Surviving the Extremes: A Doctor's Journey to the Limits of Human Endurance Read Online Free Page B
Author: Kenneth Kamler
the only form of medicine that mixes modern drugs with herbal cures, satellite signals with ancient chants, and science with spirituality.
JUNGLE
THE MOST COMPETITIVE ARENA ON EARTH
THE BLACK, STAR-FILLED LAKE was such a perfect reflection of the night sky that my paddle made ripples through each constellation. With stars both above me and below, it would have been easy to imagine I was canoeing through space—had it not been for the glassy eyes that broke the water like closely set periscopes glowing jewel-red in the reflection of my flashlight. The eyes remained unblinking, motionless, but my strange light stirred up a hollow grunting sound from just below the surface. Many other pairs of rubies were scattered among the stars in the water. As we passed each of them, the same warning noise arose from below. In the humid silence, the grunts resonated over the lake, intensified by the darkness. I could barely see my companions in the front of the canoe, and no one spoke. Each of us was alone. Hours passed that way, or maybe it was only minutes.
Gradually I grew aware of light coming from above and behind me. Over the jagged horizon appeared an orange disk. I knew it was the moon, but I felt as if I were witnessing sunrise on some other planet. The stars dimmed; the sky and the water turned silver. An irregular black seam appeared around the edge of the lake, its top and bottom edges perfectly symmetrical: the silhouette of the surrounding treetops mirrored in the still water. In this bizarrely lit world filled with unfamiliar noises and inhabited by strange creatures, I was an alien.
I was invading the Amazon, a place crowded with more plantsand animals than anywhere else in the world, and therefore the arena for the most unrelenting and fearsome battles for survival. I had come here to study one of the winners of that competition, a prehistoric relic so perfectly adapted to this environment that it has lived here, essentially unchanged, for half a million years. By contrast, I had been here a week, having arrived by plane and canoe from my home in New York City, an environment far more unnatural than the jungle, but my native habitat nonetheless. My lifetime of adaptation to many of its most prominent features, such as streets, electricity, advertising, and air pollution, was irrelevant here. However, some of my acquired skills, particularly those in medicine and surgery, retained much of their value anywhere, even and especially here—in the Upper Amazon Basin of Ecuador, on a lake so remote it’s a three-day canoe trip from the nearest town and reachable only during the rainy season, when water levels are high enough to make its shallow entrance channel navigable.
The pristine lake provides an ideal study area for a team of field biologists intent upon unraveling the secrets and survival strategies of plants and animals that can’t live anywhere else on earth. It is also an ideal setup for those very plants and animals to prey upon the biologists who have come to study them. There’s no mercy here for anyone whose bodies and skills have not been honed by natural selection and toughened by a lifetime in the jungle. Distracted by their work, the scientists knew they would be easy targets. I got a ticket onto this expedition because they needed a doctor who could at least try to repair the damage—anything from an itch to a cardiac arrest—that might be inflicted by the toxins, spines, stingers, claws, and teeth that surrounded them. I had been eager to join the team; I wanted the challenge of treating exotic diseases in an exotic setting. Even more, I wanted the chance to become enmeshed in a tangle of life so densely interwoven that in the month we would be there I would only barely begin to glimpse its complexity.
Fully intertwined in this jungle is another well-adapted species, two examples of which were with me in the canoe on that starry night, visible now as silhouettes against the backdrop of moonlit
JUNGLE
THE MOST COMPETITIVE ARENA ON EARTH
THE BLACK, STAR-FILLED LAKE was such a perfect reflection of the night sky that my paddle made ripples through each constellation. With stars both above me and below, it would have been easy to imagine I was canoeing through space—had it not been for the glassy eyes that broke the water like closely set periscopes glowing jewel-red in the reflection of my flashlight. The eyes remained unblinking, motionless, but my strange light stirred up a hollow grunting sound from just below the surface. Many other pairs of rubies were scattered among the stars in the water. As we passed each of them, the same warning noise arose from below. In the humid silence, the grunts resonated over the lake, intensified by the darkness. I could barely see my companions in the front of the canoe, and no one spoke. Each of us was alone. Hours passed that way, or maybe it was only minutes.
Gradually I grew aware of light coming from above and behind me. Over the jagged horizon appeared an orange disk. I knew it was the moon, but I felt as if I were witnessing sunrise on some other planet. The stars dimmed; the sky and the water turned silver. An irregular black seam appeared around the edge of the lake, its top and bottom edges perfectly symmetrical: the silhouette of the surrounding treetops mirrored in the still water. In this bizarrely lit world filled with unfamiliar noises and inhabited by strange creatures, I was an alien.
I was invading the Amazon, a place crowded with more plantsand animals than anywhere else in the world, and therefore the arena for the most unrelenting and fearsome battles for survival. I had come here to study one of the winners of that competition, a prehistoric relic so perfectly adapted to this environment that it has lived here, essentially unchanged, for half a million years. By contrast, I had been here a week, having arrived by plane and canoe from my home in New York City, an environment far more unnatural than the jungle, but my native habitat nonetheless. My lifetime of adaptation to many of its most prominent features, such as streets, electricity, advertising, and air pollution, was irrelevant here. However, some of my acquired skills, particularly those in medicine and surgery, retained much of their value anywhere, even and especially here—in the Upper Amazon Basin of Ecuador, on a lake so remote it’s a three-day canoe trip from the nearest town and reachable only during the rainy season, when water levels are high enough to make its shallow entrance channel navigable.
The pristine lake provides an ideal study area for a team of field biologists intent upon unraveling the secrets and survival strategies of plants and animals that can’t live anywhere else on earth. It is also an ideal setup for those very plants and animals to prey upon the biologists who have come to study them. There’s no mercy here for anyone whose bodies and skills have not been honed by natural selection and toughened by a lifetime in the jungle. Distracted by their work, the scientists knew they would be easy targets. I got a ticket onto this expedition because they needed a doctor who could at least try to repair the damage—anything from an itch to a cardiac arrest—that might be inflicted by the toxins, spines, stingers, claws, and teeth that surrounded them. I had been eager to join the team; I wanted the challenge of treating exotic diseases in an exotic setting. Even more, I wanted the chance to become enmeshed in a tangle of life so densely interwoven that in the month we would be there I would only barely begin to glimpse its complexity.
Fully intertwined in this jungle is another well-adapted species, two examples of which were with me in the canoe on that starry night, visible now as silhouettes against the backdrop of moonlit
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