Surviving the Extremes: A Doctor's Journey to the Limits of Human Endurance (9 page)

Naturally I was prepared to maintain medical confidentiality regarding the identity of my patient, but soon realized that being part of the life cycle of a tunga was a fascinating experience for a research biologist. The news produced a stimulating academic discussion, quite a bit of anxiety—and some odd behavior around the latrine. Besides spraying the area mercilessly, we all meticulously applied bug lotion to those body parts we intended to expose, and at night extinguished our headlights to black out the target once we settled in place. Two people even developed a buddy system, accompanying each other to the latrine to take turns fanning away fanny fleas.

The tungas were a reminder (as if the crocodiles, snakes, and piranha weren’t enough) that we were in hostile surroundings. Our camp was a fort, but it provided us with only partial protection. We were subject to all the natural laws of this environment—including the weather. Though I could no longer remember what life was like without rain, Antonio told me that the season had been unusually dry and water levels were dropping. Since our remote lake was only accessible by canoe during high water, it was becoming increasingly difficult to get supplies in to us. Though I didn’t sense any threat to my survival, I was nevertheless feeling increasingly isolated from civilization. The imperatives of the jungle were closing in.

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Survival is a powerful motivator for change. Animals survive over time by adapting their bodies and their behavior to changing environmental conditions. Human beings adapt as well, but they haven’t progressed nearly as far as animals—except in brain development. In fact, so powerful and so nimble have human brains become that they hamper physical adaptation, since they have the capacity to adjust to environmental pressure by mental agility. The pressure of natural selection to bring about physical adaptation is deflected by conscious behavior modifications. Though my situation at Zancudo Cocha was not immediately life-threatening, the Amazon was becoming increasingly intimidating, and that was enough to alter behavior that until then I had thought ran deep. Learned responses fall away quickly when they are removed from the surroundings that formed them. I was about to take my first conscious step toward adaptation. It took place over a bowl of spaghetti.

In the jungle, a meal belongs to whichever species can eat it first. The spaghetti served to me one evening was covered within seconds by a swarm of tiny black insects. I would have thrown the food away except that I knew there would be no second serving. Faced with the choice of eating it or going hungry, I picked up each strand of the spaghetti, drew it through my thumb and index finger to slide off most of the bugs, then ate the strands one by one, including whatever bugs were left on them. In a small way, I was adapting to a new environment, overcoming years of cultural conditioning that seemed supremely irrelevant here. I knew that once back in New York, I would quickly return to being a fussy eater.

My mind was adapting to the jungle in subconscious ways as well. One particularly hot night I was finding it impossible to sleep in the heavy humid air inside my tent. Every breath was labored, but I was too tired to get out of my sleeping bag to zip open the tent flap for ventilation. My tent mate, luckily, was less tired, and in the pitch dark I heard him get out of his sleeping bag and unzip the zipper. To my great relief I soon felt much cooler and drifted off to sleep. I awoke
in the morning feeling refreshed, but puzzled that the tent flap was closed. My tent mate told me that the zipper noise I had heard had been him taking something from his backpack. He had never opened the tent flap.

The sound of the zipper had been enough to cool me down only because I had so completely misinterpreted it. Being convinced the flap was open had brought about the same response as actually opening it. When the mind believes something strongly enough, it can will the body to make it so. My survival instinct was beginning to stir. I was gaining command over my body, forcing on it the changes in behavior that I needed to adapt to my surroundings. Though my hardships were minor, they were enough to activate my will because I was apprehensive in this extreme environment. I had already seen the power of the human will in a seven-year-old boy with a deeply damaged hand. His injury should have generated overwhelming pain and panic, yet he remained calm and purposeful. He didn’t need to feel pain to know his situation was serious, and by suppressing the pain he had vastly increased his ability to help himself.

