The Footloose American: Following the Hunter S. Thompson Trail Across South America (33 page)

To learn a little about the Pantanal, I met up in Corumbá with Márcia Rolon and Ray Knowles of the Instituto Homem Pantaneiro, a behemoth nonprofit organization dedicated to cultural and environmental programs in the southern Pantanal. Knowles is the group’s resident English-speaking attaché, a transplanted Brit who first came to Brazil as a photographer in the late 1970s. Rolon is a pretty and self-assured former ballerina who founded the IHP in 2002 along with her husband, a former captain of the region’s environmental police and now a local politico. Over beer and pizza, the two of them informed me that the river basins of the Pantanal were not as unspoiled by human influence as either Thompson or I had envisioned.

“I need this river,” Rolon announced as we sat down at a café alongside the rolling Paraguay. “The people of this region, the
pantaneiros
, need it. If this river were to die, we would die as well.”

At forty-two, Rolon still has the lithe build of a dancer, and as we spoke I noticed how gracefully she gestured at the river, taking in the whole of it with a wide, slow sweep of her arm. In her previous career, she’d performed at festivals in Europe and all across South America, but her upbringing wasn’t nearly so cosmopolitan. Rolon was raised
in the Pantanal, she explained, a product of the region’s entrenched cattle-ranching culture. Subsistence ranching in the Mato Grosso dates back to the mid-1800s, and when Rolon was young, her grandfather ran a small store for cattlemen and boatmen, strategically located on a key tributary of the Paraguay called the Rio Taquari. Her granddad had watched the Pantanal grow increasingly crowded during his lifetime, with more and more cattle run on smaller and more subdivided parcels. Settlers had really begun flocking to the interior after 1960, when Brazil christened its new inland capital of Brasília—a whole city raised up from nothing some 600 miles from the coastal population centers. When Rolon’s grandfather was a boy, fewer than a million cattle roamed the Pantanal. By the time of Rolon’s own childhood in the 1970s, that number was up to 5 million.

Cowboy-style cattle grazing in a seasonally flooded landscape is a relatively low-impact affair, but in the long term, that kind of whirligig growth is unsustainable, even in someplace as vast as the Pantanal. So it seemed like a good thing when Rolon said that ranching pressure has eased up in the Pantanal in the last few decades. Today, true to South America’s urbanizing trend, Corumbá’s population is twice what it was during Thompson’s visit, while the cattle numbers have actually dropped by a million or more since their post-Brasília peak. Hurray for urbanization, I thought, for taking some of the pressure off the “wild country.”

Except that it isn’t that simple, because some of the very same factors propelling South America’s shift toward urban living turn out to have pretty severe down-the-chain ecological impacts of their own. While there are a lot of reasons that a country-dweller might move into the city—job availability, the lure of education, escaping rural violence—the
prime motivator in Brazil is the rapid expansion of mechanized, export-oriented agriculture, which has a tendency to squeeze out small-scale and subsistence farmers, both spatially and economically. And it’s that kind of agriculture that benefited the most from Brazil’s westward expansion in the later twentieth century. Lured by the same promise of “CHEAP LAND!” that captured Thompson’s imagination, big-time agribusiness has thrived in the last thirty years in western Brazil. This is less true in the Pantanal itself than in the surrounding Mato Grosso highlands, where immense cattle and soybean operations have come to dominate the landscape. These industrial-scale farms and ranches have basically been
the
South American economic success story of the twentieth century, and one reason that cattle numbers have dipped in the Pantanal is that traditional gaucho ranchers there just can’t compete.

But while Mato Grosso’s beef and soybean empires have helped launch Brazil as an economic superpower, they had to clear a whole lot of land to do it. The rivers of the Mato Grosso highlands drain into the Pantanal, so land cleared upriver in soybean country means big-time sedimentation and erosion issues downstream. Just as deforestation back in Colombia caused the catastrophic silting of the Rio Magdalena, so the Rio Taquari that Rolon remembers from her childhood is now just a sediment-clogged and hopelessly braided mess. It’s shallower today and prone to devastating floods, just like the one that eventually wiped out her grandfather’s business and sent her family packing for Corumbá. Meanwhile, Rolon said, many of the Paraguay’s other tributaries are trending in the same direction, with serious consequences for both grazing land and wildlife habitat.

