Steven Gutkin ’86 in Goa

IMAGINE FOR A moment that this is your life. Interviewing the likes of Fidel Castro, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Lee Kuan Yew, Jimmy Carter and Shimon Peres. Getting shot at, shelled, detained or banned in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Cuba.  Bearing witness to global events such as the rise and fall of the Medellín and Cali cocaine cartels, the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, upheavals in Venezuela and Indonesia, a coup in Fiji and the defeat of the Taliban.

And now imagine that, as a reward for your efforts, you are “promoted” to a management position, where conference calls, performance reviews and bureaucratic jockeying have taken the place of covering palaces, presidents and the outbreak of war and peace.

What do you do then?  Why, you quit your job and move to India with your wife and two sons to start your own weekly newspaper, of course.

At least that’s what you do if you’re former Associated Press (AP) bureau chief Steven Gutkin ’86.

Gutkin playing with Yanomami children in the Amazon jungle

Whether fleeing Colombia because of death threats from the Cali cartel, or ducking and covering during a Taliban shell attack on a battlefield north of Kabul, or witnessing the independence celebrations of the long-suffering people of East Timor, Gutkin has always equated work with adventure and the pursuit of truth. And when he talks about his long career as a foreign correspondent, his war stories unfurl like a tightly wrapped, multicolored Sikh turban.

For instance, early in his career, he and another journalist were left stranded in the Amazon jungle with Yanomami tribespeople by a pilot who took off from a grassy field promising to return in a few hours but came back instead 10 days later. Gutkin and the other reporter were forced to trade their clothes with the tribesmen in exchange for plantains to eat, and he recalls watching dozens of Yanomami click their tongues—their word for “wow”—upon seeing their first magazine.

At the time he was angry about the pilot’s antics, but looking back, he says, “I was afforded a great privilege to spend time deep in the Amazon jungle with an intact hunter-gatherer society completely untouched by Western influence. I don’t think it would be possible to find such people today.”

And then there’s the story he tells about the day Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar was killed. Gutkin had submitted questions to the drug lord’s son, Juan Pablo Escobar, and asked him to get answers from his dad over the phone. While the two lingered on the phone, the police traced their call. Gutkin says, “Father and son spoke about a number of things that day, but among them was going through the answers to a journalist’s questions—that would be me.”

Gutkin soon arrived at the Medellín home where Escobar had been gunned down with a pistol in each hand. He saw blood, shattered glass and Escobar’s half-eaten hot dog. He recalls, “I used the same phone that Escobar had used when his call was traced, partly because he was answering my questions, to call in my reports to the AP.”

AFTER EARNING HIS master’s degree from the Columbia University School of Journalism, Gutkin moved to Venezuela in 1987 and got his first byline in Time magazine during 1989’s violent price riots in Caracas. “You could say this was my first major break in journalism,” he says, “because the Time magazine correspondent was out of station when the riots broke out, and the magazine hired me to cover them instead.”

Gutkin interviewing Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez

He then began his long relationship with the Associated Press, covering a coup attempt in 1992 by a young Venezuelan army officer named Hugo Chavez and reporting on the drug wars of Colombia. (He hasn’t seen the Netflix series Narcos but says he did “live it.”) He then became an editor on AP’s international desk in New York.

In 1997 at the unusually tender age of 32, Gutkin returned to Caracas as the AP’s bureau chief in Venezuela, where he covered Chavez’s rise to the presidency and came to know the late leader well, along with the policies that he says led to Venezuela’s implosion. “I’m absolutely sick about what is happening in Venezuela today,” he adds. “One of the most delightful countries on the planet has been driven into the ground by stupid ideology-driven policy. People are going hungry, and misery abounds.”

After the AP set up its first bureau in Havana since the Cuban revolution, he covered the story of Elián González, the 6-year-old boy who was the subject of an international custody battle in 2000 after surviving a boat wreck at sea that killed his mother and her boyfriend. Gutkin spent a week in the mother’s hometown of Cárdenas and wrote a story revealing how the Cuban authorities had lied about her motivations for leaving the island. The AP brass got wind of the piece and, fearing closure of the newly opened Havana bureau, ordered a rewrite. By then it was too late, however, as the original story had already run on the AP’s Spanish wire. In the ensuing fallout, the bureau was allowed to remain in Cuba, but Gutkin was not.

“In some ways, I have always considered being banned from Cuba as something of a badge of honor, but the truth is I love the country and very much would like to return there. I hope enough time has passed now that I will be able to do so.”

