“Não existe por aqui nenhum lugar por esse nome” (There is no place around here by that name), a man replied, as they all stared at me, this red-skinned, wild-eyed foreigner.
“But Vicenzo, the guy who works with Padre José—you know Padre José?—said there was a path at Santa Loo-CHEE-a from the Marmelos to the Madeira,” I attempted to clarify.
A woman in the background suggested, “He must mean Santa Loo-ZIa. There is a path there.”
“Oh, sure, that’s it,” the others replied in unison.
Some hope! They told me it was about thirty minutes downriver, just past the little house with the turtles. They said that a finger of land parallel to the river obscured the settlement’s location to people going downriver but that I would see it if I kept looking leftward. I yelled back “Muito obrigado!” (Much obliged) as I ran back down the steps. Kristene and Caleb were still sitting quietly in the canoe, talking to each other. Shannon complained that she was burning up. Keren said she was going to jump in the river to relieve her fever. I started off at full speed, the 6.5-horsepower engine leaving a pathetically feeble wake behind us.
In thirty minutes I looked to the port side and thought I could see an inlet. I almost passed it but then there it was, a clearing at the top of another steep bank, this one more like sixty yards high, with the same carved steps. I stopped and moored the canoe at the bottom of the steps. I picked up Kristene in one arm and Caleb in the other. I told Shannon and Keren I’d be right back for them. I ran to the top, heart pounding, and looked for an adult.
The small settlement was also very clean and orderly, with broad paths and well-swept clearings around the brightly painted houses. A church building sat in the middle of the small cluster of six houses along the shore of the Marmelos. Hand-hewn benches of thick board were built under a couple of the trees. The Marmelos was more than three hundred yards across here, bluish black from this angle. There was a light breeze, and with the shade the benches would have made for a comfortable place to rest, but there was no time.
I saw some women talking under a shade tree about fifty yards away and walked briskly toward them. They were already looking in my direction and were no doubt discussing the arrival of these gringos from upriver—a location we could have only flown into, since to get to the Pirahãs by boat, it is necessary to pass in front of Santa Luzia. Again, I wasted no time with pleasantries, asking my question immediately as I got into hearing distance.
“É aqui que tem um varador para o Rio Madeira?” (Is it here that there is a path to the Madeira River?)
“Sim tem um caminho logo ali” (Yes, there is a path right over there), a woman responded.
I told her that I had two very ill people in the canoe and asked if I could get some help to carry them to the Madeira. She sent a little girl to tell her father. I ran down and carried Shannon up in my arms. When I got to the top of the bank again I saw the most beautiful sight. Men coming in a line down the path, men with strong backs and arms, men coming to help me, a hopelessly inept gringo who had never done a thing for them in his life. But clearly a man with a family in need. I learned then that caboclos will always come to the aid of someone in need, even to their own hurt.
Before I could say anything, though, we all heard a loud splash and a woman yelled, “O meu Deus! Ela pulou na agua!” (Oh my God! She jumped in the river!)
Keren was in the river, trying to pull herself back into the canoe. I ran down to her.
She said, “The water is so cool. I was too hot.”
I picked her up in my arms and ran up the bank for the third time. Keren had sounded coherent just then. Maybe she was thinking clearly now, I thought as I sat her down under the shade tree with Shannon, Kris, and Caleb.
As she sat on the log underneath this beautiful mango tree, Keren said in Portuguese to the people standing around, “I remember this place. There are elephants over there and lions over that way. My daddy used to bring me here when I was a little girl.”
All the Brazilians looked at her, then at me. They realized she was delusional. No one said anything except “Pobrezinha” (Poor little thing).
Men went into the forest and came back in a few minutes with two six-inch-thick logs, each about eight feet long. From each one of these they suspended a hammock. We put Keren in one and Shannon in the other. Four men took off with them, two to a hammock, down the path. I strapped on all our baggage and asked another man to take care of Vicenzo’s boat (someone at Santa Luzia used his boat without mixing oil in the gas and ruined his motor before I returned). I asked them to tell Padre José that Vicenzo wanted a boat sent to bring him out of the village. My bags weighed about fifty pounds. I then picked up Caleb and told Kristene to follow. We set off down the path after the men.
