Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
“No.” Rick smiled ruefully. “I've probably only seen fifty hectares of the place.”
The highlight of our walk through Rick's rainforest was a magnificent tauari tree. Its
base spread out along the ground in huge triangular fins that embraced cavernous spaces
perhaps twenty feet tall. It wasn't a tree so much as a group of searching, wooden walls
that had come together to build a minaret.
Rick stared up at it. “As you can see here, this thing is like an art piece,” he said. “Thou-
sands of trees like this have been cut. Millions, probably. Tauari is a commercial species.
Most of it went to France. For some reason they love it. Europeans love tauari.”
With his fist, he pounded on one of the giant, fin-like roots. It made a deep, thudding
reverberation.
It was a spectacular tree, mystifying in its beauty. And yet, standing under it there in the
jungle, I saw that I would have to stop fighting a realization that had been dogging me the
whole trip: a rainforest, however fascinating, is still just a forest.
This is not as vapid an observation as it sounds. The legend of the
jungle
is so powerful,
and so laden with the importance of biodiversity and the lungs-of-the-planet thing, that
we forget that an Amazonian rainforest has an awful lot in common with a regular North
American forest. To wit: it is a forest. Yet the Amazon of our dreams persists—a place
overgrown with mythology and legend, with humid stories of explorers and murky tales of
pre-contact tribes. You almost expect it to be made of jade.
This is true even when the mythology is negative. Werner Herzog, in a wonderful in-
terview during the making of his movie
Fitzcarraldo,
proclaimed that the jungle was full
of “misery,” that the birds cried out not in song but in pain, that the Amazon rainforest
was a world of obscenity and horror. But in this, Herzog was being no less mawkish than
Kathleen Turner in her breathy search for a giant emerald in
Romancing the Stone
—not to
mention Michael Jackson in his
Earth Song.
Then there's James Cameron's
Avatar,
the ul-
timate expression of jungle-as-magical-place, driven by a story so painfully condescending
to its forest-dwellers that he could get away with it only in science fiction.
In these cinematic Amazons, sunlight must always filter seductively, a leopard or a giant
spider—or a fetching blue alien with breasts—must be around every bend, and every step
on the path must be won with a machete slashed through the succulent fronds of something
greener-than-green. Poison darts fly unceasingly from blowguns, leeches latch instantly
onto legs and bellies. And piranhas, of course—always piranhas—wait for the dip of an
unwise toe in the river. It's not just a jungle. It's Eden with some danger thrown in.
Maybe other parts of the Amazon are like that, but around here, it was primarily a forest.
It had trees, and leaves, and dirt, and animals. And in this case, it had an owner. Most im-
