Passion & Purpose
In “River of Redemption,” we discover the wisdom of Canada’s rock-star explorer Wade Davis
RIVERS RUN THROUGH HUMANITY’S STORIES in many guises. They are boundaries and passageways, homecomings and leavetakings, life as well as death. For Wade Davis, the explorer, writer, scientist and anthropology professor, the river that is the metaphor for all the others is Colombia’s mighty Magdalena and, to him, it is nothing short of redemption.
It’s a lot to put on a river. But Davis, 66, came of age on Magdalena’s banks. He first set foot in Colombia as a Montreal schoolboy of 14 and, enchanted, took a one-way ticket back six years later to parse the nation’s secrets. Now, as an elder, he has finally surrendered to the seductions of the river. He can see not just what it once meant to its people but also what it could mean. He has laid it out in his latest book, Magdalena, River of Dreams, an ardent divination of healing and hope.
On a summer day, he spent nearly two hours on the phone from his home on Bowen Island, near Vancouver, passionately regaling me with tales of the river and what he prophesies for it.
It was a parable, hanging on choices yet to be made. Magdalena’s waters, long fouled by industry’s toxic compounds and rotting
human corpses dumped by illicit drug troops, will run rich and clear. Magdalena will once more take her rightful place at the heart of the country, sweeping away the collective amnesia of Colombians who have long forgotten the river’s power.
And when Magdalena is re deemed, so too will be Colombia itself, the cocaine-scarred South American nation that, now in precarious peace, was for decades an emblem of brutality and corruption. Forgiveness will follow. The river that never abandoned its people will resurrect them.
“I feel more strongly about this book than anything I’ve ever done,” he tells me.
It is only days later, still savouring the river and the metaphors she carries, that I begin to wonder whether the redemption Magdalena represents is not just for the river and the country he cares for so passionately but also for Davis himself. What if, despite all that he has done in his life, he still needs to do one more thing – shape the future of the river that has been such a key to his past? R RIVERS HAVE ALWAYS BEEN Davis’s conduit, no matter where he has gone. Born in Vancouver, he grew up in Montreal on the banks of the St. Lawrence, one of the many sacred waterways that sculpt the imagination of our country. He was shaped by tales of the coureurs de bois who paddled their canoes from its banks to Canada’s other watery arteries, seeking pelts, money and glory. He hungered to follow in their footsteps, wholly rejecting the buttoned-down job his father, George, held as an investment manager at the Royal Trust Company.
And his mother, Gwendolyn, harbouredferociouslyambitiousdreams for her son, working a tedious job to pay his private-school fees at Lower Canada College. That first journey to Colombia as a young teen was on the roster of the school’s field trips.
Since then, he has devoured experiences in all corners and many waterways of the world, voraciously scooping up knowledge about plants, cultures and geography and knitting them into compelling tales about the necessity of cultural diversity. The myths and practices of the ancients – including the marine wayfinders of Polynesia and the nomads of the Sahara – and of modern Indigenous peoples are humanity’s greatest wealth, he reckons.
His explorations began with three years of peering at roots and leaves in the Amazon and the Andes for degrees at Harvard University, including a PhD in ethnobotany.
Then he immersed himself in the plants of Haiti and their neuropharmacological use in voodoo, which meant struggling to understand the intricate psychology and politics of that tiny Caribbean nation. At one point, in such a fever of amazement at the nighttime religious ceremonies, he failed to realize he had both malaria and hepatitis,
he tells me. Once, he set his clothes on fire at a secret ritual to prove his mettle to voodoo leaders, an act of theatre that singed his eyebrows and had them roaring with laughter. All good fun, he says.
He turned his Haitian experiences into the 1986 international bestseller The Serpent and the Rainbow: A Harvard Scientist’s Astonishing Journey into the Secret Societies of Haitian Voodoo, Zombis, and Magic – his first book – which became a 1998 cult horror classic loosely based on his book and directed by Hollywood screammeister Wes Craven. But it wasn’t enough. He was inconsolably restless of mind, body and spirit.
“No one in the world was more ambitious than me,” he says. “Never for fame, never for money but to know my destiny.”
That compulsion to find his fate nearly did him in. “My fire was so bright, so all-consuming that I came very close to self-immolation,” he writes in Magdalena. He wasn’t suicidal, he tells me, but simply couldn’t sit still. He lived to work but didn’t know exactly what his highest destiny was. Return trips to Colombia helped. In despair, he even applied to law school. Finally, it was something deep inside him that kept him going.
“The thing that saved me, in retrospect, was not an inner compass or any guiding light,” he says. “But for some quirky reason I was simply physically, psychologically, spiritually incapable of compromise.”
That involved repudiating the nine-to-five working life of his father, who commuted to work in flannel trousers, a jacket and tie. His father referred to the job as “the grind,” and, as a child, Davis thought his father meant he came home each evening a little bit shorter.
“I think in a way he did,” Davis tells me in an email.
Davis combined this abhorrence of banality with an unshakable faith in serendipity; in return, serendipity made him a favourite child. The year he was 33, for example, he finished his PhD, left Harvard, published his first book, made his first real money by selling the book rights to a Hollywood studio, ended a five-year relationship with a French woman, moved back to Canada, connected with his future wife, bought a house in Vancouver and conceived a child.
“You can’t calculate your way through life,” he says.
It has led to all the modern spoils of the storied explorer, including long and lucrative ties with the National Geographic Society, honorary doctorates, famous patrons, awards, fabulous prizes, more than a dozen books and a television series. He is one of just 20 living honorary members of the fabled New York-based Explorers Club, a select clan that has, over time, included Sir Edmund Hillary, the first conqueror of Mount Everest; astronauts John Glenn, Sally Ride and Buzz Aldrin; and Theodore Roosevelt, America’s 26th president.