Starting out, I had no idea what my father had in mind for me in the Jungles of the Amazon
This is the beginning of Men ‘n Mirrors, a memoir by Josh Hammond, edited by Emily Drabek
BAIT
I must have looked silly standing there in the jungle clearing — bare feet, knees knocking, no shirt, no shoes, no socks, stripped down to my tighty-whities. Was this some kind of initiation or endurance test? A summer camp ritual of some sort? Maybe a form of punishment for a childish prank that had caught up with me.
My father told me to keep my hands straight down and under no circumstances was I to raise them above my head. I was to show no signs of surrender, “giving up,” as he put it. I was to look straight ahead, unless he told me to do otherwise. No talking or humming, he added. Let the itch itch. Let the sweat drip.
I didn’t really know why I was there. I was six years old. My father was an Evangelical missionary in Bolivia, on the Amazon River. He talked fast when he didn’t want me to know all the stuff about our trips. When I didn’t understand him, I wasn’t allowed to ask questions. I just had to do what he told me.
He said we were there to meet a tribe of Indians who had never had a relationship with missionaries before. He said they didn’t wear clothes, which is why I was just in my white briefs to match my white skin — so I would look naked to them.
Native tribes in this “neck” of the woods had murdered missionaries in 1930 and others in 1943, just four years earlier. I had heard that those missionaries had simply walked into a camp and surprised the tribe and themselves. Startled by the sudden encounter, the missionaries dropped everything they were carrying and raised their hands in unison above their heads in what they thought was the universal language of surrender, but it turned out to be a language the local tribe did not understand. They instantly thought the gesture was a signal to their god to act, so they took preemptive action and killed them all on the spot and dumped their bodies in the river.
Nevertheless, there I was in an Amazon jungle in a clearing about the size of a public square in the eastern lowlands of Bolivia, waiting for it to happen. My father wanted me to show my face first: I was a pawn in his gambit to contact this local, nomadic tribe who were called barbarous by Bolivians and savages by my father. He told me if the tribe saw me, just a little boy, they would send their boys out to meet me. When their boys walked out into the clearing, he told me to take a few steps toward them and stop. He said I should not be surprised or concerned if they sent out two or three boys. All I was supposed to do was wait for them to move again. We had practiced that back home in our courtyard, so I remembered how to do that. Then he said he and the interpreter would walk out, and that would prompt the adult natives to walk out, and contact would be established. Mission accomplished. It sounded so easy.
I would come to know them as the Ayoré (pronounced ah-yo-ray). Ayoréo, with an “o” means “The People,” hard for an American to take, harder for a fundamentalist Christian to accept.
Missionaries had this Bible-based motivation for their mission: There would be no Second Coming of Jesus until every person in every “corner” of world had been given a shot to convert to Christian fundamentalism. This was not his proprietary idea, but a pillar of his form of Christianity, probably all forms. Missionaries, like him, would do whatever it took to accomplish the mission. As a kid I wondered why adults used the word “shot” instead of “chance” and why they used the word “corner” when the world was round.
The rainy season was over and everything was stirring in the jungle. Walking out into the clearing midmorning had been easy: It seemed like a game. I was excited, but nervous being alone. On the drive to the area early in the morning I had imagined several ways it might go. Nothing ever goes as planned, especially when strangers are involved, and the Indians did not speak English, Spanish, or sign language. I imagined it would go something like this:
I show up, they see me and send one of their kids out, then another kid, then my father walks out, then one of their lesser warriors walks out, grunts, then the interpreter walks out and says howdy and then my father gets the Jeep and signals for them to get in, then they cautiously do and he takes them for a spin. I wait for them to get back. When my father stops, they get out, and the interpreter says something to them about “see ya tomorrow” and we leave.
That’s not what happened.
Jungle noises filled the morning air and the howler monkeys, heard here, seemed to be gathering to watch the show. But nobody walked out to meet me. So, I waited and waited.
My father was back on the edge of the clearing near the Jeep. If I called out I knew — hoped — he would hear me. A whistle from him would be the signal. Absent that, I was to wait until they showed up.
It was their move. The Ayoré were nowhere in sight, but they were there all right, just not visible. Camouflaged. Watching every move we had made since they had heard the sound of the Jeep approaching the clearing. It would have been easy for them to keep pace with the Jeep as we straddled the ruts and paused a couple of times to drag recently fallen trees off the roughly cut pathway. When we stopped the Jeep, I was escorted to the clearing and left to do what I had rehearsed — the gambit, the walk, the wait in the middle of the clearing.
Suddenly, there was a brief muffled sound in the bush. Maybe them. Maybe a tiger. Maybe a signal from their scout.
