We live in an era where reality TV takes us naked and alone into jungles or pits humans against one another in faux settings of castaway islands eating roasted rats and raw fish. With cameras recording ‘adventures’ for mass consumption, we the consumers watch with wide-eyed fascination while everyday people seemingly test their skills, wills, and physical well-beings against nature and all its might. It is, of course, a modern day farce. It isn’t real – it’s TV.

On September 27, people packed the meeting room at the Mattapoisett Library to hear a true-life survival story by Dartmouth resident and author Holly FitzGerald as she discussed her memoir Ruthless River: Love and Survival by Raft on the Amazon’s Relentless Madre de Dios, published this year by Vintage.

FitzGerald’s story is the real deal. Her delivery belied the terror they felt when, in 1973, she and her husband were lost on the Madre de Dios in the Amazon River Basin for 26 days – days of torment, dehydration, starvation, and hope.

Of course we know the end of the story – they made it out. But how it happened, their experiences leading up to and after being found near death as told by the author, was thrilling and suspenseful, to say the least.

FitzGerald is a petite soft-spoken woman with a sense of humor that creeps up on you as she talks about how she encouraged her newly minted husband to cast all caution to the wind, put their 9-to-5 lives on hold, and head out on the “adventure of a lifetime,” traveling from Colombia to Brazil along the Amazon River and its tributaries. It was to have been part of their plan to circle the globe while unencumbered by professions or children.

What ensued was a journey deep into their inner reserves of youthful optimism, physical stamina, and their love for one another.

After arriving in South America to begin their “year-long honeymoon,” they took some time to enjoy impromptu meetings with the indigenous people. They also met a couple of anthropologists who were studying the Iscabacabu, a tribe that had been almost completely annihilated except for 26 souls.

FitzGerald sprinkled her story with endearing anecdotes about how they enjoyed and experienced the colors, textures, cultural differences, and the people, especially the children they came in contact with.

“Fitz made up a game of hide and seek,” she explained, pointing to a picture in the PowerPoint presentation that showed children lying on the ground, thinking they were invisible as Fitz finds them. The audience was charmed.

Then came the challenge of securing transportation to the Madre de Dios River where they were to catch a boat that would take them on this journey of discovery.

Throughout her presentation, FitzGerald spoke in a calm, careful manner with a smile that seldom left her face as she explained that the trip and the itinerary she crafted from guide books were her ideas of how to get the most out of this chapter of their lives. Fitz was happy to oblige his bride. As a reporter for a newspaper in Danbury, Connecticut, he would be documenting the trip for his newspaper while she would be the photojournalist. She also kept a personal diary or log that would turn out to be their story of surviving what was to come.

There was a plane crash into a penal colony, of which she told Fitz, “People will not believe this at home,” with her lilting laughter. Then there was the rafting.

FitzGerald often referred to their youth as a major contributing factor as to how and why they took chances to try and complete the trip, even after learning they had missed the boat they planned to take. There wouldn’t be another opportunity for a motorized trip for three months, and the rainy season was upon them.

Why not attempt rafting? They were encouraged to travel as the locals did by raft.

“I got excited,” FitzGerald said. “A raft. What a great idea!” She added, “Fitz was in full Huck Finn mode.”

With leftover rafts and materials readily available in the village, the young couple put one together.

“People sat on the banks watching us,” she said. “We were their entertainment.”

The local harbormaster gave them a license to operate the raft because, “Rafting didn’t require any skill or training.” After securing a few supplies and finishing the raft, including a pink plastic shelter they dubbed “the pink palace,” Fitz pushed the raft into the current with a 10-foot long pole and they were off.

“The first four days were wonderful – paradise – we saw birds and butterflies,” FitzGerald recalled. “The sun was shining.” But it was the rainy season; there wasn’t any solid ground. The tree canopies were then full of animals, snakes, all manner of wildlife avoiding the flooded ground. Then the storm came.

The FitzGeralds would spend the next 26 days trying to stay out of the floodwaters that they knew were filled with life-threatening creatures. “We were outnumbered,” she chuckled.

FitzGerald described one particularly horrifying experience that still haunts her.

“We became covered in bees.” She said that one day they were suddenly swarmed by hundreds of bees. “The more we tried to get them off, the more they bit us,” she said. They discovered that by lying still inside their enclosure, the bees seemed less excited, yet, “They covered us like blankets.” She said Fitz asked her, “Are they eating us?” She replied, “I think they are licking our sweat.”

