Peering around riverbends
A reflection on the river journeys I've taken, past and present.
However you found your way here, welcome! I’m Emily, and I write letters about how we seek and tell stories to make sense of a changing world and our place in it.
This essay was first published in The Mekong Review’s August 2023 issue.
I had meant to sign up for five days, tops. Then I saw the map of the river. It covered the entire wall of the tour agency’s office in Lagunas, a village gateway for river journeys into the Peruvian Amazon. I had arrived during the rainy season in 2015 and the jungle was flooded. Five days paddling downstream in a dugout canoe would take me barely halfway up the wall.
My mind began to race ahead. I stared intently at the bright blue rivulet, followed its curves upwards to where it pooled into a lake, then dropped sharply off the edge of the wall. “What’s there?” I asked.
“Lago Pastococha,” the agent said, with a whispery reverence that made an impression on me. “It’s pure wilderness there.”
From what little he told me, I imagined big black caimans turning circles lazily around a lake, reoccupying an abandoned oil storage apparatus I later found blurry pictures of online—the way, in a climate-changed world, giant lizards started reoccupying corporate boardrooms in J.G. Ballard’s The Drowned World. Perhaps that should have put me off, but instead, I found myself drawn even more to the part of the map I couldn’t see.
I’ve often come to forks like this while travelling. Do I stop where I had planned to arrive, or do I keep going? I’ve gone to places where I encountered few other tourists, which lacked conventional attractions, simply because I wanted to see for myself what was there. In a world where Google Maps is our main source of wayfinding, the seemingly unmapped places—I couldn’t find Pastococha on it, just the green expanse of the Pacaya-Samiria National Reserve it lies within—intrigue me, especially if I draw in closer, delineate tighter boundaries for myself. The smaller the area I hone in on, the more I want to know every part of it, the more it feels possible to know every part of it. Maybe if I just go on a little bit further—around the next boulder on a jungle trail, or around the next bend of a river—I might find something I have never quite seen, in quite the same way, before.
I’ve found that rivers, particularly narrow tributaries, best encapsulate this sentiment. Sculling your way along a river’s curves, your vision is necessarily obscured, blinkered by its inherent topography. Then, at some point, you emerge into an expanse, of water or of land, and regain some clarity about your surroundings. Sometimes, you come into a stillness where you can feel the slightest movement of air around you, or you stumble upon a community in places that may initially seem inhospitable for human life. I have always loved this feeling, this surfacing as if on to a different plane.
Last October, I went on another extended river journey, this time along the Kinabatangan in Sabah—starting with a reporting trip in the wetlands around the river’s lower reaches. When night fell during my days out there, I would lie awake in the dark, in one of its eight villages, shrouded beneath a mosquito net after the solar power had reached the end of its ration, and run through what I had seen and heard along my journey.
While ambient sounds provided a soundtrack for my thoughts—in one village, it was the muezzin; in another, a neighbour partaking in a passionate karaoke session that seemed to swell the air above the open water—what kept coming back to me was the memory of entering the village of Pitas Laut, narrowing into a winding tributary under the hooded shelter of mangrove trees.
We could do so only because the water was “turned on”, as the villagers describe it in Malay, and even then we had to swap our boat for a slimmer one before we weaved between flanks of bakau kurap, an especially ubiquitous species of mangrove found here. In the rustle of the breeze, they seemed almost human to me—their roots like a dancer’s arched feet, their slim, spear-like seeds hanging from their branches like a woman’s earrings, waiting to fall off and grow new roots in the soil. From their tangled shadows we bumped up gently against a bank alongside a smattering of other moored boats, where marshy ground quickly gave way to a grassy plateau squeezed between river and sea, where this fishing community had built their wooden stilt homes.
One of my favourite stories about rivers is the story of Juliane Diller, who was the sole survivor of a plane crash in the Peruvian Amazon in 1971—reportedly the deadliest lightning-strike disaster in aviation history—when she was seventeen. I first heard of her before I made my own Amazon journey, sitting around a table in Lima with a few women I had recently met, one of them a conservationist. Diller was the only child of two German zoologists working in the Peruvian Amazon, both of whom died in the crash. Miraculously, her fall had been cushioned by the Amazon’s foliage, and she sustained just minor injuries. “She had been taught by her parents to always follow the river, if she ever got lost, until she found a human settlement,” I remember the conservationist said. “That’s how she survived.” I listened to that story and was transfixed.
When I was a child, the river was a place of mystery and wonder—I saw my first fireflies there—and sometimes, of adventure laced with danger. I spent much of my childhood in Kota Tinggi, a town in the southern Malaysian state of Johor, where my maternal grandparents lived. A river traverses through it, and floods are not an uncommon occurrence despite its name, which literally translates to ‘high town’. One year, amid a deluge, my grandmother was marooned on the third floor of the building where she lived and had to wait for the fire department to rescue her. I know this from the newspaper cutting she kept, which featured a photograph of her perched on the shoulders of her bandana-wearing saviour.
