Bill Belleville

These are the Kaieteur Falls, named for a long-gone Patamonas chief who, by legend, paddled himself in a dugout over the scarp to win the favor of the gods in a war against the ferocious Caribs. It worked.

My guide is Mike Phang, half-Arawak and half-Carib; he is the warden in charge of the land protecting these falls. We step across vast crevices in the terrain, dodge hanging lianas and spot carnivorous plants, waist-high termite mounds and a rare orange bird with a bit of a Mohawk, the Guyanese “Cock-of-the-Walk.” It’s no wonder Arthur Conan Doyle’s fictional “Lost World,” with its time-stuck ape men and dinosaurs, was set on Mount Roraima, not far to the west. Or that Sir Walter Raleigh once came looking for El Dorado, the city of gold. It still seems as if almost anything could be hidden here.

Hidden from everyone but Mike. “You are having the bromeliads here, 6 meters [20 feet] high,” he says. “You are having the jaguar, the jaguarundi, the puma. You are having the howler monkey.” All of this is delivered in a stoic monotone, not unlike that I have heard from other Amerindians — the Seminoles back in Florida, the Cocama in the Peruvian Amazon. It resonates with a quiet confidence, the emotional knowledge of place locked timelessly inside each word. “We are also having the bushmaster snake,” says Mike. “Step carefully.”

A delicate plant the size of a tree looms, nurtured by the vapor plume of the falls. “Look deep into this bromeliad and you will see the golden frog. It lives nowhere else. In its skin is a compound … 150 times as powerful as cocaine.” A Scot in our small ragtag group — head shaved clean and an accent like Sean Connery’s — squats down, puts his head into the immense green leaves and sniffs.

We have come here from Georgetown, the capital of Guyana on the northeast coast of South America, bouncing down on a dirt strip l40 miles inland via Trans Guyana Airlines. The lone pilot is German; the other passengers are the frog-sniffing Brit, his three mates and a Dutchman from Aruba. Guyana is a strange, strange place — part Caribbean, part Amazonian. It doesn’t much court visitors and I am thinking that our small white group — individually gathered from around Georgetown earlier this morning by a minivan — may be the country’s entire tourism quota for the week.

With a long colonial history that ended abruptly when the British left in 1966, Guyana is not quite sure of its legacy. It is the only English-speaking country in Latin America. Beyond that, I’m uncertain about what unites its people, nearly 90 percent of whom are East Indian-African and live on the coast. The interior forest and mountains and vast savannas are the territory of its nine Amerindian nations. There is wealth here, everyone is certain, in lumbering and mining. But no one is yet sure how much can be taken before it runs out.

Folks like Mike Phang sense there is also an interest by foreigners in his country’s virgin environment, so he will make a go of it as a warden for now. The traditional Amerindian knowledge of the bush makes it a natural for him. Gold and diamond mining paid much better, Mike tells me, but he got tired of being robbed. “Bandits are the only thing that moves fast in this country,” says Mike, a slight smile revealing the pleasure in his quiet joke. Mike was robbed nine times; twice, he shot and killed his assailants. But Guyana is a desperate country, and they kept coming.

Tomorrow, I will begin a weeklong journey that will take me even farther into this odd heart of darkness. It will eventually lead me to a rain forest reserve called Iwokrama — literally, a “place of refuge.” It is a million-acre tract tucked away between the Akaiwanna and the Iwokrama mountains. Set aside by the Guyanese government in the early 1990s, its raison d’jtre is to preserve a massive oxygen-pumping terrain that helps abate the world’s increasingly abundant carbon dioxide load, relieving global warming. I am, well, perplexed that a country like Guyana would attempt something this visionary.

After all, consider Georgetown: It is a place of once-grand cricket stadiums and colonial mansions gone to seed, wood fires scenting the air like incense and bamboo poles flying Hindu spirit flags. The U.S. State Department warns about violence against “people of wealth” in the streets, i.e. tourists. After my arrival last night, I read two very curious stories in the local Stabroek News: “Ricky Chamatalk, 24, died when, riding his motorcycle downtown without a helmet, he collided with a cow.” And more disturbingly: “Sean Warde, 25, died after being chopped about the body by two men with cutlasses, at whom he had allegedly thrown a grenade.” A cutlass, a grenade, an immobile cow — all seem so much more urgent than global warming.

But, as I was told, that was the frontier capital. The interior would be different, rural and friendly. Just watch for the bushmasters and take your anti-malaria pills, and you’d do just fine.

A place of refuge could be a very good thing, indeed — especially for a nature-minded guy like myself adrift in an industrialized world bereft of connection — and I looked forward to finally staking out some space in it. Beyond the oxygen benefit, large, undisturbed chunks of jungle like this support megafauna that is rare elsewhere — the tapir, the jaguar, the giant otter, the harpy eagle. Discovery still seems possible here, not by virtue of a remote-control device but by one’s own wits. For me, that is El Dorado enough.

For now, the pre-Cambrian brink awaits. Mike and I shuffle out to its lip. There are no guardrails or warning signs, and we step across a gaping fissure in the rock, graphically leaving solid ground behind. “Years ago,” says Mike, “that crack was so small you couldn’t get your finger in it.” Just several feet away, the shallow Potaro begins its long blackwater cascade down into the gorge.

At the bottom, the fallen river swirls furiously like a washing machine, sending up vapor that creates a rainbow in the bright tropical sun. Its energy is potent, producing a muffled echo of thunder that resonates against my skin like sensory riffles. My hair seems to be standing on end, but I am not sure if it is from the upwelling charge or the realization that one giant step would put me over the edge.

“On Feb. 4,” says Mike, with no preamble, “four white peccaries went over these falls.” Then, without further explanation, he turns and walks back over the crevice to solid ground.

- – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – -

Shouldering my single bag and backpack at dawn, I trudge out to the tarmac of the Ogle Aerodome in Georgetown to catch a flight to the Mikushi village of Annai. The plane, a boxy prop locals call the “Flying Coffin,” looks like a miniature Spruce Goose. My fellow passengers are mostly Brazilians, headed deeper into their own country. As I board through a port in the tail, a woman hands me a paper box of apple juice and what appears to be a mustard sandwich, crust trimmed off and sealed in plastic wrap.

