One River: Explorations and Discoveries in the Amazon Rain. - book reviews

This year's favorite book among plant people of all stripes, the biography, One River, details plant explorer Dr. Richard Evans Schuttes's fieldwork in the Americas from the 1930s to the present: his grad student adventures with the Kiowa and their peyote ritual; his early discovery of sacred mushroom use among natives of Oaxaca, Mexico; and all sorts of science, tradition, and anecdotal highjinks with Amazonian tribal people. Author/anthropologist Wade Davis is an animating, meticulous writer, weaving in of his own field research with the late Tim Plowman, another ethnobotanical hero. The inside story on rubber in WW II, coca, plant mysticism, and the tragic price of "civilization" in the Amazon intrigue and disturb, as we follow dedicated botanists picking up precious, disintegrating threads of nature and culture. This is a really fine story.

"In turn, through dance, the Tanimuka saluted each animal of creation. First the young boys adorned as monkeys and carrying leafy branches mimicked the lithe movements of primates scattering through the canopy. The tapir dance was slow and lumbering, the one dedicated to the anteater startling in the realistic depiction of the costume. The movements of the deer dance were graceful and rapid, darting steps that perfectly captured the frightened and nervous character of the animal. The dance of the wild bee was accompanied by a low buzzing drone. That of the fruit bat was sung with unexpected beauty, a high chant, squeaky and shrill like the voices that emerge from caves. The most powerful dance of all, the one heard by Schultes just as he took a dose of ya-hee snuff, was that of the jaguar. As he watched the nimble dancers pounding and whining, snarling like cats, he saw the masks of wooden teeth, glass eyes, and whiskers of black pitch come alive. move toward him, and disappear. In a pool of colored light.

"With the disease each day making more of his body numb and useless, Schultes faced a river trip of more than seven hundred miles. There was no option. Abandoning his aluminum canoe in favor of a larger river launch, he and Pacho left La Pedrera after a day, bound for Manaus by way of the Rio Japura and the Solimoes. The passage took nine days of steady running. When finally they arrived in Manaus, on the night of July 24, Schultes could barely walk and had to be supported by Pacho on his way to the hospital. There Schultes got hold of a syringe, leaned how to use it, and bought enough thiamine to get him through a few weeks.

On his way into town from the docks he had noticed a fine riverboat belonging to the American Chicle Company. That night he dispatched Pacho to make inquiries. and by morning everything was arranged. Within three days of arriving in Manaus, Schultes was back on the river headed for the Rio Madeira. His goal was the savannah at the headwaters of the Marmelos. Three years before, when he had come down the Madeira from Bolivia, low water had prevented him from reaching the home of the rare endemic Hevea camporum. He was not about to let beriberi get in the way of a chance to secure flowering specimens. On July 31, their first day on the river, he and Pacho made collections from twenty-four different trees of Hevea spruceana.

COPYRIGHT 1997 Point Foundation
COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group