Crossing the River: A Life in Brazil

by Amy Ragsdale

  We broke out into the Solimões, a river even vaster than the Rio Negro and certainly larger than any I’d seen in the United States. The Amazon is not the longest river in the world, but it is the largest in sheer volume of water. White water was mirrored in white sky, the land a thin pancake squeezed in between.

  We sped past occasional tugboats pushing their cumbersome loads: barges laden with pink logs, cars, trucks, a two-story warehouse. There are so few roads in the state of Amazonas that in most places, goods must be transported by river.

  Along much of our ride, the banks had been cleared for subsistence farming. The occasional small settlements had a few boxy houses on stilts, the first we’d seen in Brazil made out of wood. Their painted walls were fading; their window openings gaped black. The corrugated tin roofs looked dull. There were none of the bright colors and rambling verandas of the Northeast. An occasional cross on a steeple announced the presence of missionaries. A string of buzzards hunkered down on a fence next to a house. Dozens of them rimmed the village roofs. The buzzards were as common there as pigeons at home. Maybe such fertility also brings death.

  Every settlement had a rope swing, suspended from towering trees, which dangled dizzyingly over the river. At one village, a boy ran along the bank with our boat, making us feel like an event.

  I settled into a cushioned bench on the open back deck and watched the vast river stretch out behind us. Green banks curved together in the distance, narrowing to a point on the horizon where the river joined the sky. World traveler that he’d been, I didn’t think my dad had ever made it to the Amazon. He would have loved the adventure of it, the boat, the river, the towns along the way. We were here, in Brazil, because of him—because of a little money he’d left me, because of his confidence that one could figure out how to make one’s way in a strange place, because of his insatiable thirst for exploring the unknown, the different. That “different” that’s threatening to many was fascinating to him. It was January 19, two years to the day since he’d died.

  Thank you, Dad.

  I went back inside in time for lunch. It was served on seat-back tray tables. We were on to the third movie, an action film with Tom Cruise and Cameron Diaz, when the boat began to slow. Looking out the window, I could see a large warehouse-sized building with the word Açai painted on the side. Just before we’d left the United States, this Amazonian berry was making its highly touted appearance in health-food stores. I stepped back out into the warmth of the back deck. We were pulling up to a covered floating dock. It was surreal, jumping from Tom and Cameron drinking champagne in a five-star hotel in Salzburg to the mud banks of a river town on stilts in the jungle. Sometimes I wonder if our human brains are made to switch gears this rapidly.

  Pulling off the Solimões in a fast boat into the channel leading to Lake Tefé was like pulling off the interstate onto an exit ramp. The cougar lifted and settled its rear haunches into the water as it slowed to find a place to park—a formal slip or a slot of beach sand. Next to us, men were unloading a barge, by hand. Everything, in this region, was still unloaded by hand. That new van you ordered, or the fifteen-passenger motor boat, or that semitruck? Better find more than a few strong men.

  The next morning, Molly, Skyler, Peter, an Irishman, a young woman from San Francisco, and I stood on a wooden dock, waiting to hand our backpacks to the driver of a small motorboat.

  “Here, you can wear these,” Eduardo said, handing Peter a brace of green, camouflage-patterned life jackets.

  Eduardo and Bianca were from southern Brazil and spoke English. Young biology students, they would be our main guides for the next five days at the Mamirauá Reserve.

  The six of us stepped carefully into the aluminum boat. The driver backed it away from the dock, cruised slowly past a floating gas station, then shifted into high gear.

  We were headed farther up the Solimões River toward the Peruvian border and the floating bungalows of the Uakari Lodge. The trees along the banks were coated in vines, creating a fantastical, lumpy topiary of elephant trunks and wooly mammoths. A great egret stood, three feet tall, pure white, majestic against the curtain of green. This would be just one of hundreds. We would see trees festooned with them, like Christmas ornaments, delicate white question marks. We rounded a bend and flushed a flock of cormorants, though flock doesn’t quite describe what we were seeing. A spray of black was scattering in front of us, and scattering, and scattering, and scattering. Thousands of black cormorants leaving stuttering lines of white, as their webbed feet ran across the surface of the water.

