On a Thursday, the first of December, we’re riding down Ecuador’s Napo River in a dual outboard-powered metal boat piloted by a young Ecuadorian in a light denim oxford shirt and jeans. We’re seated on wobbly benches spaced in rows like church pews. Through the din of the motor, the splash of the water, and the required foam ear plugs, the crackly stereo pours out the only conversation: “Aiy, aiy, aiy, aiy, stayin’ alive, stayin’ alive.” Not the original 70s version but Puff Daddy’s remix. Next come “Lady in Red,” “Land Down Under” and “It Must Have Been Love.” We doze in and out, lulled by a sound potion of modern contrasts.
Awake again, the boat’s motor slowing to navigate around a sandbar. Beyond our covered craft operated by an Occidental Oil Company’s boat transportation outfit, a river the color of creamed coffee slides past, throwing up occasional boils and whirlpools, the only indication of the massive volume moving through the otherwise taut, understated quarter-mile-wide river. The stark equatorial sun bakes everything exposed in a light that feels clinical in its whiteness. The mud banks a hundred yards away hold loosely to roots, occasionally sending chunks crumbling into the river like a calving glacier. The dense green of the jungle hides itself in canopied darkness, a contrast to the river’s exposed sunlight. Yasuni National Park, a World Biosphere Reserve, contains 1,679,643 acres of arguably the world’s wealthiest biodiversity. Occasionally a brown-skinned man in t-shirt and shorts, arm muscles tight and calve muscles straining in balance, guides a dugout canoe upstream, close enough to the bank to almost blend in except for the long pole pushing against the river bottom: 10 o’clock to 2 o’clock, steady as a metronome.
The contrasts down here – dual-powered gas engine boat and dugout canoe, bright sunlight and dark forest understory, the din of birds and insects and that of leftover 1980s bands – take on an extreme to match the landscape. Our focus here is on contrast. Two communities, both sovereign reserves of indigenous Quichua people, live side by side along the Napo River, roughly 60 miles downstream from the nearest road-connected town, Coca.
In 2003 I lived in the Samona-Yuturi Reserve, a community of about 90 families, almost all of whom reside along a 10-mile line down the Napo’s southern bank. The Samona-Yuturi people have resisted oil exploration offers for a number of years, preferring instead a small eco-tourism operation based out of a simple eco-lodge cluster built on a lagoon within the reserve. Each time I took the community boat to or from Coca I passed the neighboring reserve, La Eden. Whereas you might miss the balsam-wood floating docks marking a Yuturi residence, La Eden’s center was unmistakable: out of the jumbled river bank’s greenery and red banks there opened a football-field swath of gravel flatness, a steel retaining wall, a couple barges ready to transport dump trucks or 18-wheelers, and a cluster of low-slung aluminum-sided offices, complete with glass windows and AC units.
I never had a chance to enter the site in 2003 but now, two years later, I’ve returned with my brother, a photographer with whom I live in Birmingham, and a friend, a watershed engineer from Seattle.
We have permission from an Occidental Oil Company executive in California to take a tour of the site. We have an afternoon to witness and document one source of our energy needs. Then we’ll ride fifteen minutes downriver to be dropped off at a Yuturi home where hand-cut steps lead up the slippery mud bank and the only thing cutting through the jungle is a narrow foot path to a thatched-roof, wood-planked-floor home where Tiofilo and his wife, Transita take care of their nine children. Michael hopes to capture the contrasts between these two neighboring communities by photographing the everyday life of the oil reserve and that of the untouched Samona-Yuturi Reserve. 
La Eden Reserve, Oxy Oil. Napo River
Jorge Salazar precisely backs the white Ford Explorer into the car-less parking lot outside one of the offices at the La Eden port. He climbs out to greet us, wearing the same light blue denim shirt worn by all the men we’d seen walking purposefully around the riverside site. Jorge is 50 years old with silver-gray hair and a tan face. He welcomes us with hospitality and a subtle sense of authority. A month earlier I’d emailed an executive of Occidental Oil’s California office requesting a photographic tour of the Yuturi-Eden facility (EPF). Fortunately, the executive put me in touch with the Quito office, which arranged for full access to EPF guided by Jorge, the head supervisor.
