Amazon Journal: A Tourist's Odyssey
Grubbs, Kenneth E. Jr.
"Amazon Journal: A Tourist's Odyssey" -Ironically, the message will be especially well received by many of the affluent—those whose children, despite orthodontia and psychotherapy, experienced in the 1960s a period of wrenching isolation...
...I try to barter for a purse for a girlfriend...
...Just as these Carnegie-developed Children's Television Workshop programs attempt to make reading as jazzy as Road Runner, All Our Children gives us quasi-socialism as sweet as World War II patriotism...
...Then comes the blowgun demonstration...
...One explorer, Captain Faucett, got lost in the jungle, never to be seen again, and became a local legend...
...The bottom of the boat filling with water, we breathe relief as we reach the other side...only to turn up a swampy inlet for another three-quarters of a mile...
...Captain Julio is the manana complex incarnate, not long for the same turf upon which Paul Wright walks, but he assuredly will get us back in the water in the morning...
...Pulling back the bed sheets, I'm met by a six-inch lizard that leaps out into the kerosene lantern light...
...The Yagua men, decked out in grass skirts and grass headdresses and a red juice from a common plant whose name escapes me (a natural mosquito repellent as well as a native cosmetic), pin a chewing gum wrapper on a tree 40 paces away...
...Lest we be dismayed by this dubious connection, Warren Martin, director of the Fellowship program, assures us that Ralston Purina has no control over the Foundation's policies...
...the top has 12 two-bunk cabins, none mosquito-proof, some toilet-andshower rooms, ditto, and a well-stocked bar made to order for Renaldo's genius...
...He starts to tease me with the information that piranha love to spend time around docks...at that precise moment something brushes across my leg...
...He has overcome himself...
...And away we go...
...They perform their ancient dances, some of the women bouncing babies around: a dance to the snake, a dance to the turtle, and so on...
...Over the past century, all manner of entrepreneurs and adventurers have blazed through the area, making it possible for the tourism industry to establish a solid foothold...
...First, we take our jungle walks, padding through the mud, sidestepping quicksand, swinging (for fun, not necessity) on lianas, to their villages...
...Believe it or not, they're building a Holiday Inn down here...
...The wrapper looks like an acupuncture point...
...Meetings were held "under the shadow of a cross," and afterwards "we hugged the wives we were going to exploit...
...The chances of being so attacked...
...Where is the individual child—human, citizen—in all this...
...But what is most convincing of the Foundation's divorce from capitalism, to say nothing of Methodism, is Martin's boast that it is spending its assets—not just, he hastens to add, its income—faster than any other foundation...
...We are docked next to a grassy cliffside...
...As, apparently, has the Danforth Foundation...
...It is across the river, nearly a mile wide here, and the humidity is outrageous...
...Each day, more Indian vil- lages to visit...
...European explorers as Alfred Wallace and Henry Bates braved the jungle territory...
...They are without question vicious...
...The others, pollos all, renege on their Boa Constrictor-duressed pledges to do the same...
...Ah, but he is here with us today...
...The village poultry will look scrawny and diseased, and the tapioca crops insufficient, but these people will never lack their beloved monkey meat...
...He's been transformed into a recipient of services, so that the dispensers of services can be employed and the directors of the dispensers of services can wield power, power over all our children, who are all of us...
...Will the medical team...
...In addition, the Council is running an ambitious promotional campaign and planning further publications which, within the year, will include books on the following subjects: patterns of child care and public policy...
...Later, we're off to another Yagua village...
...The guides smile that swimming is perfectly—well, almost perfectly—safe...
...describes at length and with much glee the corporation's most recent transgressions...
...Not to worry, the camp crew laughs...
...It began, we are told, with William Danforth, an entrepreneurial capitalist and evangelical Methodist who made a fortune with Ralston Purina, and then established a foundation to support, among other things, the graduate education of individuals committed to college teaching and religious values...
...I rejoice for the intimation of reality...
...It will be Peruvian owned and operated, of course...
...his bouncer-sized mate, Wally, who cannot return to Orange County lest he face jail for something shady and unspecified...
...A lizard in your quarters is good for you...
...You would think them guileless...
...It can be removed only by surgery...
...No Caribbean cruise, this...
...We have been forewarned to bring not so much as a camera into sight...
...I chew on my Amazon River Cruise visor, by this time down around my neck, as I contemplate the real snakes swimming out there and the real piranha underneath and the romantic obituaries that will be written in Santa Ana and Seattle...
...I begin to walk away, a universal bartering tactic from Tijuana to Tangier, and he calls me back...
...Indeed, All Our Children is so apparently impeccable in its intentions, and so establishment classy in its origin and tone, that it will doubtless glide effortlessly into college courses, church discussion groups, social action conferences, and school libraries, there to become a new source of conventional wisdom...
