Amazon Mom
Story by Lisa Alpine
My first experience as a mom was in the Amazon in 1974 when I was twenty-one. I got a village of Indians plastered and they abandoned their kids to my care.
I had unintentionally purchased this maternal role for the price of one dollar. All I thought I was buying for that corruptible buck was the use of a dugout canoe. I wanted to explore the banks of the Rio Napo, possibly to find a dolphin-inhabited lagoon or silently glide close to a turtle in its muddy burrow, or even pass under a boa lethargically wound around an overhanging branch. Stuff like that.
The novel Green Mansions had awakened in me an incredible desire to travel the waterways of the Amazon basin and penetrate its green veil. After I’d saved two thousand dollars while working six months for a record company in San Francisco, I quit my job and flew to South America.
On a map, it looked like the Rio Napo would lead me to the Amazon. I began my journey on a rattletrap bus over the Ecuadorian Andes and into the Oriente rainforest where the Napo snakes its way to join the Amazon River near Iquitos, in Peru.
Luckily, I was in no hurry and could hitch boat rides. There is an unspoken rule of hospitality among the people in the rainforest who live in open-sided huts on stilts along the riverbank. Travelers are welcome to sleep in their houses because the jungle floor is far too dangerous at night. Even the floor of the hut where I slept the first night was horrifyingly alive. When darkness fell, creatures began to torment me. Vampire bats, which I’d always thought were a myth, dive-bombed my head, looking for places to attach themselves for their nightly fill of blood. After injecting an anesthetic into their unaware host, they are free to suck away. They prefer toes and noses; other travelers I met had alarming stories of waking up with puncture marks on the tips of their noses.
Then, a creature I will never be able to identify ran back and forth over me. It seemed to have claws like a chicken and it made snuffly rodent sounds. I curled up under my rain poncho and sweated out that first night. At dawn, I approached my Indian hosts and begged them to sell me one of their hammocks. Anything to get off the ground!
With my new hammock and a sheet of plastic in which I could wrap myself up each night like a burrito — safe from critters, but steamy hot — I continued down the Rio Napo, first with the postmaster on his monthly mail run, then with a trader. Each progressive panga (dugout canoe) got smaller and the motors fewer as I traveled deeper into the jungle. My forward pace came to a standstill in Pantoja, on the Peruvian border. Due to territorial conflicts between Ecuador and Peru, there were no more boats traveling downriver.
I was stuck in Pantoja for two weeks. The villagers were reserved and suspicious, but allowed me to hang my hammock in an abandoned hut. The last occupant had recently died. He had fallen out of his boat in the middle of the river and a neighbor explained, “One of those big-mouth fish ate him.” I made a mental note not to swim in the river.
I offered the man in the hut next to mine money in exchange for the use of his canoe. I had already asked if his family would keep a pot of water boiling continuously on the fire for me after I discovered that the river was not only the source of their drinking water, but also their toilet. No Perrier around here! I felt I should give him something for any other extra favors. When I waved an Ecuadorian bank note in front of him, he looked puzzled. Canoe rentals were a new concept and it looked like money was too. They had no use for cash — there were no stores, and the passing traders took animal hides and dried fish for payment. In the end, however, he finally took my money.
I now had an activity to pass the time. I’d already attempted to tag along with the village hunter a few days before, but keeping up with him in the web-like jungle was exhausting. He ran low to the ground with his five-foot blowgun at his side. The vine-tangled canopy made the forest oppressively hot, buggy and slippery. I knew I couldn’t keep up with him, so I abandoned any romantic vision of watching him hunt down a jaguar or thirty-foot snake, and headed back to the village alone.
Paddling the tipsy, cracked canoe turned out to be another frustrating experience. The river’s current was unexpectedly strong, the sun merciless. Perhaps the hammock, with its nylon cords that cut into my back, wasn’t such a bad place to spend the afternoons. I abandoned the canoe and headed back to my hut where I parked myself with a book, twice read and dog-eared, in the hammock.
Then the children appeared. Suddenly, I was popular. They were approaching instead of hiding from me as they normally did. By ones and twos, they’d climb or crawl up the splintery steps and peer at me with big, dark eyes. No smiles, just stares. The small ones gripped the hands of their older siblings. I swung back and forth, the hammock rope creaking, cutting a groove into the beams. The kids inched forward.