Up we go, making a U-turn over the Caribbean Sea, which is clouded brown by sediment here, and sealed like my sandwich from Georgetown by a massive dike. The Dutch, who settled Georgetown in the 1600s, built the first seawall of wood. Now reinforced with concrete, it opens only to drain the broad Demerara River, an aquatic highway that winds inland, beyond the wooden stilt homes and shops of the capital and past a wafflelike grid of cane fields.

We fly into a cloud bank, and when we emerge barely a minute later, there is nothing but green, resplendently wild green, veined by rivers and punctuated with waterfalls. We are squarely atop the equatorial forest and swamp now, the basin between where the Orinoco and the Amazon join with the sea.

Guyana is in the middle of the thick swatch of forest called the Guiana Shield that stretches across the northern rim of South America. It holds the best of what is left of the tropical forest of this continent: In Guyana, there are 22 forested acres for each person; in Brazil, where the population is taking increasingly larger slash-and-burn whacks out of the forest, the ratio is only 3 to 1.

Another hour puts us over the Rupununi, the vast grassy savanna. Before Guyanese Brahmans lost their cachet in the world beef market, Mikushi cowboys tended cattle on this tropical range. Below, the village of Annai sprawls at the cusp of the Rupununi and Kanuku mountains. The Brazilian border is only 25 miles to the west, on the other side of the Ireng River. Down we go onto a narrow strip, dropping like a carnival ride.

As soon as we screech to a stop, there is much shouting. A Canadian photographer and I, the only passengers at this destination, are urged to pick up our bags and quickly exit through the rear. The pilot keeps his motor revved, and as soon as we are clear of the plane, it shoots away from us, leaving us in the prop wash with Colin Edwards, an expat Brit. “Welcome to the Rupununi,” says Colin, stocky, barefoot and convivial. “Breakfast is ready.”

Annai, a large village of 700 with dwellings of wattle-and-daub and thatched palm, is on one side of the strip, and Colin’s Rock View Lodge is on the other. We head to the kitchen, inside a ramshackle two-story stucco ranch house in a grove of mango trees, and settle in. Colin came to South America 30 years ago as a volunteer for the U.K.’s version of the Peace Corps, the VSO, and never left. Fluent in Portuguese from his years in Brazil, he has worked as an agronomist, a gold miner and a construction engineer (on contract, he helped build the airstrip at Jonestown for the cult that later perished in Jim Jones’ Kool-Aid massacre).

Now, by leasing this 20-acre ranch, he is trying his hand at ecotourism. “It is a pet hobby that brings together everything I have come to love about the place,” explains Colin. “The culture, the art, the frontier. I do a few hires with the Bedford (four-wheel-drive) truck and Land Rover, run the Dakota bar next door and am also the agent for the airline that flew you here.”

I sit on a bench behind a long wooden table full of pitchers of coconut milk, passion fruit juice and hot Brazilian coffee. Here, I meet Velda, Colin’s Mikushi wife, three of his eight kids and Shawndell, Velda’s 21-year-old younger sister. Shawndell, a quiet beauty in braids, looks as if she stepped out of an old Mathew Brady Indian portrait. While Shawndell helps serve, the line between employee and relative is blurred. We feast on platters of eggs, pancakes, wild cucumbers, rice and hot bread just taken from a clay kiln in the corner of the room. By the time we are finished, most of Colin’s great extended family has either joined us at the table or passed through with a friendly greeting.

Wooden shutters and doors are thrown open, and outside in the golden morning light, I can see a portion of the lush orchard — cashew, lemon, guava and almond trees — and garden that feed family and guests. Fenced enclosures nearby hold local critters — orphaned or injured — that are being nursed to health: a giant anteater, a Brazilian tapir, capybaras and spider monkeys. While most guests so far have been scientists going to and from nearby Iwokrama, Colin is optimistic that those few hardy tourists who enjoy tropical wilderness and solitude will eventually find their way here. But only a few. “I am concerned it doesn’t get out of hand,” he says. “There is something peculiar and wonderful about it here — a certain easy rapport. We would like to keep it that way.”

Tomorrow, we will travel to Surama, a smaller village at the edge of the rain forest and, from there, will venture up the wild Burro Burro River in a wooden longboat with local Mikushi as guides. In preparation, I join Colin in the living room, where he is eager to show me his collection of vintage travel-adventure books from the last century, recounting astonishing exploits of the Brits who first ventured into what they knew then as “the Guianas.”

On the walls, there is the skin of a 12-foot-long anaconda — “a small one,” says Colin — artistically incised calabash gourds, self-entwining Amerindian sculptures from the latex of the bulletwood tree, a small rack of bush deer antlers, the basketlike nest of an orapendula bird. A chameleon clamps to one wall on suckered feet; a swallow zooms overhead. In the corner is a large green-felt-covered card table, where in the evenings one can sit in a chair of woven liana and wood with a cold Banks beer and a plate of homegrown peanuts and have real conversation — for that is what one does in such a place as the low-voltage lights dim and brighten at the whim of the jerry-rigged generator.

“This is fascinating!” says Colin, effusively pulling “Waterton’s Wanderings in South America” from a shelf and thumbing through its yellowed pages. “In 1812, the explorer Charles Waterman came here and wrote of Surama. It was famous in the region, along with Annai, for the excellent poison it made — curare. They tipped their arrows and spears with it, still do, and go into the bush and hunt anything that moves … . You know, there’s so much about this place that hasn’t changed.”

- – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – -

Morning comes with the distant scream of monkeys. I jolt awake inside the mosquito net canopy over my bed. The generators are off and a mild breeze wafts through the windows, with no glass or screen to obstruct it. From inside the netting, reality seems gauzy, diffuse. I can smell coffee and warm bread from the nearby kitchen.

