Crossing the River (24 page)

30
30

Surprising Finds
Surprising Finds

J
ANUARY
. This was summer break for the students at Imaculada. I'd thought this would have been welcome news for Skyler, but despite this, the old misery was creeping back in: “Why can't we go back home?” he asked. “I just feel bad. I don't know why. Why am I like this? It's me. I just feel pissed off all the time.” I wished I had an answer, but I was feeling as confused about his moodiness as he was.

When we'd made our hanging mobile of wishes for the year back home in the States, everyone had written,
Go up the Amazon
.

That would be the focus of our summer break and carrot enough, I hoped, to pull us through the next couple of months. I'd been developing the plan for some time. We would be making our now well-worn trek southwest to Salvador. There we'd catch a flight to Brasilia—the nation's capital—nine hundred miles away. From Brasilia, we'd take one more flight, the remaining two thousand miles, to Manaus—the capital of the state of Amazonas. This would be like scooping down from Boston to Nashville and back up to Seattle. After a few days in Manaus, we would take a boat for a full day upriver to the small town of Tefé, where we'd spend the night before catching a smaller boat to Mamirauá, the first sustainable development reserve in Amazonas. Our time at Mamirauá would be Part I, the viewing-flora-and-fauna part. Part II would involve catching a small plane in Tefé to São Gabriel da Cachoeira, still in the state of Amazonas, but near the Venezuelan border and a number of Yanomami villages, where we would see if we could meet any of this elusive tribe. This part was still up in the air.

We were on the second leg of our journey, our flight to Brasilia, when our baggage began to disintegrate. We'd each arrived in Brazil with one enormous duffel bag and a computer case—not good luggage for jungle trekking. Peter had combed the shops in Penedo and zeroed in
on what seemed the most promising backpacks. We'd bought three. Two were now coming to pieces before our eyes. You can't really check baggage with the compartments gaping open and your underwear leaking out. We found a storage locker at the Brasilia airport and poured out the contents of our bags.

At one of Brasilia's slick multistory malls, we picked up two real camping packs. I wasn't surprised that these were such rare items, at least in Northeastern Brazil. I just couldn't picture Brazilians, at least the ones we knew, quietly hiking for miles into an isolated area to commune with nature. Where were the boomer cars, the firecrackers, the people, the vendors, the good times? At the mall, we also found a soccer ball (in orange, Skyler's favorite color) and English-language books. We immediately stocked up on more than we could comfortably carry.

I'd opted for the twelve-hour layover in Brazil's capital because I was curious about its architecture. A nineteenth-century Italian saint, Dom Bosco, had prophesied that a new civilization would grow up on this spot, between the fifteenth and twentieth parallels. In the 1950s, the Brazilians, who had been wishing to move the capital out of Rio de Janeiro to a more central location that would help them develop the interior, decided the priest's prediction was auspicious, that this was the appropriate spot from which to signal Brazil's rise to world prominence. They were going to do this with an ultra-modern, futuristic city. They enlisted Brazilian architects Lúcio Costa to create the layout and Oscar Niemeyer to design the government buildings. In three and a half years, a city of more than two million was created out of nothing. In 1960, when it was inaugurated, it must have looked like it was straight out of a futuristic
Jetsons
cartoon.

Costa said he was inspired by the shape of a cross, but in the end, the guidebooks describe the city as having the shape of an airplane. The description is apt. The fuselage is a wide-open grassy mall, reminiscent of the mall in Washington D.C., flanked by dominos of concrete and sea-green glass. The Plaza of the Three Powers—executive, judicial, and legislative—anchors one end. The executive and judicial buildings face each other, white and light, flat roofs suspend delicately above four paper-thin legs that sweep down past glass walls to perch
on delicate points in the grass: modern versions of the Acropolis. On the third side, the legislative center, two tall slabs, white towers, rise out of a rectangular reflecting pool. A third slab lies, long and low, as though it had fallen over into the grass. On its roof are two giant bowls, one right side up, one upside down, put there, it seems, for the pure pleasure of design, a chance to luxuriate in the visual feast of contrasting shape.

There was almost no one there on a Tuesday morning, a strange feeling for Brazil. We wandered around the vast plaza looking at the stick-figure sculpture commemorating the
candangos
, the laborers out of whose toil this city rose. One wonders if it hadn't been rather like building the pyramids. Skyler kicked his newly acquired soccer ball as high as he could. It seemed to rise higher than the Eiffel Tower–like flagpole, a bunch of twenty-four upward-sweeping strands, each strand marking a state. Fifty years later, it was already out of date. Since, states had split and been renamed, making one realize how much this country was still in flux. Atop the pole, the green-and-yellow Brazilian flag thwapped in the wind like some massive sail in irons, looking for direction in guiding this ship of state.

