by Amy Ragsdale
32
On Maintaining Respect
PETER HAD MAJORED in anthropology in college, and one of the classes that stuck with him, forty years later, was the one about the Yanomami. It stunned the world that there existed a people living totally detached from modern life as late as the 1950s, when these people, upriver in the Amazon, came into the public eye. Peter had read a book he still remembered, by a French anthropologist, titled Yanomamo: The Fierce People, which described the ritualized violence they used to settle disputes.
“In my youth, it was a benchmark tribe for exoticism,” he’d told me. Perhaps this had been the beginning of Peter’s lifelong motivation to go places and meet people before it was “too late,” the birth of his fear that the worlds’ cultures would become so homogenized that they would no longer be distinct.
When we decided to go to the Amazon for the kids’ school break, there were two things we wanted to do—see animals and meet people, particularly the Yanomami. The first had been easy, with a guide to help us spot them. We knew the second would be hard. Perhaps surprisingly to some, the Yanomami, and many other Amazonian tribes, are not clamoring at the gate to get into this world of ours. Rather, they’re slamming it shut to keep us, and our ways, out. We would need permission to visit, and that meant bureaucracy. Bureaucracy was not fast and not cheap. But we had wanted to try and had heard that São Gabriel da Cachoeira would be a good base of operations.
The Amazon River runs basically west to east, dropping out of the Andes Mountains and emptying into the Atlantic Ocean. Many tributaries feed into it, but ultimately, two main rivers emerge, the Rio Negro and the Solimões, like the two parallel arms of a tuning fork lying on its side. They join just east of Manaus to make what we call the Amazon. São Gabriel and Manaus are both on the north fork, the Rio Negro. In Tefé, we were on the southern fork, but we were now about to fly even farther west and back north up to São Gabriel.
There were nine possible passenger seats on the mail plane. It flew on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Today was Tuesday. We’d been told our chances of getting on were good. Most of the mail was flying downriver to bigger population centers, not upriver to smaller ones, so they’d probably have room to leave some seats. We were getting to the end of the river road. A little farther, and we’d be in Venezuela.
I didn’t realize what hermetic environments U.S. airports and planes were until we got on this little Cessna. There were as many flies as passengers. How do we have no flies on our planes? Hunched over, I squeezed through the boxes and slid sideways down the narrow aisle, past two swarthy, barrel-chested men; past a family of three, the young boy on the grandmother’s lap; past Molly and Skyler. I was the last one on, so I was going to have to forgo my pledge to always sit in the back (something I’d done ever since I’d heard your chance of surviving a crash was better in the back). I imagined if this plane went down, there wouldn’t be a lot of difference between the front and the back anyway. There was no one telling us to fasten our seat belts, no preflight demonstrations of oxygen masks and flotation cushions, no two-fingered pointing to the exits. They just piled the boxes of mail in the back, loose—no cargo netting to keep it from decapitating us when we landed. Then the two pilots climbed in front of Peter and me, and we bobbed down the runway. It felt rather jaunty.
The electronic map on the dash reoriented as we turned around and pointed ourselves west, farther up the Solimões River. I watched the dashboard instruments and realized everything was in English. There were explicit directions about weight load and something blinking red that said Advisory. The speedometer climbed to one hundred knots, and we lifted off. We were leaving Tefé, with its jumbled collection of wooden shacks on stilts rising up the high bank above Tefé Lake, like a wall of shingles in muted pastels.
We looked down at a mat of green, a vast flattened head of broccoli, cut by a milky brown ribbon. Cloud wisps spiraled out between the florets. Then we were engulfed in cloud altogether. I was enjoying that feeling of driving through the clouds, cutting between these two cumuli and banking right at that next one. Then I looked over and noticed the pilot. The older of the two was reading the paper. I craned around the other’s seat back. Okay, good, his hands were on the wheel. The altimeter was at 6,500 feet. I went back to the clouds. When I looked again, the older pilot was asleep.
Two hours later, we were landing at a one-runway airport. The only hint of human life we’d seen while flying had been Fonte Boa, a square hacked out of the jungle with identical, tin-roofed houses plopped down in orderly rows, and then a tiny settlement of half a dozen cabins on a small, muddy lake. I expected they didn’t just zip down to the grocery when they forgot a carton of milk. In fact, I expected they didn’t zip anywhere. How did they even get there? I hadn’t noticed a river; there had been only one runway, back at Fonte Boa, and no roads. Not one road, visible from the air, in all those trees. Back in Penedo, the kids’ school director, Irma Francisca, had called the Amazon “os pulmões do mundo”—the lungs of the world. Over 50 percent of the world’s rainforest was there, in that one area. It was like an ocean of breathing.
