The Boiling River: Adventure and discovery in the Amazon, by Andrés Ruzo, is a short non-fiction account of Ruzo’s attempt to find the eponymous river. This is the second of my Strong Sense of Place books this summer – this time taken from the episode about Peru. Growing up in Lima, Ruzo heard his grandfather telling stories about the Spanish conquistadors, including a mention of a river that boiled deep in the heart of the Amazon and caught out the invaders. He assumed the boiling river itself was an exaggeration, but years later, as a geologist working on his PhD, he was studying geothermal features in Peru and began to wonder if there was truth to it. When he initially approached a senior geologist about the possibility, he was scoffed at and laughed out of the room. However, he told the story of this embarrassing experience to a sympathetic aunt – only to find that not only had she heard the story, she’d actually been to see the river herself. Considering her to be a reliable witness, Ruzo set out to find this mythical place. Given the name of the book, it’s hardly a spoiler to say that he found a river. The majority of the book is given over not to finding the river, but to studying it, finding out if it actually boils, and trying to work out what’s going on – that is the central mystery.
When I picked this up, I did not realise that it was an expansion of Ruzo’s TED talk on the subject. It does read a bit like a TED talk, and I wonder if I would have had a different experience with the audiobook, since it was originally designed to be performed rather than read. The writing starts out plain and straightforward, with no particular attempt at scene-setting, but either I got used to the writing style or it changed over the course of the book. By midway through, I could feel Ruzo’s curiosity and wonder at the discovery process. The most vivid part of the narrative is his description of his data collection and investigations – perhaps unsurprisingly, since that’s what he’d have to know inside out for his final exam – and I felt that the book really came alive while he was describing his experiences beside the river. The fact that it was in present tense irritated me, but I didn’t find it as aggravating as I sometimes do – I felt that Ruzo was using present tense in an attempt to carry the reader along on his investigations, rather than out of misguided artistic pretensions. It gets very TED-talky indeed at the end, suddenly feeling more like a lecture or a sermon than an adventure story, but it was interesting enough for long enough that it kept me turning the pages, and I’m certainly glad I read it.
I appreciated Ruzo’s thoughts on the tension between his desire to study the river while respecting the fact that it was a sacred place for local indigenous people. His careful negotiations with the shaman who oversees the area were well-written, and their discussion of what the river means to each of them were fascinating. In fact, I would have read a much longer book just on that subject – how to respect local beliefs and traditions while finding out more about the science that underpins them. As it is, he touches on the subject but doesn’t have room to expand. That’s a problem throughout the book, in fact. I’ve just marked a whole pile of first-year assignments where my most common piece of feedback was you have tried to include everything and therefore have not covered any subject in depth, and I’d say the same thing about this. There is enough here for a full-length book, and I wish Ruzo had written one (though I also have a lot of sympathy for a PhD student slinging something serviceable together before getting back to the outputs he’ll actually be assessed on). It’s an interesting blueprint of how robust methodology can work hand-in-hand with respect for local or traditional beliefs. It’s clear that Maestro, the shaman, and Ruzo, the scientist, respect each other as experts in their respective fields, even though they don’t share the same beliefs. Each works to accommodate the other’s values and priorities.
There are things in here that I related to as a former PhD student – particularly the way that Ruzo is haunted by a single historical paper that he can’t get hold of. I had my own experience with this: Green, 1967 – the author and date of which I was able to pull out of my head three years after my viva because it was so very frustrating to track it down. Would the hunt for an individual source be as compelling to someone who hadn’t had to do it? Probably not, I suspect. Similarly, I enjoyed seeing Ruzo’s deep level of personal investment in the project – at one point in his attempt to hunt down the missing paper, he has to call an academic librarian. It’s only after he bombards the poor man with his enthusiastic account of how important the papers are that “I quickly realise the librarian was ill-prepared for the tenor of this conversation when he picked up the phone”. He pauses, calms down, and introduces himself clearly. There are also accounts of his wife literally falling asleep while he explains how exciting it all is for the nth time. While I didn’t have these exact experiences, it is pretty relatable – doing a PhD makes you weird, myopic, and obsessive for years on end. My loved ones were very tolerant, but there’s no denying that nobody – not even your supervisors – cares as much about your thesis as you do.
