How to Risk It

A year or so before leaving Ecuador my friend Quinn lent me a book: Peter Matthiessen’s The Snow Leopard. I was interested in the title and the reviews, but didn’t expect much. I had just come back from Europe, and had found it difficult to connect with a culture while traveling. Everything I experienced there touched me, but more as a frantic surrealist art experiment than any kind of communing (Many of the cities were, after all, “communes”). Nevertheless gaining a meaningful or even spiritual connection somewhere “foreign” has always remained my main goal, even if any bond did have its obvious flaws during a four-week trip to Europe.

But what I found in The Snow Leopard was something deeper: while I rode the Eurail between visits to major European cities, Matthiessen walked among ever more remote Tibetan cities, albeit with porters. The two experiences differ in terms of what Hakim Bey calls mediation. Mediated experiences are those that control or focus one’s attention to a specific agenda. In this light, my jovial trip to Europe changed to a rather predictable indoctrination of euro-centrism. While Matthiessen had to accept some mediation in using porters and even in writing self-consciously about his journey, the effect was much more pronounced in my own trip. I had to learn to travel, and live, like this man.

When I made it to The Cloud Forest, I had already decided to travel to Ecuador. I was looking for guidance on how to handle the area I was about to enter. But the reach of Western civilized mediation has encroached further in this novel: Matthiessen travels through the Amazon Basin in a British cargo ship and later in a plane. True, he could never have walked through in the way he did in The Snow Leopard, but he left room for improvement: why not settle down and immerse rather than dabble from behind a porthole?

But The Cloud Forest is by no means inaccurate even if it was a rather restless pursuit. The rest of Matthiessen’s journey takes him all over South America, but I am most attracted to the select few Amazon passages perfectly capturing the ambiance of the jungle. Describing what I called “the orchestra” in my own journal, Matthiessen represents silence and noise equally:

“the jungle seems strangely silent, even when the air is full of sound; the sounds are like sounds from another sphere of consciousness, from a dream, and then suddenly they burst singly on the ear: the tree frogs and cicadas, the shattering squawks of parrots… and the eerie flutterings of birds whose appearance could scarcely be guessed at, all of these competing with the little squeaks and cries uttered by my companion, who, receiving no intimation of our insignificance, did not have the proper respect for this sort of cathedral”
(38-9)

Each species plays its part in this composition; Matthiessen is not far off when he likens it to religious spaces. The trees loom like pillars and inspired greater awe in me even than Notre Dame. While the latter was a planned construction, these trees, this life just emerged out of itself.
The sedentary lifestyle of the field school is something I thought would allow me to have more moments like Matthiessen’s, where I could feel the lukewarm embrace of the jungle. I say “sedentary” referring to the fact that we were based out of a single area rather than moving from city to city. I nevertheless found myself involved in very strenuous jungle hikes between periods of resting, listening to engaging lectures by Professor Swanson, or eating and talking. Life moved in smooth, rain-moderated cycles with equal parts activity and rest, awe and contentment. I felt as if I had begun living in the dream world, the origin of the sounds heard by Matthiessen.
I had the sense that Matthiessen missed something in The Cloud Forest that he communed with deeply in The Snow Leopard. The circumstances of his boat travel, in the light of his months-long trek through Nepal, just seemed too safe, too sterile. I felt that perhaps what was lacking was the threat of death from one’s environment, the giddy danger of taking a risk. I thought I would try risking it.

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