It was heartening to see the forest looking so healthy. The devastating deforestation we’d been hearing about in the States had not taken place there in the state of Amazonas, but in the neighboring state of Roraima, where in the 1980s they were cutting two and a half acres, the equivalent of two football fields, every five seconds—death sweeping through with an enormous scythe. Hard even to imagine the mechanics of it.
We sauntered over to the one taxi that sat beyond the airport building. As in Tefé, the evangelicals had been active here. On the side of our cab was written, 100% Jesus.
São Gabriel da Cachoeira was immediately more appealing than motorcycle-and buzzard-ridden Tefé. Despite being smack on the equator, it felt cooler, perhaps because there was a little contour. Hills reclined blue in the distance. As in Manaus, we were once again on the Rio Negro. São Gabriel’s waterfront bordered tea-colored rapids swirling around worn boulders and small islands. The view was stunning. Immediately I was struck by the leafy softness and the calm.
Driving up the hill away from the river, we checked into the Hotel Deus Me Deu—Hotel God Gave Me. The hotel, on a second floor above the one-street business district, was a welcome change from the steamy hostels where we’d been staying. The white, convent-like corridors of Deus Me Deu, with their crisp lines of dark wood doors, offered a kind of antiseptic quiet and privacy I was ready for.
We were moving into more and more indigenous territory; the census listed São Gabriel as 90 percent Indian. It was proving to be far more cosmopolitan than we’d expected. We headed out in search of lunch and found a delicious “self-serve” with freshly prepared beef filet in a sauce of onions and carrots, chicken cordon bleu, and grilled fish. A slender woman, sitting kitty-corner from us, with perfect teeth, pinstriped pants, and red patent-leather pumps was clearly as curious about us as we were about her. She was married to someone in the army, she told us, in halting English, and was up from Rio de Janeiro for the week. This must explain who the clientele was for the amazing video store under our hotel. We’d passed the army base on the way in from the airport, the base that patrolled Brazil’s borders with Venezuela and Columbia, a job fraught with drug trafficking and touchy tribes in tangled jungle. A good DVD might be just the break these soldiers needed.
The video store was unlike any we’d seen in our state of Alagoas, but here it was, over 1,500 miles up the Amazon River. It had a DVD selection as extensive as Hastings or Borders at home, in both Portuguese and English, and it had books, for rent. There weren’t many, and nothing in English, but it was still a bookstore, more than we had in Penedo. It was an interesting collection: lots of Christian theology, but also the Who Was series—Who was Darwin? Who was Einstein? Who was Leonardo da Vinci? There were also a number of books that had been popular in the states: The Da Vinci Code, Marley & Me, the Lightning Thief series, plus Eldest and Brisingr. After lunch, Molly
and Skyler combed the DVD aisles, settled on Zoolander and the TV series Lost, and put them away in their bedroom for an after-dinner treat.
It wasn’t hard to imagine why the Yanomami didn’t relish people coming to look at them, like curiosities in a zoo. I realized a big reason I travel, however, is to look at people, or rather at how they live.
“I think maybe it’s about respect,” Molly had said once. Respect can change the nature of a visit to an unfamiliar culture from being like going to see a circus freak into a healthy curiosity about difference. We had found, in Penedo, that this was a two-way street. We were looking at them. And they were definitely looking at us.
The next morning, we were sitting at the long, family-style table at Deus Me Deu when Sucy strode briskly into the breakfast room. Sucy was the man Peter had contacted at Instituto Socioambiental, a local nonprofit that advocates for the rights of indigenous peoples in the Upper Rio Negro.
“I have the man for you,” he said in Portuguese. “He knows everything here. He knows everybody, and he speaks English!”
He nodded to the short leprechaunish man with flaring ears, twinkling eyes, and a lot of missing teeth who had followed him in.
“This is Valdir. He will be your guide.”
At sixty-seven, Valdir was sprightly and liked to talk. He was full of stories, starting with his own. He was the son of a woman from the Macuxi tribe and a Portuguese worker who’d jumped ship and “gone native.” A missionary family had come from California when Valdir was nine, and he’d befriended their kids. Two years later, when the family was leaving, he wanted to go along.
