When Matt Mohlke was 24, he wrote ten things on a bar napkin that he wanted to do during his life. Partying with comedian Chris Rock at the Sundance Film Festival was not on the list, but then again neither was the 3,274-mile journey down the Amazon that routed him there.
Mohlke was at the Sundance Film Festival to introduce Big River Man, an award-winning feature film in which Mohlke, who lives in Fountain City, Wisc., plays a cornerstone role. But Mohlke isn’t an actor. He is a river guy and a writer and an adventurer who got an unlikely phone call a few years ago after he kayaked himself down the Mississippi River and wrote about it.
On the other end of the line was Martin Strel, an iconic world record breaker and certified crazy person who made his name swimming the world’s longest rivers.
Would Mohlke be interested in paddling the Mississippi again as Strel’s navigator, the man wanted to know. For free, of course, but for all the book rights Mohlke could garner.
Mohlke contemplated playing hard to get, but the truth was Strel had him at the word “paddle.”
Nine years later that trip, and the many since, have forged a friendship that not even dysentery, pirates or piranhas could break. And now that friendship, and the bizarre travels that created it, have catapulted Strel and Mohlke to Sundance stardom thanks to a Hollywood crew that accompanied the team on Strel’s most recent quest.
Big River Man, which will air on the Discovery Channel’s Planet Green on Saturday, is not the predictable template of a man breaking down barriers and world records with exhausting feats.
There is no chiseled athlete, no disciplined training regime, no health-conscious living behind this story.
In fact, it is the tale of an overweight alcoholic who believes he communicates with animals and travels four-dimensionally when he is in the swimming zone, and it is riotously funny, critics say. And thrilling. And inspiring. And true.
That’s not to say that swimming the mind-numbing distance of the Amazon River isn’t interesting enough on its own.
But it’s Strel, a self-proclaimed madman who has swum the Yangtze, the Danube, the Mississippi and more, who makes the film captivating with his strange personality. And it is Mohlke, his sidekick, who provides most of the narrative and philosophical mumbo jumbo to translate why people would push their bodies to these extremes and what it all means in the end.
To Mohlke, what it means is that he has squeezed every ounce of life he could out of the day, with every miserable, painful moment reminding him how great it is to be alive.
“When you’re on an expedition, it’s so in the moment,” he explained. “It’s 90% pain and misery and suffering, but when you see that perfect sunrise or meet people from indigenous tribes and try to speak their language it makes you remember why you are there.”
Strel swims under the banner of raising awareness about the environment, about rain forests and clean water and why the earth is precious. But Mohlke, who by this time knows Strel as few people can, thinks it’s more. “It’s like he has to,” Mohlke said.
When he swims for a grueling 12 hours a day, Strel goes into something of a trance-like state that Mohlke will only interrupt if danger arises. Part meditative, part self-hypnotized, Strel enters a different dimension when he swims, Mohlke says. Literally. “He talks to dead ancestors, he visits with his wife and daughter in Slovenia, he travels through time. He really believes that.”
Mohlke isn’t quite as sure, but whatever system Strel uses, it seems to be working for him. So do the two or so bottles of wine he drinks every day. And the enormous plates of food that keep him relatively rotund despite his physical exertion.
Strel is the Nile River away from having swum all the world’s longest waterways, but Mohlke isn’t sold on the idea yet. The dangers of the Nile, he said, make the Amazon seem safe by comparison.
And the truth is the Amazon was anything but safe.
People imagine the danger of swimming the vast tropical waterway lurks in the jaws of anacondas and piranhas, but those were the least of the group’s worries, Mohlke said.
If you ask Strel why the piranhas didn’t attack him, he would tell you it’s because he can communicate with animals. But if you ask Mohlke, it’s because they are essentially sunfish with teeth that have been romanticized by movies and legends as vicious killers, when in reality, they are just scared fish.
The real dangers for a team that started out with 22 men and ended the journey with 11 were sickness and pirates, and Mohlke would be hard-pressed to say which was worse.
At one point the entire flotilla was sick, desperately, horribly sick, thanks to bacteria infested water and food that one can’t avoid in the belly of the rain forest. “You can’t trust anything you eat or drink,” he said. “If it’s meat you better have seen it alive and if it’s water you better have seen it sealed, and you better have a lid on it every minute.”
Mohlke says he was so profoundly sick and lost so much weight he probably should have been hospitalized. But as the navigator who stood on the bow of a boat for 12 hours a day to feed Strel, give him fluids and communicate danger, Mohlke could not leave his post untended. Besides, there are no hospitals to speak of in the rain forest, and the only human life they were likely to see along some stretches were pirates. Seriously.
Was Mohlke ever terrified? “Yeah, every day,” he said. “But I know what I’m signing up for. I’m going down the Amazon in a boat.”
Two armed guards started the trip with Mohlke, Strel, Strel’s son Borut and the camera crew. But people in Peru called the ensemble crazy when they heard there were only two guards along. By the end of the trip there were six guards, each with a machine gun, everyone crammed together to sleep at night on a small houseboat that accompanied the voyage.
Tensions rose in the tight quarters, Mohlke said, but that’s bound to happen when you jam that many people together for three months. “When you go on a trip like that everybody goes a little crazy,” he said. “Three months in the jungle cut off from everything you know, some people don’t handle it well.” There were fights. There were hospitalizations. In the end, half of the original 22 were left standing, sane thanks only to card games, whatever beer the group could drag on board, and trite conversations about sporting teams just like they’d have at home.
But by the end of that journey - and every other - the person who is perhaps the most sane, or the least sane, or the most unchanged anyway, is Strel, who tackles every day with the same sure stride, the same sense of humor, the same irreverence for the “rules” of extreme athletes. It’s an inspiration for Mohlke, for people at the Sundance Film Festival, for everybody, really.
“He’s the last superhero in the world,” Mohlke said. “He’s a fat 53-year-old alcoholic, but that’s the way the world works these days. He’s doing things other people haven’t done.”
And sometimes, the movie trailer says, complex times require complex heroes.