...Now, the trading session...
...One night we run aground...
...Next, the children—I take it that societies that produce so many children are basically optimistic, no matter their squalor—surround us, chirping their importunings, hands outstretched...
...The hunters have achieved a proficiency with these weapons that an NRA marksman would envy...
...We are an HEW dream come true: 51 women and 49 men, 16 blacks, nine Chicanos, one Puerto Rican, one Native American, and one American Indian (sic...
...Already a professional journal for teachers of young children calls it " a foundation and springboard for...analysis of public policy as it impacts on children's lives...
...Sounds a voice from the rear, "Hey, man, some of us have been otherwhere...
...A great American saloon, in fact...
...But the Yagua women, I cannot possibly communicate to him, were so transported by the Disney stuff that they eagerly traded piranha and monkey teeth necklaces for it...
...There is a pattern, everywhere...
...It's morning bath time at the base...
...Until you stand in one of its teeming cities, or slosh through a muddy Indian village, or cruise down the mightiest river of them all, or tread over a 1,500-year-old burial ground of one of the most mysterious civilizations ever—only then are you struck by the importance of this place, and by how unconscious of it you were before...
...our Braniff guide...
...It is the primeval Upper Amazon, still largely uncharted since the days when such hearty Kenneth E. Grubbs, Jr., is an editorial writer for the Orange County Register in California...
...Amazon Journal: A Tourist's Odyssey Iquitos, Peru—Twenty-one years ago Paul Wright took off from Southern California to ride his motorcycle to the tip of South America and back...
...It should suffice to note that when parents lull their children to sleep with televisions in their bedrooms in order to buy time for their own, similarly anomic activities, no vital vision is informing family life...
...And for very good reason...
...What sounds radical to some now will, in the minds of those who absorbits ideas while young, be merely the "common sense" of a decade into the future...
...Impossible to predict, but the Upper Amazon may be the next trendy watering spot, with rock stars hybridizing the Peruvian music and Hollywood romanticizing the Yaguas...
...In the section on guaranteed jobs, a cartoon Uncle Sam rolls up his sleeves to go to work...
...He spends his time playing cards until the game turns against him, and then alternates between making morose political statements and cantoring Latin love songs...
...Done...
...I kick the cabin door open and see that we have pulled ashore again, this time at a Peruvian military base per government requirements...
...Yet, claims Martin, there is a unity underneath this deceptive diversity...
...unequal distribution of wealth...
...Why, at their New Fellows Conference twenty years ago he and his colleagues had been so smug, so insular, so...
...The soldiers must scrutinize the ship's documents, though just what kind of illicit trade this clumsy tub might be trafficking in escapes me...
...Certainly the Foundation has overcome the ethnic and religious prejudices of its founder...
...the central role of a U.S...
...Suddenly, tree branches penetrate the deck area, and we are quite unmistakably beached...
...And Captain Julio...
...Even here we're served that weak Peruvian product called, yes, Inca Kola...
...All you can do is laugh maniacally and surrender to the Amazon Air Force as it sucks every square inch of your hide...
...The sun comes up at six, goes down at six...
...Caucuses —black, Chicano, feminist, gay—have bloomed in the night, and 14 The American Spectator January 1978...
...he next morning my roommate rouses me with the T news that I have slept through all the action...
...Its conclusions are presented as merely the widening and flowering of old Americanism, with a sort of Time-essay-level pop history lesson on previously controversial and now accepted ideas...
...But their recent conference tells a different story—of the struggle against capitalist, racist, sexist, oppressive "Amerika...
...Charlie Wenderoth, the new owner of Wright Way Tours, whose very appearance is an oxymoron: Father Christmas on the Equator...
...This is no chorus line, but they do The American Spectator January 1978 13 it with an unsophisticated joy that is altogether endearing...
...He decided the Latin continent was insufficiently serviced by the tourist trade, so he started his own company, Wright Way Tours, headquartered in Glendale, California...
...Certain signs indicate that more tourists are streaming into this continent...
...Consider the dramatis personae: 11 journalists on a junket...
...Paul Wright, the only man who can get us out of this...
...Finally I grow so weary I couldn't care if a real boa were nestled in my room...
...The river is up, so we're unlucky, spotting only two or three pairs of red eyes transfixed in our spotlight beam...
...It is a theme perennially rediscovered by writers: Latin America, not to mention the Amazon, is simply unknown, except as an old geography lesson or recent newspaper headline, by the vast majority of North Americans, even by world travellers...
...The bottom deck houses the crew...
...The Conference is organizing, and we are on the march...
...Roughly the same, Paul Wright tells me, of a virgin getting clobbered by a bus on a Pasadena street corner...
...And that cat's mourning just outside the camp perimeter—it sounds like a lullaby...
