A Wooden Empire

One of the first things I notice about Iquitos was all the fabulous wooden furniture in La Casa Fitzcarraldo, the place we are staying for now. And that the doors are so beautiful, dark-finished and heavy. The floors are gorgeous too. Then, zooming about town, I note even the people out on the street were seated in finely crafted, solid wood chairs. Curious, I begin paying closer attention and observe scads of stores dealing in long, red planks of unfinished wood. Peering around corners, I see these “storefronts” are often filled with enormous logs that are no less than four feet wide! Huge trucks haul around logs like these, piled in a pyramid, held fast by chains. Back at home, I sit at a twelve foot long picnic table made from a single three inch thick piece of solid Amazonian hardwood.

The pieces are coming together. At first, I simply admired these fine specimens, knowing from experience that the table at which I am seated could retail in the US for $2000. Easy.

“The people of the Amazon are just rich with wood,” I think to myself, “As Americans are rich with grain.” No problem. What right would I have to tell another people to stop using their most plentiful resource? Right?
But then we get the chance to take a truck almost as far out of town as the road goes: about 50 km. (see video) I feel happy that we are leaving the town of Iquitos for the day to go into the wilderness.

Feeling fully prepared to finally jump into the living, noisy, dense, exotic, wild, flooded jungle, my forehead is glued to the window as I scanned the landscape for the looming giants I had read so much about. Yet I could barely make out in the distance the great green wall that is the beginning of the rainforest. I asked Jorn, the insane Norwegian ichthyologist when we’d get out of the countryside and into la selva.

“Oh, yew don’t a see dee jungle he-ir. Dee locals have cut her down. All dee way back fort-ee kilo-meters most times. You must hire a speed boat and go for two to three days, speeding up dee reevier to see any reul jungle.”

Whoa. I had read that wherever there is a thoroughfare in the Amazon, it acts like rust on a car: the jungle is eaten away, beginning at the line cut through its midst. And now here we are, moving so quickly and easily, cushioned by rubber tires, along one of these very roads, and I am seeing it with my own eyes! There were little thatched-roof settlements lining the street, selling barbeque chicken and plantains. On our way back, we pull over and get a closer look, and find that the local people use charcoal made from wood to cook their food. To them, of course, the jungle seems endless, eminent even. They probably haven’t seen a satellite photo of their neighborhood or cruised around google earth. How would they know that everyone is behaving in the same way they are, and it is having a real and profound effect? Education, I suppose.

All and all, it is a very interesting situation. Of course, everything I had read, everything anyone reads about the Amazon these days is about “Save the rainforest!” “Stop the destruction of the rainforest!” Somehow I thought that I could train my expert optimist eyes on this issue in person and still be able to see the jungle thriving.

I haven’t yet.

(We are setting sail tomorrow, though, heading towards the city of Manaus. Then we will take a boat an hour away from any roads and see what we find. So don’t lose hope! I haven’t done that yet either!)