People say that while Brasilia is impressive, it lacks soul. Certainly compared to the crammed, color-popping, music-blaring, rococo Northeast, this was feeling very empty and spare. I found it refreshing—a return to a sense of space more familiar to me, more like the vast empty of Montana.

After a cafeteria lunch in the basement of the judiciary (for which we'd had our backpacks x-rayed, our pictures taken, and badges issued) and a quick game of soccer on its lawn, we hailed a cab. Winding along Boulevard W-3, we headed to a restaurant on the shores of the manmade lake that wraps around the nose of the “plane.”

The fuselage runs east to west, separating the plane's wings into north and south. The wings are divided into
quadras
, numbered rectangular blocks. So when you direct a cab driver, you ask, for example, for Quadra 407 North. The system was designed for a driving-oriented city (part of the reason the streets feel so empty). It seemed robotic, even by grid-oriented North American standards. It was so far from the organic growth of tiny, knotted streets in the Northeast that it
hardly seemed Brazilian—at least not the Brazil we knew. It seemed the housing in the wings was largely in apartment buildings, mostly ten-to fifteen-stories high. As we crossed a bridge over the lake, we were greeted by a plaque. It translated as
Sector of Individual Habitations
.

“This is where the important people live,” the driver said.

The houses were so huge that their rooflines were visible, despite the towering, dense hedges; no Northeastern walls bristling with broken glass here.

There were several restaurants in a beautifully landscaped garden, a garden run amok with brides. It must have been a hot photo spot because on this Tuesday evening, there were not one or two but five brides getting their pictures taken by this fountain or that cascading tropical plant. No grooms were in sight.

“They're probably getting drunk,” murmured Skyler.

We ordered beef stroganoff, smoked salmon, and chicken with candied figs on beds of arugula. I got a glass of chilled white wine. At the arranged time, our taxi driver came back to pick us up. He juggled the soccer ball with Skyler on the lawn, while Peter, Molly, and I finished sipping sweet coffee and relished the last morsel of chocolate truffle, the perfect end to the perfect meal before we launched into the jungle.

On arrival back at the airport in plenty of time to repack our luggage and check in, we were summarily told that we'd arrived too late to board the plane for Manaus. After a bewildering conversation during which I repeatedly pointed to the clock to show that we were not past the half-hour deadline for boarding but had instead a full hour to go, Peter, who tends to leave the negotiating in Portuguese to me, finally stepped forward. Ah yes, well, they admitted under their breaths, they had in fact given away our seats. Were they coming out with this now simply because Peter had more clout, because he was a man?

The next afternoon, after one last plane flight and a luxurious night in a five-star hotel courtesy of the airline, we found ourselves in Manaus. Manaus did not fit my picture of the “Amazon.” A city of 1.7 million, this hilly capital of the state of Amazonas rolled down to the Rio Negro, at this point already four miles wide. Oceangoing ships plied its waters. Eleven miles farther downstream, the Rio
Negro joined its brown with the white of the Rio Solimões, becoming the actual Amazon.

Like Brasilia, Manaus immediately felt different from the Northeast, quieter, more reserved. While Penedenses might be laid back about work, they were full of a feisty energy when it came to fun. In Penedo, sound bounced unmuted off stone-hard streets and stucco walls. Manaus was leafy. There sound was muffled by arcing shade trees, which lined streets of multistory office buildings, mildewing in the wet, and beautifully restored colonial mansions sandwiched between blocks of decay.

We checked into the Hostel Manaus and were pleased to get a second-story room all to ourselves. It looked out over an inner courtyard. Unlike the hostel in Salvador, which had exuded a cheerful exuberance, this hostel felt as though the energy had been sucked out of it. Its inhabitants lay immobile on dingy couches, recovering from their last hard trip into the bush. Thin from digestive ailments, they drifted about, catching up on weeks of accumulated laundry, emailing friends back home, comparing notes—the notes not of tourists but of travelers. While there's often a nice camaraderie among travelers, and invariably the people you meet are interesting, there can also be a kind of stagnancy in the draped bodies lounging on worn sofas, a malaise that sets in. We were like bouncy teens fresh out of a sock hop stumbling into an opium den. But it proved to be a good base of operations.

Just down the hill was a grassy park with soccer courts. Skyler was the first to venture into the pickup games. After months of honing his footwork on the streets of Penedo, he seemed to be champing at the bit to test himself in new venues. Peter asked the next day if he could join, not sure the young guys would want him, but they'd been open, finally even taking Molly, the only girl.

