Wandering Through the Jungles of the Talbot County Free Library

by Bill Peak

The very first, full-length, grown-up book I ever read was William Brandon's American Heritage Book of Indians. I was nine when I began reading it, and almost eleven by the time I finished, but I made it through, and I made it through convinced I should have been born a hundred years earlier in a tipi on the North American plains. Now, sadly, it was too late for me to ever know the joys of life unhindered by civilization's rules about bathing and going to school and studying penmanship and long division.

At the time, of course, the jungles of South America were still home to thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of uncontacted Native Americans. If I really wanted to be what I lovingly thought of in those innocent, politically incorrect days as “a wild Indian,” I could always run off to the Amazon. But actually going to South America, trying to picture that ... well, the place seemed awfully far away and strange—an exotic, jungle locale peopled by “natives” who looked nothing like the horsemen I dreamt of, “natives” who were still known to kill the odd prospector (and who can blame them?) looking to invade their land and steal its riches. Thinking about this, imagining myself looking rather lugubriously through a tangle of lianas at an armed band of Native Americans, I would glance up from whatever book I happened to be reading, notice my sweet mother setting the table for dinner, consider the food she'd prepared for our meal, the snug bed that awaited me upstairs, and—telling myself it was only temporary—once more postpone my plans for the Orinoco till I was a little older.

But back to that first book, what was, in a sense, my ur-book. It wasn't long before I discovered that, even if I hadn't the courage to lose myself in the jungles of South America, I could still live out my dreams of doing so, however vicariously, through the writings of those that did. And so began a lifelong fascination with stories told by intrepid explorers who had hiked, paddled, and macheted their way to the furthest, darkest, most little known reaches of our planet ... and returned to tell the tale.

I read Claude Lévi-Strauss's Tristes Tropiques, Darwin's Voyage of the Beagle, and Nicole Maxwell's Witch Doctor's Apprentice. I climbed to The Top of the World with Hans Ruesch, sailed the Roaring Forties with Frank Worsley in Shackleton's Boat Journey, and measured the height of South American volcanoes with Alexander von Humboldt, courtesy of Andrea Wulff's fabulous The Invention of Nature. And, most important, I told every librarian I knew about my reading preferences, hoping against hope to find more such works in the deepest, darkest reaches of the library's own book-clad jungles.

Not too long ago, yet again, another librarian came through for me. Knowing my tastes as well or better than I, this wonderful lady handed me a copy of Wade Davis's One River. I have lived and dreamed that book for close to two months now, only finishing it last week. I know what you're thinking—“He's almost as slow a reader as he was when he was nine.”—but actually that's not the case. Permit me to explain ....

One River recounts the adventures of three ethnobotanists: a great teacher at Harvard, Richard Evans Schultes, and two of his students, Tim Plowman and the author. Ethnobotanists, for those of you who, like me, thought the name something of a contradiction in terms, turn out to be botanists who study the way indigenous peoples use plants. One River tells two tales, its narrative moving back and forth between the story of Schultes' remarkable undertakings in South America in the years before, during, and immediately after World War II, and Plowman and Davis's work retracing his steps in the '70s and '80s, adding to his list of new species discovered and uncharted lands charted ... even as they document the fragile, fraying end of South American indigenous peoples' contact with the vast botanical knowledge of their ancestors.

I don't recommend One River unreservedly. Plowman and Davis are members of my generation, the one that believed drugs could expand one's consciousness, and their fascination with native people's use of plants with hallucinogenic properties grows tiresome at times (and may have contributed to Plowman's death), but their courage—and, even more, the courage of Schultes—their willingness to plunge into places and cultures no Westerner has ever known or could possibly even imagine ... that, for me, made One River a book I never wanted to finish. Which is why I took so long to read it. Which is why, indeed, I wish I were reading it still. If such a strange, wild ride appeals to you, if you, too, decide to take a dugout canoe down One River, please, when you return, when the malarial fevers have subsided and you're feeling up to it, give me a call, let me know what unknown parts of the world—what unknown parts of yourself—you discovered.