Karen Heuler's Backstory

I like jungles—I don't know why exactly, but I think it has something to do with how they always seem to harbor unusual, fantastic things. Anything could be lurking in the darkness, or moving behind the trees.

I went to the Amazon 15 years ago. It was just when the Shining Path had gotten so out of control that the State Dept. declared Peru to be unsafe for American tourists (I read the advisory as my plane touched down at Lima). As a result there were very few tourists around, so I usually had a guide to myself at various jungle camps. We would visit villages or go out in the canoa every day and the guide would show me birds, bugs, frogs, trees, and tell me about the devils that lived in the jungle. There was one, with uneven legs, one short one long, who steals children by appearing as a familiar relative. We passed a lagoon one day and he told me to keep my head down, don’t look left or right, because there was a huge serpent there that would magnetize us and we’d be forced to paddle into its mouth. Of course I didn’t look; it would have been impolite.

In one place my guide took me out to the middle of the Momon tributary to whistle for pink dolphins. We would just sit there and call. Occasionally, one would surface, then slowly sink away.

At another camp the guide warned me never to whistle for a dolphin at night. It would become angry and come and get me.

There’s a legend that the big pink dolphins—their skin pinker than a Caucasian’s, some of them 7 feet or longer, rising and rolling over slowly in the river—the dolphins turn into men at night and go into the villages. They particularly like wedding celebrations, where they eat and drink, seduce the women and carry them away.

It’s a great story and I used it in Journey to Bom Goody. When tourists meet tourists, they tell stories, very often about what they’ve seen and what they think to be true, or things that someone somewhere said was true. It seemed to me, however, that the Indians were no doubt telling each other stories about us as well, so my book is crammed with guesses and tall tales and legends and myths and realities from both sides of the divide. We imagine their values; they imagine ours.

So the book has lots of people telling each other tales—about how their society came to be, about why they're doing what they're doing, about what they think they're searching for. The two main characters, Forbes and Tina, set out for one thing and find that what they're looking for changes radically. What they don't believe in (at first) gradually shanghais their goals.

And they're ruled by their great ideas, whether or not they’re feasible or even kind.

Forbes’ Great Idea is to show videos of our civilization to the Amazon Indians, going deeper and deeper into the jungle. He wants to see what they’ll make of it. He thinks it’s only fair, because all of his life he’s been watching PBS specials about Amazon Indians.

Forbes decides that he shouldn’t be able to answer any questions, so he gets a guide who doesn’t speak English. As it turns out, this new guide happens to be the offspring of one of these dolphin assignations. The guide occasionally turns into a dolphin, and he has a quest of his own that has nothing to do with Forbes.

As it happens, there’s an ethnobotanist by the name of Tina who’s searching for the legendary Bom Goody. She’s been going from one tribe to the other, one shaman to another seeking to document as many native cures as possible, and Bom Goody is supposed to have the best shaman. She’s taking cuttings of the leaves, the barks, the roots, she’s drawing them in her note pad, she’s writing down how to make the cures and what they’re for. She finds Forbes after his dolphin guide abandons him.

She’s kind of stuck with him. She has to lug him around with her from village to village—and don’t think she doesn’t resent it. When she meets Forbes (or actually rescues him), he’s been through a hard time, getting stalked by a spider whose web he’s destroyed, going through a major bout of intestinal illness. He seems a bit helpless.

Tourists—hard-core tourists—like to invent themselves somewhat, to present themselves as the person they'd really like to be, that in their hearts they pretend to be. But sadly, even when you go far away, you tend to reinvent yourself as pretty much what you were. So even though Forbes wants to remain outside the culture in order to avoid giving anything away, he begins to make decisions based on what he once had and now misses. And although Tina is intent on recording as many local cures as she can, to find the secrets of the shamans, she's also tempted by an aspect of life that has nothing to do with it.

But I have to confess, there’s another backstory to this book. I had just finished writing Chapter 6 when I was diagnosed with breast cancer. The next seven months were spent dealing with surgery, chemo, and radiation. I was desperate to write, but it proved impossible to concentrate on anything outside cancer. Then, when I did start writing again, I worried that the drugs I was taking might affect my ability to imagine the rest of the book. Could I still write?

So there was an unexpected journey for me, too; I don’t know whether the book changed because of cancer, but it seemed all too true that the world could look one way and be another. Things could change, transmute, or translate, the normal could become abnormal—and there’s nothing to do about it but consider your options and dive right in. Ultimately, books about journeys are books about life: we think we know where we’re going and then, suddenly, find we’re someplace we never expected to be. Well, that’s what this book is about. It has a lot of adventures in it—everyone seems to be going somewhere with a purpose—very much like here. But a lot of strange things happen, and as Forbes and Tina learn, the things you end up with are definitely not the things you thought you would. I learned it as well.

Journey to Bom Goody iz Karen Heuler's second novel.

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[Robert]

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