The Best American Travel Writing 2014 (35 page)

It's a tedious drive north through flat countryside from Pirá to the estancia, where we arrive long after dark and meet Christian, the son of the owner, and two of Noel's friends—Mariano and Alejandro. Beautiful guys—they have boats, we don't. We're fed beef with side dishes of more beef and shown to austere rooms in what seems to be a converted barracks for the resident gauchos—the estancia runs 3,500 head of cattle and 300 horses. In the morning, I awake to a riot of obnoxious parrots who inhabit, by the hundreds, the crowns of the palm trees clustered at the end of the veranda. The four of us squeeze into Mariano's pickup truck and tow his boat to the river, about five miles down flooded gravel roads. Rheas dash across the road, foxes, the huge but rarely seen swampland deer known as
ciervo de los pantanos,
flushed out to higher ground. The upper Paraná has been victimized by the same weather system—20 inches of rain, the river rising three feet out of its normal banks. In fact, as bad as the Iberá marsh was, the Paraná is worse.

The river is expansive, miles across, Paraguay out there somewhere on the eastern bank, separated from us by an archipelago of midstream islands cloaked with impenetrable jungle. The water is the color of dulce de leche, whipped by a steady breeze. We roar away to known spots, to unknown spots, scouting and fishing and roaring away again, all the familiar exposed sandbars and beaches now underwater from the deluge.

Within an hour I have my first dorado, but it's minnow size, four or maybe five pounds, and then I lose a second, bigger one. I'm spin-casting a spoon off the bow and Alejandro's fast-stripping a streamer from the stern, losing fish after fish. When Noel takes his place, the story's much the same, although he boats a half dozen
pirá pita,
a smaller fish with as much fight as a dorado, using dry flies. After a couple hours of happy frustration, we head out to the islands and their solid walls of jungle, the first line of trees and bushes half submerged, the shorelines sculpted with minicoves and overgrown inlets and gaps and twisting eddies. It would be impossible to get out of the boat but unfortunately I find a way, kneeling in the bow to retrieve Noel's fly, entangled in a branch just out of my reach, and I fall slow-motion into the fucking water. I'm only three feet offshore but there's no bottom to touch and I swim to the stern of the skiff and am pulled back aboard by my wide-eyed friends. As dips go it's pleasant enough, but with 12-foot caimans and truck-size catfish throughout the river, I'm not keen on getting back in the water around here.

 

The fishing is grueling. We're casting from about 80 feet offshore into tiny pockets between the foliage, beneath the foliage, alongside deadfalls, the trickiest shots imaginable. We're all expert marksmen, but nobody is perfect enough in the wind to stay out of the branches. Farther on into the jungle we can hear the eerie rumbling of colonies of monkeys, their vocalization like pigs, not squealing but a low persistent collective grunting. Noel picks up his rod again and now there are three of us fishing, perfectly synchronized, our casts each landing within a yard of one another in separate pockets along the bank at the same moment, and something wonderful happens. “A triple!” shouts Alejandro at the wheel. Three dorado simultaneously erupt into the air, looking like a jackpot lineup on a Vegas slot machine, then fall back into the current, gone, all three.

That night two of the Pirá Lodge guides, Augustin and Oliver, arrive from the south to join us on the Paraná. In the morning, as a river otter frolics in the shallows, we zoom off in two boats toward the islands. I'm daunted by the wind and the choppy, dirty water and ask Noel how hard he thinks it's blowing—15 knots? Twenty? That's not the scale I use, says Noel. My scale is Perfect, Nice, Shitty, Awful. This is between Shitty and Awful.