...Paranoid, these soldiers...
...they measure distance by the four days' time spent on the river...
...Back on The Adolfo we demand cervezas and soft drinks...
...He's nowhere...
...The Council's recommendations, if accepted, will act to break down that personal sense of parental responsibility which is perhaps the last provision of nature for the protection of the species...
...The influence of this report will arise also from the appeal of its rhetoric...
...The sight is almost enough to make me rejoin the Constrictor camaraderie...
...One would not want to be up the Amazon, not this stretch of Amazon, without a paddle...
...Presently a hundred screaming men in white undershorts hurtle themselves down the cliff toward The Adolfo...
...an unsinkable 77-year-old Memphis businessman and his dutiful valet...
...There are reminders of the long-gone rubber boom (Wright's building was designed by Eiffel himself...
...Home for the next four days...
...Champion is in and out before I finish my swim...
...I am too groggy to panic...
...Only now can I shake that ridiculous feeling that we've been cruising down the Adventureland streams in Anaheim...
...What really concerns me is a nasty little water creature called the candiru, a tiny fish which homes in on the smell of urine and lodges itself in a swimmer's plumbing...
...Now that tourism has recently come to their villages they have developed a trader's savvy which is at once a delight and a worry for those who want to see their ancient ways undefiled...
...white...
...I decide to retire to my hut early...
...I will sign any kind of affidavit just so long as, finally believing me, you will not regard me as suicidal or otherwise crackers...
...Captain Julio has the face of a macaw, and he chugs an incalculable quantity of a tolerable cerveza called "San Juan...
...the crusty old shaman wants cash only, and Peruvian solez at that...
...If parents will not own their children, will not control and guide their physical, passional, intellectual, and spiritual lives, will the committee...
...In fact, we do not know for certain that our cruise down to Leticia, Colombia, is the 350 miles commonly estimated...
...and now there are a few signs the bust cycle will be ending...
...Bodies shift uncomfortably in their seats...
...A rumble is heard in the audience...
...For once, KTTV's Doug Dare puts down his movie camera, and with the single tin can on board begins to bail...
...It has stopped raining, and the mosquitoes descend...
...At the Amazon Safari Camp, Wright's people have erected a cluster of thatch-roofed lodgings, and put in a bar and a restaurant...
...They take aim and blow: bullseye, bullseye, bullseye...
...Chewing gum and Mickey Mouse badges won't do...
...You've heard about piranha, those toothy little fish which, swimming in schools, will devour a cow or a person in minutes...
...the "social and economic" influences on children's attitudes...
...After nightfall a group of us decides to take the outboard in search of caimans—that's alligators...
...Take it again (or its antidote...
...I have some piranha teeth, attached to a necklace for which I traded some Mickey Mouse badges to the Yagua Indians...
...besides, there is nowhere to go...
...a German-American couple with a smart-alecky 11-year-old son...
...They make dresses and loincloths out of this barkcloth and, for the benefit of tourists, little purses...
...Probably not a hundred Americans have come to this area as tourists...
...Is that all there is...
...if to South America, maybe to Rio or Bogota or Buenos Aires...
...A note concerning the children: The Amazonian A Indians, unlike the distinctly unoptimistic natives of India, cultivate a birth control berry that is positively breathtaking in its simplicity and efficiency...
...Mary C. Norton Education for a Different Whom Danforth Fellows allegedly combine a commitment to college teaching with religious or ethical concerns...
...When the pharmaceutical companies get wind of this the tribesmen will not be content as happy little trinket traders...
...A young crewman is posted on the bow to look out for sandbars, but owing to the stormy weather he can see little...
...Paul Wright smiles reassuringly as we get lodged between two trees...
...Ho ho...
...Blended with the incomparable sounds of the jungle, the music and the laughter carry you off in an exquisite escape from the modern world...
...Then he points to my plastic rain poncho, which I'd purchased at a Southern California surplus store...
...And the Carnegie Council, in its insistence that the family can be renewed neither by parents nor children but only by the state, gives parents —rich and poor, black and white—nothing but subliminal encouragement to fail...
...First, the area will have to be discovered by the trend-setters, the people who have jetted everywhere else...
...They also make wall hangings called chamchamas...
...Who says the sixties are dead...
...Renaldo the bartender mixes a mean concoction called a "Boa Constrictor," a series of which we consume, listening to a pickup band of local musicians...
...There is little choice but to go out and glower at the captain, who most graciously hooks you into his cerveza-chugging regimen, sings his love songs, and offers you free cigarettes...
...One day, the tourist industry hopes, the stream will become a river...
...I'm not sure) and resume childbearing...
...Ironically, the message will be especially well received by many of the affluent—those whose children, despite orthodontia and psychotherapy, experienced in the 1960s a period of wrenching isolation from family, caused not by the absence of money, but by a massive spiritual blackout...
