Out beyond the idea of corporations
It is sweltering when my friend Archie and I touch down on a steaming tarmac in Guyana.
The air glistens. Past the terminal, our driver waves as he takes leave of his friends. We insist on handling our own bags but he will not hear of it. As he loads them, the old car's shocks creak.
I am underslept but energized. This sort of humidity has always signaled adventure and I breathe it gratefully as I flop into the backseat. The car bounces out onto a pockmarked freeway and we follow the snaking river north to the coast.
This would never have been my idea, but we are here to catch an ancient fish the size of a canoe called the aripaima. It lies in wait at the bottom of muddy pools of the Amazon and, disturbingly, gulps air like some mad manatee-sized bather. Our third friend, Nick, saw it on a show, and Nick being Nick, we are here. It’s not the fishing that interests me, to tell the truth. I don’t care to harm anything. Rather, I am interested in travel and the mystery of the natural world; it’s a part of my being that I’ve lost and which I hope to reclaim here.
You see, this is the first time I have taken ten consecutive days off in ten years. You wouldn’t know it meeting me on Zoom, but there was a time in my life when I prided myself on my skill navigating overland with a map and compass—when I thought freeze-dried military meals both tasty and efficient. But then came work and that dreary, hopeless descent into careerism. The day I purchased my first tie, I didn’t know it would become a noose. Those rarified dawns over the Sierras gentled into the mists of memory. My most vivid stories of bear attacks and forest service helicopter rides were now worn and faded. This trip to Guyana is my jailbreak.
As the car navigates large potholes, I look over at my friend Archie talking to our driver. I wonder how long it’s been since I've seen him. Perhaps a whole year. And my other friend, Nick, who is on his way to meet us. I marvel at what a job these two do of ensuring life comes first. Of us three, I alone had to bleed through 80-hour weeks to prepare for this time off; which is all the more embarrassing because I own the company. I’m my own boss. I did this to myself. Some part of me fantasizes that while in the bush, it will dissolve.
But, I don’t wish it too earnestly. My veins still course with that sick resin of overwork and as we drive, I test my cell phone’s WiFi and balance my laptop to answer emails. One message causes my adrenaline to spike. There is feedback. Furious feedback. My field of gaze narrows. I experience actual panic. Waxy vegetation whips past and the driver shouts to people as he maneuvers.
Out of sight
Most of those invited to this trip begged out in the year leading up. They had childcare, conferences, and at least one spouse who said, “I don’t want you going to Africa,” which I find funny, because Guyana is in South America. It bears only phonetic resemblance to Ghana.
Until recently, Guyana was one of the poorest in the Caribbean with a per capita gross domestic product of just a tiny fraction of the U.S. Less than one million people live in the entire country, which is the size of Utah but with the population of San Francisco.
Guyana’s past as a British colony is in showy evidence as we glide by sweeping yards of former baronial plantations. The avenues are enormous and bisected by lime green canals filled with tropical pink ibises. The side streets are narrow and crowd together roughshod cinder block homes, many of which feature handwritten advertisements for fried catfish and music.
It is high noon when we park at the hotel, lock our belongings, and let the driver spirit us downtown to explore. We walk the central market full of open stalls, bright vegetables, iPhone cases, horse carts, and freshly washed Escalades. We’re delighted to find a fruit called mangosteen, which Archie and I both know from our journeys through Southeast Asia, and we duck into the natural history museum to study up. We are met by a taxidermied jaguar with googly eyes of the dollar store variety. The plaster dioramas are faded and lumpy. But the great beasts are all here: a capybara, an alligator, and a person-sized giant anteater. I dutifully sketch as we go, as if on assignment.
By two o’clock, no restaurants are open so we find ourselves at the waterfront Marriott bar teeming with oil employees who sip drinks that cost as much as a local’s rent. Exxon rules this country, we read online. Back in 2016, a consortium led by Exxon approached Guyana to conduct exploratory testing off the coast. They played down the potential and convinced Guyana to foot the bill in a negotiation of epic asymmetry—Guyana, a country unable to afford roads, agreed to pay for all the deepwater equipment in exchange for a mere 2% of profits. Did Exxon find oil? You bet they found oil. The purest of the pure, which they had known all along. Exxon stretched this treasonous agreement taut across six additional wells, and today $120 billion of light, sweet oil gush from that bedrock onto ships that depart without touching shore. The winking joke among locals is, “You get your oil money yet?”
