Mac the life: damned good.

• Author: Buck, Daniel
• Position: Loren McIntyre - Interview

I had known Loren McIntyre, seasoned photographer, writer, and all-around South American explorer, a decade before we sat across a table, interviewer to subject. I wanted to hear about his discovery of the source of the Amazon (for a feature to appear in Americas. Magazine's first issue of 1992) and was finding it maddeningly difficult to extract a pithy quote from Mac. He wasn't a sound-bite sort of guy. There were no simple answers. "What did it taste like?" I asked him.

"What?"

"The Amazon at its source."

"You're serious."

"Yes. I'm assuming you drank from the source."

"Yes, but I have to tell you that a characteristic of high altitude is that your sense of smell practically fails. Nobody smells bad at that elevation. Food loses its appeal. And water has no taste. Because you're short on oxygen. What gives water its flavor is dissolved oxygen and gases as much as anything else. Boiled water is very flat, but if you shake it up, froth it, it will get some flavor back. In any event, it tasted damned good!"

I distilled Mac's answer to: "It tasted damned good!"

That might well stun up Mac's life, damned good.

Armed with nothing but a 35mm Minolta, Mac conquered more of South America than the Incas and the conquistadors combined. By the time he'd calculated his last f-stop, his realm extended up and down the Andes and from the Peruvian Pacific to the Brazilian Atlantic.

Mac would have enjoyed that salute, but he probably would have corrected my history, not to mention my grammar. He lived just across the Potomac, in Arlington, Virginia, with his wife, Sue, and their capuchin monkey, ChiChi, Because of our irregular schedules, I heard Dom him more often on the telephone than saw him in person. Thank God the calls were local. Our conversations ranged over dozens of topics before one or the other steered it back to whatever the original point was, if we could remember it.

In recent years, Mac could often be found in Brazil, where he had launched his fifth or sixth career--it's easy to lose count--as a lecturer on cruise ships plying the Amazon River. On those excursions, he was Captain McIntyre. There was a reason for that.

The merchant marine was Mac's first calling, and so it's fitting that his last put him back in the water. During World War II, he served in the U.S. Navy in the Pacific, and was later assigned to the Peruvian Navy as an advisor, finally retiring with the rank of captain. Jumping from one kind of theater to another, Mac joined...