I got there just in time to watch Molly, Skyler, and Peter leave the sidelines and jump in.

“We're gonna get killed,” Molly said, her blond ponytail swinging as she ran.

“We're gonna get killed,” Peter agreed.

They spread out on the court, concrete covered with a thin layer of Astroturf.

“Oh my Gawd!” a fancy dancer of a player exclaimed in English as Molly took the ball away from him.

The Stark-Ragsdale team held up amazingly well, slamming more hard shots at the other team's goalie than the opposing team could get on theirs. Our family knew how to play position. They lost in the end, but the regulars were impressed.

It was Peter's birthday. That night, we walked through quiet streets to dinner at the Ristorante Fiorentina, fronting on a plaza with lush trees and a fountain. Looking through plate glass windows, we watched flirting couples and teen punks mill around a nineteenth-century beaux arts newsstand. Then it suddenly turned dark. Lightning and gusting rain flushed out the park's inhabitants.

The filet mignon in Madeira sauce with mashed potatoes and grilled peppers, then the crème caramel, sweet espresso, and port wine, were just the thing for a dark, rainy night in the Amazon. Who knew! We gave Peter his presents: a blow-dart gun, small vials of oil of pau rosa—for muscle and joint aches—and the fat of a snake with a name I didn't recognize—for flu and cold. His presents were more in line with the “Amazon” I'd expected, the National Geographic land of rare-plant-and-animal-filled jungle. The next day, we would be catching a boat to travel farther upriver. I wondered which Amazon we'd find there.

31
31

Guests in Their House
Guests in Their House

W
E HAD TO BE
at the floating terminal at 6:00
AM
. This gave us time to check our backpacks and buy a cup of sugary
cafezinho
and leathery tapioca pancakes before our 7:00
AM
. departure for Tefé. This town, twelve hours upriver by “fast boat,” would be the jumping-off point for the Mamirauá Reserve.

The
Crystal I
left right on time. Sleek and white, it had
God is in first place
emblazoned in Portuguese on its water-slicing bow. The boat flexed its muscles and sped downstream away from Manaus, leaving the shipyards and ferry landings behind. The four of us stood on a small back deck, mesmerized by the frothing rooster tails shooting out of its 1500 horsepower engines.

Ducking inside, we found a red interior with rows of seats, three on a side, much like an airplane.

“There're our names!” Skyler exclaimed with wonder.

Molly
,
Skyler
,
Amy
, and
Peter
had been written on four seat backs. Rows of TV screens were suspended above them. They were permanently on, and there was no choice of programming. As it turned out, we would be treated to twelve straight hours of increasingly violent American films, their actors' mismatched mouths earnestly spouting Portuguese. But the first one looked fairly innocuous. It was set in a Swiss ski resort. Snow in the Amazon.

The air conditioning was ferocious. I escaped into the open air of the back deck, where there were also bathrooms and a kitchenette with a two-burner stove. Two women cut vegetables into a boiling vat, which would turn into succulent spare rib soup for dinner. (You don't find that on an airplane!) Taking the fast boat wasn't cheap, $175 each, but it was worth it.

Soon after our departure, we cut away from the Rio Negro, up a narrow channel dredged through grass, a shortcut to the Rio
Solimões. The water turned from brown tea to café au lait, “black water” to “white water.” Sediment from the Andes made the “white water” white, whereas the “black water” of the Rio Negro was fed by streams that were warmer and slower, so full of decomposing organic matter. The boat slowed to make the curves, honking to clear the few canoes in its path, like a cougar growling at mice.

We broke out into the Solimões, a river even vaster than the Rio Negro and certainly larger than any I'd seen in the United States. The Amazon is not the longest river in the world, but it is the largest in sheer volume of water. White water was mirrored in white sky, the land a thin pancake squeezed in between.

We sped past occasional tugboats pushing their cumbersome loads: barges laden with pink logs, cars, trucks, a two-story warehouse. There are so few roads in the state of Amazonas that in most places, goods must be transported by river.

Along much of our ride, the banks had been cleared for subsistence farming. The occasional small settlements had a few boxy houses on stilts, the first we'd seen in Brazil made out of wood. Their painted walls were fading; their window openings gaped black. The corrugated tin roofs looked dull. There were none of the bright colors and rambling verandas of the Northeast. An occasional cross on a steeple announced the presence of missionaries. A string of buzzards hunkered down on a fence next to a house. Dozens of them rimmed the village roofs. The buzzards were as common there as pigeons at home. Maybe such fertility also brings death.

Every settlement had a rope swing, suspended from towering trees, which dangled dizzyingly over the river. At one village, a boy ran along the bank with our boat, making us feel like an event.

