The Lost City of Z by David Grann

by Christina on September 23, 2009

One of my favorite “Only In New York” party stories is of this time a two-inch cockroach crawled up the inside of my jeans while I waited for a bus at 1:30 am. I will even act it out if the crowd is right. Hilarious story.

Anyway, during that incident, I managed to hold my shit together pretty well–one minor scream, a few leg slaps due to imaginary tingling that the roach was still pressed against my thigh. Oddly enough, it’s when battling cockroaches in open spaces–like, say, the kitchen–that I loose it and start screaming bloody murder.

Based on those thankfully few experiences, I’m pretty sure that I could never survive an hour in the Amazon jungle, much less six months to a year. Except right now, I totally want to. Indiana Jones, King Solomon’s Mines, wonderful explorer adventure stories that inspire you to pack a bag and take off for some white water rafting down the Orinoco. Except they’re fictional. And the story of the City of Z and Percy Fawcett is real.

The Lost City of Z is one of those books that I dismissed when I first heard of it. Which was about two weeks ago. It’s been a few months since I’ve made it to a book club meeting and this was the current choice. I would read it simply so I could attend and reconnect with everyone even though the book–based solely on title–held no appeal to me.

And now I want to grab a knife and some sturdy boots so I too can explore uncovered mysteries of the Amazon. Me, who didn’t even like camping out in the backyard as a kid. Clearly, I would not survive a night out there.

Despite the fact that our meeting isn’t until Friday, I wanted to post my thoughts. Mostly because I’m not really sure what we’re going to talk about. The Lost City of Z has multiple layers; it’s difficult to classify just what it is. Biography of Percy H. Fawcett? Check. Memoir of David Grann’s research process and trip? Check. Adventure tale? Check. I could keep going.

Grann is a great writer. The story jumps through time and is always easy to follow, possibly because those various layers can be broken out into their own stories. Interweaving the layers results in cliff-hanger ends to chapters. And it’s all engrossing–you don’t realize that you just spent a few hours plowing through the book.

The majority of the book focuses on Fawcett’s immersion into the world of exploration and his belief in an El Dorado. To Fawcett, his City of Z was a great civilization deep in the Amazon and El Dorado was just an exaggerated tale told by returning conquistadors. While focusing on the mystery surrounding his disappearance and the media frenzy it inspired, I realized that I too believed in Z and would have, in a fit of spontaneity, been like the others who signed up (and hundreds who lost their lives) to go in search of Fawcett, his son, and a friend who had been missing for a few years deep in the heart of the jungle.

Fawcett, in his 40s, returned to Europe from his long treks and budding friendships with the natives to fight in the front lines of World War I. In his letters, he laments the ability for humans supposedly so civilized to involve themselves in the atrocities of war. I wonder what he would think of civilized people now as bit by bit we see huge swaths of rainforest being cut down daily and the new farm lands altering the conditions that make the forests thrive and the native peoples, supposedly left alone, slowly adopting our way of living.

Grann visited with the tribes that Fawcett would have met along his final journey, including a chat with an old woman who remembers the party of three white men coming through the village when she was a little girl. On their parting, she laments the tribe’s loss of their culture–documentaries about the meaning of their own rituals being shown to teach the young what is being forgotten.

At the end of the book, Grann focuses a lot of the major changes that are happening to the rainforests as a result of our actions. And it turns out Z might not have been such a fool-hearted belief. Anthropologist Micheal Heckenberger has uncovered a vast civilizationthat would have been much more advanced than its European contemporaries in the general area that Fawcett was looking. However, the forest quickly devours that which has been abandoned or forgotten.

Likewise, continued deforestation and building of dams will devour the forests and make them distant memories to be read in old novels and viewed in movies.

My beliefs on the changes happening to the world fluctuate between believing that mankind is destroying the earth and feeling melting ice caps and extreme weather are all a part of the long term cycles of the earth. But The Lost City of Z makes me realize just how fragile the ecosystem is (despite the aggressive violence of the piranhas, flesh eating bacteria, killer ants, pythons, and poisonous plants of the forest).

One of the Christmas gifts I received as a kid was a small square of rainforest. I think it was in Central America. I remember expressing interest in going to visit my adopted bit of land that was probably no more than a few square feet large. My constitution would not last long in the rainforest, but that same desire has been rekindled–to see the beauty of it all before it is gone.

The Lost City of Z by David Grann

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