In the years that followed, Gutkin always seemed to find himself where the action was.

Gutkin in Kabul after the fall of the Taliban

He was appointed AP’s chief of Southeast Asia services in Singapore and then Jakarta. He became the AP’s first print journalist to enter Afghanistan after 9/11 and rode into Kabul with a triumphant Northern Alliance. He helped lead AP’s coverage of the Iraq War and covered the kidnapping and killing of fellow journalist Daniel Pearl in Pakistan (Gutkin, like Pearl, is Jewish, and they had both been seeking to interview the militants who subsequently killed Pearl after forcing him to say, “I am Jewish”).

As bureau chief in Jerusalem from 2004 to 2010, he led one of the AP’s largest international operations and directed coverage of wars in Lebanon and Gaza and the death of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat.

Then a big story broke on the other side of the world that would change his life forever.

In the spring of 2010, a blowout at the Deepwater Horizon platform sent some 210 million gallons of oil gushing into the Gulf of Mexico over a period of five months, making it the largest spill in the history of the petroleum industry.

At the time, Gutkin had been hoping to take up a new position in Mexico City, but the AP convinced him to move to Atlanta to lead the AP’s multitiered coverage of the spill, involving scores of reporters, photographers, videographers, graphic artists and others.

Eventually, however, the story died down, and Gutkin found himself living in Atlanta with no permanent assignment.  “The kids were settled in school,” he says, “and we were hoping to buy a home and stay there for a while.”

So, after decades of pursuing big stories and dodging bullets, he accepted a job as deputy regional editor for the U.S. South—“a good gig,” he says, but still “a far cry from the life I had come to love.”

So at the age of 47, with the support of his wife, Marisha Dutt, he decided to leave his AP career behind and start over.

Gutkin with his wife, Marisha Dutt, on their wedding day in India

“I HAD ALWAYS thought about the possibility of doing something on my own, and in the back of my mind I told myself that I’d stay with the AP as long as I loved it, and would leave as soon as I didn’t,” Gutkin explains. “That happened in 2011, when I decided to start a new chapter completely.”

The couple had been traveling to Dutt’s native country of India every year since their marriage in 2002, and in 2008, they had purchased a home in the tiny western state of Goa. “If the idea was to start something on our own,” he says, “Goa seemed the place to do it.”

The first edition of their new weekly newspaper, called Goa Streets, was published on Nov. 8, 2012.

“We started out with a bang, to say the least,” Gutkin says. “Our Goa Streets Flash Mob, days before our launch, attracted about 160,000 views on YouTube, and we arranged hop-on, hop-off party buses around the state, with traditional Goan brass bands aboard, to ferry people to hot spots” around Goa.

For the next four years, Gutkin and his wife, along with a devoted staff, published a weekly newspaper, informing readers about things to see, do and eat in Goa while providing cutting-edge articles on a wide range of topics, including politics, art, literature, the environment and finance.

“Our idea was to bring the idea of an ‘alt-weekly’ to India,” Gutkin says. “We worked very hard and had a wonderful time.”

Looking back, Gutkin says the price for achieving profitability at Goa Streets was too high, however. He gives the example of Goan casinos, whose advertising was essential for financial survival but who would not countenance negative coverage despite a scandalous presence in the state.

“I do not want to choose between my principles and my pocketbook,” he says of his eye-opening introduction to media entrepreneurship in India.

About a year ago, the couple decided to quit printing their weekly and publish online only. Currently, they are in the process of turning Goa Streets into a probono publication that promotes art, culture and responsible citizenship in the state and beyond—with any hopes for further monetization postponed to a later date.

“We have a great brand,” says Gutkin. “Goa Streets will live on.”

At the same time, they have ventured into a brand new arena—constructing sustainable luxury villas in Goa, an enterprise that has opened what Gutkin calls “a completely novel and entirely welcome new path in life.”

A selfie with Gutkin, his two sons and his wife Marisha Dutt

Their main project at the moment is a villa in the serene village of Sangolda. It is designed by award-winning architect Alan Abraham, who built one of the most famous homes in India—a seaside penthouse in Mumbai for his brother, Bollywood actor John Abraham, called Villa in the Sky. The new villa is nestled beside a flowing stream on a property filled with coconut palms.