After breakfast, we load into a battered, mud-splattered Land Rover, orange foam bursting out of the dashboard, for the hour-and-a-half trip to Surama, traveling over a red clay strip known only as the Road. The Road is a failed attempt by the Brazilian government to build a highway from its interior, through Guyana to the Caribbean ports. You can reach Georgetown, 200 miles away, in 12 hours over the Road from here, but only in the dry weather. With two wet seasons — a long one in the winter-spring and a shorter one, the Cashew Rains, in the summer — the Road is often a quagmire. “You can go halfway by vehicle and halfway by dugout then,” explains Colin, ever enthusiastic.

We pass coconut and papaya trees ripe with fruit, grind through ruts deep enough to swallow a couple of Honda Civics and watch as tegus — 2-foot-long carnivorous lizards — scuttle across our path. Three boys with vine-woven reels and stick poles fish in a ravine. A barefoot man with a machete saunters by on horseback. There is no other traffic. Then we enter the rain forest, bucking and heaving through troughs of mud. The low scrub turns into towering jungle walls studded with red and yellow heliconia. “Adventure travel is going through the jungle in a vehicle without brakes,” says Colin, always cheerful.

Surama is in a clearing just ahead, a modest collection of thatch and wood homes, banana and cassava plants, dark red chickens and domestic peccaries roaming free. Two larger buildings are set aside as the school (“Be Regular Punctual” written on the side) and the clinic. Barefoot Mikushi children surround us, laughing and smiling. Everyone is in Western dress, but otherwise the scene might be lifted out of another century. We pile out and walk with them to a behab, a sort of open roundhouse, which serves as the village meeting center. It has started raining. “If the rain is coming from the south, from the Amazon, it will be heavy,” says Colin.

An official ceremony has been planned. Kamesh, the schoolmaster, introduces the children, who welcome me with two songs that they sing first in English and then in Mikushi (“Surama sitting in a valley/Surama you make me so happy/Brown-skinned people everywhere/Friendliness is there”). They are holding hands and swaying, their voices ineffably sweet and winsome.

All of nature seems to offer utility, myth or solace for the Mikushi. For instance, the Mutu (the blue-capped tanager) is burned and its ashes rubbed on the skin to relieve a sprain; the Korokoro (the green ibis) is seen as a barometer of rains; if you mock the Arawo (the long-tailed potoo) by imitating its cry, your hammock strings will burst. Some 30 species of ants are used, alternately, to make the bones of babies strong, to cause pari kari (an alcoholic cassava drink) to ferment, to roust a lazy man to work.

The elected village “captain,” Sydney Allicott — brother-in-law of Colin — stands for his official greeting. Outsiders are welcome here, says Sydney, choosing his words slowly and deliberately. “It is another means of educating our people to the situation in other countries — sometimes you tend to believe the whole world is like this.” And then, as if to shatter any shards of ethnocentricity I might have remaining: “Sometimes, visitors bring photographs and you see the concrete jungles and understand what can happen to a place when the people forget what is important.”

I ask Sydney what the kids do to amuse themselves, here in this non-Nintendo world. “They play … games. The fruit game — one child will be the fruit, maybe a soursop, and he ripens. When he ripens, his voice changes and everyone runs and hides. If you are found, then you must be the fruit.”

With that, we’re off into the rain, which is now falling in thick sheets. Sydney, his brother Lionel and Kamesh squeeze into the Land Rover with us and the day suddenly seems more festive as we head deeper into the forest, the soggy trail gradually leading us down inside a dark corridor of jungle. “In the rainy season, this trail would be underwater,” says Colin. Soon, a narrow stretch of brown water appears. It is Taramu Creek and it will lead us to the Burro Burro. On the bank is a long wooden boat with a motor. We pull the boat into the creek, climb aboard and head upstream.

Almost immediately, a long silvery fish that looks like a small barracuda jumps into the boat. “Fox fish,” says Sydney, admiring its sharp teeth. Later, a silver dollar — an aquarium fish back in America — follows suit, rocketing into my wet shirt and flopping about in the few inches of water in the hull. “Piru [piranha] in the river too,” says Sydney. “Maybe we will catch one.”

In addition to a cooler full of curry-flavored noodles and cassava, Colin has packed wild limes, a bottle of El Dorado rum and a mahogany-colored bow with three arrows, each tipped with a slightly different, razor-sharp metal edge. “One is for fish, one is for birds and the other … for anything larger,” explains Colin, pouring himself a healthy dose of rum. If Guyana has itself been creolized — created from a racial and cultural stew — this Brit expat has been as thoroughly transformed as anyone. Peppering his conversation with Portuguese and Mikushi, he sits barefoot, one arm around Velda, rain soaked and happy here at the edge of the Lost World, adrift somewhere between “Swiss Family Robinson” and “Lord Jim.”

Upriver on the Burro Burro we go for nearly two hours, in and out of the Cashew Rains, past keel-billed toucans and macaws, tapir wallows and a tall ceiba tree with the hollow of a harpy eagle. A flock of green parakeets passes overhead and gigantic kingfishers dive and squawk. We have passed effortlessly through one set of rapids, but another array is just ahead, churning and spitting angrily. Instead of trying to run them, we wedge in between a slew of giant black boulders. By now, we are as ragged as wet dogs. And then, the glorious tropical sun returns and all is again right with the world. I climb from the boat onto a rock the size of a small house, welcoming the chance to stretch my legs. Upstream, through the narrow foliage corridor, the Akaiwanna Mountains materialize from the steamy mist. Howler monkeys bellow off in the distance. “Keep your eye out for a jaguar,” says Colin.

We will lunch on the rocks and then drift back, we hope, by dusk. Noodles, tiny fig bananas and rum appear — along with thin sandwiches again inexplicably filled with mustard. By the time we cast off, our crew is pleasantly buzzed. The river has swollen 2 to 3 feet higher with the rains, and the modest rapids we crossed with ease are now raging. We bounce through them, ricocheting off submerged rocks and fallen trees. My adrenalin is peaking, but no one else seems terribly concerned. Somewhere in here, we lose the mahogany-colored bow.

