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Lac resists interjecting,
“Obviously.”
They walk several more
paces before Chuck adds, “I think it was just a matter of some seriously bad
timing.”
The missionary’s tone is
apologetic. Lac, ignoring the invitation latent in the ensuing silence to
absolve him, wonders why Chuck is forbearing to use what they both just
experienced as an opportunity to preach on the depraved state of man in the
absence of Jesus. “You came here to study
their way of life,” Lac imagines him gloating. “I came here to teach them a new way of life—to save their souls. After
what you just saw, you tell me which of our missions’ ought to take precedence.”
As they thread their way
along the trail through neck-high sawgrass, though, the only voices to be heard
belong to the monkeys high in the distant canopy. Their whooping howls feature
in the raucous theater of Lac’s agitated mind as long cylindrical tubes
extending from their o-shaped faces, waving about against the deepening blue of
the sky. Somehow, the image inches him closer to the brink of fury, as if the
howlers were a chorus of obnoxious street barkers. He spent so much time
preparing, planning so meticulously, anticipating every eventuality. What he
walked into back there—that shouldn’t have happened. He shouldn’t have been the
first to waddle through that entrance. The men would have recognized Clemens,
so he would have been in danger a few seconds less, those crucial few seconds
while Lac himself was a twitch away from being turned into a porcupine. He
shouldn’t have arrived empty-handed. Proffering gifts in his outstretched
hands, he would have posed less of a threat, and hence been less likely to
provoke a preemptive attack. Most importantly, he shouldn’t have left his
shotgun with the rest of his supplies and equipment back at Tama Tama.
The grass and tall weeds
vanish abruptly as the two men plunge back into the dark understory, as barely
any light from the sun makes it through the dense foliage overhead, even from
directly above this pathetic excuse for a trail. The gnats, whose biting had
never really seemed to abate, nevertheless return to their greater numbers and heightening
frenzy as the men continue their march back toward the river.
“You okay, Shackley?” he
hears Clemens say behind him.
Stopping to turn around
and face the missionary, he opens his mouth to complain about being so grossly
misled, but catches himself before saying a word. “I can’t say I was ready for
that,” he admits instead. “It’s making me wonder…” He trails off, leaving
Clemens to guess what it is he’s wondering, before turning back to continue
along the meager trail.
Returning to his full,
aggressive stride, Lac feels his unvoiced ire shifting toward the more
deserving culprits, the ones whose knowledge and expertise he counted on,
admired even, whose every word indelibly lodged itself in his brain, whose
example shaped his every lofty vision of his own career. If anyone is to blame,
he thinks, it’s my professors. It’s Dr. Sabine. It’s Dr. Hiddleson. All of
them. They should have at least warned me of the possibility that the wild Indians would be hostile. All this
crap about cultural relativism and not being the evil white man, the lone
ranger lording it over the savages, the colonizer, the imperialist, the
goddamned racist—they’ve got us so browbeaten and guilt-laden that we completely
forget that the fucking Indians are human too, in every sense of the word. And
sometimes humans kill other humans.
He
cants his head to call over his shoulder, “Okay, Clemens, tell me something. You’ve
been wandering around in your rowboat on all these rivers and tributaries for
more than fifteen years looking for uncontacted Indians.” He stops and turns before
asking, “How often do they shoot arrows at you and chase you off?”
“You
hear lots of stories,” Chucks says as he draws near to where Lac is standing.
“And it’s not just arrows. Some of the tribes bash each other’s heads in with
clubs.” The trail is hardly more than a strip, not wide enough for them to walk
two abreast. Chuck steps into the underbrush to sidle around Lac, saying, “I’ve
actually only made first contact with one group—and you just met them.” Setting
the pace now, he continues speaking over his shoulder, as Lac did a moment
before. “When they first saw me, they were definitely scared. I think they were
too shocked and, well, curious to respond violently. I was probably lucky. The
other missionaries are always talking about close calls.” Ducking under a
tangle of lianas, he grunts and takes a fortifying breath before continuing. “The
thing is, it’s hard to say if you’re ever really making first contact. The
Yanomamö already had machetes and axes when I got here. They were worn down to
the nub, but they were also being used quite a bit. You have to remember too it
hasn’t been that long—maybe a generation—since the rubber barons were down here
killing and enslaving and torturing thousands upon thousands of the Indians.
