“How could an accumulation of adjectives or a richness of epithets help when one is faced with that splendiforous thing? Besides, any true reader – and this story is only addressed to him – will understand me anyway when I will look him straight in the eye and try to communicate my meaning. A short sharp look or a light clasp of his hand will stir him into awareness, and he will blink in rapture at the brilliance…for, under the imaginary table that separates me from my readers, don’t we secretly clasp each other’s hands?”
-Bruno Shulz, Sanitorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass
Like a River
Nobody knows how big the Amazon River is. Sure, there are large numbers involving cubic meters per second, but only computers can make use of those. For the rest of us, it may as well be an infinity. A smaller infinity, to be sure, than the number of stars in our galaxy, but a number never the less beyond any reasonable conception.
River metaphors have always had the easiest go of it, this whole job of describing life, that is. Because things just tend to flow one thing into the next like a hip hop cypher. Or a river can be used to understand a continuum, the way no one could really take a boat to the mouth, point to the Atlantic on one side and the Amazon on the other. It’s all one unbroken body of water, with a name for every distinct purpose.
Rivers inspire spiritual epiphanies. Siddhartha’s river lesson had to do with the moment and its sacredness, with change and its engine: time. “You cannot step twice into the same river for fresh waters are ever flowing upon you,” says the river boatman. They inspire big business. Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon.com, “wanted a name for his company that began with ‘A’ so that it would appear early in alphabetic order. He began looking through the dictionary and settled on ‘Amazon’ because it was a place that was ‘exotic and different’ and it was one of the biggest rivers in the world, as he hoped his company would be.” And rivers come up in politics too, as when Nikita Kruschev observed “Politicians are the same all over. They promise to build bridges even when there are no rivers.”
Analogies seem to stick to rivers like raindrops do. We can’t just take it as it comes, it has to be like something else. A river is an obstacle (for the hiker), a highway (for our boat or for fish), or an ecosystem or a drainpipe or expensive real estate. But what is it really? There is no answer to that, surprisingly. All thought and all language is analogy, says Douglas Hofstadter, and when you think about it, it’s true. Or rather, it’s like something that’s true. A river is understood one facet at a time, and the largest of them all has many.
Santana’s Golden Reality
“The hour when everything is beautiful.”
-The San People
In that “magic hour,” as a past girlfriend of mine used to chime, when all the scenery submits to a golden gilt it may never have earned, a field of kites rise. From the third deck of the Anna Karoline I watch them gain height, like a squadron of fighters. When they cross the line of gold glimmering with pride, the puppeteers give them a dance. Like fevered sea monkies, their frilled tails curve and whip and bend over themselves. Somewhere, below, young boys stand entranced and nimble. The cool air channels down the Amazon, making this the Hour of Kites, a magical hour indeed that barely preceds the waves of mosquitoes, those winged demon kites to which nobody holds the line.
And in this way the port town of Santana, just down the road from Macapá, holds control until the last fleck of gold leaves the last smear of cloud, when the last pair of kites have tangled and spun in a death plunge to the careless waters waiting. But there too lies their one chance to travel further than any boy could send them.
The Anna Karoline detaches like a somnolent, drifting log, pausing uncertainly and shivering as one who prepares for her first step on a long hike. Then she spies a child’s homemade kite behind her, and heads upriver. The two part ways, the kite to see what the river becomes, the boat to chase the sunset for the sheer thrill of it.
Slivers of the Big River
Onwards we put-putter, following a course of the river’s choosing, released for once from the bonds of efficacy which hold the reigns of every civil engineer. Far from proving dull, life on the Anna Karoline varies hourly. Nearly thirty of us have concocted a tangled jungle of hammocks and hooks. Climbing into mine is an intimate affair, as the space between the edge of my hammock and that of my neighbor’s has been squeezed and pushed elsewhere. We are practically spooning, and any adjustment of limbs (and a hammock demands several) requires a cruel disruption of sleep down the line, a domino effect I precipitate every time my bladder rebels.
In the Amazon dawn Tyler spots his first river dolphin, and later that day I spot mine. Far more often, however, I notice tough guys tossing garbage overboard, their analogy for the river is obviously ‘a landfill.’ There are two types of river dolphin in the Western Hemisphere, pink and grey. As for careless assholes, there has only ever been one type. Their brains are made of cheap beer and cigarrette tar, with only trace amounts of empathy. They’re the reason the baiji, or Chinese river dolphin, faded to oblivion seven years ago. The toughest part about being an atheist isn’t knowing that there’s no life after death, it’s realizing most thoughtlessness is never corrected for. There’s no Hell for assholes, only light sentences and willing women. But this river trip means more to me than to them, and all the scummy forró music in the world-and the crew seems capable of fitting nearly half of it into each day-can’t change that. Still, I can’t fully trust someone who cannot take out their garbage.