FitzGerald ended her presentation there with her wry sense of humor, saying, “Maybe you’ll read the book and get us out of there.”

During the Q & A that followed, FitzGerald said she always thought Fitz would write the book. “He was the writer,” after all. She said they were approached by several writers wanting to take on their story, but her response was, “No, if anyone was going to tell the story I would.” And what a story she wrote.

FitzGerald was encouraged by her children to write a book, and one suspects it was for the love of family that she eventually did. She said she took a short course on memoir writing adding, “At one point, I had been an English major … it was a good challenge.”

While the theme is one of survival, a young couple nearing death with each day that passes, it is also very much a love story – the love two people can draw upon when faced with insurmountable odds.

Fitz stood in the back of the room during the nearly hour-long presentation, a silent sentinel watching his wife enjoy her time in the limelight. When approached for a few comments, he shared that when they had met the tribal chief, he gifted Fitz with a fan made of beautiful bird feathers. He said they also planned a picture-taking session with the chief and his tribe. When the couple arrived, they found the chief had dispensed with his loincloth and donned western clothing much to their disappointment.

“Holly doesn’t read any reviews, but I do.” Fitz shared. He said he gets frustrated when people comment about the lack of photographs documenting those trying days as they fought to simply stay alive. “It’s a ‘selfie’ world today.” As he looked over to where his wife was fielding one-on-one questions and signing books, he said, “Taking photographs was the last thing on our minds. We were just trying to live!”

By Marilou Newell

The warnings that bee populations are dropping, hive collapses catastrophic, and our crops at risk for lack of pollination have been widely written about and discussed over the past few years. And while much has been said, there’s very little follow-up on how things are going.

Well, things are still very tenuous – not only for bees, but for all pollinators around the globe. So what is being done to stabilize bee populations?

These questions and others for improving backyard environments to help bees make a living were expertly discussed when the Sippican Lands Trust in partnership with the Marion Garden Group hosted local beekeepers and cranberry growers Paul and Linda Rinta at the Marion Music Hall on September 30.

Linda’s presentation explored how modern agricultural practices, habitat loss, diseases, and climate change have collided, causing bees and other pollinators to suffer a mass die-off. She also gave the audience an education in apiology or the study of honeybees and their local cousin the bumblebee.

Rinta said 75 percent of all flowering plants require pollinators. That figure goes up when discussing fruits and vegetables produced in New England; therefore, dependence on bees to keep food production high is critical, she explained.

Delving deeper into the subject of types of bees, Rinta said honeybees were imported from Europe during the 1600s and, although that was centuries in the past, “They are not native … they are a tropical insect.”

According to Rinta, early settlers used the honey for brewing purposes, and honey has been used as a preservative and medicine for centuries.

In the small universe of the honeybee colony, there will be one queen to care for and the bees will aggressively protect her and the hive, Rinta said. “They have ‘group think’ and act as one body,” she said.

To highlight that point, she said that one time she had a small hole in her beekeeper suit. “One bee found that hole and communicated its location to the others and then they were all trying to bite me.”

She said honeybees have specialized jobs, a division of labor that is geared towards building hives or colonies larger and larger and protecting the queen.

Continuing with the history lesson, Rinta said beekeeping began around 2400 B.C. and was used in mummification processes. “It’s anti-fungal, anti-bacterial, and won’t spoil.”

Of the humble bumblebee, Rinta pointed out that they are a local species. “They are cold climate insects that have evolved and adapted to our climate.” She said bumblebees don’t live in colonies, don’t communicate as one unit, and don’t winter over. “Bumblebees are more solitary and much less aggressive,” she said.

So what happened to bring these important worker bees to their knees? A perfect storm of problems, Rinta explained.

In the 1970s, farms were smaller and more diverse, Rinta said, but by the next decade the honey market had taken a dive. New pesticides were introduced, industrial farming expanded, diseases attacked colonies, and “…there were fewer and fewer migratory beekeepers.”

Add to that list the negative influences of climate change, a lack of floral diversity, and habitat loss.

“Well, bad things happen even when intentions are good…” she concluded. “In the 1990s, hives were decimated.”

Rinta said of the 4,000 different species of bees in North America, all are struggling and some have become extinct. And it’s not just the bees, she said. It’s the butterflies, too.

So what can we – the average homeowners, the average backyard gardeners – do to help endangered insects? Floral diversity.