The clearing was hemmed in by jungle. It would take a few more hours for the midmorning sun to clear the giant kapok trees that looked like big open umbrellas over the widespread Amazon jungle, hovering over the lesser trees searching for sunlight anywhere they could find it. Nearby were lupuna trees with big, wide root systems billowing above ground in all directions. They’re known as buttress roots, like the arched structures built to hold up walls of cathedrals, except these were holding up the sixty-foot trees and keeping them anchored to the ground. I recalled our guide telling my father to respect the lupuna. “Don’t step on the roots or lean on the tree,” he had warned. Local tribes thought of them as guardians of the jungles.
The trees didn’t bother me: It was the vines that scared me. Thick, brown, orangish, intertwining vines hung down from the treetops, looping and drooping from tree to tree, like braided ponytails of a jungle goddess.
The most frightening vines were called strangler vines. They wrapped themselves around trees like an anaconda, slowly squeezed the life out of them. Eventually the tree died and toppled over as the vines crawled on.
I didn’t look too closely at any of the vines — sometimes they slithered.
I needed a distraction. I needed to get my mind off the real and imagined forest. Maybe spotting a sloth would do. Sloths are one of the slowest-moving creatures on earth — hard to spot, easy to follow. Harmless, unless you get too close. I tried to see if I could spot a three-toed sloth, which were common in the area. I had seen them before on our field trips in this part of the Amazon. I reminded myself not to move my head, just let the eyes do the looking.
There, up there, high in a kapok tree, was one about the size of a small dog, grayish brown in color. They moved so slowly it seemed like they sat still. I imagined the sloth was looking for the best seat in the forest for the pending show. I imagined things to keep myself from crying, from letting my fear take over, from turning around and quitting this dumb, stupid idea. A plan made of flim and built on faith, my father’s faith, a plan that depended on the schooled obedience of a son. But nothing was happening. The more nothing happened the more I started to worry, like kids worry — unexperienced worry.
Scary things start to fill the void. I started to think that the only way out was for me to turn and run. The Jeep was a hundred yards away, camouflaged on the edge of the jungle, covered with palm fronds, tree branches, and a couple vines. I was a good sprinter, always coming in first in the races for my age group in races around the plaza at festivals. I had heard that if you are scared you can run faster. I had never tested that idea — it was something adults said with certainty. I decided it was something I could rely on if necessary. But when I realized that I would have had to sprint in bare feet over these intertwined vines, I put that idea out of my mind.
While standing there I realized my father didn’t speak jungle talk and I began to worry about what he would say or do. That part had not been rehearsed. His translator had been kidnapped from the Ayoré when he was younger than I was. He hadn’t spoken a word of their language in years — it was an obscure Zamucoan dialect. My father’s Spanish wasn’t that good either. He must have figured that what he lacked in words he could make up with hand gestures, forgetting that this tribe had never, ever peeked outside the jungle and hand signals were not universally understood. To them the jungle and their order in the jungle was the world.
My father and I had not practiced this standing-alone thing except in the safety of our house and then only for a few minutes. He never used the word “bait,” but that’s what I felt like — a worm on a hook, but no fishing line. At home, there was no need to escape, so we hadn’t practiced any possible ways. I started to wonder how he would reel me in. I gave up on that image immediately. All I knew for certain was I had to stop sniffling and pay attention: Listen for any snap of a twig, a rustle in the bush, a sudden scamper of a spider monkey.
I began to wonder if this was how life ends…in the jungle, at the end of a spear, maybe in the jaws of a hungry jaguar. Far-fetched, but briefly imagined.
My last hope was this was a pretend meeting. A dry run. Like the time God started messing around with Abraham, who was over 110 years old, no doubt with the hearing of an old man, and God told him to sacrifice his only son, Isaac, not much older than I was at the time.
So, that’s where my father got the idea.
Isaac, like me, had no choice. Isaac went along with the “joke,” assuming a lamb had been stashed away in the bushes for last-minute dramatic effect. Rams and lambs were the go-to animals for sacrifice in the Bible. What began to worry me was my preacher-man father had told this story so many times in the last couple of weeks it had become nothing more than a chant for him, a pump-up of some sort. Like his football team did before the game. Whoop! Whoop! Whoop!
There was nothing for me to whoop about as the morning wore on.
My thoughts wandered a little more as I tried to think about other things, but the waiting didn’t last much longer — and I wasn’t prepared for what happened next.
[Editorial note: My encounters should not be conflated with the five missionaries killed in Equator in 1956 as Jonathan Poletti writes so dramatically on Medium that takes place in a different country, with a different tribe, and a different missionary group.]
Part 2 will follow February 16, 2023
