“We had traded our slightly too small aluminum canoe for a much too big dugout. In this vessel, carved from a single tree, seventeen Indians at one time traveled with us. With all their baggage added to ours and everyone aboard, the vast canoe still looked rather empty. Portaging it, this time with only four or five Indians to help, over half a mile of boulders beside a large waterfall, was depressing to contemplate. It meant placing logs across the path of the canoe, and hauling it, inch by inch in the merciless sun, slipping inevitably into the crevices between the boulders whenever the canoe pivoted out of control, and scraping one’s shins, ankles and whatever else one landed on, against the granite. We had done the portage before with the small canoe and the two Italians and I, knowing what lay ahead, spent several days anticipating the hard work and pain. On the day we arrived at Arepuchi Falls we were primed to suffer and started off, grim-faced and hating every moment, to drag the thing over the rocks.

When it swung sideways, so heavy was the rogue pirogue, it several times pinned one of us to the burning rock until the others could move it off. A quarter of the way across all ankles were bleeding. Partly by way of begging off for a minute, I jumped up on a high rock to photograph the scene. From my vantage point and momentary disinvolvement, I noticed a most interesting fact. Here before me were several men engaged in a single task. Two, the Italians, were tense, frowning, losing their tempers at everything, and cursing non-stop in the distinctive manner of the Tuscan. The rest, Indians, were having a fine time. They were laughing at the unwieldiness of the canoe, making a game of the battle, relaxed between pushes, laughing at their own scrapes and especially amused when the canoe, as it wobbled forward, pinned one, then another, underneath it. The fellow held bare-backed against the scorching granite, when he could breathe again, invariably laughed the loudest.

All were doing the same work, all were experiencing strain and pain. There was no difference in our situations except that we had been conditioned by our culture to believe that such a combination of circumstances constituted an unquestionable low on the scale of well-being, and were quite unaware we had any option in the matter.”

- The Continuum Concept: In Search of Happiness Lost