Hard hats on, seat belts buckled, we leave the industrial openness of the port’s lot and the river and drive down the three-lane-wide gravel road lined in telephone wires. The road extends a few miles into the reserve’s interior where the seven platforms and central operating facility reside, but first we turn down the short road paralleling the Napo. Up until a few years ago this road was just a single-lane footpath like the one I walked each day in the neighboring Samona-Yuturi Reserve. Now this is the Eden community’s road, a stipulation they requested during the contract process in 2001. The road is short, extending only a half-mile to the town center where four school buildings stand in an open field. A cluster of classrooms, a community center, and an open field is a typical town center; Samona-Yuturi has one with two school buildings, a community center, community store, and a few houses for teachers. The difference since 2001 in La Eden: a chain link fence around the site, glass windows and real, enclosed doors and walls on the teachers’ houses across the street (teachers here have been recruited from Coca and other connected towns), an enclosed concrete medical clinic, and power lines connecting it all. The school’s computers need power.
Three teenage boys walk slowly down the street in black slacks and white dress-shirt uniforms, their slow gait typical of the universal high schooler only there never used to be a high school here, only elementary levels.
Students wishing to attend high school and presumably leave the community would previously leave their homes for classes in Coca, staying with extended family or friends.“If they could, they’d ask for paved roads and even cars,” Jorge tells us as we pull away from the town center. “For now they like the road because it’s easier to ride bikes,” he continues in his slightly broken English.
Jorge works a typical supervisor’s schedule for La Oxy, as the company is known: fourteen days on the job at EPF and fourteen off at his home in Quito. He grew up in Quito until age fifteen when his father, a UN official, began moving the family around the Americas. He’s worked with La Oxy for 22 years and hopes to retire in five so he can spend more time on his coastal ranch in Esmeraldas.
“It’s not about money. At some point it’s more important to be with the family,” he says about his career timeline.
Jorge is pleased to show us the facility. He narrates like a presidential speechwriter – all sound bites and repetition – as we turn down the first side road for a 2km spur to a platform of three wells. As we cross a small creek I ask about water contamination issues.
“Nothing at all,” Salazar says. “Nothing in lake or river. We take samples of river and lake every week and send it to the government. We Ecuadorians are very pleased with Oxy because we know we’re working with high standards. Our standards are higher than the government’s.
“At first the people thought that the deer and animals would be scared of the noise or roads. But we have to work with ambient coordinator of the community to make any changes and there are strict regulations like not building the road any wider than its precise standard,” he continues.
We pull up to a closed gate and a security official approaches the truck. Jorge shows his badge and we continue into the platform site that holds three wells. Imagine squaring a football field then topping it with packed gravel and dropping it from a plane into the middle of the Amazon jungle. Construct the drilling machinery and suddenly the tidiness of it all – stark vertical lines of the towering drill, the flat, symmetrical curves of the steel holding tanks, the rigid pipes disappearing underground – causes one to forget they’re in a remote rainforest basin of a (slowly) developing country.
Jorge begins explaining the system. La Oxy uses directional drilling, a new technique that allows one platform to drill multiple holes at various angles.
“So you no longer see the deforestation of the jungle,” says Jorge.
It’s true; the more expensive technique results in a much smaller footprint than having to clear space for multiple single-drill platforms. Ecuador’s own PetroEcuador has yet to implement the technique, another reason many regard them, ironically but not surprisingly, as the country’s worst contaminator.
We drive around to a geometrically sided concrete pit.
“The cuttings must go in lined pits for an extra precaution. It’s a very high standard we have at Oxy,” Jorge continues.
For lunch, Jorge takes us to the end of the main road (there are only three roads in the reserve, as far as we observe) where the EPF headquarters houses the employees and the most machinery. Here the accumulated oil goes through various processing stages before moving out via the TK pipeline. Over 600 people live out of this facility of TK acres. In the back a few clusters of one-story buildings look like a Days Inn one might find in a state park, the dark, but shiny wood construction intended to match the natural setting. Where there isn’t gravel or concrete, lush green grass carpets the flat ground, enough even for a four-hole chip-and-putt golf course in a back corner. (“A couple of the American supervisors like golf, they’re the only ones who use it,” Jorge tells us.) Tennis courts with lights, volleyball courts, and a small soccer field, all more well kept than any I’d seen in Ecuador, circle the dorm buildings and cafeteria. I half-expect valet parking and a concierge desk.
Lunchtime. Jorge asks that we change out of our shorts, put on long pants, and leave our hats in the car before entering the cafeteria (no reason given, just the standard). No photos inside, he says. We sign in, squirt the required hand sanitizer and pick up a plate. The spread looks like Thanksgiving: roasted turkey, green beans, soups, multiple potato options, rice, cucumber salad, rolls – a mix of all-American buffet and Ecuadorian staples like blood soup. A dispenser of guanabana juice sits between the soda fountain and a frozen yogurt machine. We eat two plates each. A large-screen TV in the corner plays a national soccer game and the fifteen tables quickly fill with denim-clad workers eating and talking quietly. Most employees work 14-on – 14-off or 8-on – 8-off shifts.