...As if to demonstrate the truth of this, he Mary C. Norton is a recent graduate of Michigan State University, a Danforth Fellow, and a Rhodes Scholar...
...All Our Children will find a receptive audience among people who sense that something is amiss in our family lives...
...Fact: Those who took their vitamins, as good little travellers should, did not get mosquito bites...
...He does not finish his sentence before I flop onto the dock like a hooked catfish...
...We gather in the community lodge of the Huitotos, my favorites notwithstanding their cannibalistic past...
...Take it once—if you're a woman—and you bear no children...
...You don't refuse even if you're a resolute nonsmoker, for you are in the midst of his, not your, predicament...
...Iquitos, smack in the middle of the Peruvian jungle and approachable only by airplane or boat, has seen better days...
...The people who will be most enthusiastic in their support of the Council's proposals are precisely those who ought to know better...
...How far we have come from those bad old days when he was—pardon the sexist term—a Danforth Fellow...
...But they've got the Holiday Inn trademark—just as in Lima there is a Sears store—and they're counting on a wave of adventuresome tourists...
...I mean, why can't we wake up to an international incident...
...I dive in...
...And all varieties of unbelief are welcome...
...The introductory speaker beams, almost chokes, as he surveys us...
...An intra-Peruvian airline is named after him...
...Of such surprises is the joy of bartering...
...Cartography is imperfect: Down in Brazil, as recently as last year, they discovered a 400-mile river, one of the countless tributaries of the Amazon...
...three young Frenchmen who aspire to be moviemakers...
...The Huitotos are noted for their fine barkcloth with simple geometric designs...
...Several of us, including Wally, pile into an outboard, which is so seriously weighted it begins to leak...
...They could do worse...
...or we pile into an outboard to cross the river in search of them...
...a Long Beach, California, ornithologist who looks like Van Heflin just back from Uganda (in fact, he is just back from Uganda...
...He points to a beautiful chamchama I'd thought out of the question...
...lizards devour insects...
...There is not a more beautiful, more hopeful, or more reassuring sound in the world, not Mozart or a lover's sigh, than the sound of that outboard coming back to life...
...We are in fact all "marginal centrists" who have "opted to avoid extremes...
...They resemble a jigsaw...
...I deliberately went swimming in piranha-inhabited waters...
...beautiful Vieri (who's really Verushka, her parents being Czech emigres to Lima, though she prefers a name reflecting her Peruvian birth...
...These blowguns are terribly accurate and terribly quiet, the darts tipped with poison curare...
...12 The American Spectator January 1978 The Amazon—The Adolfo (a family name) was built in Europe in 1905 and looks like an overgrown African Queen...
...Come to think of it, where is James Reston now that we need him...
...also reputedly the only source of foreign goods in Peru—you have to know an officer...
...Always...
...caste system as it influences occupational opportunities...
...He changes clothes five times a day, not exactly de riguer on the Amazon, and crawls frequently into a hammock...
...It is at the Tambo Piranha Lodge, and two of us—Dale Champion of the San Francisco Chronicle and myself—swim around the dock for a few minutes...
...Next, depending on the village, the tribal dances...
...They'll have that insufferable glimmer in their eyes just like the Arab oil sheiks...
...A benign mother eagle, in another cartoon, broods over her baby birds...
...Any more adventures like that and I will be Inca Pacitated...
...The soldiers splash around in the river a few minutes, then the bugler summons them back to camp...
...The style of both prose and illustration reflects its common source with "Sesame Street" and "The Electric Company" in the Carnegie Foundation...
...He is well regarded as a major promoter of tourism to the region, and in his office here in Iquitos, the first major port on the Upper Amazon, he has employed several young Peruvians to work on his newly launched Amazon River Cruise and Amazon Safari Camp...
...The captain, who doesn't seem to realize we sensitive Yanquis need to stay in the middle of the river so as to escape the cumulus mosquitoes, plays cards long after most of us have retired...
...Throats are cleared...
...but we have also "opted for reform over the status quo...
...Will the counselor...
...Still, you must be cut and bleeding or idle or especially provocative before they will attack...
...We travel four miles up river, periodically shutting off the motor so as to surprise the caimans...
...We fill them as judiciously as we can with pencils and chewing gum and Disneyland trinkets...
...and the civil-rights movement for the handicapped...
...Kenneth E. Grubbs, Jr...
...They are primitive, these Yaguas and Huitotos, some of them not long up from cannibalism, but they are touched by modern ways nonetheless...
...Wright made Lima something of a second home, doing more for U.S.-Latin American relations than Rosalynn Carter could achieve in a lifetime...
...She is presently studying international relations at Oxford...
Vol. 11 • January 1978 • No. 3
