About book The Cloud Forest: A Chronicle Of The South American Wilderness (1987)
Enjoyable in places but fairly uneven on the whole. I was also distracted by Matthiessen's admitted, though only occasional, hypocritical forays (more of a personal gripe on my part, perhaps, than anything else). Example: he decries in one moment how the constant groan of his group's outboard motor along various waterways in the Amazon basin diminishes his appreciation of the tranquil "jungle" setting. The next moment he willingly disrupts such tranquility himself by throwing in with his company's amused and entirely purposeless use of rifle fire, volleying rounds into the hides of hapless caimans left to sink to the murky river depths (mind you, without any intention of retrieving meat for the privileged gringo's expedition). This isn't Hemingway or Theodore Roosevelt, but Mr. Snow Leopard, the champion and master of elegy for the dwindling wild, and - believe it or not - an actual Zen master. Matthiessen acknowledges his hypocrisy in this regard, having just criticized his (non-indigenous) Peruvian companions for the senselessness of this practice, before taking it up himself and admitting boredom and apparent envy as the cause. He seems regretful of the decision to casually mow down these non-disruptive reptiles but later in the book records repeating this "sport" again. This from the author of Wildlife in America, a measured lament recounting the demise of North American fauna, largely from the "hook and bullet," and a seminal work in American conservationism that predates Rachel Carson by some years. In some sense his participation is a candid admission and highlights the shortcomings in his own attempt to reconcile man's impact on remaining wilderness areas when confronted with external (social) pressures and internal impulse. The excitement of the moment prevails over the better judgement of the individual. One person or a small group hunting down individual animals is obviously inconsequential to species survival, but our cumulative interactions with wildlife in this way underlies the reasons for their threatened survival (the destruction of habitat being the chief risk and an extension of the above attitude). And it didn't end with turning only caimans into Swiss cheese. Near the end of the book, after bemoaning the fact that the only land mammal he'd seen for months of the journey was a prosaic rat species, his group finally comes upon some capybaras along the river; care to take a guess at their (and his) collective response? Note: the few native "Indian" guides along with them are actually never permitted themselves to ever hold weapons and are generally treated (to use Matthiessen's words) as "peons."These episodes are only a minor note in the overall book, which does include nice testimony of his sense of wonder when reaching the kinds of sights that drew him to explore the wilds of South America in the first place. Such moments seem too few and are overwhelmed by the book's concluding section, which is devoted to the search for a large fossil mandible bone of unknown origin, deep in the jungle,that few locals believe exists, save one ardent discoverer who will lead them to it. He centers the dialogue of this several day "hunt" along treacherous waters more around the ensuing inter-company drama and growing annoyances that emerges within the group, rather than imparting the richness of sights they no doubt encountered. Again, an honest account of his travels and not some romanticized retelling is admirable on his part. This isn't the Jungle Book, and despite my lengthy complaints above, Matthiessen is not some trophy hunter out for blood, but a complex central narrator far from home, who doesn't hide his somewhat irritable side under the conditions. Complex characters- the underpinning of a good prose story, some would say. In that sense, maybe it wasn't so far off the mark.
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