“My Gawwd,” says Colin, a bit later. “Where is the bow?”

“Fell in the water,” says Velda, who seems quite amused by this.

“Gone overboard,” says Kamesh, equally humored by it.

“The water. My Gawwd. The water. Oh my. The bow is forever lost.”

- – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – -

I am headed finally to Iwokrama today. Down the Road I go again, this time in a more modern Land Cruiser with brakes, traveling an hour and a half more beyond Surama, all the way to the edge of the massive Essequibo River. Both the vehicle and the East Indian driver are from Iwokrama, funded by a kettle of international environmental aid monies. We pass colorful land tortoises, more tegus, a Mikushi on a bicycle. We rumble over narrow bridges made of fat wooden beams the size of railroad ties.

We stop to reconnoiter a particularly nefarious series of ruts, and I hear the sun bees — large bumblebee types — ringing loudly from inside the towering jungle, happy for this luminous, rain-free day. I walk to the Congo palms at the jungle edge and listen closely. Just above the ring of the sun bees comes the sweet two-note refrain of the toucan.

A modest wooden sign welcomes us to the Iwokrama Rainforest Preserve. Soon afterward, the jungle falls away to reveal the broad Essequibo. From here, I climb into another longboat for the short ride downstream to the field station of the preserve. As we approach, I notice the station is modeled on a typical Amerindian village — wooden structures with thatch roof, up on stilts for both ventilation and safety from flooding.

I stow my gear in one of the huts, take a quick look around and see a group of rangers, all Amerindians, assembled on chairs under a tent. I meet Vibert A.V. Welch, a big black-skinned man from Georgetown. Vibert, whose English is accented with a deep Caribbean-African patois, tells me how the scientists from around the world make new discoveries in this pristine landscape just about every time they look. “Iwokrama now has the best documented fauna in Guyana,” he says. Indeed, it may be ground zero for snakes and frogs. “Just in two weeks, a team of herpetologists found 11 new species.”

As for the tented rangers, they are having their bush knowledge augmented with insight about sustainable use of the forest, says Vibert. In the works is a grand vision — bioprospecting, education and training, preparation to guide the sort of tourists who will go to the ends of the earth to see rare birds and plants.

Part of the mission, Vibert tells me, is to record and catalog the complex and often mystical bush knowledge that has been passed along by oral tradition for centuries. There are, after all, some 2,000 plants in the wildly diverse Amazon Basin used by Amerindians — both medicinally and spiritually. Ironically, as ethnobotanists revel in the rich cultural-natural texture of the Guyanese interior, the government back in Georgetown is granting large mining and timber leases on indigenous land.

I climb back into a boat, this time with two Amerindians, Rodriguez Anton and Errol McBirney. We will visit some ancient petroglyphs today. Although I am nearly accustomed to the Anglicizing of local names here, I have to admit McBirney gives me a start. But both are good traveling companions, easy to smile and eager to share their local bush knowledge. Downstream on the Essequibo we go now in a smaller aluminum skiff, the Takatu, one of the field station’s official boats, a 40-horsepower Merc pushing us faster than I’ve been yet in the last week.

Errol is wearing a plaid ball cap with a Calvin Klein jeans logo, flip-flops, a khaki shirt and pants; Rodriguez, his long black hair curling over his collar, is decked out in a black cowboy hat with a miniature horseshoe emblem on the front, long pants and a long-sleeved shirt. Both are carrying machetes and hand lines for fishing. This time, there are life jackets. “Better put them on,” says Errol. “There will be rapids, I think.”

And sure enough, a set of healthy Class III rapids is thrashing just upstream, complete with standing waves. I notice that two young boys from a nearby village are riding through them in a log dugout. “They are playing,” says Errol. “Something to do.”

We run the jungle-rimmed Essequibo for nearly 40 miles, bouncing over more rapids, portaging the boat at the edge of others, crossing water that boils, eddies and swirls. The river mysteriously narrows and widens and I realize we are zigzagging through and around islands. Little white-rumped swallows skim over the surface like jet-propelled leaves; terns with bills as big and yellow as bananas dive and chatter. “The Essequibo comes out of the Amazon somewhere,” says Rodriguez. The entire time, we see no more humans, not a single dugout.

A few white beaches rim the edges of the shore. At low water, says Errol, beaches are everywhere, including sandy shoals in the middle of the river. Most of the rapids become exposed rocks. And the water, seeping from jungle creeks, is tannic black, not brown like it is now from the recent rain.

Finally, immense round boulders rise up from the water with a thin cover of lichens, looking like giant baby heads. Beyond the baby heads, we pull over to another clutch of rocks. Both men hop out and I follow. Rodriguez bends down and traces his fingers over etchings in one rock. They are at least 3,500 years old, he says. “A fox here … a scorpion here …” I look into an opening where one boulder leans against another and see a finer glyph, a stick figure of a man, protected here from the elements for more than three millenniums.

At lower water, many glyphs can be seen, says Rodriguez. It strikes me that lots more people may have lived along this river at one time, and I wonder out loud where they went. Rodriguez looks at me briefly. “Yes,” he says, inscrutably, and then tosses out a hand line, fishing for piru for dinner.

The rain is again falling in sheets. We sit quietly in the boat and drift through the forest to the squawk of distant parrots and the howl of monkeys. I am deep in now, soaked to the skin by the Cashew Rains, but warmed with a feeling of utter security that I seldom feel back in my more efficient world. If Shawndell were here, I’d marry her and end up, years later, losing my prize mahogany-colored bow in the rapids and not caring a lick about it. “We make it back by dark,” says Errol. “I think.”

My friend Terry, an old college pal who will paddle the other end of our canoe, misses the bird altogether, not because he is obtuse, but because he lives on the opposite rim of the country and his senses are already saturated with local exotica. It will take a mighty dose of melodrama to jar him.

“Wood stork,” I say, pointing with one hand and driving us onto Interstate 4 with the other.

