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The Cloud Forest
A Chronicle of the South American Wilderness
by Peter Matthiessen
November 20, Peter Matthiessen set out from Brooklyn on the Venimos, a freighter, who was “bound up the Amazon for Peru by way of Bermuda, the Sargasso Sea, the Windward Islands and Barbados, Trinidad, British Guiana and Brazilian ports.”
“My own destination,” wrote Matthiessen “is less precise - The rain forest and the Andean Sierra, Mato Gross and Tierra del Fuego - the earth’s last wild terrains within the mysterious continent of South America.” The year was 1960.
Matthiessen chronicled all these destinations in great detail. As guide, he described the birds, bugs, snakes, trees, flowers, birds, marine life, stars, people, missionaries, animals, tribes, clouds, bodies of water, modes of transportation, lay of the land, villages and cities.
He said, “Personally I am partial to bleak places.” His savoir faire, his male spirit, his dryness, his blasé nature, his lack of emotion were reassuring. I am glad to be an armchair traveller with Peter Matthiessen as my guide. This was a wonderful read on a winter’s day, when snow and ice made travel treacherous and the warmth of the fire and a cup of tea were all I needed to prepare for armchair travel to wild lands south.
Peter Matthiessen longed to “set foot in the jungle” but like any reality, the more he pursued the jungle, the more it receded before him. Always just out of reach, although just there. In the beginning of his trip, he “took a taxi out of town, accompanied at the last moment by my fellow passenger, that redoubtable maiden, Miss X. Together we struck off into the wilderness, which turned out to be . . . extremely interesting.” He wrote, “ I could feel it, hear it, smell it all at once, could believe I was almost there.”p. 46
Later he said “The jungle I glimpsed along the river is never really there, not that jungle of the giant trees and mystery that always stays in the distance.” p. 63
Mathiessen voiced the essence of the travel experience. We glimpse but cannot apprehend the world we long to know. We are outsiders.
He is alone for most of the trip, but always surrounded by people. On a tiny crowded bus, he described himself as “poor great gringo that I am. I am like a preying mantis in a beehive.” p. 63.
He crossed the Andes nine times in five months at various points from Peru to Tierra del Fuego, “through various causes, not the least of these some remarkably bad planning.” p. 75
He went to visit Clayton Templeton in Orizona who was a Baptist evangelist. Matthiessen thought of the missionaries killed in Ecudor by the Auca’s - “how moving that account was, yet exasperating: the faith that carried them far beyond the limits of courage and adventurousness, which made them, in the most literal sense, damn fools. p. 147.
This book, like any journey, just goes along for a very long time. Then, Something happens. Like any journey, at the time it was happening, the participants were too busy to know its significance. Only upon reflection, did Matthiessen realize what a great adventure he had had. The adventure came at the end of the trip. And as a reader, you could go right to it. But, then, you would miss the sense of journey that led up to The Great Adventure. For truly, on a journey, we never know when, Or Even If, the Adventure will begin.
In the town of Pucallpa, his adventure began. He met Vargaray who told him about the monstrous fossil jaw near the Mapuya River. Cesar Cruz could conduct a search party to the mandibula. So in the bar of the Gran Hotel Mercedes it was decided that Matthiessen would pay for the trip that would make them all famous.
“I wondered if I had not lost my mind, the greatest gringo idiot that had ever fallen into that nest of thieves. At least I would see the jungle close at hand.”
Andres Porras, brother of a friend in Lima, arranged the trip. They left from Cuzco April 9. It would become a trip of over 1,000 miles on jungle rivers, headed North towards Quillabamba. They are to meet Cesar Cruz at El Encuentro.
Matthiessen now wrote his most vivid, appealing, humorous and self deprecating prose. Surely, his journal must have become wet many times before the manuscript became a printed book. For now, the two men went down the Black Drunken River by canoe and no one had any experience of the river.
April 13, they are on the Urubamba River. Water came from everywhere, above, below, and over the sides. The river rose. They nearly drowned. “I was in no mood to appreciate the beauty of the valley of the Coribene.” Peter and Andres considered retreat to Cuzco but Peter and Andres were both ‘pigheaded’ and once they voiced their misgivings, they determined to go forward. Now there was no turning back. It rained a lot.
