360 Degrees Longitude (47 page)

Leaf-cutter ants are farmers. With one mind and one purpose they cut large bits of leaves off a particular variety of tree and carry the leaf fragments back to their colony. The leaves then decay and grow a fungus that feeds the colony.

In the rain forest we could see leaf-cutter ant highways everywhere. These paths were three to four inches wide and hundreds of yards long. The bumper-to-bumper traffic flowing in one direction was of empty-handed ants heading to the tree. Flowing the other direction was an endless procession of huge chunks of leaves, each being carried by a tiny ant. Each ant was working for the collective good of the colony, complaining about neither working conditions, nor the lack of days off, nor that the Internet connection is basic dial-up.

September took it as her personal mission to try to get an individual leaf-cutter ant to assert its own personality. She started by using a stick to pick up an ant that was heading back to the colony with its leaf.

“You don't have to do this!” she said to the ant. “The rest of the colony won't notice if you don't deliver your leaf! Take the rest of the day off and go to the beach.”

With those simple instructions, she gave the ant a 180 degree about-face. In every case, the ant would figure out that it had been turned around and that it had to head back toward the colony and deliver its payload.

September has never given up easily. If she couldn't get one ant to take a mental health day, she would see if she could drive the entire column of ants off to ant Disneyland. She built an off-ramp from their little highway.

This started small—she placed just a single stick across their path. The empty-handed ants milled around, confused, on one side of the stick, and the leaf-carrying ants congregated on the other side. The ants ultimately prevailed and found a way around the stick. September's diversionary tactics grew until she had built a trench across their path several inches deep, lined with aluminum foil and filled with water.

It took the poor little critters quite a while to figure out what was going on, but eventually they were able to get around every diversion that September put in their way.

Her attempt at transforming a conformist ant into an individualist ant is the only thing I have known September to have failed at. That and getting me to like classical music. An ant is an ant, and will always be an ant.

Three days later we left our rain forest dwelling and made our way via canoe to the “pampas” region of the Bolivian Amazon, to the aptly named Mosquito Camp Number 3.

Mosquito Camp was not in the jungle, but in the grasslands on the edge of a slow-moving river, a tributary to the Rio Beni. We arrived at the very beginning of the dry season. The river was subsiding from its seasonal highs, but the water was still at the level of many of the tree-tops. Mosquito Camp was supposed to give us better wildlife viewing opportunities. It did just that, even before we arrived.

As René guided our canoe up the river, he maneuvered it next to a tree that had only its very topmost branches extending out of the water. In a few weeks the tree would be several yards away from the water's edge. The tree branches seemed to come alive. As if on cue, dozens of small, bright yellow monkeys came scurrying to the canoe. Clearly this wasn't René's first visit to this tree.

“John-Rambo, catch!” René threw an overripe banana to me as the monkeys came storming aboard. I broke it in half and gave the pieces to Katrina and Jordan. The monkeys swarmed all over Katrina and Jordan, jockeying into position to get a free handout.

An hour later, Mosquito Camp Number 3 came into view. René called out, “John-Rambo, hop out and pull the boat to shore and tie it up. Plastico, he may be lonely. Just scratch him behind the ears.”

I had no idea what René was talking about, other than that he wanted me to tie up the canoe. Grabbing the rope that was fixed to the stern, I hopped into the water.

Something in the water moved. I saw a pair of eyes coming toward me. As the eyes came closer it was clear that they were attached to an eight-foot-long alligator.

I don't really know what happened next. Somehow I was hovering somewhere about four feet above the surface of the water looking down. “John-Rambo,” René was laughing so hard he could hardly speak, “meet Plastico, the flesh-eating alligator of the Amazon. He just wants a scratch behind the ears. And maybe some spaghetti.” I
was
four feet above the water, the hovering made possible by the balcony I was standing on; I just don't recall scrambling onto it.

Plastico was the resident alligator who had chosen to make Mosquito Camp Number 3 his home. We found over the next few days every camp in the area had its own resident alligator who hung out by the kitchen waiting for table scraps.

With the canoe tied up to one of the legs of the building, I called down to the kids, “An alligator can't climb up onto the balcony, so you'll be safe up here. Just step directly from the canoe to the balcony.” After the kids scurried from the canoe to the balcony and were safe beside me, I continued, “as long as you're in one of the buildings or on the balcony, you're safe. You are to never come off the balcony without an adult.”

This was the wrong thing to say. The kids are always drawn to a building's resident pets, such as the toucan and the macaws at our hotel in Rurrenabaque. Now that we had stumbled onto a resident alligator, they were immediately drawn to it.

It didn't help that René went up to the alligator and scratched the thing behind its… ears? Where does an alligator keep its ears? Anyway, you could tell by the way René moved that he respected Plastico, but was still comfortable approaching him, feeding him, and even scratching the thing behind the ears.

We had dinner a couple of hours later. Spaghetti. After dinner, René fed Plastico the table scraps. Somehow, Plastico didn't look as threatening with spaghetti dangling from his teeth. If it were possible, I became somewhat “adjusted” to life in camp with a resident alligator.

If Plastico had been a bear, he would have come right into the kitchen and torn the place apart, claiming every scrap of food for himself. But Plastico was content to sit outside the kitchen door with his mouth open, waiting for a handout. There he would sit, not moving or even, it would seem, breathing, for hours. Just waiting.

Now that we were in the pampas we went out on many sorties exploring and looking for wildlife. But unlike the jungle where our legs did the trekking, here we let the canoe take us on our expeditions.

We were looking for anacondas, piranhas, capybaras, pink river dolphins, and caimans, a kind of small crocodile. All these we found, in addition to a monkey for every branch. We even spotted a quetzal, a rare bird that symbolizes freedom throughout Latin America.