“Is that a rare bird?” asks Terry earnestly, and I tell him that it is. I say I am both heartened to see it and disturbed that it has ranged so far outside its natural home. Not so long ago, this bird with the head that seems fire-charred — this “iron head” — was so integral to the Glades it was considered a barometer of its health. But the Everglades are on the brink, have been for a while now. The wood stork is trying to roll with this change, ranging far outside its historic territory.

Terry is from three decades worth of my past, a fraternity brother and ex-jock, a reformed party animal like myself seeking redemption in the solitude of distant natural places. Individually, we have struggled to unravel the jumble of civilized threads to get at the nugget of ourselves buried inside. From its discovery, we have come to learn this nature offered solace, living Whitmanesque lessons in the values of singularity and tolerance.

And so Terry hikes east of Los Angeles, back into places like Death Valley and Borrego Springs and camps there. I live in Florida and kayak on any wild body of water I can find — the St. Francis Dead River, the Wekiva, the Mosquito Lagoon.

Now we are headed together to the Glades, to canoe deep into its distant western boundary in a hunt for the “Watson Place,” a pre-Columbian Calusa midden mound. It is a 40-acre composite of shell and stunted tropical foliage, a thread between us and the time-wronged desperado who once lived there.

Like the Glades and the wood stork, we too are on the brink, aging jocks ranging beyond what is safe and known. In this way, we sweep through the experiences that still lie before us, hoping to connect with something alive and vital. All we are sure of is that we have come to appreciate wilderness for the way it lays itself down on the soul.

Unlike other men who seek solace in this way, we don’t carry traditional props; we are not hunters or dapper L.L. Bean campers. I carry a set of old binoculars to watch for avi-fauna, but the truth is, beyond raptors and tropical wading birds, I’m lost unless a species appears clear and unobstructed in the scope. As for our gear, it is jerry-rigged and stuffed into duffels and garbage bags and plastic buckets. Instead of giant foil pouches of official freeze-dried camp food, I have brought noodles-in-a-cup and tins of tuna and chicken. We have granola bars that look and taste like Oreos compressed into little rectangles. I imagine Jack Kerouac, when he went up on Desolation Peak out West, might have packed like this.

But I do place a lot of significance on a compass and the correct nautical map to lead me in and out of untamed places like this. Each tiny paper squiggle, each logarithmic degree corresponds to something tangible — an oxbow or bar or tiny islet. Once ground-truthed, these coordinates can sometimes nudge the senses, linking near-meaningless geographic names to remarkable places on the landscape. Ahead in the Glades, my map promises Pavilion and Buzzard Keys, Chokoloskee and Rabbit Key Passes, Lostman’s and Chatham Rivers.

I have tucked both compass and map inside a waterproof seal-lock baggy I will carry on my lap when we finally reach our canoe. Also in the baggy is a paperback copy of Peter Matthiessen’s novel “Killing Mr. Watson.”

As I drive south on I-95, this idea amuses me, as if the immediacy of the adventure will require me to be ready at any time to understand direction, latitude and literary metaphor. But this book and its sequels is the thread that has relinked Terry and myself after all these years, something real our adult selves respond to that goes far beyond the retelling of old locker room jokes and keg party stories.

In “Watson,” “Lost Man’s River” and “Bone by Bone,” Matthiessen uses the real life and death of renegade cane-grower Ed Watson to re-create a wild place and a maverick culture special to southwest Florida. But if his books are about a vanished time, they are also about the social evolution of perception, about how the realities of a richly embroidered moment — or a mystifying personality — can be spun down into simple-minded slogans. Time has treated both the Glades and the strong, passionate man who was E.J. Watson this way, turning the magnificent Everglades into a swamp and the complex E.J. into “Bloody Watson.”

Like me, Terry had read the Matthiessen trilogy on Watson’s life and demise. Like me, he felt a kinship with Watson — a complex soul who existed far outside the monotone of local myth. The connection was profound, personal: During our jock-frat era, we were both regarded as “bad actors,” guys who might do most anything at any time. We fought in bars, we drank to the point of temporary pyschosis. We were confused, and when we both quit sports halfway through school, we became chaotic. Terry was fast and good with his fists and seldom lost a fight; I was strong and slow and punched in doors, old hardwood ones. We were considered “dangerous,” and when not being dangerous, we were dead drunk.

That was a long time ago, of course, and we had each learned a lot since then — though our old acquaintances, now businessmen and lawyers and doctors, weren’t quite convinced. I have been a writer for 25 years, choosing subjects that champion the put-upon earth and the people who care for it. Later in life, Terry decided to become a therapist. Now we laugh at the irony between our old personas and our current lives — and at the doubting frat brothers with whom we have been out of touch for years — but the truth is that, deep down, those old realities still hurt.

Certainly, Watson had been hurt, too. In “Bone,” which provides an astounding insight into how the wounds of childhood shaped the adult Watson, a young Ed finds himself at an emotional crossroads: “I knew my life had lost its purchase. The future was flying away forever, like a dark bird crossing distant woods. Not knowing which way to turn, with no one to confide in, I hurried onward …”

Terry and I hurried onward, too, but we eventually prevailed as adults — not because we were better people than Ed Watson, but because we lived in a different time. We had learned just enough about pyschology to understand the grace of forgiving ourselves.

Matthiessen confesses to having “reimagined” Ed Watson’s life. But in doing so, he admits the retelling probably “contains much more of the truth of Mr. Watson than the lurid and popularity accepted ‘facts.’” If I were honest, I would admit that searching for Mr. Watson was a way of reimagining ourselves — by visiting Watson’s still-intact nature world, we might find atonement in the complexities of our own lives.

But searching for Mr. Watson is not a walk in the woods. The Glades is a sprawling subtropical territory larger than the state of Delaware; ranger stations and interpretive boardwalks dot the outer edges, but inside, sawgrass stretches to the east, and mud-rooted mangroves to the west, leaving little dry land in between. It is, as Matthiessen has observed, a “labyrinthal wilderness,” and its sheer lack of accessibility has been the secret to keeping it so.

