Journey of the Pink Dolphins Read online

  That moment launched a crusade that Roxanne has pursued for the past fifteen years—a crusade to save the pink dolphins.

  Roxanne was convinced the pink dolphins were in great danger. Her guide, she said, had told her that people poisoned them, dropped dynamite in their waters, sewed up their blowholes, sold their parts for magic charms. She decided the dolphins needed her help. So she abandoned her mineral business, returned to the Rio Yarapa, and founded the International Society for the Preservation of the Tropical Rainforest, whose first project was Preservation of the Amazonian River Dolphin.

  She bought a thousand acres of land along the Yarapa and declared it a dolphin preserve. She set up a free health clinic for local people. She organized an International Dedication Day of the Dolphin and Ecology in Iquitos, with marching bands, parades, and art contests for children, still a yearly event. She erected the dolphin statue in the plaza. Today she lobbies for tougher laws and stiffer sentences for animal and skin smugglers. At her Yarapa lodge, she takes in orphaned and injured monkeys and birds—and once, a confiscated jaguar—and there operates an ecotourism venture, Pink Amazon River Dolphin Expeditions, to “raise international awareness” of the dolphins’ plight as well as raise money to finance her conservation work.

  In Miami, where she was staying with a friend before departing for Iquitos again, Roxanne bubbled over like the dolphin fountain, outlining her accomplishments and what she intends to do next. She’d like to expand the preserve and her ecotourism operation, hosting scientific and conservation conferences there. She wants to pay guards to crack down on commercial fishermen who seine the river with their huge nets. International Wildlife magazine then had a profile on her in press; film companies wanted to make documentaries on her work.

  Her dramatic flair, I could see, would make her a charismatic documentary character. She has mastered the art of speaking in sound bites, tells wonderful stories, and dresses for the camera: the day we met her, she was heading to the airport wearing a plunging jungle-print blouse, a tight khaki miniskirt, high-heeled sandals, lots of Peruvian jewelry, and lots of makeup, almost a caricature of the woman jungle explorer. Though she has grown round with the years, she is still an attractive woman. She says the local Indians consider her someone “right out of their legends” of blond-haired goddesses.

  But the problem with all this is that we encountered no one who shared Roxanne’s view of the pink dolphins’ peril. They are common over an enormous range. Vera and her students have extensively investigated Roxanne’s claims that the dolphins are tortured and hunted. Vera stated unequivocally that this is not true. Vera explained that catching a dolphin destroys a valuable fishing net. You will never find dolphin meat in the market; no one eats it. And though the animals’ fat, eyes (particularly the left eye), and genitalia are sometimes sold as magic charms to attract money and the opposite sex, they are sold cheap; most of the price comes from the cost of the shaman who casts the spell on the charm, not for the eye itself. The parts sold in the marketplace are, Vera’s investigations found, taken only from animals found dead—males who have died of wounds sustained while fighting, animals who have drowned in fishing nets they raid, or dolphins who died from some other cause. Most fishermen are afraid to kill dolphins, for they fear magical retribution.

  Though her organization’s brochures tout Roxanne’s studies of dolphins, scientists we spoke with said they found her fieldwork of questionable value. Roxanne plays music to the dolphins near her camp on an underwater speaker, and then studies the response. “They particularly like Pink Floyd!” she told me. Vera, too, has played various sounds to her study animals. “I played Magnificat. I played Rolling Stones. I played ‘ Tursiops’ [the whistles, squeaks, and clicks of the Atlantic bottlenose dolphin]. The response was the same. They are curious about these sounds, so they come to the surface. We should not mix up things,” Vera told me. “I like Pink Floyd, but I don’t need to assume that they like it.”

  Roxanne and her work are controversial. Roxanne works from a more “spiritual” perspective than do scientists. Articles about her get published in New Age newsletters like Earthstar, the sort of publication scientists often dislike. But even among nonscientists in the animal-protection community, Roxanne has made enemies.

  Still, I liked Roxanne; she seemed sincere, and her cause, even if not urgent, was just. Dianne and I both joined her organization for $35, though we were never mailed a newsletter. (Later, Roxanne told me her secretary, a woman she had hired because she felt sorry for her, was suffering from emotional problems and hadn’t done the mailings.)

