Sacred Monkey River: A Canoe Trip With the Gods [Anglais] [Relié]

Flowing across the limestone plateaus and tropical forests of Mexico and Guatemala, the Usamacinta River was the cradle of ancient Mayan civilization, heavily traveled and lined with palaces and huge cities. In the aftermath of the European conquest, the rugged Usamacinta country became a remote afterthought, a place where few travelers dared to venture.

Christopher Shaw, an American writer and canoeist, makes a journey down the Maya's "watery path," reporting his sightings from this broad stream of "pale jade shot with turquoise and slightly clouded with silt." Sacred Monkey River (whose title translates the Maya name for the great watercourse) is a spiritually charged quest into once-sacred geography--but a land profaned in recent years by warfare and ethnic division. Traveling by kayak, a craft he explains to locals as a canoe of the winik, or native people, of the far north, Shaw takes us through forbidding territory, delivering glimpses of rainforest country that is in imminent danger of being felled by the region's expanding timber concerns and dammed by governments intent on harnessing hydroelectric--and political--power. Ironically, his snapshots of the unspoiled Usamacinta may turn out to be documents of a disappeared world--unless, he observes, international environmental agencies find ways to join with the Maya to preserve their forest world. --Gregory McNamee

A naturalist who once edited Adirondack Life magazine, Shaw canoes the rough waters of Guatemala's Usumacinta River in this uneven Mesoamerican travel adventure. Like the river itself, the narrative begins slowly, gradually gathering momentum as the author abandons secondary anthropological research in favor of his own, often profound, impressions. The Usumacinta has always contained a liminal world; Shaw describes the fluid boundary between Guatemala and Mexico as "an unruly no-man's-land inhabited by political refugees, fugitives and foreign adventurers." Shaw's travels took him through Mexico's Chiapas region not long after the Zapatista uprising (a little more modern political history earlier in the narrative would have helped novice readers immensely, especially since Shaw slips back and forth between the main journey and one undertaken in 1989, before the uprising). During his river run, he encounters rebels, wayfarers and, in the book's most exciting sequence, drug smugglers. He also confronts exhilarating danger in the river itself ("the boat leaped forward onto the crown, and the world dropped away"). In describing the remote, rugged landscape, Shaw comes down heavily on the side of ecological conservation, bemoaning the loss of the surrounding rainforest to loggers and chicleros (workers who harvest sap from the chicle trees to make gum). A gifted travel writer, Shaw evokes the Usumacinta's territory with startling clarity, though his chronology is sometimes confusing. Veteran canoers and armchair travelers, as well as fans of ancient Mayan civilization, will find these narrative waters exhilarating, if a bit choppy. (Aug.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

For the Olmec, the Mesoamerican civilization which preceded the Aztecs,the canoe trip was a sacred journey. Dependent on the watercourses of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec for survival, they included miniature canoes amongtheir religious icons; the "Watery Path" was thought to connect the sacred world of the heavens with our earth.

"Sacred Money River" is journalist Christopher Shaw's account of his trip down the Usumacinta River, and the spiritual transformation it works upon him. Like a Huckleberry Finn for the hemisphere, Shaw offers lyrical reflections about life on the Usumacinta along with an analysis of life in southern Mexico, caught between modern and premodern worlds. Perhaps the most unusual aspect of Shaw's book is his discussion of his contacts with the Indian rebels of Guatemala and Chiapas. For Shaw, however, the modernization of Mexican village life, and the social and political conflicts it entails, are as integral a part of the landscape as the "pale jade shot with turquoise" of the beautiful Usumacinta River. (Beliefnet, Aug. 2000)

[T]ranscends a sense of place in his tale.... Brainy and brawny and tinged with a refreshing humility... a huge accomplishment.

You'll be reminded of everyone from Jon Krakauer to Jonathan Raban, but Chris Shaw is a true original.

An adventurous voyage into the heart of Mesoamerica and an exploration of its spiritual geography. At the border of Mexico and Guatemala lies one of the most fascinating and least-known parts of the world, the cradle of ancient Olmec and classical Maya civilization. There the Usumacinta River and its highland tributaries form a tantalizing geographic unity that once undergirded the great achievements of the Maya. The man-made nucleus of the region's culture and spirituality was the canoe, the medium for the "Watery Path" connecting the sacred world with the earthly face of the cosmos. Christopher Shaw (a skilled canoeist and former whitewater guide) has traveled these rivers by canoe, penetrating to the heart of an ancient and awe-inspiring landscape, and--despite near-death in a rapid, the Zapatista uprising in Chiapas, and the murderous activities of drug lords along the river--he brings back to us a beautifully told and important tale. In a book that is a fitting heir to Bruce Chatwin's Songlines, Barry Lopez's Arctic Dreams, and Peter Matthiessen's The Snow Leopard, Shaw brings together the thrill of adventure travel with profound historical knowledge, the acute eye of a naturalist, breathtaking prose, and an intuitive gift for the spiritual resonances of the past to be found in earthly realities.

Endpaper maps, line drawings, photographs

Christopher Shaw is the former editor of Adirondack Life and a regular commentor on North Country Public Radio. He lives in Middlebury, Vermont.