Ruthless River: Love and Survival by Raft on the Amazon's Relentless Madre de Dios

In Ruthless River, Holly Fitzgerald details the thrilling story of her and her husband’s ill-fated honeymoon in 1973. The memoir opens with their plane crash-landing in a Peruvian penal colony, and yet this inauspicious start is somehow the least terrifying part of the book.

Things take a greater turn when Holly and Fitz decide to get back on course by rafting alone down the Madre de Dios River. Snaking through the Amazon from Peru to Bolivia, the Madre de Dios is a largely uninhabited waterway, where boaters can go days without seeing another human. Several nights into their journey, a storm and its resultant flooding pulls them off course and strands their raft far from the main river, in a swampy and unreachable corner of jungle.

With no food and no way to communicate with the outside world, Holly and Fitz embark on a remarkable struggle to survive — battling ravaging insects, the dangers lurking in the water, their own failing willpower, and the slow creep of starvation.

Quote:
“The jungle softly undulated alongside the river, perhaps a half mile away on either side of us. We were so far out that the forest looked like tiny clouds of green moss and Brillo pads. Our Rio de Madre de Dios was ever changing but somehow always the same. She was a snake that carried us on her back.

The logs of the Pink Palace rode two or three inches above the main current that carried us forward, usually near the center of the river. Occasionally the current swirled us toward one shore or the other. The trees looked very different close up. Wild, gnarly branches with waving slim leaves looked like long, unbrushed hair. Other trees were stately and tall, with wide, handlike leaves. Thick vines strangled the tree limbs. The Madre would jerk us back to her center without warning.”

Author:
Holly Fitzgerald is a teacher, counselor, and the author of Ruthless River. She lives in South Dartmouth, Massachusetts.

Published: 2017
Length: 336 pages
Set in: Madre de Dios River, Bolivia and Peru