More recently, when it flooded again, the state’s wildlife department warned residents to be on guard for crocodiles. They might have strayed out of the rivers—perhaps to seek out the carcasses of drowned animals—and into monsoon drains, which, even in the absence of floods, could turn into little rivers of their own in stormy weather. I remember once, when I was a child—still small enough to clamber down into these drains to catch tadpoles with my bare hands—and it was pouring, my mother asked me to wait by a corner shop while she went to get the car. When she came back, she couldn’t find me and panicked, imagining that I had fallen into the drain and been carried away by the gushing water. Later, she found me at the other end of the shoplot, clasping the hand of an elderly uncle who had taken it upon himself to watch over me until she returned.
In Kuala Lumpur, where we currently live, I don’t live near a river—at least not one that I can see. Perhaps I just haven’t always thought of them as rivers. In fact, two major rivers—Klang and Gombak—flow through the city and flush into each other at the foot of Masjid Jamek in the city’s core. But over the decades, the rivers have been engineered—straightened, deepened and widened—in what some say has been a misguided attempt to mitigate floods. The rivers, they say, now resemble big drains, concrete having replaced the mud and vegetation that could have better absorbed excess rainwater. And that’s how people have come to treat them, too: erecting buildings with their backs facing the rivers, illicitly dumping their garbage into them.
It wasn’t until I took up a project to walk the two rivers, to better understand their physical and social histories, that I began to see them differently. I walked inside the hulking hollows of their concrete canals just to find out how it felt to be inside them. When it rained and the tide rose, I watched, helpless, as the homeless abandoned their makeshift shelters in the shadows of the flyovers along the river. I followed the rivers to the outer reaches of the city, where they took on their natural features again around clusters of kampungs—and delighted, once, in bumping into a man in traditional dress walking his free-roaming geese. I will never forget that view of the city from the vicinity of Kampung Puah, off the trunk road of Jalan Gombak: the river flanked by grassy green banks so dense they call to mind that Triassic jungle of Ballardian fantasy, tapering finally into a point on the horizon capped by the Petronas Twin Towers.
After my reporting trip around the lower reaches of the Kinabatangan River last year, I headed upstream to stay the night at the Danau Girang Field Centre. I was curious about what life was like on a scientific research station in the wild and what kind of work was being done there. I arrived sometime after lunch and was ushered to the main building, where I found foreign student conservationists on break—some watching Harry Potter on a projector in the canteen, while others planned the details for their next field trip.
Later, I followed Amanda Wilson, a local Kadazan biologist who was just beginning her PhD on the little-known but endangered flat-headed cat, as she went about her work. The small feline is believed to populate riverine forests in search of aquatic prey, and we criss-crossed the river by boat and hiked in nearby jungles in the rain to check on camera traps that had been planted sometime ago. At night, we searched a riverside palm oil plantation with our torches, looking for signs of the elusive creature.
According to Amanda, the cameras had not picked up any footage of the cat in the past decade, which made me curious about what had made her decide to commit to studying it for five whole years. There was a self-possession to her, a surefooted way of speaking and moving that belied that uncertainty.
“Well, as a researcher, you always want to test things out,” Amanda said. “So you just have to start somewhere.” She had already wanted to pursue the research for her master’s, but her supervisors had cautioned her that a master’s wouldn’t afford her enough time. A creature like the flat-headed cat would need more time to reveal itself; it would require someone patient enough to see it.
This resonated with me. I told her it sounds a lot like writing sometimes, trying to figure out what a story is. You start with a question and a hunch that you’ll find answers for that question. But sometimes you don’t find what you’re looking for, and turn up different questions instead. And isn’t that the whole reason for exploring?
In the end, in the Amazon jungles of Peru, I never did arrive at Lago Pastococha. The river can’t take you where it doesn’t flow. On my fifth day out on the Marañon River with my guide, before we would have to start making our round trip back to Lagunas, we came up against large swathes of river carpeted with bright green water lettuce and giant water lilies: an astonishingly surreal sight.
At first, Santiago hacked at them with his machete, but their roots were too strong, too entangled, and though we managed to cut through one section and bypassed another by wending off along a side stream to get back to the river, we couldn’t keep doing the same for the other floating meadows that lay ahead. It seemed destructive of the nature we had come so far to experience.
The sky had also begun to darken ominously. As tough as Santiago was, I detected a furrow of worry between his brows. He warned that the river currents could get quite turbulent in these parts, and since the jungle was flooded this time of year we wouldn’t too easily come by solid ground for refuge. The existence of black caimans in these parts also began to cast shadows on our minds.
Eventually, Santiago put down his paddle and turned back to look at me, apologetic. “I don’t think it’s a good idea to continue,” he said. “What do you say? Should we turn back?”
This essay was first published in The Mekong Review’s August 2023 issue. Do make a subscription to support literary writing in Southeast Asia.