While they’re on the base they’re working with little free time other than between shifts. There’s no alcohol and little interaction with the local community that generally keeps to itself along the riverfront or drastically avoids the facility sites when venturing into the reserve to hunt.Our final tour takes us into the meat of the operation – the facility where a small team of computer technicians oversees the entire infrastructure.
The specially designed walls and doors muffle the deafening roar of the pumps directly outside the building. It’s cold in here – air conditioners keep the space at a high-elevation Quito-like temperature.Jorge takes us into the electrical room where millions of dollars of wiring, batteries, converters, generators, and computer hard drives run the show. The metal sides of various equipment bare the supplier names: Siemens, Allen-Bradley, IntelliCenter, Cutler-Hammer. The facility requires 23 megawatts of energy with an auxiliary unit in the case of a blackout or malfunction. How long will all this be here, we ask.
“I don’t know if I can give out numbers or not, but this EPF field produces 75,000 barrels of crude per day. The government regulates the production to make it last longer. At this rate, we could continue for 30 or 40 years, but our contract with the community is only until 2019 right now. But even after this supply runs out, we can begin another operation in the area,” Jorge says.
And when it’s finally all said and done, what happens to all this stuff?
“We leave it here. It would cost so much to move it and use it again somewhere else,” Jorge answers.
I imagine this room of wall-to-wall state-of-the-art generator and computer technology two years after the operation shuts down, whenever that happens. One could probably string a hammock between two pipes, grab a bowl of chicha (the local yucca-root brew), and watch the jungle take over, converting EPF into a 21st Century Machu Picchu for 25th century archaeologists to unearth.
Samona-Yuturi Reserve. Napo River
“Suba. Suba (Come in),” Tiofilo tells me from his living-room hammock. The Oxy boat has dropped us off at a Samona-Yuturi dock and I run up the trail to the nearest house, two years after I last left this community and had any interaction with the residents. I find Tiofilo and his entire family of nine hanging out in their square, open-sided and raised home. Transita, his wife, fumbles with a shirt to cover her topless, breast-feeding torso. Children and young teenagers from age 2 to 14 sit on the floor or lean against the room’s wood railing. Tiofilo remains in his hammock but extends a hand and a warm smile. Immediately I’m offered a pull from the bowl of chicha.
Tiofilo wears old black shorts and no shirt. He’s barefoot as are the rest of the family. He’s 45 with a tightly wound body – strong chest, bulging forearms (from machete work) and a stomach protruding a block of hard muscle. He’s still got his jet-black mustache to match his glossy hair. The house looks familiar but its location has changed; it used to be nearer to the river. Tiofilo explains that they had to build a new house further back since a flood nearly got them recently. With the help of a few neighboring families and the fortifying nature of bottomless chicha pots, a Quichua group can build a house in 3 to 5 days in a work project they call a “minga.”
The layout is the same as when I was here before: a standard, purely functional design with an open meeting room joined to a kitchen with fire-pit and sometimes a gas-powered stove and range. A couple bedrooms fill out the corner with simple wood frames and thin mattresses as beds. The whole thing is raised five feet off the ground to avoid snakes and poisonous insects. A low wall hems in the structure, though the five feet between the top of the wall and the eave of the thatch roof is open-air for the meeting room and kitchen, an attempt to maintain some airflow amidst the Amazon’s stagnant humidity.
I’m looking for Tiofilo’s older brother, Jaime and his wife, Ines.
They live next door (100 yards down the town’s only “road,” a straight footpath paralleling the river) in the same house they shared with me two years ago while I lived in the community. Transita tells me Ines and Jaime are in the town center waiting for our arrival – somehow the message made it to them via my month-old email to the Yuturi Eco Lodge’s Quito office. Transita says they are down at the community center. I find Michael and Nick and we walk down the shaded 1/2 mile trail until it opens to bright sunlight. The two-football-field-square plot of open grass is bordered by two one-room cinder-block schoolhouses, a wood-and-aluminum-roofed store and a couple wooden houses (for teachers). Everything bakes in the midday sun, the wide Napo flowing by the only option for cooling off, though its waters hide dangerous wildlife and a thick current.We find Jaime and Ines drinking beer in the store. Although they don’t drink much – no more than three times in the two months I lived with them previously – when they do, they go big. Now, at 3pm they’re ripped. But their glazed eyes light up when they see us. The catching up begins.
Later in the evening, when Jaime and Ines have sobered up, we sit around their kitchen table, full on river turtle their son had caught in anticipation of our arrival. River turtle is a delicacy, it’s wildly varying tastes a variety pack of meat flavors: chicken, bacon, pork skin, liver. The lower half of the grilled shell sits on the table between us, open for picking. The head has already been cleaned – eyes, brain, and jaw muscle – by Ines.
