environmental law, and no building codes, and the gap between those who work and those in power is immense. The road from the airport to my hotel is 30 minutes long - 30 minutes in which I thought at any instant someone would die in front of me. Motorcars – motorcycles fashioned into rickshaws – crowd the one-lane road – though the road is 50ft wide and shared without regard to safety or lanes by decrepit buses, scooters, motorcycles, and exhaust fumes so thick it looks like fog. Lane changes, horns, families of three on one motorcycle, no helmets, no seatbelts, and all of it taking place in a current as thick and lazy as the Amazon, through a third-world landscape dominated by buildings that long ago should have been abandoned and torn down but now house businesses selling groceries and household goods, building materials, motorcar garages, food stalls. I saw tipped over motorcars and makeshift mechanics up to the elbows in grease. I saw dark eating places so unsanitary and dirty that I’d be afraid of the bottled water – but illuminated by huge flat-screen televisions. I saw crowds of people doing… something – anything, just walking, existing among the old peeling ads painted on failing cinderblock walls and shuttered store-fronts and piles of rotting trash and construction lying idle in the street. I was terrified, full of beauty and enlightened.

This is so far removed from my sphere of reality that I think I must be in heaven or hell. I don’t know which. I’m drenched in sweat, I am full in belly in a strange, hot room. I have a fridge full of local beer, and dogs bark while I smoke a cigarette and pack for the jungle lodge. I have just met one of the most original people I can imagine – I couldn’t have imagined – he is what Hunter S. Thompson had in mind when he spoke of “one of God’s own prototypes. Some kind of high powered mutant never even considered for mass production. Too weird to live, and too rare to die.”

I don’t know if you can smoke in here but I’m doing it and you can kiss my ass because that’s the way things seem to work around here.

This isn’t a room – it’s four, and it isn’t what was advertised. My driver pulled over in front of a walled compound with a large wooden door. We buzzed in, and were met at the end of a garden by an old man – weathered, tanned, leathery, firm of grip, bright eyed and bushy browed – Walter Saxer, the owner, a holdover from some more free time and place, captain of La Casa Fitzcarraldo.

He said there was a booking issue and he showed me my new room: a bed, and old fan, two lamps on speakers doubling as nightstands, a huge desk with a TV on top of it; a second room, empty except for a mini-fridge, some bookshelves (mysteries, travel guides, “Blood Meridian” – fitting), a door leading to the garden, and a hideous painting of an indigenous woman carrying baskets; a third room, down a few stairs, a utility closet than anything else; and a bathroom, with a bare fluorescent bulb, a mean spider spinning a web, and a shower stall I hope has been cleaned within the last year.

I said I was hungry, asked about the restaurant, and Walter said it was closed. But he made me food anyway, prepared it himself - fried plantains, a slab of smoked pork with spices and strange sauces, a salad of tomatoes, cucumbers, cabbage, and carrot. Simple, pure, amazingly good. Walter bought it to me at an outdoor bar, poured me a local beer (Amazonica, a lager), and we talked while I ate and a dog named Barko (?) lounged in the sweltering heat, and a trio of kittens crawled around the cupboards and countertops near the sink.

Walter – this place revolves around Walter, and it should revolve around Walter, since he seems to be legend incarnate. This was the house that Herzog used in his film; this is the legendary home of Fitzcarraldo. It has lost some of its charm. It still has a pool, a thick garden, ocelots in a cage, a tree-house, hammocks. And it still has Walter – film producer, conspiracy theorist, communist, old hippie, hotel proprietor, chef, conversationalist, renaissance-man of the jungle. We talked into the thick night about Peru, about economics and politics, about power and greed and democracy, about the lives of people in Iquitos and change and corruption in the US, about transportation and energy and prison and marijuana. He fetched another Amazonica, and eventually I came back to my room to wonder what the hell I’ve gotten myself into.

I’m beginning to think Iquitos might be heaven. The purest form of democracy. A kind of anything goes but we all want a leader without bullshit because we want a leader who is us – and who likes to party.

I’m in my boxers and the sweat is dripping off of me and I want out and I want in, and I am here and it is all I have – pure experience, here and now. I would miss the world I know but it is so far removed it might as well not exist. I wouldn’t want S. here – maybe Brass, he could do this – but this is almost too much for me. It’s too hot and humid to do anything – should I shower? Is it worth it now? Will it make a difference? I can’t pack, I can’t start, I don’t know where to begin.