Or, as “Lost Man” character Speck Daniel puts it: “What the hell kind of tourist would beat his way three to four miles back up a mangrove river to take a picture of some raggedy ol’ lonesome place?”

Down we go on the notorious I-95 into Miami, the car-jacking, drug-shuttling, neon-rocker-paneled, middle-finger-in-the-air conduit, finally turning west near the Latino bustle of Calle Ocho. From here, we drive through block after block of urban landscape that barely a half century ago was fresh-water marl prairie, bristling with great fields of sawgrass. Today it is colonized by espresso shops and Santeria botanicas, 7-Elevens and Texacos hugging every available square inch.

“Man,” says Terry, shaking his head, “talk about sensory overload.” I run this gantlet for an hour until we are safely west of the city, headed out across the northern boundary of the Glades. Open space and dwarfed cypress and sawgrass command the geography now, with great white cumulus billowing overhead, fed by the wet, feral terrain. There may be two more contrary realities this close to each other somewhere else in the world, but I’m not aware of them.

We are safely atop the Tamiami Trail now — a word squeeze of “Tampa-to-Miami.” It is the road that first splayed the Glades in two when it was built, water-spitting draglines and dredges crunching their way through the limerock in the 1920s.

Water-driven, the Glades is at the mercy of the kindness of strangers upstream. And this trail we are driving serves as a massive dam across it. The lazy but deliberate sheet flow of water that once swept down across southern Florida from just below Orlando is now squeezed under us through a series of mechanical gates, giant erector set-like devices built for flood control. Man plays God with the upland rainfall and water now, and as gods go, he has proved to be a baleful, selfish sort, a minor Old Testament deity with more ambition than wisdom.

Soon, we arrive at SR 29, the narrow southerly road that trails past “Panther Crossing” signs and dead-ends 6 miles south in Everglades City, the fishing village now being transformed into a RV tourist mecca on the far western tip of the park. The freshwater sweeping down from the easterly sawgrass meadows meets the coastal mangrove buffer a few miles inland from here. Everglades City is the jumping-off point for our quest.

Clinging to shards of a hard-scrabble pioneer culture still tended by a handful of stone crabbers and mullet fishermen, this little town on the edge of the park now teeters precariously towards a fun-house-mirror version of “ecotourism.” Anything alive, it seems, is fair game: Airboat rides and canned “Safaris” and “Jungle Boat Tours” (Gators Guaranteed!) are everywhere, as are boutique-like souvenir shops painted peach and green, with incongruous names like “Jungle Erv’s.” The natural rhythm — of place and people — has been squeezed and massaged and marketed in a heavy-handed attempt to catch up to the trendiness that has homogenized much of Florida’s coast.

As I watch a gaggle of tourists board an air-conditioned park service pontoon boat for a guided excursion onto Chokoloskee Bay, my only thought is how white and spanking clean everyone is. The outlaw plume hunters and gator poachers, turtlers and contraband smugglers — the bona fide heirs to the Watson legend and time — have died, trickled away, tried to grow up. “Lost Man,” set in the past, foretells this gentrification: “Beaten flat, [it] would disappear beneath the tar and concrete, the tourist courts and house trailers, the noisy cars of vacationers with their red faces, sun hats, candy-colored clothes.”

We are eager to get to the former Watson homesite as soon as we can. But it is now late in the day. Faced with spending a night in a motel here or paying an outfitter to ferry us and our canoe back to the old Watson mound by motorboat, we choose the later, planning to use the time saved to more thoroughly explore the creeks and sloughs of the back country on our five-day paddle back.

- – - – - – - – - – - -

A slight young man named Justin, wearing rubber white fisherman’s boots, has brought us to the threshold of the Watson site in his go-fast fiberglass outboard, expertly twisting and turning the wheel behind the center console to deliver us through the lookalike puzzle of mangrove islands and tidal rivers.

Justin’s new girlfriend has come along for the ride, and on our trip here, I overhear her asking him who this Watson was. Either Justin has not read the Matthiessen books or he doesn’t feel like re-creating the complexities of them. He gives her the shorthand folk version, the one locals have been giving to tourists for years. “He was a guy who lived back up here and grew cane — and when it came time to pay his hired help, he would kill them instead.”

The “Watson Place” is one of several dozen primitive campsites in this odd park; most are dock-like “chickees” built where there is simply no dry land to be found. But a few, like this one, are high mounds of shell and bone constructed first by the Calusas and later colonized by farmers, fishermen and assorted renegades. It arises from the dark tannin of the Chatham River like a high natural bluff, fringed at one edge with a thick cover of snake plants — a hardy, spiky ornamental that settlers cultivated in their yards in Florida a century and more ago. It is an odd relief, back here in this mud-driven monoculture of red and black mangrove, an exotic harbinger of other surprises yet to come.

It is 4:30 p.m. and the early spring sun is dipping down towards the top of the tall black mangroves just across the Chatham River, and Justin is anxious to get back to the marina at Everglades City before dark. We quickly unload our canoe and supplies on a narrow wooden dock. The ferocious salt water marsh mosquitoes — “swamp angels” to the settlers — seem to be marshaling their forces for sundown; their humming from back in the tangle of truncated tropical jungle at the edge of the clearing produces a low-grade static. It is early April, at the wane of an El Niño winter in which a few mildly colder months have barely kept a lid on the hatch of blood-sucking insects. We are as concerned about getting our mosquito-flapped tents set up as Justin is to get home to his warm bed.

As Terry and I sort through our pile of gear, Justin cranks the motor up, eases his boat away from the dock and disappears in a meringue-like froth around the corner of Chatham Bend. I think of Ed Watson’s old gasoline launch, the “Brave,” and how he puttered slowly down the Chatham to Chokoloskee Island in it one last time on Oct. 24, 1910, the distinctive pop-pop-pop of the ancient motor announcing his arrival to a gathering mob of islanders.

