The Footloose American: Following the Hunter S. Thompson Trail Across South America (32 page)

I caught up with him and begged his pardon before introducing myself. He wore a polo shirt and a baseball cap and was probably somewhere in his fifties. Juan Carlos was his name, he said, and he considered my question thoughtfully as I followed him back toward Satélite Norte.

“This place has been called Texas Arizona since before there were people here,” he said, “since even before they built the houses.”

“And when was that?” I asked.

“Maybe fifty years ago.”

Now we were getting somewhere. That was about the same time that the Gulf Oil Company was hitting its stride in Bolivia. Did he think that the area might have been named by the oil companies? Might there have been oil camps here? Juan Carlos just shrugged. He had never heard such a thing. We walked quietly for a while, and I reached into my backpack to offer him a beer.

“No, thank you,” said Juan Carlos politely. “I don’t drink.”

It was getting dark, and the weird frogs in the ditches were trilling even louder than before.

“I guess I’m a little disappointed,” I said. “I really thought that someone around here could tell me the significance of this name.”

“You wanted to hear a story,” Juan Carlos said, shaking his head, “but this is difficult, because sometimes the people come, and then later, they forget all the stories.”

The wall of sound from the karaoke bars echoed a good half mile from Satélite Norte. On a side street, Juan Carlos spotted some friends walking a different direction, and he wished me well before joining them. I took a quick look back at Texas Arizona, then opened a beer and walked to the bus stop alone.

A traveler who has booked passage aboard what is widely known as the “Death Train” is entitled to certain expectations. Among these is the prospect that, yes, at some point during the trip, one’s life will be imperiled. Gazing out the window at the flat, grassy lowlands of eastern Bolivia, it’s difficult to imagine how this might occur. Needless to say, the region lacks the sheer cliffs and gaping chasms of the Andes. There is, in fact, next to nothing off which you could tragically plunge. The Death Train’s route follows the comparatively dry outermost edge of the Amazon basin, so the few adjacent rivers run at a trickle, wholly incapable of submerging a railcar full of frantically clawing passengers. Meanwhile, the gradual clearing of eastern Bolivia’s forests and savannas for farming and ranching has put pressure on the local jaguar population, so a passenger stretching his legs during a stopover is less likely to be mauled by a big cat than mooed at by a Holstein.

In short, I am sorry to report that a 420-mile trip aboard Bolivia’s
tren de la muerte
is actually a rather comfortable and pleasant affair. There’s no clear consensus on how the train acquired this nickname, reliably invoked by travel guidebooks, tourism and hospitality types, and the ticketing agents at the Santa Cruz train station. The owner of my hotel told me that hundreds of workers died while constructing the line across Bolivia’s eastern backcountry in the 1940s and ’50s. At the time, this was a landscape so perilous and remote that a British travel writer of the day nicknamed it “the green hell.” A number of guidebooks and websites disagree with this, however, claiming that the name stems from the train’s violent shuddering and tendency to jump its tracks. Still another theory holds that the route was used
to transport bodies in the wake of a well-documented 1946 yellow fever outbreak. I’m personally sympathetic to the notion that the sobriquet stems from the deadly tedium. From Santa Cruz to the Brazilian border, it’s a sixteen-hour trip (only mildly shaky) across a rather monotonous landscape of ranches and gentle green waves. The few stops along the route are at rural stations that range from concrete bunkers to sheet-metal gazebos. The most exotic wildlife I saw during the ride consisted of a few large sows nosing around in the brush. To liven things up, the railroad showed the 1979 Christian propaganda flick
Jesus
, alternately known for being one of the most widely watched and one of the dullest films of all time.

At the Brazilian border, the thrill ride that is the Death Train reached its anticlimactic end. Beyond that point, the line carries only cargo. Fifty years ago, however, passenger service kept going clear across Brazil, and Thompson took the same train from Santa Cruz all the way to São Paulo in 1962, arriving there in mid-September. Ironically, the train would have breezed rather quickly through the Brazilian state of Mato Grosso, which more than any other region had fascinated Thompson since before he left for South America. Not that I think Thompson would have minded the rush. After four months on the continent, he was desperate to reach Rio de Janeiro, where there was an election to cover, but which, moreover, he’d built up in his mind as a sort of antidote to the Andes: warm, civilized, relaxed, and gringo-friendly.