Fundamentally, in order to have room for both the adventure and the discovery promised in the title, I would have liked this to be much longer – which is a compliment, I think! I’d also prefer it not to be quite so didactic at the end – I am quite comfortable being presented with facts and analysis, and drawing my own conclusions; I prefer books don’t explicitly tell me what to think. However, I recognise that that is part of the nature of TED talks, and grumbling about it too much seems churlish. It’s certainly made me more interested in reading books about both the cultures and the landscape of the Amazon, and Peru in general – I have a copy of Kim MacQuarrie’s Last Days of the Incas and reading this has probably bumped it several places up the TBR. I’ll be pleased if Ruzo decides to write a more comprehensive account of his experiences one day, but until then, this is a quick and enjoyable read that took me to a place I am not very likely to see any time in the near future.
This sounds really fascinating. I think I would be interested in learning more about his interactions with the tribes and how to explore an area like this respectfully. This sounds like there could be enough here to create a full book.
Yes, I’ll be interested to see if it’s a subject he returns to later. He’s still working with the indigenous group both to study and to protect the area, and he mentioned other researchers working with the indigenous group to research their medicinal plants and find out why they are effective at treating certain issues. Careful and respectful collaboration all round – which is encouraging to read about!
Oh, that would be really interesting too!
Thanks so much for the mention! — I enjoyed your insights as a PhD. I feel like ‘the search for that one paper’ translated to this non-academic. I’m a bit worried that a longer book would have been ‘weird, myopic, and obsessive,’ but maybe not?
I think a longer book about the science and the process of collaboration might be very popular but with a smaller audience – probably people who read a lot of popular science already. Good to know about the paper – I wasn’t sure if it was a particularly well-written part or if I just related to it a lot! Thanks for recommending it – I wouldn’t have heard of it otherwise. 😊
My daughter’s doing a PhD in Geology, well she sort of is, she keeps pausing it to have children. I should give this to her and then she could explain it to me. She doesn’t give us too hard a time about her thesis but then I’ve proof read the earlier versions.
I hope Ruzo’s ‘discovery’ doesn’t lead to exploitation.
There’s actually very little geology in this given the subject! I would have liked a lot more of the underpinning subject.
People who proofread theses are heroes – one of my friends did mine and caught some absolute clanging typos.
The last chapter in the book is about the steps Ruzo, Maestro, and others have already taken and will be taking to prevent exploitation of the area. I was pleased to read about that – he didn’t publish anything until legal protections were in place. And he is cognisant of not claiming to have discovered the river itself – only the geothermal mechanism.
I pointed my daughter to this post, since she is doing a PhD. She had empathy for the search for the historical paper, though she says that for her it has happened many times!
It’s very field-dependent! Most of the relevant papers in my field are post-1975 once archiving was better. There was more than one that gave me trouble, but only one that felt like it was following me round until I finally got hold of it!
I do think a lot of Ted Talks have a tendency to end either “feel good” or with a downer vibe of “if only things had been different in the past.” You always feel emotional when you’re done with a Ted Talk. It seems like the explanation of how the river works and what it was like being a scientist working with a tribe could be two separate books, as they likely appeal to different readers.
I think it’s actually the adventure/discovery stuff that belongs in a different book – the explanation of the underlying science and the methodology (both in terms of data collection and collaboration) could be paired to make a very interesting book in the popular science vein.
Sounds fascinating! I hope you get your wish and that he does turn it into something longer at some point. There are very few places left in the world for “explorers” now, but it sounds as if he’s found one.
Yes, I think the Amazon jungle is one of the few remaining unexplored places!
I would love to hear more about scientists actually doing the work to respect local people and their cultures! I don’t do any field work, but my impression is that this is something that’s still done pretty poorly to not at all in a lot of cases.
Yes, I agree. I’ve never done research with a particular group in the same way, but I always wonder about it when I read research carried out with specific groups or cultures. For my dissertation years ago I read a tonne of research into communities that have unusually high vaccine hesitancy for the UK (London’s small Orthodox Jewish community and the Gypsy, Roma, and Traveller community, for example) – the research is important and has informed public health policy here, but I always wonder what the process is for accessing the groups.