Kristene slowed us down a bit as she picked jungle flowers along the path, skipping and singing to herself “Jesus Loves Me.” Her hair was still partially in the little buns that Keren had put it into days before. She wore shorts, a small T-shirt, and tennis shoes. She smelled the flowers and smiled with delight at their fragrance. Even though my arms were burning with exhaustion at the weight of carrying Caleb and the bags, I could not help smiling. I always called Kris the sunshine of my life and that day her sunshine kept me from despair. Caleb was asking where the men were taking his mother and sister. Caleb was and is a sensitive person, and his mother has always been the most important person in his life.
After forty-five minutes walking down the cool, leaf-canopied jungle path to the Madeira, we came to a clearing. I could see dozens of painted wooden houses on stilts, a large church, which the locals referred to as “the cathedral,” small stores, and broad dirt avenues laid out parallel to one another. This was the Auxiliadora, a small town, not merely a village just beginning. The men asked me where to put Keren and Shannon. This little settlement was obviously too small to have rooms to rent. I told the men to set them down in the shade and I went to inquire. I located the very modest home of Maici River trader Godofredo Monteiro and his wife, Cesária. I knew that they lived here because on a trip up the Maici just after we arrived they had asked us to visit them at their home in the Auxiliadora. Their house reflected their prosperity. It had the common board walls and floor typical of caboclo homes, but it also had very clean wooden steps and a partially thatched, partially aluminum roof. It was painted white with green trim; the phrase Casa Monteiro (Monteiro House) was painted in green block letters on the front. There was an outhouse in the backyard, visible from the front, which indicated an above-average concern with that aspect of hygiene, since most in the area used the jungle as their bathroom.
Godo and Cesária welcomed us to their small home, so I had the
men carry Keren and Shannon there. Since it was evening and we were clearly very tired, Cesária asked if she could help me hang my family’s hammocks.
“Hammocks?” I asked, confused. I guess I had thought we would sleep in beds or on the floor.
“We only sleep in hammocks here, Mr. Daniel, even the priest. People here don’t use beds,” Cesária answered. She went on to explain to me how everyone, even people traveling in boats on the rivers, slept in hammocks.
“We have no hammocks.” I was growing more depressed with the situation and my lack of planning. The hammocks that Shannon and Keren had been carried in belonged to people, I didn’t even know who, from Santa Luzia.
Cesária left immediately and came back in about half an hour with five hammocks borrowed from neighbors. She started dinner and told me she’d watch Keren while I took the children to bathe in the Madeira. Now, the Madeira is not like the small, clear Maici. It is a muddy behemoth, rivaling the Mississippi, perhaps more than a mile across at the Auxiliadora at high water. The riverbank was some three hundred yards from Godofredo’s house and the bank was roughly sixty yards high, the highest of any settlement I had seen. I waded in to knee depth and washed off. I didn’t care that there were alligators (black caimans) in it and that you could not see them in the river�
��s muddy water. I didn’t care that there were candirus, tiny fish that would swim up any bodily orifice. I didn’t even care that there were piranhas, anacondas, stingrays, electric eels, and other denizens of the murky Madeira, because I was dirty. But in recognition of the potential danger, I washed Caleb and Kristene by pouring water over them and soaping them up and then dipping them quickly in and out of the river. We were somewhat clean at the end of this, but got muddy and sweaty as we walked back up the steep bank and then to the house. It was nearly dark. Unlike the Maici, the banks of the Madeira swarm with mosquitoes. They were buzzing throughout Godo’s home. We had no bug repellent, no long pants, nothing to protect us. Cesária borrowed a room-size mosquito net for us, though, and put it up in her living room, so we could sit inside this netting (which made the room much hotter because it cut out all breezes) and avoid the mosquitoes. But I couldn’t avail myself of this protection, because Godo wanted to talk. We sat on his steps and talked, I trying to appear unconcerned and at ease. I was slapping at biting mosquitoes without stop, my skin welting up under every bite.
“The mosquitoes are really horrible here,” I complained.