“When Alan came to check out the property and saw the towering coconut trees, the first thing he said was, ‘We’re keeping them,’” Gutkin remembers. “So instead of cutting the trees to build the house, we built the house around the trees. We’re calling it Villa in the Palms, kind of like the sequel to Villa in the Sky.”

It’s a long way from his old globe-trotting life on the cutting edge of the news, but Gutkin says he has no regrets. And he promises he’s not done with journalism yet.

“My next big goal in life is to write more for Indian and international publications,” he says. “I’ve lived in a lot of places, seen a lot of things, and feel I have much to say.”

For Ramona Bridges ’77 the descent into homelessness was like falling off a cliff.

FOR RAMONA BRIDGES ’77, the plunge into homelessness was like falling off a cliff. One day, she was a grounded single woman with a solid career, working a stable job. The next, she was an aimless, disoriented street person, pushing her sad belongings in a shopping cart, repeatedly arrested as a trespasser, in and out of jails and mental wards, and even banished from her own church, her only solace in her life’s most desperate moment.

Suddenly, Bridges had lost her job, her home, her car. And she had lost her way in life.

Once the bright star of her Catholic high school in South Los Angeles, one of the few African American students attending Pomona College in the mid-’70s, Bridges had met a dead end in mid-life.

How could it have come to this? How did a young woman with so much promise wind up with nothing to her name except a misdemeanor criminal record, multiple restraining orders and a tarnished résumé?

“I guess I haven’t thought about it because my faith helped me so much when I was homeless,” says Bridges. “If I hadn’t had the religious background that I had, something bad probably would have happened to me out on the streets. I felt like it was a spiritual experience. So no, it didn’t scare me.”

Ramona Armenia Bridges was born in Austin and still has a taste of a Texas drawl. Her father was an accountant, her mother a teacher. She had three siblings, but she always thought of herself as “a mommy’s girl, her favorite child, probably.” She was a tomboy when it came to sports, but she treasured the dresses her mother would sew for her at Easter.

Her parents divorced when Bridges was 13, and the teenager moved with her mother to Los Angeles. She remembers it as “a happy move,” hitching a U-Haul and heading west with her uncle and cousin. The year was 1969, the start of a new life.

The newcomers moved into an apartment in the Fairfax district. They were one of the few African-American families in the neighborhood, she recalls. But Bridges didn’t attend Fairfax High, the public school across the street. Instead, she enrolled in an all-girls Catholic school, the now-defunct Regina Caeli, 25 miles away in the heart of Compton. Her mother made the daily drive to drop her off and pick her up.

Ramona Bridges ’77 revisits a bench beneath which she sometimes slept during the time that she was homeless.

The extra effort paid off. The school’s 1973 yearbook documents the graduate’s stellar record: student body president, National Honor Society, glee club, French club, and varsity basketball. Her fellow students also voted her “Most Typical,” an ambiguous title that, as she explains it now, may as well have been “Miss Goody Two-Shoes.”

“I was always doing what I was told to do,” said Bridges, who speaks with a slight lisp that she attributes to sucking her thumb as a child. “A lot of times I got criticized for not doing the popular things, because you know how girls are. They want you to chase the boys and all that. And I just wasn’t going to necessarily do all that. You know, I was going to do the right thing. So I didn’t win any popularity contests. But the nuns loved me.”

Back then, Bridges didn’t dwell on what the future might hold.

“You know, you’re young and you don’t really have anything in mind,” she says. “I knew I was going to college. That was a given, because my mother made a house rule that everybody was going to college. No exceptions.”

Pomona College recruiters came on campus and “made a good pitch,” she recalls. They were looking for “somebody from the inner city that had scholarship credentials,” and she fit the bill. Bridges enrolled with vague ambitions to be a doctor, though she quickly decided “that I couldn’t cut the mustard” in premed. So she switched majors to psychology, “which was more my forté.”

Bridges also came out in college as a lesbian, though it wasn’t a crisis for her. “No, it might have been a crisis for my mom,” she says, with a smile. “It blew her mind. But it wasn’t for me, no.”

At the time, she thought her psychology degree would lead to “some kind of job” in counseling or social services. But after graduation, the only job she could find was in the insurance business.

For the next 15 years, Bridges toiled anonymously in unglamorous insurance work, first as a claims adjustor with State Farm in Oregon, then back in L.A. with the California Department of Insurance, this time handling consumer complaints.

It was steady work for more than a decade, but not exactly fulfilling. So Bridges started working for nonprofits, sometimes as second jobs. She was a youth advocate, children’s social worker and caregiver. Then in 2001, she was hired by the California State Employment Development Department (EDD), helping people file unemployment claims.