Several times I asked Berullio how his son was doing and told him to have the boy come to camp for a post-op follow-up. Berullio always said his son was okay, and though he would occasionally leave camp and return the next day, he never brought the boy back with him. Antonio, the boy’s grandfather, explained why. Berullio didn’t live in the same settlement with his children. Years before, he and his wife, Antonio’s daughter, had hired an outsider to help them with their farm. The farmhand ended up taking more care of the wife than the crops, and she ran off with him to the big coastal city of Guayaquil. Berullio wasn’t much interested in raising his children by himself. He moved in with a woman from another village, leaving the children to be raised by other relatives. This wasn’t the first time I had seen family problems interfere with a patient’s care, but I had never expected to find it in the Amazon.

I suggested I make a house call. In addition to being good medical practice, it would give me a chance to see more of the land and meet more of the people. Antonio didn’t think the trip necessary but readily agreed to take me. He was willing to unlock a door for me because
I was the doctoro. The trip would take a few hours. With the water level dropping, it would be difficult to go by canoe. We would have to cross the lake and then take an overland “shortcut” trail.

At sunup, I packed a few medical supplies, put sulfur powder in my underwear and socks to keep the ticks out, and applied bug lotion everywhere, though it only seems to encourage them. Antonio guided our canoe across the lake, then worked his way up a hidden channel of flooded land with trees standing in the water. The channel was green, the trees were green, even the air was green. The surroundings got narrower and gloomier as the canopy enclosed us. We scraped against the trunks of partially submerged trees whose branches were so close to the water that we had to lie flat on our backs as the canoe glided under them. Looking straight up as we slid under a branch that barely cleared the canoe, an anaconda came into view directly above my eyes. It was coiled up in a notch, sleeping peacefully. Slowly it passed over my head, giving me ample time to imagine its reaction were it to be shaken loose from its tree and suddenly awaken in the bottom of a canoe.

An anaconda is not poisonous. It kills by biting down, gripping its prey with sharp, backward-pointing teeth, then coiling itself around the victim’s chest. Each time the prey exhales, the snake tightens its grip until the animal suffocates. It then swallows the victim whole, headfirst. Anacondas can be as wide around as a tree trunk and can swallow an animal larger than itself. To open wide it will unhinge its jaws by relaxing the muscles that keep them locked together. For a really big meal, the body can enlarge as well, by expanding the ribs outward; snakes have no breastbone to hold the ribs in place. Antonio told me that he had once seen a 30-foot anaconda eat a 12-foot caiman. Even after the snake swallowed it, he could see the bulge of the crocodile within the snake’s distended body. Not one to miss an opportunity, Antonio killed the snake and went home that day with two prizes.

“So,” I declared, my imagination in overdrive, “that snake we saw could have swallowed the whole canoe, bow first, with us inside.”

Antonio shook his head no, ever patient with his pupil. “Adult anacondas don’t sleep in trees. That snake was just a baby.”

And so, I had just met another of Antonio’s neighbors, one that survives by crushing its prey. Anacondas either developed powerful constrictor muscles because they couldn’t make venom, or else once they had the muscles they no longer needed to make it. Everyone living here seems to specialize in one survival technique.

The channel ended in a mix of weeds and grass. As Antonio was tying up the canoe, he cut his finger on a razor-sharp blade of sawgrass—a small cut for which I handed him a Band-Aid. He responded by handing me some red achiote paste. I started to apply it to my face, though it seemed a little silly to become a medicine man just because I had given him a Band-Aid. He laughed and pointed to my ankles. Achiote paste has a more prosaic use than as war paint, and before we entered the forest, he wanted me to smear it around my ankles. It would work better than my sulfur powder to prevent ticks from crawling up inside my pants legs. There was still some left when I finished. Antonio smiled and pointed to my face. All the same, I put the rest in my pocket.

Hiking in the jungle always gives me the feeling that I am inside some giant organism. Trees encircle me and plants cover every spot on the ground, but there’s no sense of order: branches, vines, leaves, and stems mix chaotically, surrounding me on all sides and overhead. Tree trunks rise up, opening like giant umbrellas, their branches tightly interlocking before disappearing into the canopy above.

