A Tree Falls in the Forest
A tale of logging in Ecuador’s Yasuní National Park.
“Hora de despertar,” Ernesto’s mother gently whispers in his ear as she shakes him awake. Disoriented by the darkness, he lays still for a moment, his thoughts rapidly tracing the line of memories to surmise where he is now.
Tia Neli’s house. Shushufindi. We arrived last night at dusk. Cold showers and fresh tilapia to brush off the winding travel through the Andes from Quito. Picked up cousin Jorge in Lago Agrio on the way— a weekend away from la petrolera at his mother’s.
Ernesto rubs his eyes, wisps of his dream fading with each blink. Jorge is already in the bathroom, groaning as the cold water hits his somnolent body. He hears Tia Neli frying empanadas in the kitchen; it seems they only just ate dinner. As he stretches, the dream floods back:
Ernesto is spinning around in a panic. Tree after tree looks the same. The vines seem to block his path in every direction. He has no idea how he got here, nor how to get home.
Had he been down this path before? Not in his memory. He screws his eyes shut again, trying to return to the dream world, to abate the panic.
A twig snaps behind him. Ernesto whirls on his heels, eyes racing to locate the source of the sound. It’s lost in the melee, drowned in the voices of frogs, insects, and birds desperately searching for a mate. It’s absorbed by the thick moss coating the trees. Ernesto turns again, searching for an exit.
He comes nose-to-nose with a boy a few years younger than he. Shod in rubber boots, the boy looks too clean to have come from this wild forest, yet his shirt is threadbare, small holes forming around the seams. In one hand, he carries a machete, nearly the length of his leg; in the other, a ream of muddy tubers. Under the boy’s hard gaze, Ernesto feels shame spread through his chest; has he done something wrong? Before Ernesto can ask anything, the boy is gone, melted into the vegetation and birdsong. As Ernesto opens his mouth to shout for the boy, he feels a tug.
“Ya despierta, mijo, que ya nos vamos.” Tia Neli’s corpulent body blocks the window, so Ernesto can’t tell if it’s light outside. His aunt bundles him in a soft blanket and nudges him out the door as he slips his feet into sandals, like when he was a little boy. No light except from the car, where cousin Jorge and his parents already sit drinking coffee and eating greasy empanadas wrapped in paper towels.
As they drive, milky gray light nudges above the horizon, illuminating rows and rows of stocky palms. It seems they never stop, stretching to the horizon in every direction. Ernesto opens his mouth to ask what they are when Jorge interjects: “Estas palmas parece que son buen negocio, no tío?” A good business opportunity.
“Que producen?” asks Ernesto.
“Aceite — para todo. Chocolates, lubricantes, maquillajes.” Can’t produce anything without it.
As he stares out the window, Ernesto watches a vulture lazily circle over the palm fields. The monotonous trees are only interrupted by roads to mines and oil fields — with official-looking signs — and small herds of cattle.
Just after sunrise, they reach an imposing river. Massive and chocolate brown, it sweeps past with entire trees in its wake. The morning haze obscures the other bank as their car trundles down a muddy driveway past wooden houses to a dock. A man in a gray Buff awaits them in a long, thin motorboat. Ernesto slips in the mud on his way down to the river, his toes digging into the bank. His mother grabs his shoulders to keep him from falling, tucking a cold empanada into his hands as she guides him, whimpering, to sit on a hard wooden bench. His cousin wraps the blanket around their shoulders as the boat pulls away into the swirling current.
The boat charts a course directly across the river, nosing through the mist to reveal low hills covered in thick forest. Behind them, multicolored barges burp past pushing huge red and yellow trucks, all bearing the same sign in all caps: PELIGRO INFLAMABLE. Ernesto thinks it must be the oil from those palms his cousin was talking about, the oil everyone depends on.
As they approach the shore, Ernesto shivers. The mist grazes the treetops and leaves tiny droplets in the fuzz of the blanket. They pull up to a bank, Jorge jumping out to pull the boat’s chain to a nearby tree before helping his younger cousin to clamber out next to a white sign that reads: Bienvenido al Parque Nacional de Yasuní. Prohibido cazar.
When his feet hit the cold mud, Ernesto’s mind finally jolts to life. He turns to see his father drag a chainsaw from the back of the boat with the help of the man in the Buff. “Que vamos a hacer, pa?”
“Ya verás, hijo.” Wait and see.
They start in silence down an unmarked trail and Ernesto’s eyes struggle to adjust to the darkness. The man in the Buff leads, the chainsaw over his shoulder, then Jorge, Ernesto, and his mother and father. Tia Neli waits in the boat, already tapping away at a game on her phone. The thick mud sucks at their sandals and tennis shoes, threatening to hold them hostage. Ernesto keeps his eyes on his feet, struggling over roots and between fuzzy plants that grab at his pant legs. It reminds him of the Botanical Garden in Quito; he visited on a school trip last semester and played in the vines drooping from the Amazon Region display. Never an athletic kid, he soon strays behind Jorge, panting as he feels his feet slip backward with each step. “Un poquito más, mijo,” urges his mother as they duck through a swamp that wets the base of his jeans.
Brushing through a plant, he feels a tickle on his arm and shakes in a panic. A small spider flies off into the woods. When Ernesto pauses to catch his breath, the whine of mosquitoes drowns out the rest of the forest chorus.
Eventually, they all stop at the base of a large tree with rough wood. To Ernesto, it looks the same as every other tree they’ve passed so far, hanging with vines, so big he couldn’t even touch Jorge’s fingers if they both reached around it. On the other side, the chainsaw is already roaring to life, his cousin shouting to the man in the Buff as they work to take down the behemoth tree.