  An hour and a half later, we docked. The Uakari Lodge floats gently at a bend in the Japurá River. Connected by a boardwalk were five thatched bungalows, a two-story central house, and some outbuildings, each on their own raft. In front of the central house, a square hole had been cut through the deck—a pool, in the river. A netted pool. We’d soon find out what we could have been swimming with had there not been that added protection.

  After a lunch of catfish, we headed out for a hike in the restinga. This is a forest classification that seems mostly to refer to level—low, medium, high—because different flora survive at different heights, as rivers in this area can rise up to twelve meters, the height of a four-story building, in the rainy season. This is why the region is called the várzea, or the “flooded forest.” For three or four months a year, people living along the banks are flooded out of their houses, even though they’re built on stilts. They retreat into “floaters,” cabins on rafts, just as the animals—the jaguars, monkeys, sloths—retreat into the trees. In those months, boats are the only way to get around.

  Breaking through the matted vines, we emerged into an open forest. There are up to three hundred different kinds of trees in that forest, and I couldn’t identify one of them. Looking up was like flipping through a leaf catalogue: huge and oblate, heart-shaped, frilly and fingered, pointed, rounded, ribbed, smooth, shiny, dull, some the size of a tire, and others so tiny it was like looking through green netting. Then there was the bark: the usual, plus trees sheathed in skins of peeling paper or suction-cup thorns or shaggy coats of long, needle-sharp prickers.

  The kapok is one of many towering trees with smooth, elephant-skin bark and buttressed roots. I kept flashing back to a black-and-white photo by Richard Avedon of a tall, slim woman in a body-hugging evening gown that flares in flutes around her feet. I was in a forest of giant Avedon women. But beware their elegance. Some are lethal. Like the assacu, whose seed drops onto the trunk of another tree and over time strangles and engulfs it.

  Francisco, our local guide, pointed out the trees used for medicine: sap to heal cut umbilical cords, or wood used to make tea to get rid of tapeworms. We heard how the jaguar ambushes the sloth. The jaguar knows the sloth poops only once a week and waits in a neighboring tree to pounce as soon as the sloth hits the ground. Other animals are happy to poop right out of the tree, like the red howler monkeys, who’ve wisely figured out the ground is a dangerous place. They like to sleep in certain trees so their scat is always under them, in the same place. We heard this a lot: the herons and egrets and cormorants settle in the tops of the same trees; the pirarucu fish lays its eggs in the same place. One began to understand the saying “creatures of habit.”

  It’s strange to see a wok-shaped hole in dry ground and be told that’s where a fish lays its eggs. But when you look almost forty feet up and see a clear line where the tree trunks turn from dark to light and are told that’s the water line, it makes more sense. Here, the animals, plants, and people need to be able to adapt to living on both land and water.

  One of the cooks at the lodge was missing a chunk out of his right cheek. He’d been fishing, in the high-water season, out of a canoe and had drifted under the branches of a tall tree, the wet-season home of a jaguar. The jaguar jumped him, hungry from weeks trapped in its branches. Both tumbled into the water. Luckily for the cook, the water was deep and the jaguar couldn’t dive, so the man got away, minus only part of hi
s face.

  While we saw lots of signs of animals, it wasn’t until we returned to the lodge that we started seeing the animals themselves. Peter and I sauntered out onto our bungalow porch and were stunned by the sight. On the way out for our post-lunch hike, we’d seen some cormorants heading downriver, but this was the Indy 500! Thousands of cormorants were now rounding the bend in a blur. One in the lead, no, now it’s dropping back . . . number 504 swinging to the outside, beginning to pass . . . is he going to make it? Yes! But now passing on the inside, number 712 gaining speed, passing one, two, three . . . Wow, pulled right out in front, but there’re more coming . . .five, six, twenty, a hundred, four hundred, a thousand. We stood transfixed.

  “Whoa! Did you hear that?” Skyler exclaimed from inside.

  “Yeah, sounds like a 250-pound man doing a cannonball,” Peter guessed.

