Piranhas, no lifejackets, daughters who can’t swim: Ingrid Horrocks tells a tale on the Amazon River
We followed a narrow path through the vibrant green waist-high grasses to the river itself, now at its lowest point about 100 metres from the houses.
Looking ahead, I saw our motorboat. It did have a motor, but that only made it sit deeper in the water. The motor was a converted scrub-cutter. The wharf was a slight, narrow plank raised on sticks above the sandy shore. The boat was a smaller, more rudimentary version of the canoe we’d seen sink just a few hours before, and this one was to be ridden on the open river. By us.
Things sped up. My partner Tim and our daughters, who had gone ahead a bit with our guide Walter, were already moving on. Tim glanced back at me with a look I refused to read, as he gripped the girls’ hands. They and Walter were on the makeshift wharf and then in the boat. And then my brother Tom and I were there too and I was stepping on, gesturing to the man and his skinny son at the back of the boat about life jackets, when clearly there weren’t any. There was no other way back.
Tim was down on the floor saying nothing and then my brother was sitting on a plank seat beside Natasha, and I was hunched beside Lena, and we were pushing out into the Amazon river, as wide and terrifying as the ocean, except with currents and submerged sticks, and piranha we couldn’t see but that we’d watched on YouTube stripping flesh from bone. I could say nothing to the man just behind me who directed our course, although we were almost close enough now for me to feel his breath, the slight shifting of his son on the back bench. I was calculating whether I thought my girls could swim the distance we were from shore and whether I could swim with them and whether I would see caiman if they were here in this rushing body of water. The other bank was so far away it was another country.
I felt a flood of anger mixed in with fear.
I hissed at my brother it had to get communicated to Walter at the front and the man at the motor that we had to stay near the shore.
"We can’t go out too far," I said loudly. "You said there’d be life jackets."
I may have been shouting. "My girls, my niñas, can’t swim. Not well enough."
I glanced at Tim, then quickly away.
I was shaking my head and gesturing with my arms.
I scanned the water, half standing now, my arm still hooked around Lena. "Tell them," I breathed to my brother.
He was in the middle, as always, calling things in Spanish to Walter who shouted them back down the body of the now quivering boat to the pilot.
Then Walter sent something sharply back, which Tom translated at me. "The pilot says you have to stay still. Don’t wobble."
It was a jolt.
I’d seen what happens when you wobble.
I sat down, gripping the side of the boat and gripping Lena too tightly, so that she shrugged, pulling away from the weight of my arm. I tried not to move. I continued to mutter stuff but more quietly now. Tim and both our daughters were uncharacteristically silent. The boy behind us with his father hadn’t said a word. We all sat very still.
The small boat moved down the river with our small family balanced precariously along its length, as though along my own curved spine. I had brought us all here, to this.
It was hard in that moment to remember why.
My initial shock reaction, a drenching of maternal fierceness, began to seep away into a feeling only of helplessness. I could do nothing but sit still, and hope – and try not to do anything that would cause other people to get hurt, including those in whose company we floated. We weren’t the only people in this boat.
After what seemed a very long period of rigid silence, Tom turned and said, "Relax, sis. I’ve told them. I just couldn’t while you were yelling like that."
He swivelled and said something more to the pilot I was glad I couldn’t understand.
Then he turned back to me, smiling nervously. "Chill, sis. You worry about them all too much."
After that, we hunched uncomfortably on the boat without talking for a long time as the stillness of the evening settled around us. I’d taken off my watch in the damp, but Walter had told us the boat ride back would take about half an hour. Right then, that was forever.
Earlier in the afternoon there had been talk of spotting pink Amazonian dolphins, but now I only hoped we wouldn’t see them and be tempted to go further out. I would rather not see. I’d rather leave the dolphins to swim as they wished. My fear rode with us, as within me it began slowly to slacken. The sky gradually became gentle pink and orange, the water smooth in reflection.
It was not irrational to be afraid, I have to tell myself even now, and in doing so I notice how very afraid I am of showing fear, and I wonder about that. If (if ) I am responsible for the formation of my daughters’ courage, I am also responsible for their safety.
At some point, my brother said more gently, "I did ask for life jackets. Before we set out."
It meant something to hear him say that. It was an acknowledgement.
And later, "We’ll be okay."
Then we were quiet again, almost close enough to shore to imagine swimming. I am not a good swimmer – I could not hold us up, or stop my children being swept away. This was not somewhere we could swim.
I saw then how closely my brother was holding my daughter in the boat, his arm around her shoulders.
Between us all Tim was quiet, sitting on the bottom of our floating craft.
Then he said, "Look. It’s beautiful." It was quiet, but insistent. It was a hand held out.
Tim was all right. I had felt responsible for that too, hardly daring to think about him. He didn’t like small boats. But he’d seen there wasn’t much to be done and so had just gone with it. It might have seemed to be one of the conditions of being involved with my family. In the scale of things, it might have felt no more risky than anything else.
"Yes," I returned, also in a whisper, and despite Tim’s admitted nervousness, or perhaps because of it, he felt like an anchor there, sitting cross-legged in the centre of the boat, a solid link to our other life.
Finally I could believe we were not going to drown. Our daughters were not going to drown. Not this beautiful evening.
When we stepped off one by one at the dock I tried to thank the pilot, our host, gesturing at his child and my own and trying to make some connection between them; he would not meet my eye. My brother and Walter’s farewell to him was long and profuse. Glancing our way, the three men laughed.
An extract from a book of memoir and travel, Where We Swim, by Ingrid Horrocks (Victoria University Press, $35), available in bookstores nationwide.