The Yanomamö may have traded for those machetes with the Ye’kwana. But even now
there are often run-ins between ranchers and Indians. Loggers too—they’re
probably even worse.”
“You
think they’re hostile to outsiders because of earlier attacks? That’s not what
we walked into back there, was it? You said the fight was with another Yanomamö
village.”
“That’s
true. And I can’t say what a war party from another village would have done to
us. Maybe nothing. Of course, we may have been killed in a crossfire even if
they weren’t trying to shoot us—they dip their arrows in poison when they’re
hunting. I guess my point is just that it’s different out here. We may as well
be a million miles away from any working justice system. It takes a certain
kind of person to go into the jungle in the first place. Once you’re in it,
well, it may be that you go a little crazy because it gets so intense—the
discomfort, the constant threats, the endless insults to your person, the
boredom—and you’re so far removed from anything you’re accustomed to. Anyway,
it’s hard to tell how time in the jungle will affect a man. It changes people. I’ve
even seen it happen to men with the New Tribes, good men. And God knows what
the Indians have been through. I can’t say I really know much about how violent
most indigenous tribes are before they meet anyone from civilization—I figure
you’d know more about that than me. Either way, out here you have to be on your
guard around people of pretty much any sort.”
Lac
detected no hint of sarcasm in Chuck’s suggestion that he ought to know more
about what the Indians are like. It rankles nonetheless. Shooing the bareto
away from his mouth, he inhales sharply, calming himself. The missionary’s
words send his mind traveling back to a time when he and his dad were hunting
in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, along with his older brother and his uncle.
Lac would have been
around thirteen, he figures, and after a few days wandering through the forest
he was starting to get bored—in spite of the weeks of lobbying it had taken to
get his dad to agree to let him tag along. At one point, as he was going about
whistling and clownishly dancing around, he lifted his gaze to see the three
older men crouching alongside a fallen tree. His dad shot him a look that
struck him like a hard palm to the temple. Lac immediately fell silent, dropped
to his knees, and crawled toward the cover of the wide trunk. Peering over it,
he saw two men, both with rifles slung over their shoulders, making their way
along a valley that was barely visible in the distance. Lac watched them for
several moments until his dad pulled him down by the back of his vest.
“What’s the big deal?” he
whispered.
His dad lifted his finger
to lips, a gesture as peremptory as any command issued beside a raised hand.
They waited in near complete silence for what seemed to Lac like an hour, until
the men had long since disappeared into the forest. Even after he and the older
men started moving again themselves, Lac sensed that a decision had somehow
been made to keep silent, and to give the two strange men a wide berth. After
what felt to the teenage Lac like hours, but may have been little more than
twenty minutes, he opened his mouth to begin peppering his dad with questions.
That’s when Uncle Rob swatted him hard on the back of the head. Lac turned to
face his uncle, opening his mouth yet again to complain. The look on his
uncle’s face was no less peremptory in its command to keep quiet than his
father’s had been. They walked on, barely making a sound beyond the crunch of
leaves and the snap of twigs beneath their boots, until the sun was nearly down
and they wordlessly agreed to begin setting up camp, Lac fuming all the while.
“Those two men,” Uncle
Rob said to him as they worked together running a rope for the roof of their
tent. “Did you see their clothes?”
“Not really. They were
wearing old jackets I suppose.”
“They were wearing
tatters. Which tells your dad and me they’ve been out here for a long time.”
“So what?”