She held that job for almost 12 years, until a crisis within the agency led to a personal crisis for Bridges. Stress at work, she says, triggered the mental illness that had haunted her since her 30s. Suddenly, she found herself on the downward spiral into homelessness.

Bridges remembers finding comfort on a bench outside her church, the Agape International Spiritual Center, where she could listen to the wind chimes.

Bridges was diagnosed with bipolar disorder in the 1990s. She had gone through a bitter breakup with her long-term partner and the loss of their Lancaster home through foreclosure. At the same time, she discovered that her younger brother, now deceased, was HIV-positive.

“So that all made me snap,” says Bridges, who was prescribed medication to control her mood swings.

Fast-forward a decade. In 2007, Bridges was working two jobs—by day at the EDD and by night as a live-in caretaker for a disabled adult. But by 2011, she felt burned out. She wanted privacy and a place of her own. So she quit the night job and moved into a one-bedroom apartment in Inglewood, where the rent chewed up half her pay. “It wasn’t the smartest thing to do because I couldn’t support myself on one income,” she says.

The breaking point came in 2013. The EDD was under pressure to clear a backlog of old cases, forcing employees to work faster. Bridges resisted the rush and argued that clients needed better service, which takes time. “Well, they started making my life miserable,” she says. “And I got thrown under the bus as a result of speaking out the way I did.”

Once again, stress triggered her bipolar symptoms.

“What happens is—when I start getting manic, I don’t sleep enough, and that’s what brings on the sickness. So I started staying up all hours of the night.”

Bridges says she went out on disability, under doctor’s orders. What she did next—or failed to do—would prove catastrophic.

Bridges missed the deadline to file for disability benefits, a lapse that would delay her checks. Now, with no income, she stopped paying her rent. Then she stopped taking her meds and started acting out. Neighbors called police. An eviction notice was tacked to her front door.

Before she knew it, she was out on the street.

Bridges is very good at giving directions. She navigated for her mother with maps as they drove around an unfamiliar L.A. Today, she knows these streets like a cabbie. In fact, she worked for a time as an Uber driver in 2012, and also as a chauffeur for celebrities, once even attending the Oscars.

Recently, she led a reporter on a tour of her favorite homeless haunts, mainly in West L.A., near the Howard Hughes Center. There was the bench at a bus stop and, when she could afford it, the hotel across the street, until they kicked her out. Nearby, she staked out a special spot outside her church, the Agape International Spiritual Center, sleeping on a bench, wind chimes ringing softly in the cool ocean breeze. She found peace and comfort here. But that wouldn’t last either.

Court records show Bridges faced multiple criminal charges for trespassing. But when asked about her specific behavior, she answered only vaguely. “I’m trying to remember what would I do,” she says. “I would behave in a strange way where people would think something was wrong.”

Indeed, at times she was so disruptive during church services that police were called. Once, she got into a physical altercation with a church security guard who, according to police reports, held her on the ground with a knee in her back. She was taken to a psych ward and banned from the church.

Looking back, Bridges says police and prison guards treated her “like a second-class citizen.” She doesn’t remember ever being aggressive, but police and church officials tell a different story. They say a barefoot Bridges was often angry and delusional, lashing out at strangers. In one report, officers describe her as “yelling incoherently and (being) verbally aggressive.”

At one point, Bridges sought counseling from a church minister, the Rev. Greta Sesheta. Bridges brought an expensive bottle of wine and asked the minister to give it to Oprah Winfrey, who she said was her friend and an inspiration. The pastor could see that Bridges was in a lot of pain. What she needed was just someone to talk to her, to listen and to offer encouragement.

“I admired her in a way,” says Sesheta, “because she was having such difficulties, yet she always had a higher vision for her life. She always had these great ideas for businesses that she could start. The spirit within her was strong.”

Bridges was soon allowed back in the church, and the minister has been impressed with her recovery.

“Now she seems completely self-sufficient,” Sesheta says. “It’s almost like talking to a completely different person.”

Back among familiy and friends, Bridges is joined by her cousin and fellow church member Jason Mitchel (right) and Thelma Chichester, chief administrative officer at Agape.

Eventually, Bridges had a life-saving payday. Her disability came through, and so did a settlement for a separate workers’ compensation claim, which she says she had to sue to win. The money helped her get off the streets, and her restored health insurance helped her gain stability, because she was able to start taking her meds regularly again.

