Ayauntepui.

AuthorMoon, Bart
PositionTravel at Auyantepui, Venezuela

Note from the Editor: The Foreign Service usually provides for an interesting and rewarding career, the opportunity to live and work in diverse environments, experience different cultures and ways of life, and meet a variety of fascinating people. On occasion it also provides for all of the above and some real adventure.

Late. Way late. When the telephone rings after 10:30 at night nothing good is apt to follow ... especially on a Friday and especially if you are attached to an American Embassy overseas.

The voice on the other end was familiar. It belonged to the American Ambassador to Venezuela, my boss. His distress was genuine. His wife was ill ... very intestinal ... maybe the flu or some bad food. He had an appointment in town the next morning he had to keep. Would Calista and I please take their place and accompany John and Martha on their trip to the interior?

Calista whooped when I broke the news. It promised to be a memorable day.

Boy, was it.

Back Story: The year was 1981. In those Cold War days one activity of the U.S. Diplomatic Service involved sending distinguished American artists abroad to participate in programs organized by our embassies. This exercise in soft diplomacy was to show the world that the United States was not the greed-driven cultural wasteland depicted by our foes (not to mention some of our allies).

In Caracas we had so far hosted a world-class American string quartet, the conductor of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra, and two prize-winning American writers, playwright Arthur Miller and the novelist William Styron. The embassy's role was to arrange exposure of these American artists to the appropriate Venezuelan audiences. This typically involved arranging performances or lectures for students at Venezuela's Central University, informal talks to small groups of Caracas's literati, and, always, a large reception to show off our luminaries to the country's wider artistic community, to its politicians, and, above all, to the news and television media.

The morning in question marked the last day in Venezuela of our latest and most famous cultural envoy. This Pulitzer Prize winning author's series of novels about a New England car dealer seemed to have staked out a permanent home atop U.S. best-seller lists for a decade or more. These books, plus a prodigious output of poetry, short stories, criticism, and essays had earned the writer recognition as America's premier literary craftsman. After several days in Caracas gamely meeting with students, giving interviews, and other sundry public appearances, John Updike and wife Martha were to return the next day, Sunday, to Massachusetts.

But first the Venezuelans had planned for that Saturday a day of appreciation organized by EDELCA (Electrification del Caroni, CA). A state-owned corporation, EDELCA had been created to oversee the completion of the Guri Dam on the Caroni River in the far southeast of Venezuela near the Guyana and Brazilian borders. This immense hydroelectric project, whose second stage was then still under construction, today supplies 80 percent of the country's energy needs, freeing for export some 300,000 barrels per day of Venezuela's most prized resource, petroleum.

Honored guests, embassy escorts, and EDELCA's CEO Efrain and his wife Elena, fluent English speakers, were to meet the next morning at nine at La Carlota, a small military-run airport. Once located on the outskirts of the city, it had since become almost hidden by noisy avenues and tall buildings as Caracas metastasized to surround it. A six-passenger Cessna and its pilot, Fidel, would fly us to the airstrip at Canaima, a village situated where the dark waters of the Carrao River tumble over a massive waterfall to form the Canaima Lagoon. At Canaima we were to be joined by site personnel from the dam project. Our little band, eleven in all, would board a helicopter for the vertical leg of our...

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