Sacred Monkey River
a review by Ron Mader

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Ready to explore one of the world's most intriguing regions? Take your trip with Christopher Shaw who introduces readers to the Usumacinta River and its magnificent watershed that stretches across the Mexico-Guatemala border in his new book, Sacred Monkey River (New York: W.W. Norton, 2000).

Subtitled "A Canoe Trip with the Gods," this notable book traces the author's canoe trips running the great river. Unlike many adventure travel narratives in which the author plunges into an unknown terrain, Shaw aims for comprehension rather than searching for misadventure. The result is an account which combines the best of travel literature and environmental reporting.

Few travelers opt for the watery path, particularly with the threat of hijackings and shootings in such a remote area. But Shaw, an accomplished river guide and an enthusiast of the Maya culture, will not be deterred.

"In classical art, two gods pictured as canoeists, accompanied travelers on both actual and metaphysical journeys," Shaw explains. "Both gods paddle the souls of the dead to the Otherworld and the cosmic canoe -- the Milky Way -- across the sky."

Shaw also connects with the environmentalists in the region, including Fernando Ochoa and Ronald Nigh -- two pioneers in developing sustainable agricultural practices in the region.

The book is a veritable "Who's Who" in the region. Meet Scott Davis of Ceiba Adventures, Maya scholars Linda Schele and David Freidel, Moises Morales, the owner of El Pachan and Victor Perera, author of The Last Lords of Palenque.

The book is divided into 12 chapters and boasts the 1953 Franz Blom map of the Selva Lacandona on the inside book cover. What would be useful additions would be a map of the author's expeditions and an index of places and names.

Sacred Monkey River deserves a long shelf-life and it will no doubt be consulted for many years by travelers and environmentalists alike.

Excerpts

The Usumacinta has been photographed from space, the images magnified and pored over by governments and non-governmental agencies -- and prospective looters -- looking for ruins, ancient roads, canals and raised beds, mineral wealth, illegal logging and settlement. Satellite images documenting the watershed's shrinking forests have depressed National Geographic readers and North American high school students. Its flow has been measured to the decimal point by interests intent on damning it for hydroelectric power. At least from on high, it has been reduced to a sum of known quantities. But in its essence, its nature as a place apart, it remains a dimly perceived and shapeless expanse. (p. 33)

I harbored no pretensions of a "first descent," nor of discovery. Ancient traders, lumbermen and modern recreationists had run the Usumacinta for centuries, down each of its half dozen major tributaries. (p. 47)

The Olmec laid down principles that influenced religion and royal practice in Mesoamerica for two thousand years. The classical Maya, the architects of the grand ruins now crawling with tourists and New Age pilgrims from Honduras to Cancun, subscribed to the Olmec worldview as conscientiously and deliberately as we look to Greece and the Old Testament. (p. 19)

Central to this shared view was the principle of the Watery Path connecting the sacred world in the sky with the earthly face of the cosmos. The means of travel from one to the other, metaphysically speaking, was the canoe; its avatar a celestial canoe in the sky, the Milky Way. (p. 19)

The Usumacinta proper begins ina nebulous region surrounding the convergence of its three main tributaries, the rios Pasion, Chixoy and Lacantun, somewhat less that two hundred miles upstream from the delta. Its headwater geography resembles an enormous amphitheater -- the Chiapas highlands, the Cuchumatan Mountains and the Alta Verapaz highlands of Guatemala forming a semicircle two hundred miles in diamater and rising to twelve thousand feet. (p. 29)

Oddly, nobody I talked to mentioned the possibility of small, economical "run of the river" hydro plants for communities in the selva, the kind that wouldn't require huge dams, wouldn't result in siltation, evaporation, habitat loss or lost tourist dollars. The government and agencies like USAID and the World Bank smiled on the massive projects, it seemed. (p. 118)

When Fernando Ochoa first started visiting Zapata and Miramar in the early nineties, the four communities of highland immigrants surrounding the lake were locked in long-standing land disputes. The lessons in forest milpa management Chan Bor had taught them had worn off. Bad market-driven agricultural practices had shrunk their arable acreage, but the borders of the ejido grants had never been marked and no reliable maps existed. (p. 187)

Ron Nigh was advising Zapata's farmers how to shift to organic methods and low-impact crops like wild cacao, brown rice and shadw-grown coffee so they could broaden their economic base and become less dependent on corn and coffee monocultures and the pesticides they required. Such dependencies had haunted them in the past... Nigh said Gruppo Pulsar, a Japanese conglomerate (now part of Seiko), had donated $10 million to manage the biosphere reserve. Some of the money would finance a string of Conservation International ecotourist hostels on the edges of the reserve. The rest was enough to take care of Montes Azules for a long time." (p. 188)

In almost every Mayanist's eschatological scenario, humans had populated the watershed so thickly by the eighth century that the forest had become a patchwork. The resulting climate changes and erosion depleted poor rain forest soils. Food demand outstripped the productivity of both the Mayas' sophisticated slash-and-burn agriculture and their elaborately maintained system of aquatic raised beds. Eight-century burials show a widening nutritional gap between the elite royal classes -- the ahuas -- whose skeletons remained robust, and the common folk, whose remains grew smaller and showed signs of malnutrition. Wars ensued. The people lost faith in their rulers and abandoned the cities. Their populations returned to a sustainable level. It meant that large sections of the Lacandon forst and the contiguous forests of Peten and southern Yucatan were already mature second-growth, second chance wilderness long before Cortes hacked his way from Tenosique to Honduras in 1525. Classical culture had to decline in order for the ecosystem to recover. (p. 43)

Recent Americans -- those of us whose forebears crossed the oceans in the past five hundred years -- have lost the connection to the past and place that galvanizes many traditional communities. Yet the longer we stay here the more that world imprints itself on our psyches. (p. 302)

Ron Mader lives in Mexico and hosts the award-winning Planeta.com website -- www.planeta.com. Ron is the author of the Exploring Ecotourism Resource Guide and can be contracted for presentations and workshops.

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