by Amy Ragsdale
As I listened quietly, my eyes began to close. Excusing myself, I ducked under the bamboo chimes and unlocked the door of our bungalow. I kicked off my new flip-flops. The stone floor felt cool under my sandy feet. I turned on the fan, crept under the diaphanous mosquito netting, and collapsed into bed. It had been a good day.
The next morning, the kids once again headed to the beach, and I logged on to Grants.gov. Two days to go. My “nonexistent” username worked! My pleas for help had been heard. I headed out to the beach. Balance and joy. I thought the fifties were going to be fine.
29
Walking Tall
SKYLER HAD HAD one rocky day after Carson and Bowen left, but he seemed notably better than he had been for the previous six months, as though he’d suddenly made a jump in the journey toward adulthood. He seemed to be handling things that would have sent him into a downward spiral two months before with philosophical equanimity.
After two days at Pontal, we moved on to Maceió, to spend a couple of days before putting Brooke on the plane back to the States. As soon as we arrived, she, Skyler, and Molly donned their suits and ran for Jatiúca Beach to go surfing. Disraelle, our favorite instructor, went out with Brooke, as it was her first time. Skyler ended up with Disraelle’s wife, who forgot her flippers, swallowed a lot of water, and bailed before Skyler even made it out to where he could wait for waves. My heart sank as I watched this from my rented beach chair.
Skyler was also on the squirrely, smaller board, the one that was harder to control. He only got up once, but on the difficult board and on his own. The girls came in. He stayed out. One more good ride, just one more, I prayed to myself. I could see this was going to take a while. I dug my heels into the sand. My stamina for handling Skyler’s downturns was definitely diminishing.
A group of Brazilian tourists from Amazonas asked about Skyler, as he flipped over time and again. “Muita resistência”—A lot of resilience, they said.
As I looked out at the incredible turquoise-green water and watched my boy miss wave after wave, I began to wonder about obsession—when it’s helpful, when it’s not. I supposed the Steve Jobses of the world had to have some degree of obsessiveness to bring their dreams to fruition. But when did it become self-destructive? How could we help Skyler navigate that line?
He finally came in. I said I’d seen him hanging upside down, under the water, feet hooked on top of the board, quite a few times, sometimes for a long time.
“I know,” he said. “I was so pissed, I thought I should just hang upside down and chill out. But I like that board.”
“You do?” I was surprised. “It’s so difficult.”
“I know, but did you see, I got up on it once, all by myself, and it’s cool. I wasn’t very steady, but it’s really quick. You can move it all around.”
This was definitely not the boy we’d known a few months before. The boy who was convinced, after he’d split his head, that he couldn’t do anything. The next day, he asked if he could just rent a board, no lessons. The proprietor looked at him and advised him to go to the part of the beach with smaller waves.
“No, I want to go there,” he replied.
“That’s where the big waves are,” I said uneasily.
“I know.”
He hitched that same squirrely board under his arm and marched into the breaking waves. Paddling out, belly down, his already slight figure disappeared behind the swells. But then he reappeared, sitting upright on his board; out with the big guys, all rising and sinking on the building waves, face to the horizon, waiting. He got up several times in the next hour, not long rides, but solidly on his feet.
I felt tremendous pride. Not because Skyler was learning to surf, but because Skyler seemed to be walking out of the fire. Walking tall.
30
Surprising Finds
JANUARY. This was summer break for the students at Imaculada. I’d thought this would have been welcome news for Skyler, but despite this, the old misery was creeping back in: “Why can’t we go back home?” he asked. “I just feel bad. I don’t know why. Why am I like this? It’s me. I just feel pissed off all the time.” I wished I had an answer, but I was feeling as confused about his moodiness as he was.
When we’d made our hanging mobile of wishes for the year back home in the States, everyone had written, Go up the Amazon.
