EDITORIAL & OPINION — ODDS ‘N’ SODS — The last forty metres

The following is the second in a series in which the author, an exploration geologist based in Delta, B.C., recounts his experiences working in the jungles of Venezuela in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

It’s an hour’s drive south from Tumeremo to Kilometre 33, with good highway all the way and only two military checkpoints, or alcabalas as they’re known locally, to pass through.

At the first one, where a road peels west toward Anacoco, the Guardia Nacional look you over pretty thoroughly, then laugh as they wave you through.

Once and a while, when one squad is rotated out and another in, a seventeen-year-old sergeant with a scrubbed face and shiny black boots will swagger over and let you know who is boss. He might go as far as asking for papers, but mostly he will walk slowly around the truck fingering his weapon and looking angry. It’s a game we both play, our job being to look significantly impressed and perhaps slightly nervous, until, with a casual flick of his finger, he dismisses us as harmless.

From the local population of farmers or ranchers they are more demanding, requiring a bribe of a dozen mangos or a choice cut of meat. For the locals, it is no game — this is a highway with user fees.

At the second alcabala, on the other side of a bridge across the Cuyuni River at El Dorado, the Guardia rarely even raise their heads to acknowledge your expectant stare. They just wave you through and go back to their newspaper or comic book, or to watching a couple of prisoners from the local jail sweep off a second bridge under construction.

Kilometre 33 is so called because it is 33 km east of El Dorado, the zero mark on a new highway that wends all the way to the Brazilian border. Built with petro-dollars from Venezuela’s oil boom, the road was designed to attract throngs of tourists to the splendid desolation of La Gran Sabana. Thankfully, the tourists did not come. The drive south, once past Kilometre 88 and Las Claritas, is one of the most magnificent — and loneliest — in the world. If you see one other vehicle during the five hours it takes to cross the Sabana, it’s a busy day.

Kilometre 33 can seem as lonely, with nothing much more than the Aerotecnica helicopter base. The base, though, doesn’t seem so bad once you feel your backside pushed into the seat and hear the whine of the turbine. Pedro, an icy cool Brazilian pilot dressed in sharp blue overalls, even smiles a little bit upon takeoff.

Pedro flies fast and low over the jungle, but I love the s.o.b. because he says no. Seven times in the 100 or so hours I sat beside him on approach into a hundred different places, he has looked at me and shaken his head no. He knows better than anyone that in trying to twist into too tight a hole, death is a yes away. In three years, he has buried four pilots who said yes once too often.

You feel fearless as you fly out of the jungle. A canopy of a thousand shades of green unfolds beneath you and birds scatter in the wake of blade wash. In this egress, there is an elation, a giddiness as pure and distinct a moment of joy as I have ever experienced. After a long, 10-km day of slashing through vines and wading through water, I am suddenly lifted above it all. It takes only a few seconds to fly over what took a day to cross on foot.

Pedro will just smile and offer me a beer from the cooler in the backseat, and a cigarette.

On his last day, before he left for a month’s R&R in Caracas, I asked Pedro the question I had wanted to ask throughout the 100 hours we shared in the small cockpit of a Bell 206 Jet Ranger.

On so many flights to such strange-sounding places as Marawani, Bochinche, Chicanan and La Culebra, I had trusted and not asked. Over such stunning scenery as the tepuis, along the southern edge of the shield, where remnants of the Roraima quartzite loom like pillars holding up the heavens, I sat nervous or elated, but never asked.

Nor did I ask on the day my partner and I discovered, 100 km from nowhere, the remnants of another Bell 206. We stared at the tail boom a long while before recognizing it for what it was. Thirty metres away, we found part of the main rotor. We also found the twisted and burned engine, fearing all the while the discovery of whatever might be left of those occupants whose luck had run out.

But I eventually did ask Pedro, over beer at a small cantina beside the base.

“Were we up high enough to autorotate to safety if something ever went wrong?” “Altitude,” Pedro explained, “only helps if there is someplace to go to.” “So what do you do?” I asked.

“Flare into the canopy and put the tail down,” he said laughingly. “But it doesn’t really matter — it’s the last 40 metres that kill you.”