But the day has its rugged magic, at least a window into the magic. Augustin, in Mariano's boat, lands a 12-pound hunk of what one American magazine referred to as “gaucho gold,” and on an assassin's shot between two downed trees I'm struck by lightning, so to speak. The strike is immediate, a nanosecond after my diving plug hits the surface, and like a Polaris missile launched from a submarine, up comes the dorado, 15 pounds, jumping into the air above our heads. Like orcas, a dorado will jump out of the water onto land a full yard to pursue its prey—in the dorado's case,
sabalo,
panicked baitfish. Somewhere in the sequence I can feel the release of the hook and the fish is free again but honestly it hardly matters; Noel and Alejandro are hooting and will talk about that fish with a thrill in their voices for the next two days—
Oh man, that fish
—because it was huge and magnificent and for a moment it was ours. When the two boats reunite, Augustin tells us Oliver has spent the day “harvesting the forest,” which means he's been an inch or two too far in all his casts, but at least he hasn't gone swimming. Noel and Alejandro tell him about the monster I hooked and lost. “And then,” Oliver, an Englishman, says to me, “you were left with your thoughts.” But there wasn't a thought in my head. I was left with only heartbreak. Yet to have owned the fish for a few seconds, to see it in the air, suspended between outcomes, has to be enough.

 

La vida es sueño,
the Latins say—life is a dream. I think of Noel and his struggle in Bolivia. This time it's not the fish but something much, much bigger, and it stays in the air for what seems like an eternity but in fact is only three years, and when it falls back to the water, it's gone, receded back to the dream; you thought you had it but you never did and its descent is a form of bittersweet devastation. Sometimes you can catch the big one but the result is pathos and tragedy. And you can lose the big one and yet it persists and remains, a triumphant vision, something to carry forward beyond the dream. There's clarity here—these fishermen, these lovely men, the spread and flow of big water, the dance of the big fish, the ascendant luminosity, a blazing star built of muscle and teeth and fury, the golden arc of sweetness and sorrow, possession and loss. That's what you discover in the marshes, what you bring home from the river. That, finally, is the meaning of the dream.

The next day on the Paraná is a screaming disaster. Noel and I fly back down to Buenos Aires to fish the delta. In the morning, we are greeted by squalls but head out anyway into shining moments of solitude and silence, autumn light and autumn colors and yes,
kaboom,
up a little creek one last bull's-eye next to a log.
Pirajú,
the Guaraní god of water, strains for the sun.

A week later, in the suburbs of the capital, scores of people will be swept away by the floods. Any dream has its limits, and this dream had breached its boundaries, waiting to be dreamed again, and better.

FROM
Vanity Fair

 

T
HE WELCOMING COMMITTEE
comes down from the village. Three of the men have yellow crowns of toucan feathers, red toucan-feather bracelets on their upper arms, and red toucan down dabbed on the tip of their foreskins, which are tied up with string. They are carrying beautifully made longbows and arrows that come to their shoulders. The tallest man is called Piraí. He sits on one of the benches behind the Brazilian National Indian Foundation's post of Juriti, where I am staying, and his wife, Pakoyaí, in a skirt of finely woven tucum palm, sits next to him. Their son Iuwí is to his right, and in the background is his father, Pirahá, who is also married to Iuwí's sister, so Pirahá is both Iuwí's grandfather and his brother-in-law. Pirahá has a big smile, which I recognize is the smirk of someone with a sense of the absurd, who appreciates the delicious ironies, the constant outrageous surprises of existence, as people tend to do at the end of their lives. He is listening to a bird in the nearby forest that is singing in triplets. Emaciated dogs, little brown bags of bones, are snoozing and rolling in the dust. A rooster is prancing on the path for the benefit of a dozen hens and lesser males. Our gathering, on one of the last islands of intact rain forest in the eastern Amazon, is taking place in the context of an entire ecosystem. All these communications and interactions are going on that our contingent from the modern world is dead to.

Piraí starts to speak in Portuguese, his voice full of gravitas and emotion. “We are Awá,” he says. “We don't succeed in living with chickens and cows. We don't want to live in cities. We want to live here. We have much courage, but we need you close to us. The Ka'apor and Guajajara”—neighboring tribes the Awá have testy relationships with—“are selling their wood to the whites. We don't want their money and their motorcycles. We don't want anything from the whites but to live as we live and be who we are. We just want to be Awá.”