“Really? There are hardly any out tonight” came Godo’s reply, tinged with a bit of defensiveness about his town. But I noticed that he held his T-shirt in his hands to slap regularly at his back, front, and sides.
We settled down for a dinner of beans heavily flavored with onions, salt, oil, and cilantro, accompanied by rice and some fish. I had very little money to pay for this food. We were living on the charity of the poor.
Men inquired and reported to me that the next boat to Humaitá would pass by in two or three days. This was a letdown. We would be stranded in this place. But at least Keren and Shannon could rest and we had help washing clothes and getting food. And we had hope that we would make it to a doctor.
“How will I know when the boat is coming?” I asked.
“A gente vai escutar de longe, seu Daniel” (We will hear it from afar, Mr. Daniel) was the enigmatic reply.
How could they hear it from enough distance for me to get my family and things together in time to reach the riverbank and flag it down?I again wondered whether I had made the right decision to leave rather than wait for the plane.
Keren called me to her hammock and said that she wanted to go back to the village and wait for the plane. She seemed so much stronger and clearheaded that I considered returning after another night’s sleep. In any case, before the next morning when I might have returned to the Maici, Godofredo woke me up. It was about 2 a.m.
“O recreio já vem, seu Daniel” (The recreation boat—a name that still causes me to scratch my head—is coming).
I started to get the family up and pack, but Godofredo said, “Relax. It won’t be here for a while. We can have some coffee first.”
We had coffee, I growing more anxious at the thought that the boat was going to pass by and we’d be stranded here for at least another week. As we finished our coffee, though, I heard voices outside his house. Men were coming, unbidden, to help me carry my family to the boat. After conversing for about fifteen minutes, the men slung ham mocks on poles and I gathered our belongings together. Keren and Shannon were put back in the hammocks. Cesária picked up Caleb, I got Kris in my arms, someone else took our bags, and we began walking in a procession illuminated by kerosene lamp and flashlight through clouds of mosquitoes in the humid blackness toward the port. There were no lights anywhere. But as we neared the bank, off in the distance like a spaceship, the boat’s searchlight intermittently roamed the bank and river, looking for floating logs that could damage its wooden hull, checking the distance of the boat from the banks, searching for rock shoals that could sink it. We began the precarious descent in the dark, down the steep bank, straining our eyes to see by the light of a flashlight. Suddenly I heard someone fall and tumble down a few steps. It was the man who had been holding the back end of Keren’s hammock pole. But even before he hit the ground, another man had taken his place and Keren didn’t seem to have noticed.
We blinked our flashlights at the boat to signal it that we wanted a ride. As it approached out of the blackness of the starless, moonless night, more than twenty feet high and seventy feet long, its enormous searchlight came to rest on us down at the river’s edge. It looked us over, puny little earthlings on this Martian shore.
The men unloaded Shannon and Keren onto the lowest deck of the three-deck boat. I put everything else on board, including Kristene and Caleb, and the boat pulled out. Suddenly the friends from the Auxiliadora were gone, swallowed up in the Amazonian night. Would I ever see them again? What would happen now? I hung all five hammocks that we had been loaned by folks at the Auxiliadora in a near frenzy, worried that Kristene and Caleb might fall into the river, that Keren or Shannon would be stepped on as they lay unprotected on the deck, and that someone might try to steal our few belongings. After hanging our hammocks, I moved everyone and our baggage to the second deck. Then I gathered all our bags underneath my own hammock, settled my family in, and tried to get some sleep. I put everyone close to me so that I could hear and feel if anyone awoke or needed me.
The top deck of our boat was a bar area. Underneath the bottom deck there was storage. The boat was dirty, with thick brown paint covering the floors, whitewashed rails about one yard high around the sides, and blue paint on the hull. It was painted white everywhere else. I had known about these boats from reading, but this was the first time I had seen one up close. There were perhaps one hundred passengers on the vessel.
