Amazon: Straight From the Source : Joe Kane, who in 1985-86 navigated the 4,300-mile river to the sea, will appear at Bowers to discuss his journey and other discoveries.

Author Joe Kane has faced numerous dangers in the Amazon Basin, but twice he was sure he was dying.

Once was in 1985 in the Acobamba Abyss, a stretch of fearsome white water not far from the river’s source in Peru, where he was pitched from the raft during a particularly violent rapid and trapped underwater by the current.

“I had taken some bad swims before, but this was different,” Kane wrote later. “In a moment of surprising peace and clarity I understood that I was drowning. I grew angry. Then I quit. I knew that it was my time to die.”

Kane, a river neophyte at the time, survived that and more to complete the first-ever expedition to navigate all 4,300 miles of the Amazon, from source to sea; his account of the 1985-86 trip became a best-selling book, “Running the Amazon.” Kane will discuss that journey in a lecture at the Bowers Museum in Santa Ana on Thursday.

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In 1991, Kane was in the company of Huaorani guides deep within the Ecuadorean Amazon when the party became lost and went several days without food, finally drifting aimlessly on an unknown river. “My hunger had become physically painful--my stomach felt as if it were being ripped open from the inside out--and I was certain I wouldn’t live that long,” Kane wrote.

The area is so sparsely populated that they might have gone weeks before finding help, but after two days on the river they met another Huaorani in a canoe equipped with an outboard motor and “piled high with boar and monkey and yucca and banana.” They were saved.

As frightening as it is to face drowning, Kane said in a phone interview, “starvation is true suffering, because it goes on for so damn long.” Being lost in the vast tropical forest was a daunting experience in itself. “It’s a great big wilderness, but I’ve never felt so claustrophobic,” he said. “You have no idea how you’re going to get out of there.”

Since mid-1991, Kane has spent about a year in Ecuador (spanning three trips) researching the little-known Huaorani. A small band of semi-nomadic hunter-gatherers, the Huaorani face increasing pressures from oil development in their forest home.

One of the less-publicized threats to the Amazonian rain forest, oil development in the remote Oriente region of Ecuador is escalating. Oil spills and the release of toxic wastes related to the drilling process are polluting the delicate forest ecosystem (some rivers and streams, Kane reports, now run black with oil).

Also, and perhaps more devastatingly for traditional forest dwellers such as the Huaorani, the many roads built for drilling and for seismic exploration are bringing in settlers from other areas of the country, leading inevitably to deforestation in an area that has, until now, been one of the most remote regions of the Amazon.

The subject caught Kane’s attention when he was working as an editor at the San Francisco office of the Rainforest Action Network. A letter arrived at the office, addressed to the chairman of DuPont-Conoco (then negotiating for rights to drill on Huaorani lands) and purporting to be from a group calling itself the Organization of the Huaorani Nation of the Ecuadorean Amazon.

If the letter (which expressed opposition to any drilling on Huaorani lands) turned out to be authentic, it would prove significant to the issue of drilling rights in Ecuador. As it was, no one--not even U.S. environmental groups claiming to represent their interests--knew what the Huaorani wanted, or even knew much about the people. Kane decided to investigate.

“This issue just started developing in front of me,” Kane said. “Nobody really knew what was going on down there.” In some respects, that was understandable: The areas are extremely remote, and the Huaorani have largely resisted contact with outsiders, sometimes violently.

Kane nevertheless gained the trust of the letter-writers and traveled with them through much of the Huaorani lands. He learned a lot, he said, “especially (about) the gulf between what happens here in the offices (of environmental groups) and what really happens on the ground.”

A lengthy article by Kane in the Sept. 27 issue of the New Yorker magazine does not paint a pretty picture of Western involvement in Huaorani affairs: oil company officials ready to flout the law to gain drilling rights, missionaries carelessly destroying a culture in their zeal, and environmental groups negotiating on behalf of a people they know nothing about.

Kane says the efforts of environmental groups, particularly the National Resources Defense Council in this case, are “well-intentioned” but ultimately misguided, even paternalistic.

“It’s really hard to get out there. I think a lot of people are really out of touch . . . . Nobody really spends much time down there,” Kane said. “They come away thinking that these people are incapable of negotiating for themselves, when that really couldn’t be further from the truth.”

Meanwhile, oil development in the Oriente is continuing “rapidly and terribly,” Kane said. He is working on a book detailing his experiences and findings in Ecuador, an expanded version of his New Yorker story.

His Ecuador travels were in many ways different from his earlier source-to-sea exploration of the Amazon, Kane said. The Amazon trip was “about the river and the landscape, whereas in Ecuador it was about the people,” Kane said. “In that way, it was really a different experience.” On the other hand, “one helped the other. I had an idea of the conditions to expect” in Ecuador.

Kane was a journalist with no river experience when he signed up for the Amazon journey, almost on a whim. Joining as a writer, he was not expected to be an integral part of the expedition. But when the journey ended, he was one of only two to kayak into the Atlantic at the river’s mouth.

In those six months, he had rafted some of the most dangerous white water on Earth; later, when the river flattened, he had to contend with disease, with Peru’s Shining Path guerrillas and with impossibly long days in his sea kayak, at the end of which he was not able to uncurl his bloodied hands.

There was also continuous infighting within the original 10-person group, which was down to four by the end of the trip (two traveled along in support, by car and by boat).

“I can’t believe what a lunatic I was to go do it,” he said on the phone. “I can’t believe we made it. Now, I cannot see myself sitting in the sea kayak for 12, 15 hours a day.”

He has no regrets, however. The event was a “milestone” in his life, and the experience forced him to write a book. He also made enduring friendships, rafting Peru’s deadly Colca Canyon with expedition cohorts Piotr Chmielinski, Jerome Truran and Zbigniew Bzdak in 1991 (the trip was featured in the January, 1993, issue of National Geographic). Bzdak also accompanied Kane in Ecuador.

Kane says his current book effort is a “far more ambitious project” than “Running the Amazon,” which had a fairly straightforward narrative thrust to propel it, he said. The writing project will occupy him for the next several months.

And what adventures await him after that? “My mind is not nimble enough to try and conceive of anything after this book,” Kane said. With a wife, an 18-month-old daughter and a recently purchased “wreck of a house” in Oakland, Kane said his immediate adventures are likely to be closer to home.

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Joe Kane will speak about his experiences running the Amazon from source to sea Nov. 4 at 7:30 p.m. at the Bowers Museum of Cultural Art, 2002 N. Main St., Santa Ana. Admission is $5 for museum members, $7.50 for non-members. Information: (714) 567-3603.