  During our meeting in Miami, Roxanne had urged us to visit her at her camp, Dolphin Corners, on the Yarapa, for which she had prepared an impressive brochure, and we considered doing so. But she was not in the country during our visit that spring. Dianne and I promised to stop by her camp anyway and drop off some medical and veterinary supplies with the resident manager.

  I found Roxanne’s story deeply touching. To finance her project, she had sold her grandfather’s land and her grandmother’s house in Wisconsin; and in one of our many long phone conversations, she mentioned that she was $56,000 in debt for the project. But the dolphins were more than worth it, she assured: “Dolphins are the highest beings on the planet, for sure,” she said. She loves the dolphins; she believes in them; she needs them.

  By her own admission, the pink dolphins have seduced her. It may be that, in the shadowy underworld of Iquitos—where, as Jamie said, “you can be anything you want”—she has allowed herself to become the golden-haired goddess of local legend. And the shape-shifting dolphins have let her. She has become the savior of a people and a species—which perhaps do not need her help. Perhaps she is a victim of the same seduction to which so many of the evangelists and aid workers fall prey: allowing yourself to believe that those you love also love and need you back.

  Roxanne tells a story that many in Iquitos consider apocryphal. One day when she was swimming in the Rio Yarapa, she saw a form in the water that she didn’t recognize. She says it was a two-meter bull shark, headed straight toward her. She says that “out of nowhere” a group of pink dolphins appeared and fought it off, while others used their snouts to push her to her boat and safety. “I think,” she says, “they were trying to thank me.”

  The morning we left Iquitos for the jungle, it was raining again: a man rain, Moises said, which would be short and violent, and done in a few hours. I was cold and crabby. I had a sore throat from having been soaked by the rain that had dripped for eight hours down my sleeve through the plastic-covered windows on the Rápido boat three days before. (Dianne had chosen the aisle seat so she could get up to smoke in the latrine in the back, perched atop the drum carrying the boat’s supply of extra diesel.) As we loaded our gear in our thatched-roof, tarp-shrouded boat, the Hoatzin that would carry us on our day-long journey upriver, I could hardly croak hello to our fellow passengers. Piloting the boat was Mario Huanaquiri, a handsome young man with straight black hair, Indian features, and teeth outlined in gold-work. He’d already married twice, Moises said: “Maybe he has some dolphin grease.” Dianne and I christened him “Super Mario,” after the video game. Thereafter, we cried out “Super Mario!” with great enthusiasm every time we saw him, upon which he would break into his great golden smile.

  Stephen Nordlinger, thirty-one, was a quick, wiry man who worked as a crisis counselor at a Florida clinic. “Your name is Sai?” he asked me with great interest. “That’s a kind of an Okinawan fighting staff.” Steve, we discovered, is an expert in the Oriental martial arts, who gets together with other guys to fight the way others gather at friends’ houses for dinner parties. He had spent the summer between high school and college working as a security guard at an amusement park in Massachusetts. He had slept in the bucket of the Ferris wheel, and by night, dressed in black, patrolled the grounds for prowlers with the Okinawan fighting sticks called nunchaku. His stories were so fantastic that Dianne and I were initially skept
ical—until the first time we saw his hand dart out to catch an inch-long beetle he wanted to examine. Faster than a snake can strike, he pinned it with breathtaking precision, its thorax held securely but harmlessly between his thumb and forefinger. From then on, we knew everything he told us was true.

  Steve had gone to the Amazon the previous year, with his mother—an intrepid woman who sometimes picks up roadside scorpions and tarantulas on her travels out West and mails them to her son the way other mothers mail their children chocolate chip cookies. On this second trip, he planned to continue his studies and drawings of Amazonian ants, spiders, and insects and to practice his Spanish.