That would be the focus of our summer break and carrot enough, I hoped, to pull us through the next couple of months. I’d been developing the plan for some time. We would be making our now well-worn trek southwest to Salvador. There we’d catch a flight to Brasilia—the nation’s capital—nine hundred miles away. From Brasilia, we’d take one more flight, the remaining two thousand miles, to Manaus—the capital of the state of Amazonas. This would be like scooping down from Boston to Nashville and back up to Seattle. After a few days in Manaus, we would take a boat for a full day upriver to the small town of Tefé, where we’d spend the night before catching a smaller boat to Mamirauá, the first sustainable development reserve in Amazonas. Our time at Mamirauá would be Part I, the viewing-flora-and-fauna part. Part II would involve catching a small plane in Tefé to São Gabriel da Cachoeira, still in the state of Amazonas, but near the Venezuelan border and a number of Yanomami villages, where we would see if we could meet any of this elusive tribe. This part was still up in the air.
We were on the second leg of our journey, our flight to Brasilia, when our baggage began to disintegrate. We’d each arrived in Brazil with one enormous duffel bag and a computer case—not good luggage for jungle trekking. Peter had combed the shops in Penedo and zeroed in on what seemed the most promising backpacks. We’d bought three. Two were now coming to pieces before our eyes. You can’t really check baggage with the compartments gaping open and your underwear leaking out. We found a storage locker at the Brasilia airport and poured out the contents of our bags.
At one of Brasilia’s slick multistory malls, we picked up two real camping packs. I wasn’t surprised that these were such rare items, at least in Northeastern Brazil. I just couldn’t picture Brazilians, at least the ones we knew, quietly hiking for miles into an isolated area to commune with nature. Where were the boomer cars, the firecrackers, the people, the vendors, the good times? At the mall, we also found a soccer ball (in orange, Skyler’s favorite color) and English-language books. We immediately stocked up on more than we could comfortably carry.
I’d opted for the twelve-hour layover in Brazil’s capital because I was curious about its architecture. A nineteenth-century Italian saint, Dom Bosco, had prophesied that a new civilization would grow up on this spot, between the fifteenth and twentieth parallels. In the 1950s, the Brazilians, who had been wishing to move the capital out of Rio de Janeiro to a more central location that would help them develop the interior, decided the priest’s prediction was auspicious, that this was the appropriate spot from which to signal Brazil’s rise to world prominence. They were going to do this with an ultra-modern, futuristic city. They enlisted Brazilian architects Lúcio Costa to create the layout and Oscar Niemeyer to design the government buildings. In three and a half years, a city of more than two million was created out of nothing. In 1960, when it was inaugurated, it must have looked like it was straight out of a futuristic Jetsons cartoon.
Costa said he was inspired by the shape of a cross, but in the end, the guidebooks describe the city as having the shape of an airplane. The description is apt. The fuselage is a wide-open grassy mall, reminiscent of the mall in Washington D.C., flanked by dominos of concrete and sea-green glass. The Plaza of the Three Powers—executive, judicial, and legislative—anchors one end. The executive and judicial buildings face each other, white and light, flat roofs suspend delicately above four paper-thin legs that sweep down past glass walls to perch on delicate points in the grass: modern versions of the Acropolis. On the third side, the legislative center, two tall slabs, white towers, rise out of a rectangular reflecting pool. A third slab lies, long and low, as though it had f
allen over into the grass. On its roof are two giant bowls, one right side up, one upside down, put there, it seems, for the pure pleasure of design, a chance to luxuriate in the visual feast of contrasting shape.
There was almost no one there on a Tuesday morning, a strange feeling for Brazil. We wandered around the vast plaza looking at the stick-figure sculpture commemorating the candangos, the laborers out of whose toil this city rose. One wonders if it hadn’t been rather like building the pyramids. Skyler kicked his newly acquired soccer ball as high as he could. It seemed to rise higher than the Eiffel Tower–like flagpole, a bunch of twenty-four upward-sweeping strands, each strand marking a state. Fifty years later, it was already out of date. Since, states had split and been renamed, making one realize how much this country was still in flux. Atop the pole, the green-and-yellow Brazilian flag thwapped in the wind like some massive sail in irons, looking for direction in guiding this ship of state.
