Squirrel Monkeys on the Cuyabeno

When you are speeding down the Cuyabeno River in the deep Amazonian rainforest, there are certain things that you don’t want to hear. One of these things is “You need to learn CPR”.


A few hours earlier I had been standing on the dock waiting for Juan, our guide, to finish setting up the canoe. The last of the fishing bats were using echo-location to snatch their last meals of the night while the birds and frogs were warming up for the dawn chorus.

Three of us, Juan, Andrea, and myself, were going birding. Juan, the guide, was incredible. Half Quichua, half Shuar – anthropologists will tell you that his ancestors once shrunk heads. Juan wasn’t shy about it, and admitted that his own grandfather used to engage in the practice. He possessed an amazing knowledge of the forest. Whereas I can barely keep the eight trees of Yellowstone straight in my head, he knew trees that could provide birth control, cure constipation, make tattoos, treat malaria, help children fall asleep or had leaves that could be used to leave messages. (Pressing into the flesh of the leaves, he explained, releases tannins that dark. His note proclaimed his love for one of the girls who works in the kitchen.) He even knew a tree that nurtures a phosphorescent fungus that can be used as a lantern in the dark.

Most impressively, he acknowledged sources with an honesty that would impress any academic. Not coy about his knowledge, he easily mixed information drawn from books, family members, local shamans, and even other visitors.

Andrea I liked almost instantly. I think she took to me when I asked if she was a student. It turns out that she was a doctor from Austria – a neurologist. She was bright and curious – with soulful brown eyes and a knack for listening. At one point, she questioned Juan for a good 20 minutes about the finer points of woodpecker tongues.

It was a wonderful trip – full of magpie tanagers, bat falcons, scarlet macaws and white throated toucans. The morning mist carries the spices and flowers waking up in the forest from their beds of rotting trees and moldy leaves. Like two children, Andrea and I kept pointing at things: “What’s that?” and “What’s that?” Not much scope for more explanation than just a name, given with patience and enthusiasm by Juan.

I came back feeling more relaxed and at ease than I have been in a while. It took a few moments to register the fact that Brian was sitting on the floor in his underwear, with the mosquito netting torn from the ceiling wrapped around him. “Brian, are you OK?” I asked over some synthetic alarm what was going off in the room.

“Mwwaarrhh… buh, buh… help”. He had diabetes. The day before he had an episode - breaking out into a very visible sweat that required food.

I knocked on Andrea’s door first. Then I ran to get Jack and Joan – a husband and wife team of nurses from New Zealand, taking a year off to explore the world. They were incredibly kind people and two of the best storytellers I’ve ever met.

As the three of them tended to Brian, I started quietly packing. I figured that since Andrea and I were leaving that morning anyway, we would be taking the boat with Brian. Since there was nothing I could do on the medical side of things, I wanted to stay close in case they needed things – which they did. I also figured that eventually we were going to have to start moving quickly.

Once my stuff was packed, Joan took me outside to see how I was doing, then sent me to go get a plastic bag to pack Brian’s stuff. Meanwhile, the medical professionals were starting to disagree. Brian kept insisting he needed insulin; he had managed to spit out that his insulin needed to be at around 6, his machine was registering something in the low 40s. Jack and Joan weren’t used to the metrics of Brian’s glucose meter. Andrea was used to it, but wasn’t sure what to make of Brian’s statements that he needed to drop his blood sugar – rather urgently.

Brian, meanwhile, started having seizures.

Juan had been taking care of getting everything together. The canoe was made ready, the fastest driver was getting fuel for the trip, breakfast for Andrea and I was put into Tupperware, the ambulance had been called, and a bottle of jam was ready in case Brian needed sugar.

I brought the backpacks down to the boat while the stretcher was fetched. As I came back to get Andrea’s pack, Brian was being carried to the boat.

The river was low. Although there was plenty of rain while we were there, it hadn’t rained for three weeks before. It was normally a two hour ride, but with the low water, the driver had to avoid fallen trees and sandbars. Juan told us it would take three hours at top speed.

The driver was good—fast and frightening, but good. Andrea went to work, putting a line in for the medics, keeping Brian in the rescue position, and constantly monitoring his blood sugar. At one point she decided to try giving him a bit of jam to see what would happen, so I was sent to mix some jam with water as we moved up stream, branches whacking us, and the canoe making tighter and tighter turns to avoid obstacles in the water.

We got some blackberry jam into him, and he seemed to be getting better. His convulsions were easing and he appeared to be a bit more conscious. However, when Andrea tested his blood sugar, it had dropped. Since he had improved with lower blood sugar, she decided against giving him more jam.

She turned to Juan and asked how much longer.

The answer came back “An hour, maybe an hour and a half”.

That was when the CPR lessons began. “Tilt the head like this, hold his nose.” “Apply pressure here. Keep your arms locked, use your body weight.”

She was running the lesson for the third time when the boat ran out of fuel. The river was little more than a large stream at this point – and a troop of monkeys were easily leaping across it from one tree to another.

It interrupted the lesson as we watched in silence for a few moments—some kind of ancient compact. Finally Andrea asked Juan, “What type of monkeys are those?”

“Squirrel monkeys”.

We returned to silence as the rest of the troop finished crossing—graceful and elegant as they slipped back into the canopy. The silence lasted after they were gone.

The engine roared to life, Andrea turned to me, “OK, so you remember, 5 pushes on the chest, one breath?”

At the dock, EMTs, soldiers and firefighters were ready to bring Brian up to the fire truck.

Before I knew it, I was sitting on top of a fire truck, tearing through the jungle on a dirt road to bring a guy who was slipping into a coma to the nearest medical help.

The nearest medical facility was not much. There was no running water, no alcohol swabs, and a hand painted sheet on the wall explaining how to diagnose starvation in a child. Amazingly, there was a blood sugar monitor and glucose. In a relatively short period of time, Brian was fine–laughing and eating potato chips.

Andrea wanted Brian to go to a hospital, but he refused – preferring to sign a form agreeing that he was acting against medical advice. Brian offered to pay for the treatment, but the doctors refused. Ultimately, payment was made as a donation to vaccinate kids in the area.

Two days later, Brian and I had beers in Quito. He was much better with a new glucose monitor. It turned out that his old meter was broken, leading to an overly large injection of insulin. He is probably in the Galapagos. Andrea is probably in Chile at this point, as are Jack and Joan.

I’ve read in numerous anthropology text books that human sacrifice and shrunken heads is common amongst tropical peoples because the link between life and death is never as obvious as in a rainforest. Dead trees are quickly decomposed, animal flesh doesn’t last long at all, and all life rests on a thin mat of rotting leaves. Death and life depend on each other.

This blog post was nearly an obituary. Thankfully, it isn’t.

Instead, I can talk about squirrel monkeys who, as we stood on the line between life and death – offered a glimpse of how beautiful it somehow always manages to be.