Throughout the Amazon River system, whether in Brazil, Peru, Colombia, or any other Amazonian country, a passenger boat is built pretty much the same. One begins with a massive frame for the hull, built from three- or four-inch-thick planks of a water-resistant, sturdy wood, such as itauba. The frame for a smallish boat will be about ten yards long and three yards wide. The rest of the heavy wooden structure of the hull is fashioned from two- to three-inch-thick boards, with spaces between them filled tightly with rope or other fiber and caulk, then covered with putty and paint. The rope and fibers are driven in with a caulking mallet and a caulking iron (like a chisel). The hull (batelão in Portuguese) has to be able to withstand blows from floating logs, some longer than the boat itself, in the rainy seasons, and survive grounding on the sand or rocks in the dry season.
The lower deck of the boat is used for storage at the prow and for the motor and drive shaft at the stern. Over this is another deck and over that, more often than not, a final deck. Each deck’s ceiling is about five feet, ten inches high. These passenger decks often have no walls, at least in bigger commercial passenger boats, because of the heat—only short railings like picket fences and support posts. The ceilings usually have one-by-three-inch boards placed just for hanging hammocks. In case of rain, a plastic tarp can be lowered at the sides. The boats leak but they are by and large reliable and practical vessels. And since their design, motors, and operation are standard throughout the Amazon system, parts and labor are abundantly available—so long as you stick with this standard. Deviating from the norms of construction and operation or using engines that are uncommon is asking for trouble, because a breakdown or need for technical assistance can go unanswered. You can be inconvenienced and stranded if the parts and labor you need fall outside normal expectations.
Once these boats are constructed, they go to those who have commissioned them, usually relatively well-off traders. They are used as passenger boats or as trade vessels. Those owned by traders are used to purchase jungle products from Indians and jungle-dwelling Brazilians, who receive in exchange manufactured goods, such as matches, powdered milk, canned meats, tool files, machetes, hoes, shovels, needles, thread, rolled tobacco, liquor, fish hooks, ammunition, guns, and canoes. Many traders possess fleets of such craft. The most common home ports for these fleets of trade boats are Porto Velho, Manaus, Santarém, Parintins, and Belém—the major cities of the Amazon system. The boats transport a never-e
nding supply of kopaiba, Brazil nuts, hardwoods, latex, and other jungle products. The crews of these boats purchase the raw jungle products from Indians like the Pirahãs, the Tenharim, the Apurinãs, Nadëb, and dozens of others, as well as from caboclos.
The crews are usually caboclos as well. A typical crew consists of two to four men who operate the motor, steer the boat, repair the hull, and so on. During the hours of operation, the crew can relax. So long as the motor is operating normally, they can lounge in their hammocks or sit and talk. When the boat stops during work hours they load heavy cargo off or onto the boat, repair the engine, dive under the boat to plug leaks or repair the drive shaft or propeller, and do other tasks. It is a Huckleberry Finn kind of life, seasoned with intense labor.
There is an inherent contradiction in the lives of these caboclo crews. In spite of their generosity and friendliness, many of them have violent backgrounds. Some crew members are fleeing from a city life that they never adjusted well to—failed marriages, debts, enemies, the police. In the isolation of the Amazonian tributaries, a violent land populated by violent men, a certain thickness of skin is required to endure.
Just as I began to sleep, Keren said she had to use the toilet. She and Shannon still had severe diarrhea. Countless times during this voyage I would need to help them use the chamber pot (which I had luckily thought to bring with us), covering them with a blanket for privacy, then carrying it and its contents through the crowd that gathered on the boat to stare at this sick American family, to the stern to empty and wash it in the boat’s bathroom.
As I got back from cleaning the chamber pot, Shannon said, “I’m sorry, Daddy. I’m sorry.”
“For what?” I asked.
I went near her and could tell by the smell that she had soiled herself. I looked and saw that she and her hammock were covered in diarrhea. She was so ashamed and so sorry. I should have been watching her better. I got a bucket of water and hung a blanket up from the hammocks to give her a bit of privacy. Then I washed her off and helped her change clothes. I washed out her hammock as well as I could and gave her the blanket to lie on in the hammock so that she wouldn’t feel the wetness. She was still apologetic. I then washed her clothes and hung them over the railing around the deck to dry.
Don't Sleep, There are Snakes Page 6