July 04, 2004
Chris Shaw interview

Chris Shaw will be speaking this week at Old Forge Library in the Adirondacks. He is 90% of the reason that I am working to protect the Usumacinta right now. I've just re-read his book "Sacred Monkey River" and I'm finally beginning to understand what he accomplished by writing it.

Here's a press release (click MORE) about his appearance on July 6 at 7:30 at the library. It includes an interview in which Chris discusses the creation of the book, growing out of an encounter with Victor Perera, who died last year.

Thanks Chris, for all the inspiration.

PRESS INFORMATION JUNE 18, 2004

Contact: Isabella Worthen, Old Forge Library, Old Forge, NY
315-369-6008,
IWorthen@midyork.org

[HEAD] Writer's Book on Mesoamerican River Reflects His Years In
Adirondacks

[SUBHEAD] Christopher Shaw, who wrote Sacred Monkey River in 2000 about extreme canoe trip, will read At Old Forge Library.

June 18, 2004, Saranac Lake, New York: In fall of 1988, the Guatemalan writer Victor Perera picked up a copy of Adirondack Life magazine for the first time. After reading it Perera, who was staying in Blue Mountain Lake, thought he and the editor had interests in common. So he called then-editor Christopher Shaw at the magazine, in Jay, New York, and suggested they meet.

Over dinner a week later Shaw described to Perera a novel he had been writing that took place on a river called the Usumacinta, that drains the rain forest dividing Mexico and Guatemala. At that point Perera was fighting a dam threat on the same river and invited Shaw to join him on a hundred mile raft descent that January. "It was pure coincidence," said Shaw.

The Usumacinta River runs through threatened rain forest past some of the most important and spectacular ruins of Classical Maya. The habitat sustains shrinking populations of monkeys, jaguars, crocodiles, and macaws, and a riparian ecosystem like none other.

The journey changed Shaw's life. On the river they met Guatemalan rebels living in jungle shrouded ruins, and visited the traditional Lacandon Maya at Naha.

"Frankly, it overwhelmed me" Shaw said. "I couldn't get a handle on it." But he continued writing about it.

"I had originally wanted to start a rafting outfit down there," said the former raft guide for Adirondack River Outfitters, in Old Forge. "Then I wound up working at the magazine. I decided to write a novel about the river instead, about some raft guides who get in a jam.

"I went back a number of times, and started working exclusively on the novel. Then I was invited to write a piece for an anthology of nature writing." That piece was his essay, "Empty at the Heart of the World," about the remote region south of Cranberry Lake. The piece won Shaw a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, and brought him to the attention of an editor at W.W. Norton. He showed her the half finished novel.

"She liked the novel but was more interested in publishing non-fiction," he said. Unwilling to abandon his research of ten years, Shaw proposed a book that paralleled the novel: "I would run the river myself, all the way, and write about the region's natural and political history, making connections between the canoe and the peoples' world view."

Shaw, who had spend twenty years in the Adirondacks working as a guide, a caretaker and a ski lift operator before joining the magazine, had what it took.

"I had looked around the Usumacinta basin and realized that in an odd way I recognized the territory. It reminded me of the Adirondacks: forested mountains laced with lakes and rivers. The best way to penetrate it, in fact, was by water, as the Maya had, and from my years as a guide I had the necessary skills."

"The river had already withstood two previous dam threats," Shaw went on. "The forest was disappearing fast. It was like the Adirondacks in the 1870s. I knew another dam proposal would come along, and that someone had to tell the story of the river as clearly as possible before it was too late." That way a record would always exist that wove together fragmented strands of archaeology, anthropology, and conservation.

On his 1997 descent Shaw made it two thirds of the way before political instability and bandit activity forced him to quit.

"It was very disappointing, but reflected the reality of the place at the time. And I was writing about the place, not the adventure." The book is an adventure, nevertheless.

When it came out the Washington Post called it "brainy and brawny," and "a huge accomplishment." Bill McKibben said of the book, "You will be reminded of Jon Krakauer and Jonathan Raban, but Chris Shaw is a true original."

But he could never see the place without reference to his experience in the Adirondacks. "It formed all my perceptions of the Usumacinta basin. And the Adirondacks could serve as the best model to preserve it, as well." Last year Shaw co-founded, with videographer Dave Pentecost, the organization Rios Mayas to fight a new dam threat on the Usumacinta. In 2003 he returned to Chiapas and Mexico City to draw press attention to the problem, and to propose the Adirondacks as a model for a watershed protection plan spanning the Mexican-Guatemalan border. "You'd have to do it right, using both the positive and negative examples of the Adirondack experiment. It's a long-term project.

"The dam won't go away until the river is protected forever," he added. "I wish Victor could be here to see it happen." Perera died in 2003.

Today Shaw lives with his wife Sue Kavanagh in Middlebury, Vermont, where he teaches writing at Middlebury College. He still spends much of the year in his cabin near Saranac Lake, where he is currently writing a novel and editing manuscripts left behind at the death in 2000 of his friend, the guide and regional historian, Abel St. Martin.

Shaw will read from Sacred Money River at the Old Forge Library, on July 6, at 7:30.

Posted by Dave at July 04, 2004 09:54 AM