“So we’re in a different
world out here. We’re a long way from any roads or any phones. It’s hard to
tell what a man will do when he can be sure no one will know he’s doing it. Those
two guys, we may have waved to them, shouted our hellos, and they may have
waved and said hi back. Just as likely, though, they’d play friendly until they
got close enough to shoot us. Then they’d rifle through our pockets and
backpacks looking for money or anything they could sell. Men start to forget
all about the rules when they’re a hundred miles from any police, a hundred
miles from all the things that might remind them who they are. You gotta be
careful who you just walk up to when you’re this deep in the forest.”
Lac hasn’t recalled this
exchange, or thought about Uncle Rob, since he was still a teenager. At the
time, he’d remained sulky, thinking his dad and uncle were being paranoid. Or
delusional even, pretending to be commandos on some secret mission. How the two
men they saw traversing the valley would have reacted upon being alerted to
their presence remains an experiment yet to be conducted. But Charles Clemens
of the New Tribes Mission, who ought to be plenty qualified to remark on the matter,
apparently agrees wholeheartedly with old Uncle Rob that you gotta be careful
who you just walk up to when you’re this deep in the forest, or in his own
words, that out here you have to be on your guard against people of pretty much
any sort.
Those times with his dad
and brothers out in the Michigan wilderness had seemed so distant, from another
lifetime. The last thing he expected venturing into the rain forest of Venezuela
was to be reacquainted with anything from that period of his life. While the
nostalgia is less than pure, he does manage to avoid delving into the myriad complications
marring his reminiscences of that time, when he was both bullied and protected
by men who were larger than life, when he still had the entirety of his adult
life beckoning him onward with promises of boundless possibility. The memory
effects a transformation, stripping away the dread that has been hanging from
the trees like some pestilential fungus, suffusing the air with its spores,
infecting his thoughts and weighing down his every step through the scrub. An
actual breeze weaves its way through the shadowy undergrowth, a cleansing
stream of thick, oxygen-rich air. For the first time in days, Lac experiences afresh
the exhilaration of being beyond the reach of the workaday world, the thrill of
impending discovery, the lure of the unknown on the other side of this thick
teeming wall of green. The cooling and smoothing of the air speaks of their
closeness to the river, but Lac feels like the breeze could almost be coming in
response to a shift taking place in his own mind.
As they drag the rowboat
from where they’d tucked it amid the latticework of kapok roots, Lac forgets
his reasons for locking his thoughts away from the missionary, as though the
farther away from the familiar world they travel, the more useless their
so-called education proves, and the more pointless their competing agendas
seem.
“When I was a kid,” he
begins to say as they slide the rowboat down the bank through the suctioning
mud, before being interrupted by a caught shoe. Bracing himself on the side of
the boat, he lifts it free, producing a loud, almost comical gagging sound. “When
I was a kid,” he begins again, “I loved adventure stories. I didn’t care if they
were true or if they were fiction. Back then, there didn’t seem to be such a
sharp distinction between the two. I was just as excited about Expedition Fawcett as I was by The Lost World. In college, though, that
all changed. It was reading Darwin that made me want to go into anthropology.”
He glances over at
Clemens as they swing the boat out into the water to see if the voicing of this
blasphemous name induces any contortion of his sweat-soaked, washed out visage,
but his face registers little aside from an intense focus on the delicate task
at hand. “After Origin of Species,” Lac
continues, “I turned right away to Voyage
of the Beagle. After about a year I damn near had the whole book memorized.
Then one of my professors used the section where he writes about the Indians of
Tierra del Fuego as an example of nineteenth century racist attitudes.”