“If my grandfather were to come back and see the Pantanal without the Rio Taquari,” Rolon said, crossing her long ballerina’s legs, “I think he would just die again.”

Her colleague, Knowles, reached over to fill my beer. Brazilian bars serve liters of grimacingly cold beer in insulated cooler sleeves, like giant cozies—yet another altitude adjustment from the Andes, where cold beer is sadly underappreciated. Knowles followed Brazilian custom, filling everyone else’s glasses first, then clinking his own glass against the bottle as a kind of toast. As Rolon spoke, he helped translate the Portuguese that she mixed in liberally with her English.

“The other problem with export agriculture,” he chimed in, “is the demand it places on infrastructure. Do you know about the Hidrovia?”

In the 1990s, Knowles and Rolon explained, the governments of Brazil, Bolivia, Argentina, Paraguay, and Uruguay all jointly negotiated a proposal to dredge, widen, and “straighten” the countless meanders of the Rio Paraguay, hoping to streamline the channel for seagoing cargo barges. The cattle, cotton, and soybean industries of the Mato Grosso lobbied hard on behalf of the plan, and the mining industry was another big supporter, since the hills surrounding the Pantanal are rich in manganese, iron, and other minerals, all of them expensive to transport overland. Straightening the river would have boosted shipping speeds and accommodated larger container ships, but it also would have drastically and permanently altered the Pantanal’s drainage, turning the world’s largest wetland into something like a desert. Smart dredging to counteract the effects of sedimentation is one thing, Knowles said. Dramatically increasing the volume and flow of one of the continent’s biggest river is another. The
ecological consequences would have been severe. Thankfully, the Hidrovia proposal was defeated in the early 2000s, but it remains a cautionary tale around the Pantanal, and similar proposals are still regularly floated.

Knowles picked up the bottle and split the last of the beer among our three glasses.

“You know how Brazilians are really fond of proverbs?” he asked.

As a matter of fact, I did. Thompson pointed out this cultural soft spot for aphorisms in a 1963
Observer
article about the Brazilian economy. “One concerns the bumblebee,” he wrote, “which, according to the laws of aerodynamics, cannot possibly fly.” But bumblebees don’t know about aerodynamics, the Brazilian saying goes, and so they fly all the same. Thompson compared Brazil at the time to a bumblebee, “defying most known laws of economics in a headlong rush to ‘development.’ ”

Knowles shared another Brazilian proverb, this one derived from the traditional method of hunting jaguar in the Pantanal. Come at the jaguar with a conventional spear, he explained, and the cat will feint, dodge, and retreat. But leave some bushy branches at the end of your spear, and the foliage will rustle irritatingly in the animal’s face. A perturbed jaguar will grab at the spear, pulling it closer and allowing you to strike. Use too short a spear, though, and you risk being pulled in along with it.

“So when Brazilians warn you about something dangerous,” he said, “they talk about ‘provoking a jaguar with a short stick.’ ” He swallowed the last of his beer and looked out at the pale river. “When we start messing around with rivers in the Pantanal, we are poking at jaguars with a very, very short stick.”

A gringo with a backpack at the Corumbá bus station is like Christ among the lepers, beset on all sides by gregarious recruiters for Pantanal tours. The system behind guides and outfitters in the Pantanal is still rather obscure to me. Knowles told me that back in the 1980s, Pantanal tourism was kind of a free-for-all, where locals with jeeps gouged foreign tourists, camped where they pleased, and often ran roughshod over the land. These days, outfitters are regulated by Brazil’s tourism ministry, and local guides work with licensed companies that maintain established
pousadas
(lodges) and campsites throughout the countryside. Best I can tell, these companies then employ hordes of free-agent recruiters in towns like Corumbá—slick salesmen who mercilessly berate any gringo in sight until he or she signs up for a tour. Just standing outside of my hostel one morning, I got the hard sell from two different recruiters; another smooth-talker sidled up to me one day in line for the ATM. What’s especially ridiculous is that all of these recruiters work on commission for the exact same five or six outfitters, so regardless of which one of them ends up parting you from your money, you will likely end up in the exact same van en route to the exact same
pousada
.