  It was happening all around us, these great ka-thunks. Then we saw one; a huge, finned tail curled and lashed the surface of the water. The Loch Ness Monster: a pirarucu, the eight-foot-long fish, twice Skyler’s height, that we’d seen in the fish market in Manaus, the one whose scales were sold for fingernail files. It was coming up to breathe. In addition to gills, pirarucu have swim bladders, allowing them to extract oxygen from the air. This unusual adaptation to oxygen-poor-water conditions in the Amazonian floodplains would seem to be an advantage, but instead it required what appeared to be a thrashingly desperate act of survival every few minutes. They rose and thrashed like self-flagellating penitents all through the night. I couldn’t believe I’d made it to fifty-three without knowing that fish don’t sleep.

  But the ka-thunks weren’t the only strange sound. There was that low groan, that icy wind howling through cavernous medieval halls—red howler monkeys marking their territory. Their otherworldly roar became a regular part of the soundscape.

  We didn’t see the caimans until the next day, when they surrounded our shallow-sided canoe. Two nostrils were followed a foot away by two glassy eyes and then a strip of scaly back. The semi-submersion was part of what gave them their stealthy quality, but really I thought it was their glide, that pulseless swimming, the skimming silence of it. We went out again in a motorboat that night. In the dark, Eduardo scanned the river with a powerful flashlight, looking for obstacles in the water. The eyes of the caimans, those trench-coated undercover agents, glowed red.

  “I counted thirteen that time,” whispered Skyler.

  Despite this, the reserve is a tranquil place. A place where there is a lot of hunting going on—quiet, focused hunting. A lot of stalking, a lot of stillness. The anhinga paddles silently with webbed feet, then unexpectedly slides backward under the water, only to emerge somewhere else, golden neck first, actually only the neck, a pulsing, snake-like periscope. It is surprising to see how fast the caimans can cruise because more often they seem to be stopped, probably knowing it’s the motion that gives them away. The egrets ride, white, on electric-green floating meadows, still lives on a conveyor belt of tall grass.

  Between the hulking pirarucus, the diving anhingas, the plummeting kingfishers, the strafing large-billed terns, and the stealthily cruising caimans, being a small fish in the Amazon must be risky business. I wondered where we, as humans, fit into the hierarchy. Were we predators or prey? Clearly in this environment, we had the potential to be both. How much control did we really have?

  I yearned to sit in one of the hammocks on our porch and immerse myself in the quiet, but we had a schedule: up at six, out by seven, back by twelve, lunch, out at three, back by seven, dinner, after-dinner activity.

  When Bianca said the purpose of the night walk was to have a chance to “experience the night life,” I thought, Okay! Like party time in Salvador. Well, I didn’t really think that. There were no boomer cars or boom boxes; there wasn’t even a radio here, only Eduardo’s soothing guitar. Still, a walk in the soft jungle night sounded like fun until you heard the guide urgently hissing, “Muito venenoso.” It didn’t take any language skill to figure out what that meant when it was attached to “Cobra!” I was in the front, behind Francisco, the local guide, when he spotted the snake by the side of the path with his flashlight. I couldn’t really tell you what it looked like, since I was backing up rapidamente, as I’d been instructed to. He had that excited, tight sound in his voice that you didn’t question as he hissed its name, “Surucucu, surucucu!” Funny, that was the Brazilian name for the fer-de-lance, also known as the pit viper, also known as the most venomous snake in the Amazon, that we’d just been talking about, Molly and I.

  As we’d paddled our canoe earlier that afternoon, Almir, our guide, said offhandedly that he’d been bitten by pit vipers, twice that year. Could they really swim? Jump into a canoe? Climb trees, do double backflips . . . ? Okay, maybe our minds were getting a little carried away. Maybe we just couldn’t understand Almir’s Portuguese. Later, talking to Bianca, we sorted it out. It was the anaconda, another friendly local, that could climb trees and hop into your canoe. The surucucu just kills you. Almir had gotten the antivenom in time but had been unable to walk the first time—for a month. The snake’s venom had paralyzed his legs. When Francisco invited us to come forward for a look, I declined, unlike Molly, Skyler, and Peter.

  That morning, we’d visited a village down the river. A woman there had told us how she’d seen an anaconda, at the edge of the water, already fully wrapped around a calf, starting to constrict it. She’d dashed into the river to free it. Now, would that be your first instinct? The anaconda had bitten her (she showed us the marks) and then had been unable to extract its curved teeth from her arm. Her husband, seeing that she was in trouble, dashed into the water, too, and, having no knife, bit the snake. I know, it’s starting to sound like a tall tale. The calf lived.

