Biology Reference
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the curve, where the water was usually deepest. He swept the light over the surface, looking for the
faint froth that gathered on the slow deep water; the fast current over sandbars was always a dark
glassy plate.
Eventually, one by one, we returned inside and lay on our beds. Shortly after I closed my eyes,
the first sandbar grated against the bottom of the pirogues. Everyone was getting out as I put on my
headlamp. I climbed from beneath the tarp, between two fuel drums, and looked down, my light
shining through the rippling surface against red sand.
I stepped in. The river was ankle-deep. Each of us walked into the darkness in a different dir-
ection from the boat, the river so wide here that the shores were hardly visible in the beams of our
headlamps. Wisps of mist rose from the surface and the sand creaked beneath my feet as I looked
for a channel. With each step, the water turned a darker red, rusty silt and tannins clouding up and
swept away.
The current rose to my thighs, and I called back, telling the others. Briefly, I had a sense of
vertigo. Warm air blew over the river, and I turned and saw five other headlamps, each alone, mov-
ing across the gleaming dark surface, turning this way and that, mist in tendrils, distant forested
shoreline in glimpses, and above us a few faint stars penetrating the haze. The susurrus of insects
and frogs was as steady as silence.
I skirted the channel, trying to see where it passed closest to the boat, so that we knew in what
direction we should push it. Another headlamp neared, briefly blinding me, and then a hand tilted it
up, and Michael's pale hair appeared in the glow.
“This is what we do this for, this place,” he told me, speaking softly as he turned and took in the
breadth of the river, the spacious dark. “When a trip's been challenging, it's the river that makes up
for it.”
We stood side by side, at the edge of the deeper current, looking back at the boat. Lit in our
headlamps, it appeared long and ancient, like a dhow on the Indian Ocean, the hand-hewn pirogues
loaded with barrels and synthetic sisal bags.
We walked back and discussed with the others which way to push. We were all in the water,
the four boatmen shoulder to shoulder with us, Dieudonné, Gabriel, Freddy, and Médard—Miracle
Bonobo. Counting one, two, three, we shoved the boat a few feet at a time. Then we went to the
front and pivoted it toward the center of the river, across the deeper current. With half its weight
afloat, we easily slipped it from the sandbar. The boatmen fired up the outboards, and we coasted
back across the dark.
That night, we hit two other sandbars, the second not long afterward, but the third hours later,
after one in the morning. This was the shallowest. We pushed the boat in circle after circle, trying to
pivot it above deeper water as small green moths fluttered about our headlamps, their wings waxy
and transparent.
It took nearly an hour before we were afloat again. As the engines revved and we started to
move, I lifted myself over the side, between the barrels, and changed into dry shorts. I lay on my
bamboo bed and listened to the thrum, the rush of water in the narrow spaces between the three
pirogues, and then I was asleep.
The next day, as Sally and I talked, she described the sites where BCI supported the local
people, and their current project with Conservation International to create conservation concessions
in much the same way that logging companies leased timber concessions for very little. BCI had
proposed this project to the DRC government during the moratorium on new logging concessions,