Clemens, with a hand on
each gunwale, is already lowering himself into a seated position. It’s Lac’s
turn to step aboard. His shoes trail thick streams of mud through the air, and
his last awkward lurch sets the rowboat to tottering precariously. “He called
them ‘poor wretches,’ Lac says as they steady the rocking, “with ‘hideous
faces,’ whose ‘violent gestures were without dignity.’ I remember going through
a crisis after that class. It was the last time I ever opened that book. I never
read anymore adventure novels or expedition chronicles again either. Unless you
count Margaret Mead and Bronislaw Malinowski.”
The missionary hands him
a paddle; the journey across the river will be too brief to warrant the use of
the outboard. A few strokes on either side and they’re a quarter of the way to
the opposing bank. Gazing mystified at the swirling eddies produced by each dip
and pull of the paddle, Lac hears Clemens say, “You know, for me it was David
Livingston and Albert Schweitzer.”
“Of course it was,” Lac
says, chuckling. Clemens laughs along with him. “The irony,” Lac adds, “is that
guys like Darwin and Livingston stand as icons of this evil imperialist drive
to subjugate and enslave, but they were both staunch abolitionists.”
As they approach a clear
spot on the bank, Clemens takes up the theme. “Schweitzer too. He wrote that
part of his mission to build the hospital in Gabon was to make up for the
crimes Europeans had committed against ‘the coloured races.’ A lot of his
writings were criticisms of colonial oppression.”
We look back with such
disdain for these doctors and missionaries and activists who did so much for
indigenous peoples, Lac thinks, sussing out all the markers of their
deep-seated racism, all the while declaring that our civilization’s supposed history
of moral progress is but a myth. And no one notes the contradiction.
Their first task after
hauling the rowboat up yet another soggy embankment is to find a clearing in
the scrubland where Clemens says there’s an old hut they can hang their
hammocks in to keep them out of reach of the ants and various other crawling
insects. As they slog on, spiritlessly swinging their machetes, exhaustion
beginning to set in, Lac turns his attention to the loud buzzing in the back of
his mind, the insistent clamoring shame of his monumental error. He remembers
once lying awake in his dorm at U of M and trying to mentally catalogue the
elements common to all of his formerly beloved adventure tales, an exercise in
cynicism and budding disillusionment. You start with a mystery and a hero. The
mystery takes you to an exotic locale, leading to an ominous arrival. Now the
quest begins. Along the way, you have an inventory of lethal threats, a certain
fraction of which the characters will subsequently encounter—the
disease-bearing insects; in the water, the piranha, the electric eels, those
nightmarish, urethra-burrowing candiru, the anaconda; in the jungle, the
venomous snakes, the wild boar gnashing and goring with their tusks, the
jaguar, the hostile Indians. The characters nearly succumb before the mystery
is finally unveiled and the object of the quest—the people of the lost
civilization, the legendary monster, the secret medicinal plant—arrives on the
scene to rescue them. But somehow the mystery then becomes a moral dilemma. Now
that we know it’s here, how will we absorb it into our lives—without destroying
it? Without destroying ourselves. But it all somehow redounds to the
benefit—the development, the edification, the entertainment—of those of us
carrying the torch of western civilization.
Lac
stops to watch Clemens hacking his way through the brush, engulfed by the darkening green
immensity. Even if you decide to quit now, he thinks, you’ve still got quite an
ordeal to go through before you make it out of here. Swiping away some of the
sweat from his forehead and flicking away the bugs in one practiced motion, he
takes again to the path carved out by the missionary, shrugging to adjust his
pack. He realizes they’ve barely made it twenty yards from the top of the
riverbank.
Before reading Darwin his
freshman year at Sault Ste. Marie, Lac had perused scores of books about
jungles and animals and geography, but they all unfurled as papery lists of
lifeless, disconnected facts and details. In Darwin’s hands, on the contrary,
every living creature on earth burst vividly to life on the page. His had been
a synthesizing mind, not one geared toward mere observation. Origin unfolds as part chronicle of an
idea’s incubation, part systematic weighing of evidence, and part exuberant
celebration of the wondrousness of discovering how one simple theory could explain
such infinitely diverse complexity. Lac absorbed it greedily, letting the
points, the systematic style of reasoning, the character underlying it all,
letting all of it permeate his thoughts, transforming them.
