Guest Author: Karen Heuler

Karen Heuler is the author of the short story collection The Other Door and the novel The Soft Room. Her most recent novel, Journey to Bom Goody, follows a man as he tries to deliver electricity and mass media to the natives along the Amazon River. I wondered how much on-site research Heuler had done, so I went ahead and asked her. New Yorkers will be able to hear her read from the novel on Wednesday, June 1st, at Pier 63 (I'm guessing at the tiki bar).

Journey to the Amazon
by Karen Heuler

Jungles are big surprise packages for me. I went to the Amazon in 1990, a time when the Shining Path guerrillas prompted advisories against traveling in Peru. When I got to my lodge outside Iquitos, there were very few tourists, so I had a guide of my own for a while. We spent leisurely days going from one village to another, or looking for birds or plants. He pointed out trees that cured malaria, diabetes, intestinal worms, as well as leaves that held the antidotes for snake bites, tree saps that hardened into casts for broken bones, and vines that contained pure water. He insisted we both look straight ahead when we paddled past a lagoon with a monster in it and described a one-legged devil that turns into the enormous blue morpho butterfly. I saw birds that made nests like great drooping socks and spiders the size of dinner plates. I heard frogs that sounded like rattling bones and birds that sounded like police whistles. I whistled like he did to attract the pink river dolphins, and I swung from vines, shot blow guns, got chigger bites like rows of bracelets around my ankles.

If the screen door wasn't closed in the lodge's dining area, the resident blue and yellow parrot would stalk across the floor and then use his beak to pull himself up a chair and onto the table. He waddled up to coffee cups, pulling the spoons out and rotating them on his black tongue like a complex seed. He was a little bit like a tourist who had gotten overbearing from long residence.

The tourists who came through were resilient and stolid. Evenings were spent trading anecdotes, stories about the Shining Path, stories about what we'd seen. There was a sense of being comfortably on the edge of the unknown. We were hooked on the details of murdered tourists, lost money or identification papers, canceled flights, jungle illnesses. For all of us, there was a little flurry of reinventing ourselves: we were brave, we were adventurous, we fit in everywhere.

There were a few hammocks down by the river, and if I took one and read for a while, a parrot would land on another hammock, chuckling to himself, then walk sideways and look away, pretending he wasn't eyeing my ponytail. He had a ritual: four bobs, a very noisy takeoff, and then he'd fly at my hair. I always heard him; I always ducked. When I washed out a shirt and hung it over the railing outside my room, a toucan would pull at the buttons, dragging the whole thing away.

Bugs, birds, howler monkeys; eels, piranhas, sea monsters. Everything was alive and filtering into each other; it was possible to see the river dolphins change into men who seduced the local women; it was possible to see lightning shoot sideways above the trees. My guide kept dreaming about animals he'd never seen; they were the animals I knew.

Anything could happen. When I left that lodge, I took a boat down the Amazon, with side trips to search for caiman (someone unexpectedly handed one to me, a small one, yes, but startling). Another guide peeled a sloth off a tree and showed us the moss growing along its fur.

This is the setting of my second novel, Journey to Bom Goody. In it, two very unlikely Americans with strange missions meet in the Amazon and find that their destinations keep changing as they head towards the legendary village of Bom Goody. There's a guide in there who is sometimes a dolphin; there are parrots stealing buttons; there are devils and Amazons and cities of gold. There are shamans and dart guns and the hallucinogen ayahuasca--and people spinning ideas in their heads like parrots spinning spoons.