Soon this baker’s dozen of kids, aged two to fourteen, were yanking the hammock to get it to swing higher. The little ones crawled into its banana peel shape with me. Giggles, tickles, chasing. They took over my hut and didn’t leave. It felt like a day care center run by the Cat in the Hat.
One melancholy-eyed girl picked up my hairbrush and stroked my blond hair. The other girls gathered around. Lubina, of the sad eyes, pulled my blouse forward and peered down the front. She shook her head in disbelief and announced that I was “white all over!” in pidgin Spanish. They each took a peek and had the same incredulous reaction.
At dusk, the kids still filled my house. Dinner. What about dinner? I didn’t want to eat my can of tuna fish, which I usually just scooped into my mouth on the end of a Swiss Army knife. There wasn’t enough to go around, so it was oatmeal for everybody. They scurried over the banister and down the steps to get their bowls. Iridescent blue clouds of thirsty Morpho butterflies exploded upward from the puddle edges as the children stormed past.
I went to my neighbor’s hut to get some water. The windowless interior was pitch black. Snorting punctuated the darkness. Raucous laughter rose toward me from the floor as I tripped over something. I lit a match and illuminated a huddle of thigh-slapping villagers, all howling as they pointed at me. Apparently I was the funniest thing they had ever seen.
They were rip-roaring drunk, thanks to me. Mr. Canoe Rental had turned his tidy fee into enough cane alcohol to get every adult in the village drunk for several days. He’d paddled like a demon to the Peruvian military outpost (consisting of one shack, two soldiers) and brought back a huge jug of the extremely potent local brew.
I didn’t mind being laughed at — that was nothing new — but I felt guilty. I had corrupted this capital-free village with my measly buck. I was the snake in Rousseau’s garden.
It became apparent why the kids had clustered around me. They needed me. Someone had to care for them while their parents lolled about, bathed in tears of mirth. No mean drunks here, just comedians.
The adults were on their drunken sabbatical for several days. I got used to living with a dozen kids. I felt responsible for them and they were very affectionate with me. I developed mothering skills I didn’t know I had. I told them children’s stories in a language they didn’t speak. I cuddled the little ones and made a bed for them in my hammock. I cooked odd stews of dried Pirarucú (delicious fresh water fish) and smoked monkey meat. Together we washed our clothes in the river from log rafts. They showed me where it was safe to swim. We splashed and dived and painted our bodies with green-grey clay from the riverbanks. My dreams of heading toward Brazil had drifted away. I forgot my downstream quest.
By this time the adults had exhausted their alcohol. They were sober and back on track, but the kids still stayed overnight and hung out with me during the day. Lubina walked about in my over-sized clothes and looked like Minnie Mouse strutting around with a pair of my high heels on her tiny feet. I had become fond of her and I had fantasies of bringing her home with me.
Then, a military seaplane landed in front of our village. Suddenly, there was transportation available and I had to decide quickly if I wanted to accept an offer of a ride. The pilot was shocked to find an American woman in such a remote outpost and felt obligated to airlift me to Iquitos.
I hurriedly packed and in the hubbub of an abrupt departure, I didn’t feel the tearing sense of leaving the children behind until the plane was circling over the village and I knew I would never be there again.
The jungle is amazing from overhead. River tributaries twist like Shiva’s arms through the green tangle. So much water, so much growth. So far away. I hear that the Rio Napo has been destroyed by oil spills over the last decade. Lubina and the children of Pantoja are adults now. I wonder where they live if they can live there no longer.
Lisa Alpine is the author of Dance Life: Movin’ & Groovin’ Around the Globe , Wild Life: Travel Adventures of a Worldly Woman , and Exotic Life: Travel Tales of an Adventurous Woman . Alpine is co-author of Wild Writing Women: Stories of World Travel and Self-Publishing Boot Camp Workbook: Ten Steps to Self-Publishing Success,
Read her monthly online magazine about travel, dance, writing, culture, and inspiration at https://www.lisaalpine.com