  Jerry Goszczycki, forty, was a personal fitness trainer, tall, blond, and muscled. While in Peru, he was going “survival camping” in the jungle. With his guide, Rudy Flores, a twenty-five-year-old with dancing brown eyes and excellent English, Jerry was going to build his own raft to travel down the river and explore the forest. But Jerry was a surprise, too. He was not a macho muscle-head. He was particularly interested in alternative healing, which he was going to study in China on a trip the following fall. His calling card has two weight lifters with his name and address on the front, and on the back:

  THE WAY TO HAPPINESS

  Keep your heart free from hate, your mind from worry. Live simply, expect little, give much. Fill your life w/ love. Scatter sunshine. Forget self, think of others. Do as you would be done by.

  Jerry had already had an adventure, he told us. He’d gone dancing at one of the discos in Iquitos the night before, and there he had met “the piranha woman.” He had only wanted to dance with her, and was looking for nothing more. They had been having a perfectly fine time, he said, communicating in snippets of English and Spanish, when something happened that caused him to end the association: without warning, she leaned into his neck and bit him.

  Eight hours later, as we docked beside Paul’s impeccable thatched, screened lodge, Iquitos seemed a world away. The lodge is built on stilts, like a tree house, but instead of among branches, this time of year the building is surrounded by water. The flow of the river follows you even into sleep. The soft gleam of oil lanterns in the dining hall provides the only artificial light. No generator drowns out the dripping call of the sun grebes, the shivering, rainy trill of the screech owls, the bubbling notes of the tree frogs, the tail-splash of caimans and jumping fish. The ladder-tailed nightjar calls out the name of the place: “Too-WHY-you! Too-WHY- you!” Later, when we would canoe through the flooded forest at night and probe the trees with our huge yellow flashlights, Moises would teach us to recognize the orange glow of the bird’s eyes.

  The day’s travel seemed to have cleansed Iquitos from our city-sore souls. So had the day’s rain cleansed the skies. That night, even with a half moon, the stars seemed brighter than I had ever seen. The night skies near the equator are quite different from those we see in North America, with stars I did not recognize. A single constellation sprawled across a full quarter of the sky. I thought it must be Draco, thinking only a dragon could be so big. But in the wet world of the Amazon, during the rainy season, the heavens are ruled not by a fire-breathing reptile but by a water creature: it was Hydra, the water snake. A huge anaconda, many Amazonian tribes believe, is the mother of all water creatures. And her allies, I remembered, are the rainbow and the dolphin.

  Life in the Rain Forest

  Within a few days, I found myself seven stories up a giant machimango tree, hanging by a slender rope over black waters where people were fishing for piranhas. My purpose here was as absurd as my position: I was looking, as usual, for dolphins.

  On previous days, with Moises and Mario, we had explored several lakes in our canoe and found that Paul was right: there are many dolphins here. But again, like at the Meeting of the Waters, watching them was like a giant shell game. A piece of a dolphin would appear, then disappear, and we could not predict where it would show up next—or whether the next dolphin we saw was the same or a different individual. From our perch in the canoe, the water’s surface seemed like a trapdoor that only the dolphins could open, and that slammed shut with every dive.

  Earlier we’d tried to pass through that door at Charro Lake. Less than an hour’s journey downriver from camp, past the handsome, stilted village of Buena Vista, the 1,200-acre lake is shaped like a figure 8 with a big mimosa poking its crown up from the middle. The dolphins like this lake in the high water, Moises said, and in fact, in the distance, we saw several right away, rising slow and low. It was safe to swim here, Moises told us—no piranhas. Perhaps, I hoped, I could see the dolphins better if I were underwater, too.

  Gratefully, Dianne and I slipped over the side of the canoe and into the cool, wet darkness. The water wrapped around us, weighty and sensuous as a black satin sheet. Then, expelling my breath like a dolphin, I sank wholly beneath the surface. I opened my eyes.

  I often swim with open eyes in ponds and lakes at home, and in the sea, and find I see fish and plants quite well; but here the waters were black as night, and I could not see even my hands or feet. Beneath the water, weightless as an astronaut, I felt as if I were floating in a night sky bereft of stars.

  The dolphins were still at the other end of the lake, but now we couldn’t see them at all. Perhaps they would come over to investigate us. And in fact, after some time, Moises called out to us that dolphins were approaching. Once they came within twenty yards of us. But the visibility was even worse than from the canoe: at eye level, every wave was now as tall as a dorsal ridge, and because our ears were clogged with water, we couldn’t even hear their breath. We splashed to attract them; we swam toward them, and away; we floated serene as lilies; but they never came closer.