A shifting world full of dynamism calls from starboard. Little fishermen’s huts stand alone on stilts, their curious fish traps scattered along the swollen banks. Egrets wait on logs, and surprisingly large clumps of grass and lilies regularly break off and sail away, rippling like magic carpets. Sometimes the far bank is close enough to pick out the porch of a remote shack. Other times only a vague silhouette of greenery is visible. I didn’t believe it when I’d first heard it years ago, but there really are places so wide the far bank disappears entirely over the curvature of the earth, even from a vantage point 20ft above the water. Though we experience this during the wet season, with the water level over thirty feet higher, there are points this wide even during the dry season.
Music, books and gazing can take up a lot of time.
The riverbank, usually flat and dense, will open out to flooded grasslands where cows swim, nibbling leaves from the protruding saplings. Then it will close in again and rise up on a massif several hundred feet high. Vast power lines, the largest I’ve ever seen, span the Amazon here. Towers higher than Columbia Center, the tallest skyscraper in North America west of Chicago, support these cables and march north to provide power to Macapá and Manaus. Still other times our young captain will veer into the narrows between an island and the bank, and our river journey encloses us in an envelope of jungle life.
We stop briefly at a tiny village to exchange passengers and goods and we purchase a block of cheese from a man making his rounds among the hammocks. What a lovely way to spend a sunny day on the river, munching crackers with tuna, cheese and hot sauce. Sure beats the piddly meals cooked below, above the engine room. Always a grab bag, the cook seems to toss spaghetti, rice and meat into every possible combination: one. Supplemental snacks are a must, though pleasantly a bug net is not. The skeeters must not buzz out this far over flowing water.
I spend my hours at the railing, passing whole villages arrayed along a flooded bank like a tropical Waterworld, their stubby satellite dishes peering hopeful and skyward, torn between the fact of their remoteness and the common impulse to connect. These amphibious cottages speak to the reality that rivers of a certain magnitude begin to swell above the rules of what a river should be. The Amazon becomes pocked with grass clumps, they coalesce and establish a tangle in tall trees. This mass grows large enough for humans to take note and consider calling it an island. In this way the Amazon is split, subdivided and reintegrated downstream. Hardly a normal river, the Amazon is more a common theme repeated and witnessed for 4,000 miles.
Borrowing sugar becomes an odyssey for some of these river dwellers.
Bring your galoshes on Sunday!
We spot the tree that had held us transfixed at the botanical garden in Ciudad Bolivar. What is it? No birds touch the fruit, which flower from the branches of a few of them. The bark gleams like a turtle’s shell. In fact there is so much not knowing taking place, we become rooted at the railing, mesmerized completely by this constantly unfolding channel. Upstream river travel is delightfully slower, the boats heading down ride the central current, but we hug the coast. This allows for wildlife viewing. In ten minutes I see a toucan, dolphins, an iguana on a branch, a monkey on a trunk and, I’m convinced, a sloth! When we rejoin the main flow of water and a giant moth nearly flops into my mouth.
Past a large island of grass, a barge heads towards the Atlantic.
Trace the myriad tongues of this body of water and you can find all manner of uncomfortable issues, from the unforgivable oil spills up in Ecuador, to the construction of the world’s third largest dam complex on the Xingu River. The Belo Monte dam will displace over 20,000 people, and indigenous leaders have travelled as far as Paris protesting the Brazilian government’s crude environmental impact statement. On a more chronic scale, the wet season sweeps disease thru the basin.* Creatures unknown to science devour each other in places far from any hospital. But here on the river I fail to frame things any other way than beautiful.
Musings from a Moving Deck
During our second night the river swells like a drowned cow. Cumulus peaks had been sparking just before the storm hit, creeping over us like the mothership from Independence Day. Now I awaken to a darkened deck. The crew has unfurled the tarps around the entire vessel. The only lookout is from the top, so we take our shower in the open under a soapless torrent. These outbursts don’t last long, so soon the only dripping falls from the canopy, and a full rainbow parabolas wildly as if every other rainbow in the world was nothing more than a captured specimen removed from this flooded Eden, to be displayed in the zoos of lesser downpours.