We went out looking for alligators that first night. We all piled into the canoe with our flashlights. After a few minutes, I couldn't help but think that this was futile. The river was so wide and black our puny flashlights were no match for the darkness. I shined my flashlight down river, but its light was swallowed by the blackness. As there was nothing to reflect back the light, all we could see were the fireflies dancing in the treetops.

René knew that was the point.

It took us about half an hour of searching before we found something that would reflect the light. In the distance, just breaking the surface of the water, a pair of glowing orange eyes shone in the blackness, waiting patiently—just like Plastico—for something to underestimate the blackness and venture within striking distance.

René had a genuine fondness for Plastico. But he kept several boat lengths between us and this pair of orange glowing eyes.

It was fitting that both Katrina and Jordan both asked about this later: why we didn't get any closer. “You need to know what is dangerous and keep your distance,” P admonished. “And if you don't know, bring someone along who does.” Useful advice for any jungle, concrete or otherwise.

• • •

“Today, we must catch our dinner!” René announced.

René passed out some loose fishing line and hooks, and prepared a small bowl with scraps of bloody raw beef. “Tonight we will be dining on the flesh-eating piranha of the Amazon.”

We took the canoe to a promising spot, baited our hooks, and without benefit of poles, dropped our lines into the water. Immediately I could feel action on the end of my line, but when I tried to hook the fish, I missed. I pulled in the line and found just the bait dangling off the hook, looking forlorn.

From my database of playground folklore, my expectation was that I would pull my baited hook from the water and there would be a half dozen piranhas tearing at the bait like pit bulls.

René, on the other hand,
was
pulling in piranhas one after the other. The piranhas were tiny: Each would yield no more than a forkful. But the piranhas also had massive teeth for their size, and those teeth were very sharp.

“John-Rambo!” René was tweaking me again. “You no catch piranha? You need to learn first how they eat.” He then demonstrated something that shocked me. He stuck his bare arm into the water.

“Unless the piranha smells blood,” René blithely advised, “it will not feed. Don't try this with a cut on your arm.”

I began to understand. The water is so black, the piranhas can't see their food. A piranha needs to smell blood in order to find its dinner.

“Got it, René. Don't slit my wrists and then stick my arm in piranha-infested waters. Important safety tip.”

So how do you catch a piranha? You don't “hook” it, and then reel it in like a normal fish. When you feel it tearing at the bait you have to pull it into the boat with one quick yank. Before they know it, they's a-floppin' and a-twitchin' in the bottom of the boat.

We took the afternoon's piranha haul back to camp. As soon as Plastico heard the roar of the outboard motor, he climbed out of the water and onto shore. He stood patiently, mouth open, waiting for someone to throw something into it. Of course, Katrina and Jordan each wanted to feed Plastico a piranha.

“Oh, come on, Dad. Everyone else is doing it!” I had been dreading the day when Katrina would say this to me, but I always thought it would be about getting a navel ring or dying her hair flaming red.

I watched as the camp cook, the caretaker, and even René each threw Plastico a piranha. I heard a dramatic CHOMP! as the beast's jaws caught the offering. René stood close to Plastico, monitoring feeding time, presumably ready to manhandle the beast if things got out of hand.

And so it was that I demonstrated that when it comes to parenting, I have a backbone with all the structural integrity of well-cooked pasta. I let Katrina feed a piranha to a wild alligator. Jordan, too. If someone had told me a year ago that I would be in the Amazon watching my kids feed a wild alligator several flesh-eating fish that they had caught just a few minutes before, I would have told them they were absolutely nuts. But here I was, watching the scene unfold before me, while I took out the digital camera and made an .mpg of it all.

• • •

We had checked into our hotel room in the tiny Bolivian town of Rurrenabaque only ten minutes prior, but I was already showering off six days' worth of Amazon grime. September came bursting into the bathroom.

“Our return flight to La Paz tomorrow morning has been cancelled. We can either try to make a flight that leaves in 20 minutes or wait two more days.”

Nineteen minutes later, without formalities such as tickets or security checks for derelict table forks, we were shoe-horned into a tiny Cessna. Two pilots emerged in military jumpsuits.

Our mighty steed was built for four adult passengers who knew one another very well, or who were about to get better acquainted. As our party was three adults and two children, we had to do some contortionist acts. I noted that there was an abundance of duct tape holding together the interior upholstery.

I was sitting behind the pilot of a tiny rubber band-powered Cessna that was looking down a short grass runway. I glanced over the pilot's shoulder to read a sticker on the instrument panel:
AEROBATIC MANEUVERS NOT PERMITTED
. September leaned over and yelled in my ear so that she could overcome the roar of the propeller, “You didn't get all the shampoo out of your hair!”

Positioned right behind the pilots, I watched the youngest open what appeared to be a textbook in his lap. The senior pilot appeared to be giving his companion instructions. Our original plane tickets were with Amazonas Air, but there were no such markings on our plane. I tapped one of the pilots on the shoulder and confirmed my suspicions. This was not a commercial flight. It was a military training flight, and our pilot was a new student, so would I please keep my questions to myself until we got airborne? They had a checklist to go through.

Pardonnez-moi
, I thought to myself. The last thing I wanted to do was interrupt Junior and his checklist.

Soon we were airborne. The sky was clear and we had front-row seats to the green carpet of the Amazon basin below. As we climbed to the high Altiplano near La Paz, we watched the green turn to the browns of bare earth and the whites of the permanent snow cover of the higher elevations. Our Little Plane That Could couldn't quite get enough altitude to go over the mountain peaks, so we flew below and between them.
We could look out the window and see the sheer rock walls of the Andes only a few hundred yards away. The one-hour flight back to La Paz was thrilling, even without aerobatic maneuvers.