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.