I went into the Pantanal with a guide named Gabriel, a lifelong
pantaneiro
from a family of ranchers. He spoke good English and drove a pickup truck built in the days before mufflers and shocks. Gabriel came recommended by the owner of my hostel, in part because the company he works for keeps a no-frills hammock camp a few hours into the bush, which was much more appealing to me than a lodge. I had really hoped to avoid the tour circuit altogether, to find some chummy local with a truck and an excess of free time,
then press on into the virgin corners of the countryside to sleep under the stars and run with the maned wolves. But when a few days of asking around in Corumbá turned up no such Natty Bumppo, I settled for the hammock camp. So I took a bus out of town heading east, to a spot where a lonely dirt road peels off the main highway. Gabriel was waiting there, a big man with a baby face and a camo vest, standing alongside his truck and two pretty German girls he’d picked up in Campo Grande.

The road we followed was built in the late 1800s by a Brazilian explorer and folk hero named Cândido Rondon, a sort of composite of Lewis and Clark, Davy Crockett, and Margaret Mead. Amid the wetlands, it’s a jostling seventy-five-mile ribbon of solid ground, crossing countless half-flooded fazendas by way of rickety wooden bridges. In the bed of the truck, the German girls and I settled onto a couple of wooden benches. It was too loud to converse, so we just smiled at one another and pointed to the animals we saw browsing on either side of the road. We hadn’t been off the pavement for more than a few minutes before we spotted several herds of capybaras nosing around in the brush. The world’s largest rodents, capybaras are basically guinea pigs the size of Saint Bernards. I had eaten one at a BBQ joint back in Bogotá, but I’d never seen one in person. They were oblivious to the truck, grazing nonchalantly on swamp grasses, snorting and poking at the reeds with their weirdly rectangular snouts. At least one capybara gets eaten in every wildlife documentary ever produced about lowland South America. They are the ecosystem’s quintessential prey species, the wildebeest of the Western Hemisphere and a hot lunch for jaguars, anacondas, pumas, ocelots, and caimans—all of which make their homes nearby.

Most of these big predators are still a rare sighting in
the Pantanal, but not caimans. During two weeks along the Magdalena, I hadn’t managed to spot a single one of the continent’s smallish alligators, but in the Pantanal they litter the swampy landscape like sidewalk earthworms after a good rain. I was stunned by the reptilian multitudes that the Germans and I managed to glimpse on a two-hour drive to camp. There were caimans sunning themselves on scrubby beaches, caimans swathed in blankets of mud, caimans dog-paddling through the shallows. In the Pantanal, caimans number in the tens of millions. There are so many that before the Brazilian government cracked down on poaching in the 1980s, armed leather hunters called
coureiros
killed as many as a million animals per year, and they didn’t have to work particularly hard to do it.

Once we arrived at camp, I had a chance to get to know my fellow travelers, a pair of thirtyish chemical engineers from Aachen nearing the end of a two-week Brazilian holiday. Peggy was a doctoral student in mycology, nerdy about mushrooms and at home in the outdoors. Tara was a city girl putting on a brave face for three days of mosquitoes and pit latrines. Our camp consisted of a screened-in pavilion with a dozen hammocks tied to a central pole, plus a simple cooking cabin and a row of outhouses. A small brown stream flowed nearby, and after we’d dropped off our backpacks, Gabriel led us down to the water, where a dozen or so caimans were lounging next to a decrepit-looking rowboat.

“You can walk right up to them, if you want,” he said, sauntering right up to one and crouching down beside it. “Just make sure you move slowly.”

As a son of the reptile-light northwoods, I have a mild fascination for all things lizardlike. There is something enigmatic about the sleek taper of a crocodile’s jaw, and I’ve always appreciated large predators for the reminder they
offer that my species and I are not always top dog. I watched Gabriel with what I imagine was an expression of childlike glee. The grandest caiman on the beach was probably eight feet long. The rest were in the neighborhood of five or six. I moved in closer.

“They don’t want to eat you,” Gabriel joked. “Mostly they just stick to the piranhas. If you look closely, you can see that the piranhas eat them, too.” He pointed to the caiman closest to me, a graceful five-footer gazing tranquilly over the water. Along the serrated ridge of its tail, I could see where a few scales had been blunted. The piranha nibbles looked like the filed-down teeth of a well-worked handsaw.

“Go ahead and touch them, if you want,” he said. “You just have to move slowly.”