But months before, Brazil’s wild interior had captured Thompson’s imagination. Back in the States, he had written long letters to friends, bemoaning his poverty and his inability to sell
The Rum Diary
and fantasizing about escaping to “the unplumbed jungle of the Mato Grosso.” As a
burgeoning gun nut, he dreamed of hunting wild game there and even schemed about buying land, which he had heard was going for a song.

“It is a rumor, you know,” he wrote excitedly to a friend, “like GOLD! or WHISKEY! In this case, it’s CHEAP LAND!”

Thompson’s pre-travel letters show a somewhat starry-eyed fascination with South America’s wild and primal landscape—a far cry from the largely urban reporting on culture and policy that mostly became his focus. All throughout his correspondence, Thompson confessed a romantic longing for the “wild country.” Later on, after arriving in Rio, he regretted allowing his election coverage to curtail his time in the bush. He wrote to a fellow hunter back in California, wistfully mentioning a tall and foxlike predator called the maned wolf, native to Brazil’s western grasslands. “I recently swung through Maned Wolf territory,” he wrote, “… [but] I missed the animals. I am so fucking involved in politics, etc. that I don’t have much time for the oddball stuff that is really the most important.”

I think Thompson shared a bias that’s common among overseas travelers, a tendency to view cities as somehow less authentically “other” than what he called the “wild country.” Among the gringo nomads I ran into along the Thompson Trail, I regularly heard the statement “It’s a city” deployed as a kind of verbal shrug, a shorthand method of telling a fellow traveler that Bogotá or Lima or La Paz was less worthy of description than, say, Bolivia’s mountain villages or Ecuador’s sparsely trammeled beaches.

Thompson himself did this in a letter from Colombia, after his very first urban encounter on the continent. “Barranquilla was a city, of course,” he wrote dismissively, “too much like San Juan for my taste, but now we are heading into the wild country again.”

There’s nothing new about this mind-set. In La Paz, I had grabbed a dusty hardcover off a hostel bookshelf, a reprint of a 1922 travelogue called
The Real South America
, written by a journalist from the Jazz Age London
Times
. Even back then, the author had sniffed, “As the real South America cannot now be entered without crossing the civilized littoral, we must first see what the cities have to show before plunging into the crude life of the interior.” It’s the same sentiment as when the backpackers mutter, “It’s a city,” implying that cities are basically the same worldwide, or perhaps that even the very concept of a city is somehow not “real South America” enough, cities lacking things like llama trains and gaucho cowboys and pre-Columbian ruins—which, in addition to not being true, suggests that the phenomenon of the city is perhaps an American or European invention, imposed here and there upon an otherwise pastoral Southern Hemisphere.

Forgetting for a minute that Peru’s ruined city of Caral is roughly contemporaneous with the pyramids at Giza, it’s worth pointing out that South America’s urbanization rate has been more or less on par with North America’s since the beginning of the nineteenth century. Gauged by the percentage of its population living in cities, it is currently the
world’s most urban continent, and by the same measure, Latin America was actually “flipping” from predominantly rural to predominantly urban just as Thompson was passing through, way back in 1962. North America hit its tipping point in the ’50s, but the world as a whole didn’t reach that milestone until 2008. So I don’t much truck with the notion that the cities of South America are in any way less authentic than the outback. The truth is, cities are as much an ongoing Latin American invention as they are an American, Chinese, or Mesopotamian one.

All of that being said, I am every bit as guilty as Thompson of romanticizing the “wild country,” and I was pretty psyched to be getting into it for a few days, leaving the urban landscape behind.