Our third buddy Nick calls. He’s at the hotel and grabbing dinner with our guide, Larry. We rush back, curious to understand the man who led us all here.
Larry is in his seventies, pale, portly, conical, and stiffened by a recent neck injury which prevents him from looking left. His words are clever, but sometimes slowed by spittle. We learn he won’t be joining us. Jules, his son-in-law, will meet us out in the jungle. We exchange nervous glances. Larry holds up his phone the whole dinner to show jaguars recently spotted. Our driver joins us—he and Larry are old friends—as do two other friends of theirs, a couple who emigrated to Toronto in the 1990s. “So many have left,” they marvel. “We hardly know anyone here anymore.”
I am up until midnight tacking away at the computer before I can seize a precious three hours of sleep before our flight into the interior.
Into thick air
Aloft, I have time to journal, and I think hard on the question I love that Yuval Noah Harari poses in Sapiens: Did we cultivate wheat, or did wheat cultivate us? From a certain perspective, those grains lured our species out of the hills and as thanks, broke our backs, stole our leisure, and left us susceptible to agricultural famine. Farming swept the world but it left people working longer hours and eating less well, dental records show. I think about the question often while hunching over my computer. Maybe life really was better before. We seem to welcome innovations that impoverish us.
My mind wanders to the natural philosophers of the 18th century who took months-long vacations, with no phone signal to chase them. I think about what perils could await my own company with me beyond cell service. I think about life in my 20s, when the redwooded coasts were a short skip from my dorm.
I write a new savings goal for the business and underline it. Why haven’t I more control over my environment, I wonder? What even is rent, actually? That’s really the heart of my stress, isn’t it? That’s what saps my paycheck and ensures I’m never free of the work cycle.
We land, and there is Jules—tall, imposing, a silver tooth gleaming in his easy, full-throated laugh. His lips are wide and he’s bearishly scraggly with those camouflage wraparound sunglasses typical of a backwoodsman. A cigarette hovers near his lips. His paw envelops our hands in a macho, menacing handshake. As our Jeep rumbles out of town and as it picks up to 80 miles an hour, Jules’ shotgun falls with the barrel pointing at my face. Nick adjusts it so it points up.
The highway arcs up over a great dry plateau that rises from the hundreds of miles of Amazonian basin, and we roar through high desert and low grasslands, veering off the paved road to pass smaller cars and trucks, never slowing. I scan for anteaters and see only the club-shaped termite mounds that attract them, some more than a dozen feet high. The mounds are hard as cement, Jules assures us, with a look-back grin. He wants to know what we want to know. Laughing, we ask him what we should know. Jules launches into an inventory of fish caught this past week by Australians.
The highway turns to dirt with a jolt, but our driver does not slow—his tires fishtail and we lurch and push against the roof as we catch air over some hills. Nick wants to know everything about the fishing gear Jules has packed, and asks if the steel leaders he uses for shark in Florida will be enough. The talk ranges from lures to petropolitics. Then the jungle swallows us and we are slip-sliding up and down muddy berms of a long, narrow easement. We slow to pass locals felling trees to cover muddy ruts.
After half a day, the jungle relaxes its grip and we emerge above a coursing brown river. Down below, a boat awaits. Here, our journey begins. We have another 98 miles to go up the Rewa River.
Savage silence
If prior to this trip you had asked me to describe the deep Amazon, I’d tell you of flesh-eating bacteria and monstrous insects. Thus we marvel as one of our guides dives from the moving speedboat into the bracken—to splash back up, wielding a great saucer of a turtle, for dinner. The guides with us are men of the Macushi tribe who wear acid-wash jeans, sunglasses, and nothing more. When they need a free hand, they place their machete on the boat. There are no toolbelts, no sheaths. Their ease suggests we are overcautious, but for that first day, we jump at everything.
We arrive at camp, just an exposed stretch of beach with hammocks, a gas stove, and a picnic bench. The guides rest but we cannot—we must explore. We get not 20 feet into the darkening bush and find our legs swarming with tiny red ticks—and race right back to the beach. I am conscious of malaria, and so I gulp pills. I also wear a full-fabric jumpsuit under my clothes through which bugs apparently cannot bite. It is hot, but mostly mosquito-less. As dusk falls, eyes glow wherever our headlamps shine and the first night’s walk to the pit toilets feels harrowing.