  So we swam, for the pure joy of it. After we had swum for many minutes, Moises said softly, “Don’t pee in the water.”

  “Oh?” asked Dianne, alarmed. As usual, she had been drinking coffee steadily since 4 A.M., and had brought in her voluminous camera bag an enormous Thermos-ful, which she had just emptied. Twice.

  “Candiru?” I asked. Candiru are surely the most dreaded fish in the Amazon, far more feared than piranhas. Attracted by urine, these tiny, needle-shaped catfish are known to lodge in the human urethra, where, secured with backward-pointing spines, they are impossible to remove without surgery. One British author, Redmond O’Hanlon, had been so intimidated by the possibility of getting candiru stuck up his penis that before visiting the Amazon he had constructed an elaborate codpiece, which included, as I recall, a kitchen strainer.

  Dianne and I, though, were completely safe; candiru do not frequent black-water rivers. At least that’s what the books had said. Moises was pulling our leg, as I could tell by his sly smile.

  But there were other things in the water, which we could feel but couldn’t see. One of them—a fish? an electric eel? a water snake?— had plucked a Band-Aid off the sole of my foot. It could have been a dolphin, for all I knew. For even when we shared their waters, they were invisible to us.

  So this was what I was doing up the tree: trying once more to penetrate the black waters. I hoped, at some height, to be able to stare down through the water, to be able to see the dolphins swimming below. I was making slow progress. The climbing apparatus is a harness-type affair, the same gear that mountain climbers use to scale cliffs, with leather loops that grip you around the tops of the thighs and across the pelvis, and a hangman’s noose for one foot. You step up into the noose like climbing a stair, and straightening the leg, push yourself up. Then with your hands you slide a knot the length of your step up the rope, and take another step again. At first I was so nervous and clumsy I shook with exertion and fear. But after the first few yards, I felt the treetops calling me up. The machimango was a muscular, sinuous creature, wider at the base than our canoe was long, whose every movement over many decades was now recorded in the architecture of its woody flesh.

  Unlike in North American forests, it is easy to see here that plants, like animals, are creatures on th
e move: You can almost feel the force of limb growth and root grip, the grasp of coiling tendrils, the seductive swellings of fruit and flower. Like animals, plants are hunters: they hunt light. And they are willing to kill to capture their prey. The strangler fig to my left as I climbed had arrived as a seed that became wedged in the crotch of a large tree. Decades ago, the baby plant had dropped its aerial roots down the trunk. Fed by the nutrients, the sun-hungry young leaves of the fig had surged skyward, while the plant poured forth more roots like wax dripping from a lit candle. Years ago, the roots had eventually run together, finally entombing the nursery trunk in its clasping loins.

  Philodendrons use a different strategy: the seedlings first pursue a tree trunk, and once there, climb to the top by growing modified roots. Eventually, the stem dies at the tree base, severing its connection with the soil. Arriving at the treetop, the plant may wander farther. If its spot is too shady, it can move to a better location by building more stem, growing in front and dying behind. If the spot becomes too dry, it can drop new roots to the ground. And unlike most epiphytes, many philodendrons do not die if they drop to the ground. They simply begin their climb upward all over again, to perch harmlessly on the host tree without robbing its nutrients.

  As I climbed, I willed myself the strength of a philodendron. Up I climbed, past snails clinging to the undersides of leaves; up past an inexplicable frenzy of gnats; up past the big mud termite nest that hung like a clump of drying tobacco in an adjacent, smaller tree; up past a spiky-leafed bromeliad as big around as a Volkswagen. Up I climbed, up past a bird’s- foot philodendron with leaves shaped like the outstretched fingers of giant hands, up past the remains of the dreaded wasp’s nest . . . up, heave, straighten the leg, pull up the rope, push up the knot. Now cobalt-winged parakeets zoomed by at eye level and yellow butterflies floated below, and still I climbed: up past the grasping tendrils of a liana, up past a brown termite nest larger than a pumpkin, up past another bromeliad in whose teacup-sized bowl I could see mosquito larvae swimming, and up . . .