Finally alone now, we establish priorities: First, we douse ourselves with repellent, then we hurry to set up camp in the scant half-acre or so of open, weedy land. At the clearing’s edge, an entangled jungle has colonized the rest of the 40-acre mound, slender trunks and boughs of native gumbo limbo and machineel gridded together like spider webs, along with lime and guava and avocado left from the Watson era, all as feral now as a herd of wild hogs.

After I work up a light sweat assembling my tent, I stop and look around, letting the reality of being atop the former Watson homestead settle in. The quiet back here is complete, so full it seems to have measurable weight.

At the edge of the Chatham River, several large red mangroves, bow-like roots arching into the oyster shell mud, frame the water. The sun dips down below them to the west, and Terry asks, “You think ol’ Ed trimmed back those mangroves to give him a good view of the sunset?” and I figure he probably did.

This Watson Place is the largest shell mound for miles in any direction. The Calusas shucked oysters and clams here, discarded bones from bear and panther, manatee and deer for at least 2,000 years. Spiritually complex and savvy to nature, they understood its power — especially the water-thrashing energy of tropical hurricanes — and did all they could to literally rise above it.

In his time, Ed Watson painstakingly hauled timber in by boat to build a substantial two-story frame farm house here, flanking it with flowering red royal poinciana trees. It was said to be the finest of its type inside the great uncivilized wash between Ft. Myers and Key West. After Watson’s death, the home was used by hunters and fishermen and squatters. Hurricane Donna damaged the house in 1960, and the park service — looking for any excuse to clear old private structures from public land — razed it soon afterwards,

I ask Terry if he’s ready to look for Ed’s homesite in the jungle, and he says he is. It is Friday night now, a weekend evening in the middle of the Everglades, darkness coming fast. A large, unseen gator bellows out a mating call from the edge of the Chatham — or perhaps it is a territorial warning. I can’t imagine being in a place more removed from the superfluous collegiate atmosphere under which Terry and I met. He must think the same of me, for we both exist far outside the social convention that first bound us.

Off we go on a narrow trail back into the wall of stunted tropical foliage, ducking under low branches. Terry has on long pants and a T-shirt sporting an ET-like extraterrestrial, a large Bowie-type knife strapped to his belt. I am in jeans and T-shirt, wearing a baseball cap that reads “Jung.” Under the thick canopy back here, the sun barely penetrates — by day, it is sepia-tinted; in the early evening, it is downright gloomy. At the edge of the trail lies a skull and skeleton, a small mammal of some sort, about the size of a raccoon, like the wild-eyed coons I have been seeing clattering about on the bow roots, dark stripes bleached almost white by salt and sun.

We are in the midst of the insect static now, and despite our repellent, the swamp angels blanket us — hanging on for dear life, waiting for the chemical to wear off. Settlers, like Watson, virtually lived in the black smoke of smudge pots, which they kept burning day and night; when they had window screens, they rubbed crankcase oil on them to keep the insects from smothering the grid.

Just off the trail, I see what looks like knee-high concrete boundary markers, scattered haphazardly. I look closer and realize they are the original foundations Watson once built his fine house upon, raising it up a couple feet for ventilation. They are made of a tabby, crushed limerock and shells of the sort the Calusas left behind. From the elegant trunks of the gumbo limbo trees, tissue-thin patches of red-amber bark curl like the skin of a sunburnt tourist, pineapple-like bromeliads tucked away in the crooks.

Just when the buzzing seems enough to drive us mad, I notice a mysterious structure peeking out from the thick jungle just ahead. It is made of the same tabby material as the foundations, except it is rectangular, as large as a room-sized funeral vault. The park service has built a wooden cap atop it to keep people and animals from falling in. “It’s Ed’s cistern,” I say, “where he gathered rainwater.” Weathered by a century of tropical heat and rain, the tabby walls look more like the sides of an ancient Spanish mission. A gumbo limbo, far bigger than any of the others, grows from a corner of the cistern, happy for the fresh water still inside. Nearby, Ed and his family slept and dreamed, and I wonder, what of?

The swamp angels, perhaps a mutant breed, are starting to bite now, and we move as fast as we can back to our camp. I fire up my gas lantern, and as I do, an easy breeze picks up from the Chatham, enough to hold the insects at bay. We concoct a dinner swill over a one-burner stove, and as we eat, the scarlet sky turns gray, then full black. Fireflies, a rarity in Chem-Lawned Florida nowadays, dart the edge of the jungle with their green-blue light.

I look overhead to see Venus hanging just under the sliver of new moon; minutes later, the sky is as full of stars and constellations as any I have ever seen. I turn down the lantern and Terry and I sit in silence, watching meteors streak through the darkness like distant flares, as if underscoring our own sense of awe. From the Chatham, mullet leap and splash, joyous ghosts water-skipping in the night.

It is too warm for a sleeping bag, so when I crawl into my tent, I lie on top of the bag, using it as a mattress. Above, the bright stars burn a soft glow through the thin fabric. From the river, I hear a deep human-like exhalation, the sound of a bottlenose dolphin surfacing to blow. From back up the trail, a chuck-will’s-widow calls its own name over and over, waiting for an answer that doesn’t come. Everywhere, unseen critters rustle and gurgle in the isolation of the Everglades darkness. Instead of distressing me, this has a remarkably calming effect, as if the mound itself is exuding the timeless exhalations of all who have come here before me, the Calusas, the renegades, Ed Watson. And now, into the collective dreams of the mound I also go.

The new morning is fresh, dew on the tent and the wild grass in the clearing. After a quick breakfast, we walk the edge of the jungle, find what must have been a farm plow in the weeds, metal wheels dark red with rust. A few yards in, we discover the frame of an old truck, rubber and wood long gone. Terry takes my photograph sitting on it. Out near the shell-encrusted shore of the river, we see the 150-gallon iron kettle where Watson rendered down his cane, still mounted inside a waist-high concrete and brick pedestal. Instead of cane syrup, the kettle holds stagnant rainwater, green now with algae, tadpoles swirling back and forth just under the surface. I run my hand on the concrete rimming the kettle, realize someone once took the trouble to round and smooth the edges, a remarkable act of civilization in such a place.