Bridges also credits the help of loyal friends like Audrey James, who visited her in jail and bought her clothes. Then there were her best friends—books. They were like medicine without a prescription. The “healing messages” contained in them, she says, helped “me find my way back to myself.”

Still, it wasn’t easy getting an apartment with an eviction on her credit record. So in 2014 Bridges rented a room that she found advertised on a bulletin board at a Starbucks on La Brea in Inglewood. She lived there for the next two years, until a family crisis called her back to Texas.

When Bridges was homeless she had had a falling-out with her mother, who at one point refused to bail her out of jail. “My mother was very disappointed that I had gotten arrested and was homeless,” she says, “so she lost a lot of respect for me.” Now, the elderly woman was ailing. She had moved back to Texas and was calling for her once-favored daughter. “She was lonely and didn’t want to live by herself,” recalls Bridges. So just before Christmas in 2016, she returned to the Lone Star State to be with her mother.

Three months later, her mother was dead at 87.

Today, Bridges is back in Los Angeles, living with her aunt and looking for work again. Finding a job is still a struggle. In December, she had passed on one job offer from a homeless agency because of her move. “Trust me, I was disappointed, because it had taken me forever to get that job,” she says, over her favorite chicken wrap sandwich at that same Starbucks. “I always wanted to be at work. But because I’m 62 and I haven’t worked in three or four years, those are overall barriers to my employment.”

Asked for a copy of her current résumé, Bridges makes a dash to retrieve one from her car, a Toyota Rav 4 purchased when her disability came through. She always keeps her phone close, anxiously anticipating word of any new job offer.

The tough time on the streets had taken its toll physically; she has missing teeth, “really bad knees,” chronically aching feet and diabetic nerve damage. Luckily, she was able to get her Kaiser health insurance coverage back as part of her pension benefits. These days, she’s careful to take her meds every night before bedtime, for her cholesterol, blood pressure and bipolar disorder.

Bridges is trying to rebuild her life and her image. She has written a book about her homeless experience, slyly titled Forgive Me My Trespasses. And she has a website (ramonabuildsbridges.com) putting herself forward as an educator, mental health advocate and speaker on homelessness and women’s empowerment. She also makes a pitch for donations to complete a documentary and to join her campaign to end homelessness, Ramona’s Bridge, granting donors such benefits as “VIP seating” at her book signings.

“When I got out, I wanted to start an advocacy group,” she says, “because I didn’t want to see this happen to anybody else.”

And she vows it will never happen to her again.

In late September of this year, Bridges still had irons in the fire. She had gone through a background check to work for FEMA at a Pasadena call center for hurricane relief. But she worried she wouldn’t pass the credit check required for federal employees because her credit was “in the toilet.” She also applied to the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority to work on the county agency’s emergency response team.

Yes, the search has been frustrating. But through it all, there’s one thing she hasn’t lost—her faith. And that gives her hope that she’ll finally find work again.

“I pray on it,” she says softly. “I pray on it.”

Douglas Preston ’78 in the unnamed river deep in the Honduran jungle

DOUGLAS PRESTON ’78 SAYS he keeps bank hours, writing from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. No dead-of-the-night or predawn creative marathons. The buttoned-down approach might be surprising given the risks he will take to get a good story. In 2015, Preston joined an expedition to see firsthand whether a 500-year-old legend was true. Was there a lost city of immense wealth hidden deep in the Honduran jungle? Indigenous tribes had spoken of this sacred city since the days of conquistador Hernán Cortés. In The Lost City of the Monkey God, Preston narrates an adventure you couldn’t dream up (well, maybe in a nightmare). He and his fellow adventurers found an impenetrable rain forest, deadly snakes, a flesh-eating disease—and the remains of an ancient city rich with artifacts.

Pomona College Magazine’s Sneha Abraham talked to Preston about his search for a vanished civilization. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

PCM: What inspired you to go on this adventure?

Preston: I’ve been following this story for a long time. Honestly, I’ve never quite grown up. I’ve always thought that it would be exciting to find a lost city. When I was a kid I was always interested in reading about the discovery of the Maya cities, the tombs in ancient Egypt, the tomb of King Tut. I just loved those stories. But as I became an adult I realized, “Well, all the lost cities have been found, so that one childhood dream is never going to come true.” But then it did come true. So, I guess that’s why I was so intrigued by the story of this legendary lost city. It’s remarkable to me that in the 21st century, you could still find a lost city somewhere on the surface of the Earth. Amazing.