People say that while Brasilia is impressive, it lacks soul. Certainly compared to the crammed, color-popping, music-blaring, rococo Northeast, this was feeling very empty and spare. I found it refreshing—a return to a sense of space more familiar to me, more like the vast empty of Montana.
After a cafeteria lunch in the basement of the judiciary (for which we’d had our backpacks x-rayed, our pictures taken, and badges issued) and a quick game of soccer on its lawn, we hailed a cab. Winding along Boulevard W-3, we headed to a restaurant on the shores of the manmade lake that wraps around the nose of the “plane.”
The fuselage runs east to west, separating the plane’s wings into north and south. The wings are divided into quadras, numbered rectangular blocks. So when you direct a cab driver, you ask, for example, for Quadra 407 North. The system was designed for a driving-oriented city (part of the reason the streets feel so empty). It seemed robotic, even by grid-oriented North American standards. It was so far from the organic growth of tiny, knotted streets in the Northeast that it hardly seemed Brazilian—at least not the Brazil we knew. It seemed the housing in the wings was largely in apartment buildings, mostly ten-to fifteen-stories high. As we crossed a bridge over the lake, we were greeted by a plaque. It translated as Sector of Individual Habitations.
“This is where the important people live,” the driver said.
The houses were so huge that their rooflines were visible, despite the towering, dense hedges; no Northeastern walls bristling with broken glass here.
There were several restaurants in a beautifully landscaped garden, a garden run amok with brides. It must have been a hot photo spot because on this Tuesday evening, there were not one or two but five brides getting their pictures taken by this fountain or that cascading tropical plant. No grooms were in sight.
“They’re probably getting drunk,” murmured Skyler.
We ordered beef stroganoff, smoked salmon, and chicken with candied figs on beds of arugula. I got a glass of chilled white wine. At the arranged time, our taxi driver came back to pick us up. He juggled the soccer ball with Skyler on the lawn, while Peter, Molly, and I finished sipping sweet coffee and relished the last morsel of chocolate truffle, the perfect end to the perfect meal before we launched into the jungle.
On arrival back at the airport in plenty of time to repack our luggage and check in, we were summarily told that we’d arrived too late to board the plane for Manaus. After a bewildering conversation during which I repeatedly pointed to the clock to show that we were not past the half-hour deadline for boarding but had instead a full hour to go, Peter, who tends to leave the negotiating in Portuguese to me, finally stepped forward. Ah yes, well, they admitted under their breaths, they had in fact given away our seats. Were they coming out with this now simply because Peter had more clout, because he was a man?
The next afternoon, after one last plane flight and a luxurious night in a five-star hotel courtesy of the airline, we found ourselves in Manaus. Manaus did not fit my picture of the “Amazon.” A city of 1.7 million, this hilly capital of the state of Amazonas rolled down to the Rio Negro, at this point already four miles wide. Oceangoing ships plied its waters. Eleven miles farther downstream, the Rio Negro joined its brown with the white of the Rio Solimões, becoming the actual Amazon.
Like Brasilia, Manaus immediately felt different from the Northeast, quieter, more reserved. While Penedenses might be laid back about work, they were full of a feisty energy when it came to fun. In Penedo, sound bounced unmuted off stone-hard streets and stucco walls. Manaus was leafy. There sound was muffled by arcing shade trees, which lined streets of multistory office buildings, mildewing in the wet, and beautifully restored colonial mansions sandwiched between blocks of decay.
We checked into the Hostel Manaus and were pleased to get a second-story room all to ourselves. It looked out over an inner courtyard. Unlike the hostel in Salvador, which had exuded a cheerful exuberance, this hostel felt as though the energy had been sucked out of it. Its inhabitants lay immobile on dingy couches, recovering from their last hard trip into the bush. Thin from digestive ailments, they drifted about, catching up on weeks of accumulated laundry, emailing friends back home, comparing notes—the notes not of tourists but of travelers. While there’s often a nice camaraderie among travelers, and invariably the people you meet are interesting, there can also be a kind of stagnancy in the draped bodies lounging on worn sofas, a malaise that sets in. We were like bouncy teens fresh out of a sock hop stumbling into an opium den. But it proved to be a good base of operations.
