by Brian Kevin
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.
BACKPACKER 1: What did you think of northern Peru?
BACKPACKER 2: I loved it! There’s a huge nature preserve where you can run with the Andean wolves, and the coast is spotted with dozens of Moche ruins that hardly anyone visits.
B1: Sounds great. What’s Trujillo like?
B2: Trujillo? Oh, you know. It’s a city.
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.
II
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.
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 Eng
lish-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.”
III
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, outfit
ters 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.