I settled into a cushioned bench on the open back deck and watched the vast river stretch out behind us. Green banks curved together in the distance, narrowing to a point on the horizon where the river joined the sky. World traveler that he'd been, I didn't think my dad had ever made it to the Amazon. He would have loved the adventure of it, the boat, the river, the towns along the way. We were here, in Brazil, because of him—because of a little money he'd left me, because of his confidence that one could figure out how to make one's way
in a strange place, because of his insatiable thirst for exploring the unknown, the different. That “different” that's threatening to many was fascinating to him. It was January 19, two years to the day since he'd died.

Thank you, Dad
.

I went back inside in time for lunch. It was served on seat-back tray tables. We were on to the third movie, an action film with Tom Cruise and Cameron Diaz, when the boat began to slow. Looking out the window, I could see a large warehouse-sized building with the word
Açai
painted on the side. Just before we'd left the United States, this Amazonian berry was making its highly touted appearance in health-food stores. I stepped back out into the warmth of the back deck. We were pulling up to a covered floating dock. It was surreal, jumping from Tom and Cameron drinking champagne in a five-star hotel in Salzburg to the mud banks of a river town on stilts in the jungle. Sometimes I wonder if our human brains are made to switch gears this rapidly.

Pulling off the Solimões in a fast boat into the channel leading to Lake Tefé was like pulling off the interstate onto an exit ramp. The cougar lifted and settled its rear haunches into the water as it slowed to find a place to park—a formal slip or a slot of beach sand. Next to us, men were unloading a barge, by hand. Everything, in this region, was still unloaded by hand. That new van you ordered, or the fifteen-passenger motor boat, or that semitruck? Better find more than a few strong men.

The next morning, Molly, Skyler, Peter, an Irishman, a young woman from San Francisco, and I stood on a wooden dock, waiting to hand our backpacks to the driver of a small motorboat.

“Here, you can wear these,” Eduardo said, handing Peter a brace of green, camouflage-patterned life jackets.

Eduardo and Bianca were from southern Brazil and spoke English. Young biology students, they would be our main guides for the next five days at the Mamirauá Reserve.

The six of us stepped carefully into the aluminum boat. The driver
backed it away from the dock, cruised slowly past a floating gas station, then shifted into high gear.

We were headed farther up the Solimões River toward the Peruvian border and the floating bungalows of the Uakari Lodge. The trees along the banks were coated in vines, creating a fantastical, lumpy topiary of elephant trunks and wooly mammoths. A great egret stood, three feet tall, pure white, majestic against the curtain of green. This would be just one of hundreds. We would see trees festooned with them, like Christmas ornaments, delicate white question marks. We rounded a bend and flushed a flock of cormorants, though
flock
doesn't quite describe what we were seeing. A spray of black was scattering in front of us, and scattering, and scattering, and scattering. Thousands of black cormorants leaving stuttering lines of white, as their webbed feet ran across the surface of the water.

An hour and a half later, we docked. The Uakari Lodge floats gently at a bend in the Japurá River. Connected by a boardwalk were five thatched bungalows, a two-story central house, and some outbuildings, each on their own raft. In front of the central house, a square hole had been cut through the deck—a pool, in the river. A
netted
pool. We'd soon find out what we could have been swimming with had there not been that added protection.

After a lunch of catfish, we headed out for a hike in the
restinga
. This is a forest classification that seems mostly to refer to level—low, medium, high—because different flora survive at different heights, as rivers in this area can rise up to twelve meters, the height of a four-story building, in the rainy season. This is why the region is called the
várzea
, or the “flooded forest.” For three or four months a year, people living along the banks are flooded out of their houses, even though they're built on stilts. They retreat into “floaters,” cabins on rafts, just as the animals—the jaguars, monkeys, sloths—retreat into the trees. In those months, boats are the only way to get around.

Breaking through the matted vines, we emerged into an open forest. There are up to three hundred different kinds of trees in that forest, and I couldn't identify one of them. Looking up was like flipping through a leaf catalogue: huge and oblate, heart-shaped, frilly and
fingered, pointed, rounded, ribbed, smooth, shiny, dull, some the size of a tire, and others so tiny it was like looking through green netting. Then there was the bark: the usual, plus trees sheathed in skins of peeling paper or suction-cup thorns or shaggy coats of long, needle-sharp prickers.

The kapok is one of many towering trees with smooth, elephant-skin bark and buttressed roots. I kept flashing back to a black-and-white photo by Richard Avedon of a tall, slim woman in a body-hugging evening gown that flares in flutes around her feet. I was in a forest of giant Avedon women. But beware their elegance. Some are lethal. Like the assacu, whose seed drops onto the trunk of another tree and over time strangles and engulfs it.