Watson, as Matthiessen wisely guessed, was ambitious, a person who cared about how the world was ordered around him. He was, after all, the only white man to live on this mound more than a year or two — farming it for nearly two decades before he was killed in 1910. I reach down to the ground, pick up a piece of metal, maybe a ladle, iron corroded beyond recognition. Watson’s presence here is nearly palatable: I think of him laying down this tool 90 years ago on the edge of the smooth concrete rim, going down to Chokoloskee to take care of business, just for the afternoon.

We have spent three days here now, using the Watson mound as a base to explore local waters, seguing up into tight canopied creeks, including one that wasn’t even on our map. Once back there, we paddled for almost a mile, until the tide ebbed finally out from under us, reshaping our path into an impassable slough of foliage and roots. Stoic, we rested, drank tepid water and ate granola bars, listened to the coon oysters spit, watched the mangrove crabs nervously scuttle over the mud like black mice. Terry, gracious, named the creek Belleville. From there, I saw my first swallowtail kite of the season, newly arrived from Brazil, joining the frigates soaring overhead like untethered origami. In three days, we have encountered only five other boats, and all were fishermen hunkered down, coming to or going from Florida Bay.

Each night on the mound, the chuck-will’s-widow has sung his sweet sad song, a four-note serenade of all he has ever seen and can’t fully say, and the stars have fallen, inexorably marking mortal time. One evening, I slept next to the water and Venus rose under a crescent moon, setting down a trail of pale light that connected me to it, a planet too distant to imagine, yet able to touch me in these Everglades.

Now, with our canoe loaded to the gunnels, we are pushing away from the mound one last time for our two-day paddle back to Chokoloskee and Everglades City. Terry began to sketch and paint several years ago, waiting for each image to “push” its way out, allowing his unseen self to become less so on paper, healing old wounds. I try to do much of the same with words, a mechanism to remind me of what I have experienced. And now, in our coming back together after all this time, we grasp onto the tangible around us, discuss it with great joy, and then let it sink back into ourselves, waiting to see what it will finally reveal.

Upstream we go on this fine river, one eye on the tree line and the sky above, the other on the map and compass. Mangroves surround us. From a distance, they seem like a diminutive northern forest, but up close, the land under them is ephemeral, water and detritus-fueled mud, rich nursery grounds for the same critters — redfish, trout, snook, tarpon — the fishermen hunt. Neither fully land nor water, this place has long claimed a hold on the imagination of visitors, spooking them with its mystique.

The early Spanish conquistadors, at once superstitious and brutal, first charted this territory as La Laguna de la Espirtus Santus, the Lagoon of the Sacred Spirit. As we bear down today against a building wind and outgoing tide, I think of this place in that way, a terrain with a pulse and a heart, able to breathe. Right now, its breath is sun-warmed mangrove leaves and sea purslane, a dusky perfume of salt and chlorophyll and sap.

Up the Chatham we go, following the more narrow branch that meanders to the west, once almost running aground on a shoal that mysteriously appears in the middle of the river where eight feet of water should be. Instead of working our way north through Last Huston and Huston bays, we sneak around the lee sides of mangrove islands, crouching as close to shore as we can get to avoid the wind-driven thrash of the waves that will pile up in two-foot-high whitecaps. Sometimes the water is so clear we can see blue crabs scuttling across the seagrass bottom, needle fish flashing iridescent at the surface. Other times, it is soil-brown, a moving organic soup.

As I paddle, I pay careful attention to direction, to the spin of a little sliver of metal locked inside glass, gauging how the world of mangrove and marl unfolds around us, curious how it matches up to my nautical chart.

Suddenly the air is filled with sulfur-wing butterflies fresh from a new spring hatch. We paddle through them for a mile until finally they vanish as quickly as they appeared, a rain shower of butterflies. Up to the southerly forks of Huston Bay we go, and then down again into an unnamed branch leading to the Huston River. It empties us into House Hammock Bay, named for an old clan that once homesteaded here, collecting buttonwood mangrove for charcoal like Watson did, fishing and hunting.

House Hammock is barely two feet deep, and as I dip and draw my paddle it touches mud as often as not. Ospreys are nesting everywhere, young chicks just large enough to rise up and squawk now from their huge beds of twigs. Mother birds fly over us, small mullet in their talons, headed for home. In the distance, gators, their bodies as black and corrugated as large truck tires, thrash in the water and mud to flee this odd apparition, a log with two moving heads.

We spend the night on the wooden dock chickee at Sunday Bay, and then surf the rolling breakers back out of its broad lagoon. As we do, we ride an easterly wind beyond Barnes and Crooked creeks, into the lee of the shoal-filled Cross Bays where we run aground, using our paddles as poles to finally push away. From there, we skim the conflux of Hurddles Creek and the Turner River, an intersection deep enough to hold giant half-ton manatees up from Florida Bay; they frolic like giant children, fluke-like tails out of the water, bodies rolling and churning the water in some outsized mammalian ecstasy, safe at last from motorboat props. We sit at a distance and watch in quiet obeisance, then push on towards Chokoloskee under a bright tropical sun.

Once, just after a flock of white ibis fly low across the mangrove tops, I blunder somewhere off the map, getting lost as thoroughly as I have ever been. When I tell Terry of the mistake, I joke that we must be in such a state before we can ever truly be found, and he smiles and says gently, I know what you mean, bro.

Safely back on track, we finally enter Chokoloskee Bay, windswept and sparkling in the sun, the end-game in sight now. I wonder what secrets are still hiding from us. But in the end, I decide it doesn’t much matter — this lagoon of the sacred spirit and its ghosts will be here, whether I want them to be or not.

But then, there is this: I think one last time of Ed Watson and how Matthiessen treated him more generously than life ever did. And I wish the same for the Glades itself. I wish it in my heart for Terry, for me, for us all.