And there is the dove and we ride the ark, for it is a view like this one that Noah would have floated by. The difference is that none of these animals are on the boat, and their spectacular shapes and plumage are far too colorful to be mentioned in the dusty Bible.
The New World…only to those who would condescend to its tenants and, at the same time, declare grand plans for filling its “emptiness.” This is the old world separated from itself, not a blank palimpsest but a land utterly teeming. This is where a culture independently invented the wheel but decided to narrow its use to children’s toys.
What to make of that call is tough to say, and perhaps it wouldn’t be politically correct, but neither was the thrusting of the wheel-and everything that rolls along with it-upon a people who had been minding their own business. But that’s history, everything except politically correct.
Cause and effect are eternal, and free will is an illusion, so none of this could have been a lick different and judgment is ultimately superfluous. But so is the judging of the judgment. All that will be done is already implied in the process of doing right now. But fortunately the causes of our thoughts appear to be us, and that may just be enough to build a platform from which to leap out of this esoteric mindfuck and accept the simply straightforward conclusion that South America is a helluva place to be in and you should “choose” to visit soon if any of my understatements have moved you.
Reflecting in this manner, and listening to Blue Sky Black Death’s album Noir, we pull into Santarém. We don’t spend any time in this middle-man of a river city, trading goods between Belém and Manaus and exporting its surplus of soybeans to Europe for chicken feed. Instead, we took a bus an hour west to Alter do Chao, a freshwater beach town free of any surfers. This is the place to go when you feel cabin fever creeping up your legs and staying out of the water becomes pointless.
Our hostel entrance is a forced one, since no one answers the gate. The man who sashays over to the counter, Angelo, has been running Albergue da Florista for ten years. “Seattle…this is the home of Jimi Hendrix.” Exactly. Wanna hear his new album? We immediately head towards the amps to make the day sing. He does some cooking while I play with his dog and daughters. An iguana does some slithering up above, the sky unleashes more water and Angelo shares his passion for the slower type of capoeira. His favorite word is “relaaax,” which can make the most supine napper feel like they were getting up in his business. I’m sorry, I wanted to say at first, I’ll go relax more now. Or later. Whenever I get to it. It’s not too important…
When Tyler heads off to hang his hammock and I’m left alone with Angelo, I get the idea to see if I can’t find a bag of bud for the three day boat trip we would be starting the next day. I’d smelled it in the kitchen when he’d disappeared, and decided it wouldn’t hurt to ask someone so relaaaxed. Before I’ve said one word, though, he catches my train of thought thru my eyes and exclaims, “no! no! I no have.” Well played, I tell him, feeling like the millionth gringo he’s hosted. Well played.
The day is young, so we rent kayaks and paddle thoroughly about, past grass roof huts serving drinks and grilled fish, past people lounging in plastic chairs beneath umbrellas. The difference is this is all conducted in two feet of water, this being the end of the wet season. Yachts sit anchored by these aquatic bars, with girls dancing to forró music and taking open showers at the rear.
We find our own sand spit and tie up our kayaks. Swimming in the Amazon is something I’ve looked forward to since Chile. And never mind all their excited gossip about the fateful candiru, that catfish parasite that has fueled scary legends for hundreds of years. The most exciting detail they never fail to blurt out: if you stand in the river around knee height and pee, it could swim up the stream and lodge in your urethra. I’ll pay you mad dollars if you can find even one authenticated report of this happening to humans. I pee to my heart’s content.
The only hill for miles is a funny shaped mini-mountain rising from nothing nearby. We hike it to catch a 360 degree view from the top, something often difficult to do because most of the basin is flatter than Kansas, lacking even an errant stone on the ground. The day blooms into a panorama of Amazonia. Nothing else can literally top this, so we paddle back to eat.
A rare peak from which to take in the basin.
Before you know it, you’re on somebody’s roof!!
Who wants water with their burgers?
At dinner a beggar with a lazy eye makes his rounds toward our table. Beseeching me, he puts his hand on my shoulder. “No, and please don’t touch me.” It isn’t said in a nasty way, simply straightforward to minimize our language barrier. But he decides to get ugly and punch me on the shoulder, the first beggar I’ve ever seen take it to that level. So of course I give him my burger and fish fingers because that’s how that works. Either that or I tell him to fuck off and finish them myself. Time to get back on a boat.
*My thalassemia minor, while conferring smaller red blood cells, gives me extra protection against malaria. I wouldn’t have swallowed the pills anyway, but it helps to have a minor superpower.
South America! But I Digress... 