Thompson’s enthusiasm for Brazil’s Mato Grosso was not misplaced. The area that Portuguese explorers wrote off as “Thick Forest” has since been partitioned into two states (Mato Grosso and its southern neighbor Mato Grosso do Sul). Together they contain the great majority of the 60,000-square-mile Pantanal—the world’s largest wetland and easily one of the most biodiverse spaces on the planet. More than just a big swamp, the Pantanal is a patchwork of tropical forests, grasslands, river systems, and the wet savanna that Brazilians call the
cerrado
. It isn’t so different from the Everglades, really, if maybe the Everglades were stretched over an area larger than the entire state of Florida. When conquistadors first glimpsed the Pantanal at full flood, they mistook it for a giant inland lake and presumed (as they often did) that El Dorado lay just beyond. It is one of those “Here Be Dragons”–type places, remote enough that the cartographers of the era simply let their imaginations fill in the blanks. On several eighteenth-century maps, the mythical lake contained a large “Isle of Paradise” at
its center, based on the accounts of one inventive explorer who claimed to have there discovered a golden Eden full of abundant springs, kindly natives, and fruit trees in perennial bloom.

My expectations weren’t quite so high, but I was definitely looking forward to a quiet interlude someplace a bit less affected by humanity and its failings. Bolivia had brought me a little closer to understanding Thompson’s metamorphosis, his evolving gonzo outlook, but I didn’t feel the epiphanic glow that I was hoping for. The tumult and hardship of Bolivia had simply gotten me down. I was starting to internalize Thompson’s cynical observation that “Dostoyevsky was right.” I needed to clear my head, and the Pantanal seemed like the right place to do it, since even at the apex of his cynicism, Thompson went so far as to exempt the Brazilian frontier from his bleak prediction that South America had a bad decade in store.

“I retain hope for the Mato Grosso,” he wrote, “and ultimately for Brazil, but I think the next ten years are going to be ugly.” Not a robust statement of confidence, exactly, but it was the first marginally uplifting thing he’d had to say since Cali.

Stepping off the Death Train and leaving behind the green hell, I figured I should probably take my optimism where I could get it.

It must be acknowledged that altitude in South America is a great determinant of the regional flavor of life. Not so much the
pace
of it, which to a North American seems always a paradoxical mixture of frantic and languid—the
crush of traffic and the din of vendors on the one hand, the unhurried meals and the loitering in plazas on the other—but the
tenor
of it, the palpable mood of the people as they go about their everywhere-crazy routines. At around 400 feet from sea level, the Brazilian river town of Corumbá lacks the loony, brassy urgency of the Andes. Sure, folks in Corumbá still drive like maniacs and cut in line at the ATM, but they’re slower to answer one another and quicker to laugh. Everyone there keeps bankers’ hours, and happy hour along the wide, slow river is as faithfully observed as any mealtime. If life in Quito or La Paz is a trombone-heavy Sousa march, then life in Corumbá seemed like the same melody, but played Kenny G–style on a smooth alto sax.

Corumbá is probably the least utilized of any of the Pantanal’s several gateway towns. These days, eco-tourism has a significant foothold in the Mato Grosso, and to the east and northeast, the metropolitan capitals of Campo Grande and Cuiabá each harbor dozens of tour groups and outfitters. Elsewhere, entire villages have reoriented their economies around adventure tourism. But I wanted a respite from the slick commercialism of the cities and tourist hubs, and Corumbá struck me as a working town with some history and character. It’s built up along the Rio Paraguay, a 1,629-mile waterway that drains the Pantanal and flows eventually to the Atlantic. This winding river corridor made Corumbá a rich and strategic inland port around the turn of the twentieth century. For most of Brazil’s history, traveling up the Rio Paraguay was actually the easiest way to reach the Mato Grosso, since Brazil didn’t get serious about building roads into its interior until the 1940s.

Corumbá today is still a trade hub for the region’s ranching, mining, and fishing industries, although as with the Magdalena, its commercial traffic has dwindled. I spent my
first afternoon there hanging out by the waterfront, where the cargo ships were outnumbered by the wading, shirtless fishermen. I sat down on the beach to observe their technique. They fished without rods, using line tied to a plastic soda bottle, swinging the line above their heads like David battling Goliath. Then, holding the soda bottle with two hands, they spooled the line back in like a kite string on a spindle, occasionally reaching underwater at the last moment to pull up a giant, carplike
boga
fish with a hook protruding from its lip.