Francisco, our local guide, pointed out the trees used for medicine: sap to heal cut umbilical cords, or wood used to make tea to get rid of tapeworms. We heard how the jaguar ambushes the sloth. The jaguar knows the sloth poops only once a week and waits in a neighboring tree to pounce as soon as the sloth hits the ground. Other animals are happy to poop right out of the tree, like the red howler monkeys, who've wisely figured out the ground is a dangerous place. They like to sleep in certain trees so their scat is always under them, in the same place. We heard this a lot: the herons and egrets and cormorants settle in the tops of the same trees; the pirarucu fish lays its eggs in the same place. One began to understand the saying “creatures of habit.”

It's strange to see a wok-shaped hole in dry ground and be told that's where a fish lays its eggs. But when you look almost forty feet up and see a clear line where the tree trunks turn from dark to light and are told that's the
water
line, it makes more sense. Here, the animals, plants, and people need to be able to adapt to living on both land and water.

One of the cooks at the lodge was missing a chunk out of his right cheek. He'd been fishing, in the high-water season, out of a canoe and had drifted under the branches of a tall tree, the wet-season home of a jaguar. The jaguar jumped him, hungry from weeks trapped in its branches. Both tumbled into the water. Luckily for the cook, the water was deep and the jaguar couldn't dive, so the man got away, minus only part of his face.

While we saw lots of signs of animals, it wasn't until we returned to the lodge that we started seeing the animals themselves. Peter and I sauntered out onto our bungalow porch and were stunned by the sight. On the way out for our post-lunch hike, we'd seen some cormorants heading downriver, but this was the Indy 500! Thousands of cormorants were now rounding the bend in a blur. One in the lead, no, now it's dropping back . . . number 504 swinging to the outside, beginning to pass . . . is he going to make it? Yes! But now passing on the inside, number 712 gaining speed, passing one, two, three . . . Wow, pulled right out in front, but there're more coming . . .five, six, twenty, a hundred, four hundred, a thousand. We stood transfixed.

“Whoa! Did you hear that?” Skyler exclaimed from inside.

“Yeah, sounds like a 250-pound man doing a cannonball,” Peter guessed.

It was happening all around us, these great
ka-thunk
s. Then we saw one; a huge, finned tail curled and lashed the surface of the water. The Loch Ness Monster: a pirarucu, the eight-foot-long fish, twice Skyler's height, that we'd seen in the fish market in Manaus, the one whose scales were sold for fingernail files. It was coming up to breathe. In addition to gills, pirarucu have swim bladders, allowing them to extract oxygen from the air. This unusual adaptation to oxygen-poor-water conditions in the Amazonian floodplains would seem to be an advantage, but instead it required what appeared to be a thrashingly desperate act of survival every few minutes. They rose and thrashed like self-flagellating penitents all through the night. I couldn't believe I'd made it to fifty-three without knowing that fish don't sleep.

But the
ka-thunk
s weren't the only strange sound. There was that low groan, that icy wind howling through cavernous medieval halls—red howler monkeys marking their territory. Their otherworldly roar became a regular part of the soundscape.

We didn't see the caimans until the next day, when they surrounded our shallow-sided canoe. Two nostrils were followed a foot away by two glassy eyes and then a strip of scaly back. The semi-submersion was part of what gave them their stealthy quality, but really I thought it was their glide, that pulseless swimming, the skimming silence of
it. We went out again in a motorboat that night. In the dark, Eduardo scanned the river with a powerful flashlight, looking for obstacles in the water. The eyes of the caimans, those trench-coated undercover agents, glowed red.

“I counted thirteen that time,” whispered Skyler.

Despite this, the reserve is a tranquil place. A place where there is a lot of hunting going on—quiet, focused hunting. A lot of stalking, a lot of stillness. The anhinga paddles silently with webbed feet, then unexpectedly slides backward under the water, only to emerge somewhere else, golden neck first, actually only the neck, a pulsing, snake-like periscope. It is surprising to see how fast the caimans can cruise because more often they seem to be stopped, probably knowing it's the motion that gives them away. The egrets ride, white, on electric-green floating meadows, still lives on a conveyor belt of tall grass.

Between the hulking pirarucus, the diving anhingas, the plummeting kingfishers, the strafing large-billed terns, and the stealthily cruising caimans, being a small fish in the Amazon must be risky business. I wondered where we, as humans, fit into the hierarchy. Were we predators or prey? Clearly in this environment, we had the potential to be both. How much control did we really have?