Just down the hill was a grassy park with soccer courts. Skyler was the first to venture into the pickup games. After months of honing his footwork on the streets of Penedo, he seemed to be champing at the bit to test himself in new venues. Peter asked the next day if he could join, not sure the young guys would want him, but they’d been open, finally even taking Molly, the only girl.
I got there just in time to watch Molly, Skyler, and Peter leave the sidelines and jump in.
“We’re gonna get killed,” Molly said, her blond ponytail swinging as she ran.
“We’re gonna get killed,” Peter agreed.
They spread out on the court, concrete covered with a thin layer of Astroturf.
“Oh my Gawd!” a fancy dancer of a player exclaimed in English as Molly took the ball away from him.
The Stark-Ragsdale team held up amazingly well, slamming more hard shots at the other team’s goalie than the opposing team could get on theirs. Our family knew how to play position. They lost in the end, but the regulars were impressed.
It was Peter’s birthday. That night, we walked through quiet streets to dinner at the Ristorante Fiorentina, fronting on a plaza with lush trees and a fountain. Looking through plate glass windows, we watched flirting couples and teen punks mill around a nineteenth-century beaux arts newsstand. Then it suddenly turned dark. Lightning and gusting rain flushed out the park’s inhabitants.
The filet mignon in Madeira sauce with mashed potatoes and grilled peppers, then the crème caramel, sweet espresso, and port wine, were just the thing for a dark, rainy night in the Amazon. Who knew! We gave Peter his presents: a blow-dart gun, small vials of oil of pau rosa—for muscle and joint aches—and the fat of a snake with a name I didn’t recognize—for flu and cold. His presents were more in line with the “Amazon” I’d expected, the National Geographic land of rare-plant-and-animal-filled jungle. The next day, we would be catching a boat to travel farther upriver. I wondered which Amazon we’d find there.
31
Guests in Their House
WE HAD TO BE at the floating terminal at 6:00 AM. This gave us time to check our backpacks and buy a cup of sugary cafezinho and leathery tapioca pancakes before our 7:00 AM. departure for Tefé. This town, twelve hours upriver by “fast boat,” would be the jumping-off point for the Mamirauá Reserve.
The Crystal I left right on time. Sleek and white, it had God is in first place emblazoned in Portuguese on its water-slicing bow. The boat flexed its muscles and sped downstream away
from Manaus, leaving the shipyards and ferry landings behind. The four of us stood on a small back deck, mesmerized by the frothing rooster tails shooting out of its 1500 horsepower engines.
Ducking inside, we found a red interior with rows of seats, three on a side, much like an airplane.
“There’re our names!” Skyler exclaimed with wonder.
Molly, Skyler, Amy, and Peter had been written on four seat backs. Rows of TV screens were suspended above them. They were permanently on, and there was no choice of programming. As it turned out, we would be treated to twelve straight hours of increasingly violent American films, their actors’ mismatched mouths earnestly spouting Portuguese. But the first one looked fairly innocuous. It was set in a Swiss ski resort. Snow in the Amazon.
The air conditioning was ferocious. I escaped into the open air of the back deck, where there were also bathrooms and a kitchenette with a two-burner stove. Two women cut vegetables into a boiling vat, which would turn into succulent spare rib soup for dinner. (You don’t find that on an airplane!) Taking the fast boat wasn’t cheap, $175 each, but it was worth it.
Soon after our departure, we cut away from the Rio Negro, up a narrow channel dredged through grass, a shortcut to the Rio Solimões. The water turned from brown tea to café au lait, “black water” to “white water.” Sediment from the Andes made the “white water” white, whereas the “black water” of the Rio Negro was fed by streams that were warmer and slower, so full of decomposing organic matter. The boat slowed to make the curves, honking to clear the few canoes in its path, like a cougar growling at mice.