“I want to do something
like that,” he’d said to himself
after reading the final page and clapping the covers shut. This was the
beginning of his self-imposed discipline, his ceaseless efforts to marshal his
attention and corral his thoughts. First, master the details, and then progress
to searching for the thread that binds them all together, the dynamic principle
that sets them all in vital motion.
But there was something else about Darwin’s
style of thinking and writing and arguing, something he would come to associate
with the project of science more generally. Lac had all his life felt bound to
Port Austin, to Northern Michigan, to the struggles with his dad and his
brothers and sisters, the smothering weight of the future’s most pressingly
practical of considerations. Darwin’s was a mind unbound, a playground for fascination
unfettered. Whereas most people’s curiosity before the natural world flashes
for a fleeting moment before thudding into the wall of daily banality, the
soaring wonder of great scientific minds again and again breaks through, like a
freight train charging forth along the twin rails of pattern-seeking and
prediction. The future-directedness of science was for Lac simultaneously a
ticket to an unrestricted world and an escape from the mundane, a way to brush
up against the eternal, the sacred even. People he knew growing up sought
solace and spiritual uplift by muttering their futile prayers while kneeling
beside their beds or by going to church and being led through the mindless motions.
But religion obsesses over the past, trapping you there. Science looks out over
the horizon, beckoning like a liberation. That’s the part he kept firmly in his
grasp even after turning away from Darwin’s grand view of life at his
professors’ behest.
“This is it,” Clemens
says. “A guy from the Malarialogìa built this a few years back. It should keep
the bats out of our hair.”
Lac scans the area, his
eyes lighting on the ramshackle hut in a clearing in the brush. “The sun will
only be up for a little while longer,” Chuck says as he clears the last of the
sparse branches and vines in their path. “Not much point in trying to do
anything but sleep after it gets dark.”
Inside the modest but
blessedly empty hut, the missionary pulls his hammock from his bag and removes
it from its rubber bag. Lac catches a whiff of the old sweat and stale wood
smoke odor coming off the mildewed cotton. Recoiling, lifting his hand to his
nose, he thinks: Even the damned missionaries are filthy down here.
“When we get back to Tama
Tama,” Clemens says, “I’ll try to write up a list of common words and phrases.
It took me months to start really picking up the language, but I can at least
help get you started.”
Lac doesn’t tell him the
issue is moot, because he won’t be returning to this place. Even now, he’s
working out the logistics of his return trip to Puerto Ayacucho. Still, he
can’t help wondering why this missionary is being so patient and helpful. It
dawns on him, as it should have weeks ago, that Clemens knows he’s supposed to
be writing a book, his dissertation, on the Yanomamö’s culture—a book that can
be passed around to any other New Tribes missionary who follows him into the
jungle in search of souls wilting for lack of Christ’s nourishing light. Disgusted,
Lac finishes tying his own fresh hammock to the support posts and lies down,
just in time to hear his kindly bald companion’s snoring begin in earnest. It’s
not quite dark yet.
“Strange bedfellows,” he
mutters, looking up at the underside of the thatched roof, wondering why he
didn’t take a minute to check it for vermin but too exhausted to get up now.
His legs and feet throb. His skin tingles and aches from the constant sweating
and swelling. He can’t remember the last time he was this uncomfortable. But
all the bodily insults are a mere backdrop for the chaos swirling in his mind.
In spite of it all, however, he knows in a few moments he’ll be as deeply
asleep as Chuck. Placing a cracker in his mouth and sipping from his canteen to
wash it down, he smiles at the realization that he’s almost too tired to finish
chewing.
Continue reading: The Sleep of Reason: He Borara Ch 3.1
Continue reading: The Sleep of Reason: He Borara Ch 3.1
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