The second day, they split us into three boats and I alone catch four catfish of considerable size bristling with poisonous spines that we break with pliers. I am exhausted and proud to provide something we can all eat. But as we approach camp, I see Archie’s boat which bulges with hairy mammalian carcasses and hooves. His crew alighted on a pack of peccary pigs and leapt ashore firing in a running skirmish. We're all surprised to learn that these diminutive forest pigs have musk sacs on their backs which make the meat inedible if not quickly shorn off. Archie is standing in a riverside that has turned to blood as he helps the guides. We’re a mixture of aghast and intrigued.
Evenings, we stand high on the sand, exhausted, gnawing chunks of animal and potato with curried rice out of colorful plastic bowls. Most of the guides eat by themselves but a few, like one who calls himself Bugs, join us, and we play silly games and ask about their lives. We want to know what Bugs does when he’s not guiding, and he finds this an odd question—he does some carpentry. But when pressed on what he’s otherwise doing—what’s his full-time job—he says he spends time with his family. He’s curious what we spend our time doing. Why would he work if he didn’t need to? This trip is funding the Macushi buying cinderblocks to expand someone’s home.
Later, as we swat at a maelstrom of moths and stickbugs that form a spiral galaxy around the lantern, Archie marvels that our guide Bugs thinks about money the same way he does the peccary pigs now smoking over coals—when you need pigs, you hunt them. When you need money, you hunt it. In the Macushi village, there is no rent.
The next night, we hear about the only man our guides know to have lost an arm to one of the hundreds of caimans that float about our camp. That man still fires a bow and lives unencumbered. We hear about how the Guyanese government delivered an ATV to each village, to help them carry water and fuel, and how the headman of one village has dragooned it as his personal transport. We learn how the Rewa River connects all villages, for the jungle deconstructs roads too quickly to maintain them—and so the further upriver a village is, the more primal its existence and the more colorful its inhabitants’ beliefs. Across the river from where we are now, which is the very last sporting outpost, there lives an uncontacted tribe. You never see them, Jules explains one night, cigarette lighting his face as he inhales. But you can see the deep grooves in the riverside rocks where they sharpen their knives. They fish at night with long, slender arrows, and you can hear them slapping the piranhas and payarahs on rocks to stun them. The next day, Jules points out several such grooves, and we walk past hulking petroglyphs carved into rock by his people’s ancient forebears, riddled with symbols none can now decode, below a stooped ancient city the jungle has consumed whole.
Over whiskey, Jules and Nick debate what the uncontacted peoples must think when they see government planes flying overhead. I tell the story I know of the last truly uncontacted Californian native to wander out of the woods near Oroville after a 1911 wildfire. At 50, this man—they called him Ishi—was the last of his kind. A professor took him to stay in Berkeley and over time learned that “Ishi” simply means “man” in Yahi. Ishi never gave his true name. To do so is to give someone sorcerous powers over you.
One day, Ishi and the professor stood on San Francisco’s Crissy Field watching a biplane fly over. Ishi asked, “Man?” and the professor nodded. Ishi is said to have shaken his head in what looked like shame.
The last believers
Today’s rain is torrential and unsympathetic. I’m in a boat with our most experienced guide, Stephano, and his young cousin, who holds the boat against the current so I can cast. These two have grown exasperated with me—my heart glows at seeing the great fish but I’m hesitant to hurt them. I explain this, but the guides find it implausible. They mutter to each other. It’s clear they believe that I am incompetent and a liar. So I smile, they glower, and we stare at our rods as the rain tears into the water’s surface. Occasionally, there’s a flash of fin and scale and an aripiama gulps air. We’ve plenty of time to talk.