Then Iuwí gives an impassioned speech in Awá, which none of us understand, but his words have such conviction and pride they bring tears to my eyes. Two courageous Awá men, father and son, in their prime—there are not many others here in their demographic, nowhere near enough to take on the
madeireiros,
the loggers who are killing their trees and their animals and are now within a few miles of here, and the thousands of other
invasores
who have illegally settled on their land and converted a third of their forest to pasture. I think of all the speeches like this given by brave natives in the Americas over the last 500 years, who were trying to save their people and way of life and world but were unable to stop the inevitable, brutal advance of the conqueror and his “progress,” and how this is probably what is going to happen here, to this remnant tribe in its endgame.

The Awá are a distinctive-looking, diminutive forest people, smaller than any of the dozen other Amazon tribespeople I have met. Reduced size is adaptive in a rain forest. You can move around more easily and unobtrusively. Not only humans but other species are smaller in rain forests. The older Awá, like Pirahá, have long scruffy hair and broad grins. Despite all their vicissitudes, they seem to have a happy outlook—they're just glad to still be here, and what they can do for the others is to show it with their big smiles. Some of the women and kids have beautiful faces, long and narrow at the chin, their noses long and curved down at the end, their dark, almond-shaped eyes gleaming with interest. They are more like Ainu or Quechua, indigenous people from Japan or the Andes, than musclebound bruisers of Amazonia like the Xavante or Kayapo.

Some of the kids look a little inbred. There is a lot of marriage between close kin here, there being no one else to marry. And there being more men than women, some of the women have several husbands—polyandry, a rare marital arrangement, found most famously in Tibet. But some of the men have several wives, so there's polygyny, too. There seems to be a lot of flexibility in who sleeps with whom. In fact, an Awá woman is not thought to get pregnant from one man—she has to have sex with several men, generally three. Reproduction is a collective, cumulative effort, and all of the men who sleep with her are the father of her child: plural paternity, the first I've ever heard of this.

 

Two days earlier I had set out from São Luís, the capital of Maranhão, the easternmost state in the Brazilian Amazon, on the Atlantic coast of northern Brazil. After driving south, into the interior of the impoverished state for 300 miles on increasingly sketchy roads, and walking through glorious rain forest for a couple of miles, I reached the ethno-environmental protection post of Juriti, in the roughly 289,000-acre Território Indígena (TI) Awá. The Awá of Juriti are made up of three groups who were contacted for the first time in 1989, 1992, and 1996, and, with the children they've had since then, their population is up to 56. There are still 100 or so Awá who remain uncontacted. One of the three known isolated, or
isolado,
groups—there are probably more in the other last islands of Maranhão's rain forest—is closely related to Juriti's 1996 group, who had decided they had had enough of life on the run, which has been the Awá's survival strategy for nearly 200 years, and a successful one until now, with their forest shrinking and the modern world closing in, and there being nowhere else to go. The Awá of Juriti still go out in the forest and hunt every day and have the same basic outlook and beliefs that they did before they were contacted. Their only concessions to modernity are that they wear clothes most of the time, grow some crops, and hunt with guns, except for a few of the old men, who still prefer their bows.

The Awá are among Brazil's more than 800,000 “Indians,” who belong to at least 239 different cultures and speak roughly 190 different languages, yet are only 0.4 percent of the country's 200 million people. Modern Brazil is a fractious, joyous mix of classes, races, and ethnically distinct regional subcultures, with a very rich 1 percent, a middle class that has been stuck in neutral since the global recession, and a dark-skinned proletariat, millions of whom have nothing—no home, no job, no land, no opportunities. So many realities at odds with each other, and most of the population under 25 and idealistic and anxious about what the future holds. This anxiety and the desire for real change and a decent government not riddled with corruption are what triggered the massive, spontaneous, countrywide demonstrations last June.

It is astonishing that there are still uncontacted native people in such a devastated part of the Amazon. The modern frontier, with its chainsaws, bulldozers, loggers, squatters, and cattle ranchers, has been eating away at the Awá's rain forest for 40 years. Illegal logging roads have penetrated to within a few miles of where one of the three known bands of
isolados
roams. Survival International, the tribal peoples' champion, has classified the Awá as the most endangered tribe on earth. FUNAI, Brazil's National Indian Foundation, has put the Awá in its most vulnerable “red alert” category.