The head of a fer-de-lance, tied to a tree as a reminder of the jungle’s hidden dangers

PCM: What did your family think about your going on this particular adventure, knowing the risks involved?

Preston: Well, I didn’t tell my mother because I didn’t want her to worry, but she found out anyway. But my wife is just as adventurous as I am, and her problem was that she wasn’t going. She wanted to go!

To be honest with you, I didn’t realize just how dangerous this environment was until I was actually in it. Now, I’d been warned. People talked about it and I was fully briefed. But I dismissed those warnings, thinking, “It’s exaggeration. This is for people who’ve never been in a wilderness before.” I assumed they were giving us the worst-case scenario. I didn’t take it all that seriously. Then I entered that jungle environment and realized it was even worse than described.

PCM: Were you afraid when you arrived and you realized just how dangerous it was?

Preston: Oh, I wasn’t at all afraid in the beginning because it was gorgeous. It was amazing to be in a place where the animals had never seen people. They weren’t frightened of us. But where I had the come-to-God moment was when I saw that gigantic fer-de-lance coiled up that first night, highly aroused and in striking position, tracking me as I walked past.

The head of the expedition, a British SAS [Special Air Service] jungle warfare specialist, tried to move the snake but ended up having to kill it because it was so big. The fight was terrifying. That snake was striking everywhere and there was venom flying through the air. It was really shocking. After that, I felt a little shaky. I thought, “Well, this is sort of a dangerous environment, isn’t it?”

PCM: Are there many places in the world that are left unexplored?

Preston: There really aren’t. But even today there are some areas in the mountains of Honduras that remain unexplored. The thickest jungle in the world covers incredibly rugged mountains. When you’ve actually been in that jungle, you realize the steepness of the landscape and the thickness of the jungle make it almost impossible to move forward anywhere, except by traveling in a river or stream. You can’t get over the mountains. You just can’t get over them. You can fight with machetes for 10 hours and be lucky to go two or three miles.

And then, of course, there are all the snakes. The number of poisonous snakes in that area is staggering—and you can’t see them.

PCM: Are you in grasslands? What is the terrain like?

Preston: Well, it’s interesting that you mention that. Most of it is really thick jungle, but where there isn’t jungle, there’s high grass. It’s nine or 10 feet tall and it’s very thick-stemmed. It’s almost like wood. It’s the worst stuff to travel through. You hack away at it with a machete and you can barely make any forward movement. There are snakes hiding in the grass. They climb up into it so there’s always the chance of their falling down on you.

Wherever you are, when you move forward after cutting through with machetes, you’re stepping through leaves and debris that are lying on the ground. It’s two feet deep. You have no idea where you’re putting your feet.

So it’s a really frightening thing when you see just how common the snakes are in there.

PCM: Would you talk about places that are unexplored—like the lost city at the site known as T1? What do you think places like these, for lack of a better phrase, do for the human psyche? Specifically, what did T1 do for you as a group? And broadly speaking, what is it about these unexplored places that is important or significant for us as human beings?

Preston: There are layers of answers to that question. The first is that on a personal level, when you’re there, you realize just how unimportant you are. This is an environment that is not only indifferent but is actively hostile to you. It’s important, I think, for human beings to be humbled by nature once in a while.

On a much deeper level, these environments that haven’t been touched by human presence are extremely rare on the surface of the Earth. It’s vital for us to protect them.

Conservation International sent 14 biologists down into this valley, and they set camera traps. They recently brought those camera traps out, and they saw the most amazing animals—animals thought to be extinct, species that were unknown to science, and unbelievably dense numbers of big cats. There are mountain lions, jaguars, margays, ocelots. Apex predators.

And they’re everywhere in that valley. They’ve never been hunted by people. And what they prey on are animals like peccaries and tapirs, which are also heavily hunted by humans. There are so many peccaries and tapirs in this environment that they support a very large number of these apex predators. This is truly a rain-forest environment that is what it was like before the arrival of human beings and in equilibrium. It’s a beautiful thing to see that.

PCM: Did you feel that others in the expedition group were sharing the same sort of response to that experience?

Preston: Yes, I did. We had 10 Ph.D. scientists with us on this expedition. We had ethnobotanists, three archaeologists, an anthropologist, engineers and others. And all of them were deeply affected and impressed by what we saw. They had the scientific background to appreciate it on a deep level. While I was appreciating it on more of a layman’s level, they understood it on a scientific level, and it was extremely impressive to them.

