The Great Adventure: Part I Preparations

In a week I will depart on perhaps the greatest adventure of my time in the Amazon Rainforest. A crew of six is gearing up for a two-week dugout canoe trip deep into the jungle and back. Two Ndjuka friends of ours will bring us and three dugout canoes to an Amerindian village called Apetina. From there we will canoe over sixty-five miles without a guide through almost entirely uninhabited jungle and deadly rapids back home to Diitabiki. We will bring very little food with us, for piranha and peacock bass will be our fare. Tents are unnecessary; we will build frames covered by tarps for our hammocks every night, clearing our own campsites from the forest. Our Ndjuka friends believe us to be insane, which may be true, but our thirst for adventure knows no bounds.

Charles Shriley, an American IMB missionary who lives across the river from Diitabiki has organized the event. Two short-term missionaries in Charles’ organization, Ryan Rindels, who rode with me in the Endurance, and Taylor Ivester, who rode with Charles will come as well. Ted Jantz, a media professional who grew up among the Amerindians in the south, and his son Raphael, who also was raised in Suriname, completes our team of six Americans. All of us have experience living in the bush and are proficient in the local language. Where we are going, however, we are unlikely to see many people.

Charles and Taylor have improved their canoe by adding backrests for their seats and racks for fishing rods and coolah sticks, which are used for poling through rapids. They will be laughed at, and the rest of us will hide the inevitable soreness of our backs on the second week of the trip. The Endurance, however, is not to be outdone. She will be cleaned, sanded, and re-varnished, and her slow leak in the bow will be stopped.

To prepare for the challenges of the trip, I have been taking the Endurance to the swift waters downriver and teaching myself to pole down…and up rapids, standing up of course. As you can imagine, standing in dugout canoe is like balancing on a floating log. The rapids steadily are being conquered, but it is good to practice far away, so stories of spectacular tumbles will be limited. When I referred to the excursion as a “camping trip,” Charles admonished me, “this is no camping trip; this is an adventure.”

Scrambling for Mangos

Mango season can be frightening when one lives under a mango tree. In the still of night, dozing to the hum of cicadas and chirps of vampire bats, a crash from a falling mango landing on my tin roof can make me wide awake instantly. Flashlights and hushed voices of children at five in the morning wake me up again as the harvesters gleam the precious fruit from around my house.

Early in the season, when bunches of green mangos tempt the hungry, one must make an effort to find ripe fruit. When a ripe mango falls during the day, all work or conversation instantly stops and everyone scrambles for the prize as in a game of spoons. The victor holds the fruit aloft as the other walk sulkily away.

Mango season provided an opportunity to explain basic business economics in my radio show. With scarce resources, those who have a greater desire for mangoes must make a greater effort to obtain them. This (partially) is why prices are higher when there are fewer goods than the people who want them. Too many mangoes, however, will result in ripe fruit sitting uneaten under the tree, for when there is too much of a good, people will no longer pay enough to meet a seller’s costs, and eventually would not take any more even if it were offered for free. This ties into the law of diminishing returns, or as I explain on the air, “the fifth mango does not taste as good as the first.” This in turn leads into marginal analysis, or finding out exactly how many mangoes people want to buy before it is no longer profitable to sell mangoes. Sometimes people save mangoes for another day, because they know that the first mango they eat each day tastes the best. This is called delayed gratification.

Economics is human action. Any economic concept that does not describe what people do is mere mathematics. For this reason, any economic idea, despite complicated technical names, can be explained in any language to anyone, no matter where they live. In my radio show, specialization of labor occurred when two boys each had to decide whether they would hunt for tapir or fish for kumalu. A woman’s reluctance to by assai because she did not have qwak to eat it with showed that assai and qwak are complementary goods, they go together. In languages without extensive vocabulary, complex ideas may take a little time to explain, but it definitely can be done. Now it’s time for a mango.

Mahka!

I have had two thorns in my left hand for over a month now. Swimming through the dark river, I suddenly met with a spiny mahka frond. Fortunately I was able to dig most of the thorns out of my skin, but a few have remained. Mahka thorns are so sharp that they can pierce heavy rubber boot soles, yet so brittle that they tend to break into tiny pieces when one tries to extract them. After burning the fallen brush so that planting can begin, mahka are one of the first plants to begin growing again.

Mahka (literally, “thorn”) palms are the toughest trees in the Amazon. Thorns up to nine inches long cover their trunks, frond stalks, and even each individual leaf. Wasps love mahka palms because, they assume that no one disturbs a nest in a thorn tree. Clearing planning grounds with my friends, I have been stung several times by angry insects protesting the destruction of their thorny home.

When cutting a swath of forest to plant, cutting down mahka palms takes the most time. Dispatching a young stand of mahka requires holding each stalk with a forked stick to direct its fall as you chop it with a machete. Mature palms require a chainsaw, which can send fragments of thorns flying if the tree is not prepared correctly. Even then, the tough trunk of the mahka tree can ruin the chainsaw. Oh, and when a mahka tree falls, stand out of the way.