Rinta said that by giving bees a variety of flowering plants throughout the growing season, gardeners are helping to provide bees with nutrition. She said plants considered weeds by landscapers are actually critical plants to bees, such as milkweed and golden rod. She said forests are poor environments for bees. Bees need fields and meadows with a variety of plant types in order to thrive. And, gardeners may also keep bees.

Rinta was clear that beekeeping does not have to be a large-scale endeavor. While she and her husband have eight hives that they manage year round next to their cranberry bogs, the average homeowner can install small mason bee boxes that are non-intrusive.

“Mason bees have a range of about 100 yards and fly for only 30 days, then live in tunnel nests – they are easy to manage,” she told her audience.

When selecting plants for flowerbeds, Rinta said, “Assume everything as [having] been triple sprayed with insecticides.” She said to talk to nursery owners and select plants that may have been more organically raised.

As for commercial honey consumers, honey found in chain grocery stores, Rinta cautioned, “Those are blended, heated … all the good properties have been removed. Some honey is coming from China where insecticide controls are poor… Know your beekeeper.”

One final word from Rinta regarding beekeeping: “You will get stung!”

There is plenty of help available to anyone interested in learning more about planning a more bio-diverse home garden and/or raising bees.

The Marion Garden Group is a good starting point for locals. They can provide a variety of resources for those interested in expanding their knowledge base. Kristie Marshall of MGG said the group is currently sponsoring two hives in their Bee Benefactor program.

Marshall also handed out resource cards that listed the following websites: beekeeper schools www.plymouthcountybeekeepers.org, www.bristolbee.com or www.massbee.org, along with The Xerces Society www.xerces.org, The Pollination Home Page www.pollinator.com, Pollinator Partnership www.pollinator.org, and Million Pollinator Garden Challenge www.millionpollinatorgardens.org.

Marshall also said that fall is the season for casting seeds into meadows and fields and that MGG can offer guidance on how to plan for spring and summer flowering and what types of seeds to select. Visit their Facebook page for more information.

By Marilou Newell

The colorful brook trout is an indigenous cold water fish in New England streams such as our local Mattapoisett and Sippican Rivers, true to the heritage of their Native American names. As a biological member of the northern char family, the brook trout spawns in autumn rather than in spring like many other aquatic species.

As it becomes even more colorful to match the autumn foliage as the shorter days and colder nights cut off the supply of chlorophyll to trees of deciduous leaves of the maples, oaks, aspen, and sumac, Mother Nature similarly and simultaneously paints the bellies of the trout a flaming red as they swell with roe and morph their backs with green and blue worm-like markings of contrasting ceremonial regalia, as in my illustration, to dance to the Indian Summer celestial drum beat of reproduction.

Sportsmen have affectionately call it “Brookie” as one of their favorite angling rewards with a voracious appetite and fighting fury when hooked after dashing out from the back eddy of a streamside boulder to bite at almost any reasonably presented dry or wet fly, or even by a youngster dangling a terrestrial squirming worm for the thrill of landing such a beautiful prize.

Such a magnificent aquatic performance has inspired conservation-minded sportsmen, especially fly fishermen, to gradually customize the practice of “catch and release,” deserving of at least one curtain call at a later time and bigger size, or even for someone else. This concept of release is gaining in popularity almost everywhere in the sporting world.

The species goes back in historical time and place to the cold water habitat of pristine pools of runoff of the melting of the Wisconsin glacier some 25,000 years ago. Their adaptation to such cold water gave them constitutional survival capacity all over Northern New England, except in the late 19^th century when fir trees that shaded streams we cut down by tanneries for turpentine to cure hides. Unfortunately, these were buffalo hides that came in an unending stream of railroad freight cars from the western plains, almost wiping out buffalo from the face of the Earth. Simultaneously, the lack of shade on trout waters increased the temperature, diminishing the brook trout population in most New England States.

Now the brook trout has recovered from near extinction and, as we speak, move upstream by falling water temperatures to select a pristine bed of loose gravel and a good supply of oxygen.

In reproduction once again, they are ceremoniously completing an unbroken circle of their kind, traditional to the original period of natural post-glacial global warming which hopefully will be followed by another cycle of eventual cooling in keeping with the unending orbit of planets in the sky. Then Mother Earth may herself recover from all that we have done to her, but as in my tale of the brook trout, not without our help.

By George B. Emmons