PCM: When you open the book, it begins as an adventure story, but it turns into a history lesson and a biology lesson. Obviously, it’s still an adventure book, but there are many layers to it. You talk about the historic decimation of the population in the New World versus the lack of decimation in the Old World. Is what you put forth something that’s accepted by the mainstream? Obviously, the numbers seem to bear that out, but are other people talking about it in these terms?

Preston: Yes, I would say that the view I presented is the consensus view. However, it is controversial.

PCM: Would you talk about that?

Preston: Everyone agrees that there is a tremendous die-off among the indigenous people of the New World from Old World pathogens. The controversy is what percentage of people died. There are those who say, “Well, we don’t have solid evidence that 90 percent to 95 percent died. All these numbers that the early Spanish give us, they’re very unreliable.” But the doubters have not come forward with their own numbers. They just say it’s all very unreliable.

However, with no event in history are we given reliable numbers, especially that far back. It’s really a question of looking at all the evidence, the confluence of evidence, and coming up with the most reasonable interpretation. And the most reasonable interpretation, which is, in fact, the consensus, is that there was a 90 percent mortality rate from European diseases. That’s just staggering.

Of course, the big question is, “How many people were in the New World before the Europeans arrived? What was the population? We have very good numbers on what the populations were after, but we don’t know how many were there before. And, again, I think the consensus view is that the aboriginal populations in the New World were quite high.

PCM: Your group got quite the negative backlash from the archaeological community. How do you feel about that today? And do you still think those objections are primarily turf battles, jealousy, politics? Would you talk a little bit about that?

Preston (right) and Chris Yoder wading in the unnamed river

Preston: In my book I try to balance some of the legitimate objections with some of the ones that were not legitimate. To put it in perspective, it was a very small group of archaeologists objecting very vociferously.

The Honduran archaeologists who dismissed our findings were individuals who had been removed from their positions following the military coup in Honduras in 2009. The military removed the leftist president and then turned the government back over to the civilian sector, and they had new elections. A leftist government was replaced by a rightist government. In the process, several Honduran archaeologists lost their jobs and new archaeologists were brought in. Some of the dismissed archaeologists did not look with approval on our cooperating with the current government. On the American side, there were several archaeologists who specialized in Honduras who were upset that the discovery was made not by archaeologists but by engineers using lidar, which is an extremely expensive technology unaffordable to most archaeologists. They also objected that the expedition was financed not by archaeologists but by filmmakers. But since my book was published, along with several peer-reviewed papers on the discovery, the objections have ceased.

When archaeologists first heard about the discovery, they initially didn’t know anything about it. There were no scientific publications yet. They heard that a “lost city” had been found, and some reacted with understandable skepticism. But then when the scientific publications started appearing, the criticism ceased. As of now, almost a dozen archaeologists have worked at the site, all from top institutions—Harvard, Caltech—as well as archaeologists from Honduras, Mexico and Costa Rica. When the doubters read those scientific publications and saw the lidar images of the city, they realized, “Oh, wow, this really is a big find.”

The fact is the importance of this discovery isn’t just archaeological. It has stimulated the Honduran government into rolling back the illegal deforestation of this area and encouraged it to preserve this incredibly pristine and untouched rain forest for the future. That might be even more important than the archaeological discovery. Preserving that rain forest is crucial.

PCM: Talk a little bit about that preservation, because you write in the book about the encroaching destruction of these rain forests and jungles. Do you feel that the protection is going to be effective?

Preston: Well, it’s hard to say. Deforestation is a huge problem. The land is being cleared, most of it, not for timbering, not for the value of the logs, but for the grazing of cattle, for beef production. Because of this discovery, the Honduran government has finally taken steps to stop the cutting of trees and the burning of the forests in the area. And also they’ve taken measures to prevent illegal rain-forest beef from entering the supply chains. I was able to show that originally when we went into 2015, some of this rain-forest beef was going to a meat packing company that was selling through a long supply chain to McDonald’s, Wendy’s and Burger King.

Now those three American companies weren’t aware, I don’t think, that they were buying rain-forest beef, because they were buying it several wholesalers removed, through intermediaries. I know that when I brought my evidence to the attention of McDonald’s, they freaked out and immediately sent people down to Honduras and tried to make sure that they weren’t buying rain-forest beef. Obviously, it’s a good business decision not to be accused of being behind the destruction of the rain forest.

