Standing on Fishes by Richard Sawyer

About the book

Standing on Fishes is the story of a dramatic rescue in the vast rainforest of the Northwest Amazon of Colombia. Into this jungle tangle, Taylor Monroe leaves with a single companion, his friend Butch McCann, to locate Taylor's kidnapped sister, Teresa.

The adventure begins with the unprepared young men flying over the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, the highest coastal mountain range on earth, and crashing into this remote hostile wilderness.

Tragically, not long into the journey, while canoeing down the deep, cold waters of the Magdalena River, they are swept over a fearsome cataract and Butch is killed.

Viewing the two men's plight, Taylor is saved from drowning by Ashaninka, a shaman Indian from the Kogi tribe, a highly spiritual people living in the forests, ravines, hidden valleys, and fertile lower slopes of the Sierra Nevada.

Exhausted in spirit, with his world irrevocably turned upside down, Taylor nonetheless continues, with Ashaninka's guidance, in the single-minded pursuit of his sister. Along the way, Taylor, is introduced into the Kogi ways of life. Through trial and error and much patience, he learns the mysterious ceremonies and sacred customs, and is eventually initiated into the tribe and given the name Standing on Fishes.

Confronted with the unknown at every turn of the road, the two men continue their journey. Through dense suffocating walls of vegetation stretching to the horizon they hack their way forward with machetes. Undaunted by the difficulties, they paddle along serpentine rivers and fly over immense sandstone mountain ranges.

Several weeks into the journey, Ashaninka must return to his Kogi village to help his ailing father, Mashutaka. Standing on Fishes now must continue the journey alone.

The weeks and months that follow find Standing on Fishes crisscrossing the country, in many treacherous situations, living by his wits and strong heart. Overcome by malaria, captured by a ruthless paramilitary group, Standing on Fishes is fearless in his quest to find Teresa, often paddling a canoe hundreds of miles through unexplored territory.

Many weeks after their parting, Ashaninka and Standing on Fishes are reunited. They journey into a lawless frontier town where renegades and desperadoes play out their lives beside drug dealers and prostitutes. The two men are then nearly fatally killed by the Pijaos, a fearsome, superstitious tribe. After more confrontations in this nameless primal world, Ashaninka and Standing on Fishes eventually end up at a military garrison where Teresa is being held prisoner.

In the early morning hours the two men sneak into the garrison to rescue Teresa. Confronting the man guarding his sister, Standing on Fishes brutally kills him. Ashaninka, Standing on Fishes, and Teresa then return to the plane, where Standing on Fishes and Teresa bid Ashaninka a sad by grateful goodbye and they return home.

About the author

For the past twenty years I have worked in the music and recording business as a songwriter and musician. Before coming to Los Angeles in 1971, I studied piano at Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa and continued my studies at the R. D. Colburn School of Music at USC. I am a classical music buff and have taken jazz and classical classes in orchestration and arranging from teachers too numerous to mention. I have also taught classical, jazz, and popular music privately for many years.

For several years in the 1980's I was employed at Capitol Records in Hollywood, working in their Printing/Merchandising Departments as well as in their Screen Gems Recording Studios (the Capitol Publishing Division). During my years at Capitol, I started my own music publishing company, known as Blue River Music, and had songs recorded by Johnny Mathis and Air Supply. Although recorded, the songs were never released, but the experiences were nevertheless an insightful introduction into the publishing side of the music business. After giving the music business as much devotion and dedication as humanly possible, I decided to do a little traveling and figure out what my next move would be. Having always been a writer of some kind or another (lyrics and music or poetry) it seemed a logical transition to novel writing.

Shortly after returning from South America I knew I had found the right subject matter. (Living with people that believe that spirits are real, that souls exist, that magic has potency, can do a complete housecleaning on your belief system. ) Within three weeks I contacted the retired Harvard professor, Richard Evans Schultes, who I read about in many of the journals during my travels. Mr. Schultes is considered the most important scientific explorer in South America in the past century, whose exploits rival those of the great naturalist explorers of the Victorian age. Although very ill, he spoke with me on several occasions and referred me to several of his former
pupils and other writings on the Northwest Amazon of Colombia. Combining my own experiences with Schultes' added insights, I dedicated the following two years to writing my first novel, Standing on Fishes.