The morning air was cool and moist, the light dim but attentive to every variation of green. Occasional glints of sunlight speckled the ground, forming kaleidoscopic patterns that rolled over us as the branches swayed overhead. If there was a trail here, it was invisible to my eyes. Though Antonio had come through here a week ago, the forest had already taken back the trail.

He set about carving it out once more. Leading the way with his machete, he cut a path just wide enough for us to walk single file and just high enough for him to pass under. Antonio was a foot shorter than I was and did most of his cutting in a semicrouched position, creating a low tunnel through which I advanced with bent knees and stooped shoulders. The machete never stopped moving. Antonio was equally adept at forehands and backhands, though I think some of his
backswings and follow-throughs brought the blade a little closer to my face than he realized. That thing was really sharp. It sliced through loose dangling vines, dropping them straight to the ground. I admired Antonio’s skill. There was no wasted motion. His technique reminded me of the chief hand surgeon at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital in New York, where I had done my fellowship. Though he never seemed to move quickly while operating, all his actions were so precisely placed and maximally efficient that he could perform an operation faster than anyone else. Both he and Antonio had applied their similar talents to learning skills appropriate for their environment—the master surgeon in New York, the consummate trail blazer in the Amazon.

The seemingly endless and impenetrable forest gradually relented, giving way to a foul-smelling swamp. The hard part wasn’t crossing the water; it was crossing the muck to get to the water. Mud sucked at my boots; I had to pull hard at every step to extract them. Preparing to jump over one muck-lined rivulet, I pushed down hard with one foot and lifted the other. I heard a loud sucking noise as one leg sank in over the boot top and the other came out of the boot entirely. I managed to get it back in, but all my struggling served only to embed me deeper.

This wasn’t quicksand, but it was close, and as with quicksand, the danger is not so much of drowning as of getting irremediably stuck. If you don’t struggle, your head won’t go under, but you can sink in up to your chest, and with no way to defend yourself, and your head at ground level, you are easy prey for anything that crawls or slithers by. Intentionally burying someone this way is a custom some jungle tribes once reserved for their worst enemies. I was beginning to understand what it felt like.

Antonio looked back at me and smiled like a tolerant uncle, then began casually chopping down a small tree. After he had trimmed off the branches, he handed it to me to use to pry myself out, which I managed to do. The deeper slime-covered pools all seemed to have fallen trees lying across them. It was no accident, I realized. This was, in fact, a trail. Crossing log bridges on mud-slicked boots is pretty tricky, but I overcame the repeated challenges by concentrating on my feet and the placement of my hiking pole, steadfastly refusing to consider
what awaited me if I slipped into the unfathomable slime on either side.

Gradually the land rose and a path became evident even to me. The trees closed in again and I felt confined, but we were in a corridor now, moving more rapidly than before. Antonio skimmed over the trail with a smooth, shuffling motion as if feeling the ground with his feet. He never looked down; his eyes roamed the canopy continuously. He was alert to any sight or sound that might be interesting to me or valuable to him. At times he would stop his machete in mid-arc and point to something that would take me a long time to find—a family of howler monkeys or a marmoset; hummingbirds, macaws, and toucans; translucent butterflies and delicate purple flowers. I was seeing the jungle through Antonio’s eyes.

And hearing it through his ears. A sharp crack sounded as a large branch broke off an unseen tree, followed by a muffled
woomph
as it landed on the roof of the canopy above us. Parrots screamed in flight. Bushes rustled from unseen animals. All the typical jungle noises I remembered from old Tarzan movies were now being brought to me with startling immediacy in three dimensions.

I was experiencing the jungle through Antonio’s senses but not through his mind. I was a jungle tourist. Antonio showed me the riches around us, but I saw the plants and animals as natural wonders. For him they were resources or dangers, or both. Even had I been suddenly endowed with Antonio’s heightened senses, I’d be clueless about how to use them; and human senses, even when brought to their fullest potential, are still meager compared to those of the animals with which the humans compete. The far more critical factor in adaptation to the jungle is the vast storehouse of knowledge the brain is capable of holding. I would need a lifetime in the jungle to acquire that knowledge and to develop the skills to make it useful.