PCM: How much of the site has been excavatied, and how many of the artifacts have been retrieved?

Preston: The city of T1 itself probably covers 600 to 1,000 acres. That’s a very rough guess. Only 200 square feet have been excavated. In that area, they took out 500 sculptures from a cache at the base of the central pyramid. There is so much more still in the ground. It’s just incredible. But the Hondurans are not going to excavate the city. They understand, everyone understands, that it’s much better to leave it as is. They’re not going to clear the jungle or anything like that. They’re going to leave virtually all the rest of it as is.

PCM: So much of it remains untouched still, but do you feel that the experts are gaining more knowledge about this culture that disappeared?

A sculpture of a “were-jaguar” found at the site of the lost city

Preston: Yes, this culture is so little known and uninvestigated that it doesn’t even have a name. They’re just the ancient people of Mosquitia. But they had a relationship with the Maya. It’s a very interesting question as to what the relationship was. The city of Copán is 200 miles west of the site of T1. After Copán collapsed, a lot of Maya influence flowed into the Mosquitia region. The ancient people of Mosquitia then started building pyramids. They started building ball courts and playing the Mesoamerican ball game. And they started laying out their cities in a kind of vaguely Maya fashion. But they weren’t Maya. They probably did not speak a Mayan language. They probably spoke some variant of Chibchan, which is a language group connected to South America.

There are so many mysteries as to who these people were, where they came from, what their relationship was to the Maya, and what happened to them. Now, the excavation of the cache hinted at what might have happened to these people, what caused the collapse not only of T1 but of all the cities in Mosquitia. But we still don’t know anything about their origin, where they came from, who they were. And we have only a vague idea of how they lived in this seemingly hostile jungle environment, how they thrived in that environment.

PCM: You mentioned global warming in the context of the flesh-eating disease you contracted, leishmaniasis.

Preston: Two thirds of the expedition came down with leishmaniasis. The valley turned out to be a hot zone of disease. When I got leishmaniasis, of course, I became very interested in it because it’s a potentially deadly and incurable disease. You find it’s suddenly a rather intense focus of your interest! Epidemiologists have predicted the spread of leishmaniasis across the United States. There was a paper that looked at best-case and worst-case global warming scenarios for the spread of leishmaniasis into the United States. Even in the most optimistic, best-case scenario, leishmaniasis will spread across the United States and enter Canada by the year 2080.

In the entire 20th century, there were 29 cases recorded in the United States, and those were right on the border with Mexico. Since then, leish has been found across Texas and deep into Oklahoma, almost to the Arkansas border. It’s a disease that we are going to have to deal with in the future. There’s no vaccine. There’s no prophylactic for it, unlike malaria. It’s transmitted by sand flies which feed on any number of mammals, from rats and mice to dogs and cats. Sandflies are about the quarter of the size of mosquitos. You can’t hear them. You can’t feel them biting. They come out at night. The disease is very difficult to treat.

PCM: How your current health? You mentioned in your book that the disease is coming back, but you haven’t told your doctor.

Preston: It unfortunately does seem to be coming back. This is not unusual for the strain of leish that we all got. I finally photographed the lesion that is redeveloping. But I haven’t sent it to my doctor yet. I just don’t have the guts to do it.

PCM: So what price are you willing to pay for a story? If you’d known beforehand what would happen, would you have still gone?

Preston: Yes, I would’ve.

PCM: You would’ve?

Preston: Yeah, I would’ve. Honestly, as a journalist, I’ve put myself into some dangerous situations, and if this is the worst that’s going to happen to me, I’m probably ahead of the game. I’m lucky. I would do it again. Look, leishmaniasis is not the worst thing that can happen to you. A lot of people are dealing with a lot worse, like cancer and things like that. So I’m doing just fine.

PCM: Would you go back?

Preston: Well, I would if they discovered something really cool. This culture apparently buried their dead in caves as opposed to in the ground. In this jungle, ground burials are gone. The soil is so acidic that there would be nothing left in terms of bones or remains. But they do find spectacular necropolises in caves in this region. Archaeologists are now exploring the valley for caves, where they hope to find burials full of extraordinary artifacts. That would be an amazing find. I’d go down for that.

The Lost City of the Monkey God
by Douglas Preston ’78
Grand Central Publishing 2017
366 pages | 35 photos and maps
Hardcover $28.00
Paperback $15.99