As they went down the River Pongo in the balsa canoe, named the Happy Days, the mal paso - bad water- took its toll and in the afternoon, Matthiessen admitted, he was scared and described fear vividly yet with gallow humor.
“Fear is very much like pain, in the sense that in the interval one is free from it, one forgets how very disagreeable it is. I am not an authority on fear, avoiding the condition whenever possible, but I do know that its worst agony comes beforehand.”
There was joy at their deliverance from the river canyon. High drama and danger abounded. Matthiessen was in his glory.
It seemed that the navigation of the Pongo was quite an achievement, of which they were unaware. Their goal had been to find Cruz and the Mandible. Peter Matthiessen wrote, “Andres and I were the first white men ever to travel the Pongo de Mainique in the time of waters.”
“Adventure,” said Andres. “My Lord! Look, in all the years I’ve spent in the jungle, I’ve never been through anything like the last ten days.”
Then out of the blue, Matthiessen wrote, “The sight of the osprey and the sandpiper affect me, reminding me of my own North Atlantic coasts; it occurs to me now after five months of wandering this continent, that I must think about going home.”
Peter and Andres find Cruz - who is not glad to be found - and Cruz made flimsy excuses about finding the mandible. They re-negotiated and Cruz agreed to lead them to the fossil. They traveled by a canoe carved out of a single log of cedar. Andres warned Peter that Cruz followed the time honored jungle law - ‘He is out for what he can get.’
Matthiessen is nonplused. “That he might hoodwink us does not mean that he dislikes us; nor the fact that he might cheat us mean that I cannot like him.”
They found the mandible on April 26. It was 24 inches across and 28 inches long and had 26 teeth sockets. But, surprising to him, it was not the bones that enchanted him but the pure jungle stream in which they once had lain. “It is this inner, mysterious quality of the jungle, represented so well by this lost stream that I have been searching for and have found at last - there was an adventure here, an exploration, however timid.”
Now he remembered fondly the adventure of the trip down the Pongo. Now - with Cruz- the expedition lacked the element of the unknown, the un-predictable, that the orderal of the mountain river had had in abundance. “I think back on the first days with a faint regret. We did not comprehend, did not evaluate our experience until it was all over and gone forever from our days.” p. 245.
April 27 the band of men broke up, angry about money. Matthiessen planned to ship the mandible to the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. But the police took the mandible into custody. Matthiessen considered a bribe. He spent a week in Pucallpa, attempting to deal with an aroused populace. The bone became the talk of the town. The question of ownership was lost in a mountain of lies and accusations.
A weary Matthiessen wrote, “I am flying out to Ingo Maria tomorrow, minus the object of the expedition with only the faint hope that it can be straightened out. p. 266. I am suffering from a certain sense of failure. I am certain that I will be here another time for I have the strong sense that something mysterious exists here which if if located, can never be found.” p. 269.
But the outcome, to the Adventurer, is never crucial. Matthiessen had reached his true goal - the apprehension of the mysterious. The mysterious can never be approached directly. Yet, it is the mysterious which travelers hope for and fear at the onset of each journey.
Mattiessen expressed the entire nature of a journey. As an exquisite observer, an excellent writer, and with an acute perception of himself as a Traveler, Matthiessen takes us on a journey. The land comes to life under his sure writing style. Like Miss X and Andres, I would welcome Matthiessen as a companion, hoping only that I could measure up to his courage and perspicacity.
But do I wonder! Is Mr. Mattheissen looking for authenticity? Dean MacCannell in The Tourist suggested that authenticity is the goal of modern travelers.
Or Was Mr. Matthiessen looking for adventure? Play as adventure, defined by Robert Neale happens by chance, entails risk and is of remarkable purport.
Most likely, he longed for both authenticity and adventure.
I invite you read the next review in this series, The Savage, My Kinsman. Instead of the drifting across the entire continent which Peter Matthiessen related, Elizabeth Elliott stayed in one monotonous, yet frigthening place in the Rain Forest. She and her small daughter, Valerie, lived with the Auca, the savages who had slayed her missionary husband. Her spiritual, interior, and personal journey contrasts sharply with that of Peter Matthiessen’s adventures.
Copyright©1999 Mary Jo Kelly Wilhelm
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See Also:
In Praise of Play. Robert Neale. Harper and Row. 1969.
The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class. Dean MacCannell. New York. Schocken Books. 1973.
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