Al's Celebration of Life

Traveling with Al:  Excerpts from the journals Al wrote in as he traveled around the world.

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Kids pulled by the City, June 92

 

Sunday – 7 June 1992   Iquitos

 

6:00 A.M.        This city has no roads going into or out of it. The only way in or out is by air or via the Amazon River, so motorcycle taxis and homemade buses make all the sense in the world.

 

9:00 A.M.        We load our stuff and climb aboard homemade bus. Drive through sleepy Sunday morning, hung over Iquitos – to the river.

 

                        Very sad collection of river side shacks & shanties made of scrap boards, tin sheets, cardboard and unfulfilled promises and dreams.

 

                        As “civilization” encroaches upon the Amazonian jungle – rainforest, a tremendous pressure is placed upon the teenagers. The world is simply too small for them to not know about discos, booze, T.V. (actually – electricity) and “something” besides hunting, fishing, farming and gathering. Once he or she leaves the jungle village to go to the BIG CITY (Iquitos) he/she will never return to the difficult but healthy life he/she knows in the forest and its plants/animals/weather patterns/healing properties etc. etc. They will go to the city and speak not kindly of the “Indians,” of the jungle that nurtured them and which they have disavowed.

 

                        And they will chase their elusive dreams around while THE CITY becomes overcrowded – and they will chase their dreams around in a place where there are not enough jobs for everyone – and where the plants that were used to cure disease, illness and yes even despair – are nowhere to be found. These things are back in the warm/humid rainforest – and the people are lost – hopelessly lost without them. The one consolation, as they sway back and forth on a drunken Saturday night in Iquitos is that they have become “civilized.”

 

                        And so there are hovels along the river and the outskirts of town, filled with people who had a dream – and left the forest – and left their souls and their heritage behind.

 

                        Who is to know whether they were pulled by THE CITY or pushed by the forest.