“So why have you come back, other than to visit us?” Ines asks.
A short, stout woman in her 50s with short-cut hair, Ines is a fiery woman within the Samona community. In community meetings and interactions with oil companies I’d witnessed in my previous stay, she stood as the most impassioned and vocal member of Samona-Yuturi. Jaime spent years in the Ecuadorian military during which time they lived in Quito and other parts of Ecuador, though they grew up in and call the Amazon home. At one point in her young 40s Ines grew ill for an extended period with stomach issues. Jaime tried treating her in the jungle but the problem persisted. They went to a doctor in Quito who told her she may have cancer and they’d need to operate to find out. Ines refused, preferring instead to return to the jungle and either improve or die, but do it in her home, the Amazon.
For over a year, Jaime, with the native knowledge typical of most Samona-Yuturi residents who grew up in the jungle, treated Ines with a strict homeopathic diet derived from their backyard (miles of pristine jungle). Ines’ condition slowly regained strength and the pain subsided. After 18 months, she was back to full capacity, washing clothes by hand in the river, joining Jaime on hunts deep within the reserve, and paddling the canoe six miles upstream to the Yuturi Lodge where Jaime works as a guide. The final test came with a return visit to the doctor in Quito. His tests and x-rays showed no signs of cancer or other illness and Ines has had no problem since.
Perhaps that is why Ines gets fired up about her home. Or perhaps she’s looking after her seven children’s futures. Either way, she has opinions on the hot topic of the last few years within Yuturi – to oil or not to oil.
During my stay in the fall of 2003, the Samona-Yuturi Community had insisted on extolling a fine from the Brazilian oil giant, PetroBras for illegal cutting and testing on their land.
At the time of my visit they asked me for advice on the fine to be imposed. Despite my dissent due to a belief that no oil company would ever acquiesce to such a high price, they asked for 1 million dollars at a meeting with three PetroBras officials. The request was ultimately denied, of course. Now Ines catches me up on the last two years.“They paid us $100,000 for the trochas (cuts in the jungle),” she says. “Then, on February 2, 2005 we signed a contract to allow them to work for 20 years, but only to build and operate 35 km of pipeline to connect to adjacent blocks of oil operations.”
She goes on to explain how PetroBras and the community came to such an important and new decision.
“For 20 years we will suffer. We fought but they came everyday, not to talk to the community but to individuals. They came to my house to ask how much do I want in order to be quiet. They are scared that we’ll fight them and we’re still fighting them. There are some families that don’t want them here.
“For now they have paid $120,000 to the community and when the pipe gets halfway they will pay the remaining $120,000. This pipe will allow PetroBras to pull oil from the neighboring reserve, Chiro Isla, which is ready to pull oil but is waiting for a pipe to transport it west to Coca,” she says.
I’ve heard from the tourism company, Yuturi Lodge, that they may pull out of Samona-Yuturi, choosing instead to focus on their eco-lodge operation in the Yarina community just five miles east of Coca. Currently the Yuturi Lodge has a simple set-up on a lagoon in the reserve’s interior. The company hires Jaime, their son Medardo, and other locals as guides and laborers. It provides a modest income and auxiliary benefits like medical supplies, boat transport to/from Coca, and building materials to the community. Ines is frustrated with them, as well.
“Don Fernando (the owner of the Yuturi Lodge company) has many excuses and he thinks we don’t want to work with him now that we’ve made a deal with the oil company. But he never talks to us. We went to talk with him because we want to continue with tourism. We know that tourism is very sustainable.
“When I was young we worked on our land and made our food and living at home. Now we have to talk to the petroleros all the time and go to meetings and we don’t have time to do the work at the house. They (PetroBras) know what’s key to our lifestyle and they’re pulling us away from it to make us dependent on money,” Ines explains when I ask why the shift toward money in a culture that has no real marketplace for consumer items.
Conversationed out for tonight we retire to our room: Michael, Nick, and I to the side addition and our wood-framed cots just a few inches too small and Jaime and Ines to their small room off the kitchen. As we settle in behind the mosquito nets, the usual din of insects and night sounds is distorted by a much more familiar sound from my childhood: the repetitive beat of the Super Mario Brothers Nintendo game. Jaime Jr. is apparently on Level II. The green-blue television glow from the meeting room seeps in through the cracks in the wood siding of our room. Ines and Jaime have a gas generator that powers the lights at night as well as the 30” television and old-school Nintendo. I fall asleep, again lulled by the confusing contrasts of time and space here at one of the sources of our civilization’s energy.