I adjust my poncho and ask about life in the most remote villages. Stephano realizes he won’t reform me and throws his carving stick into the water. He asks if I’ve heard about the tribe here that can move themselves mysteriously from one location to another. He doesn’t completely believe it, he says, “But sometimes it happens.” He repeats this several times, shaking his head. Once in college, in the capital, Stephano knew a guy from that tribe who forever had a fresh bowl of fruit at the foot of his bed—the varieties of which only came from the deep jungle. “My parents bring it to me,” this man told Stephano. But Stephano never saw the man’s parents. Not once. He got curious enough to check with the registrar's office—there too, no evidence the man ever had a visitor. Then one day, Stephano walks into the man’s room and sees lights on in the bathroom and hears a crowd of voices, realizes what has happened, and is struck dumb with fear. This tribe knows a certain bitter herb you can chew which paired with an incantation causes a grassy hill to appear before you. If you walk up it, at the other side, you arrive wherever you intend to be. My guide fled that man’s room. Stephano told of another incident of a bar fight where a man of that tribe was struck savagely on the jaw. Months later, in another town, Stephano witnessed that same man emerge from nowhere and strike his erstwhile assailant—then vanish. “I’m not saying,” Stephano marvels, spitting, as the downpour intensifies. “But sometimes it happens.”
We are finally ready for the real arapaima. This is Nick’s day. He is always teasing and joking and keeping people’s spirits up but today, he doubles his stomach prodding. The guides take us to where we must scramble 40 feet up a crumbling riverbank and hike through a section of the forest with prehistorically large trees girded in iron-hard vines the width of my legs. The muck is so deep it sucks away one of Nick’s sandals. We arrive at a mud hole which seems disappointingly small. But this is an old section of the river choked off by mudslides and so isolated—and where the greatest monsters lay.
We sit and watch. Occasionally, the water shimmers then breaks, and there’s an audible gulp, a quicksilver fin and sometimes a thunderous slap of a tail. We spend the full day and both Nick and Archie catch two arapaima. To unhook them, they must wade waist-deep into a thousand-year-old sludge to hold these rather childish-looking, docile, exhausted fish and stick a hand down their throat. Comparing our photos later, to last week’s Australians, our fish are the size of us and yet still younglings. I don’t catch one but am enthralled at those I have seen. Stephano wrings his hat with two fists as he watches me.
Some days in, two new tourists join our camp—a father and son. We watch them jump at every damn thing as we laugh on our way down to the river to bathe naked and careless among the piranhas and puppy dog caiman.
This is our last day. I savor my final round of routine—waking to the roaring 4am whoop of far-off howler monkeys, reading the Dao De Jing under my mosquito net, and meditating before others rise. As the pinpricks of dawn show, the camp rustles. Folks heat water, calm the one child, and string rods. I have hardly thought about work. My mind has a new, cooling clarity—it cannot go to that place of worry; I’ve lost it. I bet everyone at home has things handled. If not, I can’t be bothered here. I am protected.
The day-long boat ride back, we three are lost in thought. We consider the infinite unfurling river before us, the sheer red rock sides and surging canopy of carnivorous plant life and the multitude of nonhuman existences all armored and shrieking for space—sleeping rough and living with predation. I get shivers thinking about how much older it is than all of us.
The way home
We return to the town with the airstrip a day earlier than expected, and cannot get a flight further, so are stuck. We walk the dusty frontier streets among stray dogs and chain-link fences and people playing cards. We hire a taxi to take us across the border to Brazil, a town called Bonfim, only to arrive and learn the border will close soon—though nothing is yet open. The taxi driver asks if he can pick up his wife to come back across with us, and he does. It also happens today is Valentine’s Day. Nick is incorrigible and jokes with them and insists they have dinner with us, and they do. We pick the nicest restaurant we can find on the Guyanese side.
I can’t tell if these two are excited or obligated and we struggle to know what to ask each other. Then the driver receives a call and we watch our guests have a private spat as he begs out of the dinner—he has clients. He must give one more ride. So sorry. Work beckons. For most of the dinner, it’s just the wife and us. We want to know about life here. She is reserved, but she’s clear that this dinner is a treat—one cocktail costs a full month’s rent.
We have one day left in the capital, and take a cooking class where the chef famously sings about the meal and the wife, a British expatriate, tells us of her love for this place. A dinnermate, a former local, gives us the lowdown on the oil companies and their perfidy; he now lives in Dallas with his daughter. So few people are left.
Back at the hotel I log into WiFi and watch the river of emails unspool. The screen is harsh to my sunburned eyes. The text is so very faint, as is my experience of it. I revisit the feedback email that caused me to panic on our drive in, what feels like months ago. And I feel nothing. My team did marvelously in my absence. I feel removed, as though watching myself in the third person. I feel love for that human. And for all the people who’d think to send him notes. And for the first time in a very long time, I like his story.
I return to work at a different pace, and things aren't the same after that.