In a few minutes, it groans, the telltale sound of a falling tree. The forest goes silent, as if holding its breath for the crash. Even Ernesto braces himself, pressed against his mother at a safe distance. Yet the fall is quieter than he expects, slowed by the surrounding trees and vines that keep it from slamming into the Earth.
Once it hits the ground, Ernesto can see the web of life in its branches; spiky bromeliads stand out in purple and green stripes, trails of vines connect it to the standing treetops. He watches as a small green frog hops out to safety and tries to imagine how many thousands more live in the endless hiding places in this tree. No monkeys could have fallen, he hopes, imagining a family of them running off into the treetops when they felt their home shudder and fall.
Ernesto’s family immediately gets to work cutting the trunk into small pieces, his cousin shrouded in flying sawdust. Ernesto focuses again on the leafy treetop, spotting a delicate yellow orchid, then a bird’s nest. His heart drops before he realizes there is no egg in it. The leaves shake with the force of the chainsaw as it plunges again and again through the trunk, his father grunting with the effort of throwing the pieces aside.
Though they seem in a rush, the men take over an hour to take apart the tree. He sits on the stump, swinging his legs in boredom, holding the orchid as he waits. The man in the Buff begins to load one of the smaller pieces onto his shoulders, like an ox, stomping through the mud in the direction of the boat. Soon, his father and cousin are doing the same. “Espéranos aquí,” they tell Ernesto and his mother.
It takes over a dozen trips to move the entire tree into the canoe. All that is left is the top, what was once the canopy lying lifeless on the forest floor. Sharp late morning sunlight pours through the now-open canopy and Ernesto feels beads of sweat start to drip down the back of his neck as he tromps through the branches toward the canoe.
On the walk back, Ernesto loses himself in thought. What would he tell his classmates at school about his weekend? They had all learned about the Amazon last year in seventh grade, of course, but none of them had ever been there. Until now, he had only been to his Tía Neli’s house once, and it barely counted as the Amazon. But Yasuní, yes, that’s the real Amazon.
As he watches his black Crocs squelch in the mud, Ernesto looks up to see his mother gone. Wasn’t the river just a few minutes further? He can’t remember. The trail seemed well-worn from the trips to carry the logs but now it all looks the same. He spins around, hoping for some sign of his family and remembers the dream. The boy. How Ernesto wishes he could return to Quito, to wake up in his warm bed to a cup of hot chocolate like other Sundays. Maybe this is still part of the dream. But in this case, he remembers why they came.
“Necesitamos el dinero, mijo,” muttered his father as he hacked away at the trunk. Each time his father had visited his sister when Ernesto was younger, something special would happen: a new car, a trip to the beach, those sneakers he’d loved at the mall. He begins to connect the dots. No use thinking of that now.
Ernesto spins and spins, until he loses his balance and falls at the base of a tree. A small shower of termites falls over his neck and he stands quickly to shake himself free of the insects. When he turns, he sees a shadow between the trees, perhaps a person passing through silently. Should he shout out for help? He can no longer see them, if they even passed at all. He remembers his dream with a gasp, terrified suddenly that a person might be watching him. Was that why his family was rushing?
He hears a branch snap to his left. Ernesto spins, half expecting to see the boy from his dream pressed nose to nose, machete swinging in his hand. A single monkey with woolly chocolate fur runs along a branch. He stops holding his breath then hears his mother shout for him a few feet away. No boy. No machete. Ernesto runs to his mother.
Back at the edge of the river, Ernesto’s father looks impatient, perched on the mound of wood under the graying skies. He motions to his son to clamber up onto the pile with him, alongside his cousin and aunt, who is still absorbed in her phone. The wet wood is muddy from the riverbank and Ernesto feels the water seep through his underpants immediately. He squirms. As the man in the Buff — who never introduced himself — starts the motor with a roar, Ernesto notices the green frog peering from between the sliced trunks. He quickly cups it in his hands and tosses it to shore. Hopefully, it knows its way back to a new tree.
They race across the river, dodging mud islands and large driftwood trapped in the current. Arriving at a steeper bank this time, Ernesto’s father leaps out and runs up the hill and down the road, presumably to get the car. Meanwhile, Jorge ties up the boat and gestures to Ernesto to hop out and help move the wood. Ernesto looks down at his muddy pants, his dirty feet, and hops out gingerly, uncertain. Jorge motions to a hut on the hill where it seems they’ll leave the wood, then heaves the smallest log onto Ernesto’s already broad back. He slips down under the weight, his foot falling into the river, but regains his balance. He remembers the man in the Buff plowing his feet into the mud like an ox and tries to imitate the movements, breathing hard.
The hill that once seemed small, is endless. The hut never approaches. Each footfall appears to bring Ernesto closer to the river, rather than away. And yet, he inches forward. He slips to a knee, then stands. He quakes, but doesn’t fall. Eventually, the hut appears in front of him and his feet find solid grass, a welcome replacement after the mud. His father has already arrived with the truck and takes the small log from his son to load. He pats Ernesto on the back and directs him back toward the boat. The man in the Buff is already on his way up the hill with one of the biggest logs, with Jorge close behind. Tia Neli stays by the riverside, overseeing the operation without looking up from the screen. His mother has already made her way to the car, her favorite cumbia turned on full blast.
Ernesto turns and makes his way, stalwart, toward the river to grab more logs. But tomorrow, he’ll tell his classmates of the small green frog and the striped bromeliads. In his version, the tree fell on its own. He was merely there to see it. No family, no boy with a machete, no man in a Buff, no chainsaw. But for now, it’s time to move the logs to Tía Neli’s. Ernesto slips down the slope, heaves a larger log onto his back, and steps — more confidently now — toward the hut.
