TRANSCRIPT
Some years back, I was living about a half mile off the Amazon River in southern Columbia, in a town called Puerto Narino. I had access at the hostel where I was staying to a little plastic kayak, and I would go out kayaking in a little tributary to the Amazon. I would go to this freshwater lake, and in this freshwater lake, there sometimes were pink Amazonian dolphins. I would just watch them.
I remember one day I went out there, and I spent probably three or four hours watching this pink dolphin. I think it was about eight feet long, big dolphin, fairly near to me. He was jumping, and he was catching fish. He was fishing, or she, I don’t know, he or she. It was fishing for hours and just catching fish and jumping and leaping. It was a beautiful dolphin, really bright pink also. I was just imagining, I wonder what this dolphin is thinking. Is he or she thinking about me? He or she definitely knows that I’m here. I would dip my feet off the side of the kayak in the water, but he never came over. She never came over. She kept her distance, but I felt somehow at some level we were interacting with each other, especially when she would jump or he would jump. I just felt, okay, even though maybe a hundred feet away from me, she’s watching me. She’s kind of getting an idea of what I’m all about.
Well, eventually the sun was starting to go down. It was time for me to go back. I didn’t want to get stranded out there at night. The river that I would have to go back to to get home was very fast-moving. I didn’t want to get trapped and end up getting swept out into the Amazon. So I started going back, and I said goodbye to the dolphin. As I’m paddling back, I was thinking and just thinking. I got out into the river, and I was going along the side of the river, probably, who knows, 20 feet deep, maybe could be 30 feet deep. Suddenly, the back of my kayak went woof, and it kind of pushed up in the air. Nothing bumped it, but it was very clear that something underwater had just displaced a lot of water. I looked back, and there was the dolphin. I just saw a quick flash of pink and went down.
Well, what the dolphin had done had come really fast next to my boat and then stopped fast and displaced a huge amount of water against the back of my kayak, such that the back of my kayak went up in the air. This is an animal who knows three, four hundred pounds, a huge creature. Although up until that moment, I had not been scared of pink Amazonian dolphins at all. In fact, many people had said, “Oh no, no, no, they’re not dangerous at all. There’s no known attacks or anything like that.” Science actually has not recorded any attacks of pink Amazonian dolphins on people. I must say it scared the living hell out of me.
Also, I want to say, when I was a kid, I had a phobia of sharks. Even though I grew up inland in central New York and the Finger Lakes region, I was always swimming in the Finger Lakes, swimming in water sometimes three, four hundred feet deep. There were no sharks there, but I just had a fear that maybe there was a shark lurking there, and it would come up and it would get me, and it would bite me. What I figured out later on was this actually had nothing to do with sharks at all. This phobia related to my unresolved childhood traumas. This related to my parents intruding into my world, physically attacking me, sometimes attacking me psychologically, emotionally, coming out of nowhere into the depths of my psyche and ripping me apart, hurting me terribly, painfully, making me split off and rip away from whole sides of myself. But I couldn’t deal with it back then. I had to believe my parents were wonderful and loved me. I needed to retain my love for them to survive in my family’s system, so it all got pushed into my unconscious, down into the depths of the lake of my unconscious. But I remember swimming in the water sometimes and feeling like something big could be down there, could come up and get me.
Well, suddenly that phobia came to life as I’m paddling in this kayak, realizing for some reason this eight or nine-foot large pink mammalian creature with lots of teeth is after me, and I don’t know why. What in the hell is going on? My worst fear is becoming realized right now. I am being stalked by a giant creature that could kill me, and I had no doubt from the strength of watching this creature that it could kill me. Twice as big as me, longer than me, and in its element. I mean, I’m clumsy in the water. This thing can actually catch fish with its mouth. So I started paddling faster. I’m like, get me out of here.
Then the scarier thing happened. As I’m going along, I’m looking around. I don’t see it anywhere. I’m like, I know it’s around here somewhere, but where is it? Suddenly, the whole back of my boat, boom, it smashed and went up in the air even harder this time. I saw the whole creature had come and rammed its body right against the back of my boat, knocking it, almost knocking me right out of the kayak. I was able to right myself, and I took the paddle and I paddled even faster. I’m like, get me away, get me away, get me away! Don’t kill me, don’t kill me! I’m paddling as fast as I can, and then I paddled across the river and went back to the dock where my hostel was. I pulled the boat out of the water, and I was like, oh my god, I’m alive! My heart was beating fast. I was completely adrenalized. I’ve been attacked, is how I felt.
I went up, and in this area, there were lots of local indigenous people, and I told them what happened. To a person, they all laughed. They thought it was hilarious. I was like, hilarious? It was horrible for me! I thought I was gonna die. They said, “No, no, no.” And here’s what they told me, and I’ll translate it into English. They said it was a female dolphin and that she’d fallen in love with me. She had a crush on me. They said she wanted to make love to me. I said, “Make love to me? This is horrible! This thing could have killed me!” They said, “Well, no, she wouldn’t have killed you. She might have pulled you down a little bit. She might have taken you by the arm and pulled you under, held you under for a while to get to know you.” I’m like, “Held me under? It could kill me!” They said, “Well, I mean, it depends on how far she pulled you down. She probably wouldn’t have killed you.”
I thought this is awful. I said, “But how do you know it was a female dolphin?” They said, “Well, that’s probably what it was. If she was bumping up against you, she was in you.” I said, “Well, what if she wasn’t female?” And then they said, “Well, it’s possible actually it wasn’t female and that she was a male and that he was a male and that actually he wasn’t in love with you. Maybe he knew you were hanging around too much, and he sensed you to be competition. Maybe he was jealous of you and angry with you. Maybe he thought the females might fall in love with you, and he wanted to hurt you.” I said, “Hurt me? And what would he do?” They said, “Well, they said probably the same thing, take in, hold you under for a while, but maybe keep you under for a while.” I thought that could kill me. They said, “Yes.”
Well, when I got on the internet again and I read about it, I read, yeah, again, science said this. There was no evidence that anything like this had ever happened. But then again, science had not lived for generations or hundreds of generations, right, in these tributaries around the Amazon where the pink river dolphins lived. These people had Amazonian river dolphins as part of their mythology, even in the area where I…
Was living, I’d see paintings of it. They believed that at night, these dolphins had the capacity to shape-shift, and they could develop legs and they could walk on land. And the males could seduce women, and the female dolphins maybe even could seduce men. That these dolphins were actually people in dolphin form, in pink dolphin form. They were another form of human beings. They believed they had intelligence and sophistication and insight and emotions, maybe even language.
And I remember thinking this. Yes, at some level, I kind of felt it was true. I don’t know what this creature was thinking. I don’t know what he or she was feeling. But somehow, this creature was most definitely drawn to me. Out of love? Out of hatred? I don’t know what it was. I mean, one might say yes, it was just curious, but I think it was actually a lot more than that and a lot more intense.