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It looked old and weathered, but the dugout canoe had
been carved only three years before. I was
surprised when Coyote, our guide and indigenous Rama
storyteller, explained this over the din of the
outboard motor that was propelling it a little
unsteadily up the Indio-Maiz River and into
Nicaragua’s Mosquito Coast jungle.
I’d heard about Coyote from another traveler whose path
I’d crossed months before. Upon
arriving in Nicaragua, I found, as one finds most
anywhere, a tourist trail defined by the
connect-the-dots narratives in travel guidebooks.
Though Nicaragua isn’t exactly crowded, I wanted something
wilder and less scripted. I also wanted to revel in the
melodically thorny utterances of the infamous and
reclusive Mono Congo, or Howler monkey. So I
caught a passenger lancha (boat) up the San Juan River from Lake
Nicaragua to the Caribbean coast and San Juan del Norte,
a delightfully anachronistic village with
footpaths instead of roads, conversation instead
of computers, and wheelbarrows instead of cars.
It is the capital of the Indio-Maiz Biological Reserve, a thousand square mile
region and the heartbeat of the largest lowland
tropical rainforest north of the Amazon.
I was traveli ng
with Michael, a German friend. We arrived in San Juan del
Norte after midnight, and followed other passengers to a
hotel by flashlight (the town’s electric generator
shuts down by 10:00 P.M.). We found Coyote easily
the next morning, despite knowing only his nickname.
“He’s the man who’s building a city!” a boy told
me, leading me by the hand to his house, a small
wooden dwelling on stilts like many others in this
hurricane-prone area. A speaker of English, Creole
and Spanish, Coyote was free to guide us into the
jungle, and explained the trip and its costs, about $25 US each per
day, inclusive. Two hours later, we were headed upriver.
“You see the bird?” Coyote pointed
to the east. “Kwan Kwis Kwis in Rama
language, or fish eagle.” Then, moments later, he yelled,
“Iguana, big one!” as a large lizard sought cover
ahead, running like those voracious little
dinosaurs from Jurassic Park, the movie.
The dugout canoe had become a family affair. Coyote’s
wife, her mother, their 4 young
children, his brother and uncle were all aboard. The 25
horse Yamaha motor – rented from a
local fisherman – that propelled us shuddered
enough to let us know it wasn’t entirely comfortable
pushing a half-ton dugout canoe designed by
resourceful woodcarvers, not computers. But just a
little. This was one stable (though at 25 feet, not particularly
maneuverable) canoe!
The river narrowed as we entered the jungle. Flora and
fauna proliferated.
The narrow waterway was treacherous, and Coyote’s bro ther
and uncle often sprang into action, deftly guiding
us around or over fallen trees and sandbars. We
stopped midday for a break, and the women prepared ivo (in the
Rama tongue) or almendra (in Spanish), a refreshing
elixir of crushed almond seeds and water. It was a
traditional drink, more common here than foreign
sodas, and it tasted like fresh dew from a butterfly’s wing the morning
after a coconut thunderstorm.
We arrived at the camp at dusk.
The women cooked crabs
from the river while Michael and I were shown the
newly-built “guest house.” After appraising the 5
raised wooden beds without mattresses under an open-air roof, I opted for
an airborne hammock, which looked more comfortable.
Following a tasty crab supper washed down with
water from a nearby spring, we retired to our
somewhat muggy open-air “room.”
The morning brought cool air and showers. But they
subsided, the sun rose, and we went fishing. We
caught breakfast, using hand-held wooden ‘reels,’
with no rods. Emiriano, Coyote’s uncle, dug bait worms from the riverbank.
We landed over twenty fish of at least 8 different
species, then cleaned and cooked them for
breakfast, right about lunchtime. Rice and beans (imported
from town), and a bit of a
cassava-type root from the river’s edge completed
our enviable spread, followed by a dessert of…a nap!?
Hey! I didn’t come to the
jungle to sleep during daylight, when I should be exploring! So we asked
Coyote to sacrifice his siesta and show us the forest.
On the first of numerous forays, we followed vague trails
made passable by Coyote’s deftly brandished
machete. He pointed out various insects, spiders,
and plants, while advising of the ones we’d best not touch. “This ant has a
painful bite,” he said, pointing to a plump specimen on a
tree. The warning was merely an abstraction until,
later, one dropped into my hair from a tree and
bit me on the finger as I brushed it off. “Here is what we do for that,”
he said and, after scraping the poison from my skin with
his machete, he rubbed hea ling
juices from a nearby medicinal plant into the bite, which felt
fine within minutes.
In what became a soundtrack of sorts, we continually
heard the curious “gobble gobble swallow” song (that’s the only way to
explain it) of the yellowtail bird, whose woven nests hang from trees like
those of the Baltimore oriole. Coyote
showed us the paths and tracks of wild pigs, wild turkeys, and what he
called “wild cows.” Once he stopped, raised a finger to his lips, and we
heard the cry of a jaguar, deep in the forest. “She is calling for a mate.
She is lonely,” he said. This quiet, often pensive man knew how to read the
forest. He was experienced in more than its peaceful rhythms; he fought in
the 1980s revolution, narrowly averting death here and elsewhere in the wild
east of Nicaragua.
When we arrived at a clearing in the jungle, I could tell
with excitement that the vegetation-covered stone
hills he’d brought us here to see were of a human,
not natural arrangement. Several structures rose from the jungle
floor, as well as a burial ground. All were unexcavated,
with partially exposed walls. The largest rose
perhaps thirty feet – nothing to rival Mayan
temples – and was comprised of odd but symmetrically hewn five-sided stones.
Coyote said his late grandfather had told him of this
place when he was young, but he couldn’t find it
for many years. He regretted knowing little about
its relevance to the Rama people, saying only said
that this place was left by his people when they
fled the Spanish conquistadors centuries ago. Iasked him how he would feel
if outsiders wanted to study and excavate the
site, and he paused reflectively before replying. “I want to learn more,” he
said. “But I don’t know if that’s a good idea.”
The Rama are among the lesser-known indigenous peoples of
the Mosquito Coast, numbering about one thousand.
Their language is nearly extinct. As Coyote spoke,
energized by the obvious connection he felt for this place, he
described his dream of building a school nearby, then a
village and community, enlisting Rama elders to
teach a new generation how to reclaim their
heritage and homeland. He said the Rama people of the region were
excited about moving here, but spoke skeptically of
government promises to protect their aboriginal
claims to the land in the face of timber and
development pressures.
Nearly asleep in my hammock
later, I was oddly surprised by the sound I’d been
waiting for; a group of howler monkeys, moving through the
darkness. A
dull, ominous, monster-like groan echoed from deep in the
forest, and I remembered my first encounter with
howlers, years before in a remote part of
Guatemala’s Peten province; I’d never heard them before, but had recognized
the sound immediately. Howlers speak with an evocative
throaty resonance that, once heard, you never
forget. It’s powerful and chilling, yet you smile
because you know that, when faced with the verity of such wildness,
there is no true reference point. You’re left feeling
helplessly and self-consciously civilized in a
simian world where the untamed can still taunt the
shadows of your primal imagination, even as you realize with
certainty that you’ll never swing from trees again
yourself.
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