Riding a Watery Path
The heart of the country is found along the “Watery Path” of the Usumacinta River, one of the less settled areas of Central America that Shaw calls “an unruly no-man’s-land inhabited by political refugees, fugitives and foreign adventurers.”
     The term Watery Path is a translation of the Mayan term for the local waterways, but as Shaw explains, the name implies more than just geography. The watery path is also a metaphor for the Mayan way, the ancient civilization’s means of transport — not just for the body, but also for the sprit.
     Which is also to say that on the watery path, as in life, there are hazards. Each bend in the river provides its own intrigue, each rapid its own moment of excitement. The furious river water “boil[s] and spout[s] like lava pits.” The team Shaw travels with “roar[s] over the chute in a plume of spray.” All this leads one of the less-experienced assistants — a novice canoeist — to pack it in altogether and bail out of the trip.
     Shaw knows his subject, and it is his obvious interest in it that makes this book such a compelling read. Like a Joseph Conrad yarn, Sacred Monkey River searches for meaning along the river that explains a bit about our own lives. The river is the pathway of understanding, its unpredictable turns and falls are an inescapable part of the natural landscape, qualities to be both appreciated and respected.

Of the Mayan and Mexican
Shaw draws from a large body of anthropological research to interpret the ancient way, almost to the point of overwhelming the reader with terms and data, but towards the end he slips into a more personal discourse, using his own observations rather than those of past travelers to carry the story along.
     Shaw’s journey, while mostly an examination of Mayan and current Mexican life, does veer into the personal realm, where the author gets in touch with his own watery path, a means of understanding his place in the world. As a veteran rafter and canoeist, Shaw claims to have always been aware of the spiritual nature of water, its value as a vehicle into deeper meanings.
     Here, he describes an early experience on the water near his home:

The mountain, the water’s surface, and the ring of forest formed a diametrical middle plane separating two identical, equally spacious and complementary concavities — one above, the other below. I floated, my canoe making a soft indentation in the sky, a portable personal portal connecting me to both hemispheres simultaneously. It was the clearest picture of the universe as we experience it I had ever known.

Overall, Sacred Monkey River is a well-researched book, and Shaw pays great attention to detail, occasionally to the point of stodginess, but otherwise remaining true to his subject.
     Its subtitle, A Canoe Trip with the Gods, is apt, for that is exactly what the trip almost becomes in one of its more exciting moments. Shaw, navigating a particularly violent stretch of river in his kayak, finds himself caught in a dangerous vortex that very nearly takes his life. His cavalier reflection of the moment says a lot about the extent to which he embraced the mysticism of the locals:

What more direct route to the Otherworld existed? It would have been the ultimate form of belonging, to be subsumed and digested into the landscape through the purification of a watery death.