He was cracking under the pressure

He was cracking under the pressure drums.jpg (30626 bytes)

Chapter Four - Part Two

By Krsna's arrangement we eventually made our way back to the boat at eleven o'clock that night. Needless to say I had a pretty good sleep.

Some days into the trip, one of the devotees decided that he wanted to go back. He wanted to leave the boat immediately. He was cracking under the pressure. I spoke with him briefly but didn't try to force him to stay. I had learnt from experience that you can't force in a situation like that. We had organised a tight program and it was difficult for some of the devotees to maintain it. No one missed mangala-arati. Everyone went to the full morning program and chanted all their rounds. Then each person did his duties and went out on sankirtana. But the pace had already proved too much for him. He first caught a ride on one of the villager's canoes. He then jumped aboard a passing river boat that took him back to Manaus.

The next day I woke up with dysentery. All night I had cramps in my stomach, the kind I get in India when the same dysentery comes. As I was walking from the washroom I mentioned it to another devotee who thought that the cause of the dysentery was the old prasadam we ate the night before.
"Things tend to rot quickly in the hot sun," he told me.
But I blamed the river water. The one thing we overlooked bringing was a water tank. The water we used for bathing, cooking and drinking came directly from the river. It was another risk we took while travelling in this wild Amazon Jungle.

Our voyage to the next village took us twice as long as we planned. We didn't arrive until two o'clock in the afternoon. When I asked the captain why it took us so long, he said that every few months the river changed. Sometimes there were new islands, new swamps and changes in the course of the river. I realised that to be a captain of a ship on the Amazon requires a lot of experience. You have to know the river and also how to read it when it changes. Otherwise disaster can result. He told me that one technique the "old salts" use is to follow behind the local villagers paddling their canoes. The local villager knows the shifting of the river in his area. This explained to me why we took the erratic course we did the first night. I had been wondering why we were going here and there; the captain explained that he had no understanding of that area and we were simply following a small boat.

He also told me that going up the river as we were doing, was not as dangerous as coming down. If going up the river we hit a sand bar, the flowing current going downstream would push us off. But if we hit one going downstream the force of the current might embed us in the sand with no way of escape.

He went on to describe how last year he'd seen several ships stuck on sand bars during the low water season. They had to wait six months until the high water season came to get the boats off. They took advantage of that time to make small repairs on their boats but the fact remained that they were stuck on the river for six months. The water rising helps the boat off the sand bar.

Even I could see that the river was changing. Huge trees were constantly floating by with large pieces of earth. The big river eats at the side of the bank relentlessly, tearing huge pieces of it away, including enormous trees.

This was one reason why the banks were bare. The other reason was man. During the last forty years he had ravaged the banks of the river, cutting down trees, and floating them downriver as logs. It was easy picking. Even in the wild Amazon Jungle man has taken his toll and as a result, a lot of wildlife has retreated inland.