  They all had stories like that. You started to believe them when you walked back to your bungalow after lunch and found a caiman—just a four-foot-long baby—sunning itself on the flotation logs of your cabin.

  Now, our night guide was shining his light into the base of a tree trunk. I’d dropped back safely into the middle of the pack. “Caranguejeira,” was whispered along the line. “Tem muitos nomes”—It has lots of names. It turned out tarantula was the one I recognized. By the time I got up to the tree, she had slid back into her white pocket of a house, only a few of her long, furry black legs still stuck out, yellow on the tips. She’d done her nails.

  Given that I was the child of a father who’d had a phobia for snakes and a mother with a phobia for spiders, this was not shaping up to be my kind of a stroll. I can’t tell you much about the canopy at night, or the symphonic sounds of insects, as my eyes and ears were pretty solidly focused—okay, glued—to the ground.

  We did, however, stop once to listen. And, in fact, the sounds were amazing. Like a percussion section, the cicadas played a steady blanket of sixteenth notes on high-pitched triangles; frogs, the washboard quarter notes; and toads, the low, belching whole note. An occasional rapid-fire rattle skimmed the surface. Here was a little of Salvador after all.

  Soon afterward, we spotted the lights of the lodge through the trees. I was happy to return to our floating boardwalk. I’d take the ka-thunks in the night anytime. But I was pleased, too, to have ventured into that other world, that Halloween night world of spiders and snakes, and to have had a small taste of what it might be like to live with, not just in fear of, those small creatures who are, after all, just defending themselves against those out to get them—the likes of us.

  We were sorry to leave. I recognized specific places along the channel now, the entrance through the matted vines where our first walk had started, the corner where we’d gone fishing for piranhas, the path up the muddy bank to the lily pond.

  We’d followed that path on our third hike when it had rained. Our guide had pulled us into a shelter of slender walls made by kapok roots and asked, “Who knows a joke?” in Portuguese, of course. Instantly, Skyler delivered several. Who knew that dumb-blond jokes would translate
in a place where everyone’s hair was black? It was then that I realized Skyler could really speak Portuguese!

  How, without any concerted study of grammar, could he now conjugate verbs, when I still had to stop, think, translate, and envision the dictionary in order to tentatively venture forth with a possible verb ending, all the while wondering whether I’d really managed to select the -er and not the -ar or -ir verb, and the simple past, not the pluperfect? I guessed that was the difference between learning on the hoof—running with friends for hours every day—versus studying a textbook.

  Now, as we sped through the green-walled channel, I could name most of the birdlife and recognized the knobbly bits of log that were actually caimans. I’ve always wondered why just the act of being able to label things is so pleasurable to me. It seems to help me see, as though I don’t see things I can’t name, or maybe just don’t pay attention until I can.

  The boat was now moving so fast that the air was pulling the spittle right out of my mouth. We passed a few small settlements, where the Ribeirinhos, river people sometimes generically referred to as the caboclo, live. They were descended from the mixing of indigenous Indians and northeastern Brazilians. The northeasterners had come here to find jobs a hundred years earlier, during the rubber boom.

  Back in Tefé, the Irishman flew out, but the young woman from San Francisco was scheduled to spend a few more days in town like us. She was waiting for the “slow boat” to Manaus, while we gambled on getting onto a mail plane to São Gabriel da Cachoeira. Before she’d come to Brazil, she’d been camping in an abandoned cabin in the Columbian jungle, so she was clearly a toughened traveler. Even so, she was now rethinking her choice to take the slow boat. They were notorious for long lines outside bathrooms that made you gag, jammed sleeping quarters (hammocks packed elbow to elbow), and gut-twisting food. She was thinking she might switch to the fast.

  Perhaps she was reaching that line that Peter and I had reached some years before, when you start to think, Maybe I don’t have to go totally native to be a “real traveler.” Maybe I don’t have to sleep on hard floors, sample all the local semi-edibles, tramp barefoot through microbe-laden mud, and pick up all the local bugs. At some point, it loses its romance.