“I begged to go wit’ them, wit’ my friends, so my fadder say, okay,” Valdir told us. But when he arrived in California, instead of living with the family, he was put in a school. It had a high fence and was surrounded by guards. “Santa Maria it called. I cry and I cry.” He screwed the knobs of his fists into his eyes. He hadn’t been allowed to go home. “I was nine years, tere.”
Now he speaks English, German, Spanish, Portuguese, and Yanomami, and he doesn’t have much good to say about missionaries.
The bureaucracy was starting to roll. But we needed to get permission to visit from the Fundação Nacional do Indio, or FUNAI, the Brazilian government’s department of Indian affairs, as well as from the Yanomami themselves. Approximately thirty-two thousand Yanomami live on the border of Brazil and Venezuela. They’re the largest still relatively isolated tribe in South America, residing in approximately 250 independent villages, scattered deep in the jungle.
“Berto, he can help us,” Valdir said, full of confidence, his head cocked to one side, speaking of the son of a Yanomami headman. “I know him.” Valdir had occasionally taken other westerners to Berto’s village before, usually mountain climbers trekking to Pico da Neblina.
Berto showed up the morning of our third day in São Gabriel, in his Yanomami headman’s son’s garb: board shorts and a muscle shirt. It turned out he was living in São Gabriel studying to be a dentist. This was the first clue that we were about to enter a remarkably complicated, multilayered world.
“We can go today, if the final permission comes through,” he told us in Portuguese. “But don’t buy anything until we know for sure.”
We’d been told we could have a lot to buy, about $2,000 worth. If we were given the permit, we’d begin the delicate matter of negotiating gifts for the tribe. Very specific gifts: fifty-three gallons of diesel for the electrical generators, eight gallons of oil, eighty gallons of gas for the motorized canoe to get us there, and four and a half pounds of bulk tobacco. (Everyone chewed, both men and women.) Plus there was payment for guides and transport. Our “ticket in” wasn’t cheap, and it turned out we almost weren’t able to buy it.
Valdir and Peter sat down to compile a list of the things we would need for ourselves: hammocks, ropes, blankets, mosquito nets, rain boots, rain jackets, food. At eleven, the permissions came through; stores would close for lunch at twelve. Berto said we should leave São Gabriel for the village at one. The journey would require two hours by truck and five by canoe. We jumped into action. I went for the dry goods, Peter and Valdir went for food, Molly and Skyler went for take-out lunch. By one, we were ready. At two, we were still there. At three, Valdir arrived to say he’d found the truck driver at work on his broken-down engine.
But he’d engaged another driver, whose nickname was Coelho, or “Rabbit,” who rumbled up soon after in an old blue jalopy, coated in orange road dust.
“Not a coelho,” Valdir joked.
The truck looked as though it might rattle apart. Peter and I climbed onto the cracked leather seats of the cab, and Berto, Valdir, and the kids pulled themselves over the wooden rails to stand in back, with a bed full of empty plastic barrels. Berto was accompanying us as far as the gas pumps. We filled the barrels. The station attendant, in her tight jeans and pink Dolce & Gabbana T-shirt, ran our card. It didn’t clear. Nor did the next card, or the next, or the next. The truck stood pregnant with one hundred and thirty gallons of gas. We needed to come up with the money, $1,000, in cash.
I ran to tell the kids, still standing among the cans and barrels, that we were going to catch a taxi to the bank and try our luck with the ATMs there. Months before, we might have thought twice about leaving our kids with strangers, in a strange city, in a strange country. But we’d come to trust our intuition about people and places. There didn’t seem to be anything threatening about this one.
Finally, one card gave us enough cash. Berto had never seemed worried. For the most part, people there didn’t look worried. They were patient. They were used to waiting. They didn’t curse and twitch and pace, the way we did in the States. Combined with the cash we already had, we pulled together enough, but it left us with almost nothing. This made us uneasy. You never knew when you might need to buy your way out of a fix.
We finally waved good-bye to Berto and left. It was four.
It took Coelho more than two hours to suck his way through the orange gumbo of the dirt road, that orange road that creeps through jungles all over the world. Peter and I had seen them in Ghana, Mozambique, Indonesia. Another truck was installing electric poles, and despite being a fancy Volkswagen, it wasn’t equipped for the job. (We stopped to tug it out of the slurping goo.) We, on the other hand, in our rattletrap blue Toyota Bandeirante, motored steadily along like an animal perfectly adapted to the climate. Back on the truck bed, the kids weathered the wind and a burst of pounding rain. Their soaked clothes had nearly dried when the truck finally jolted to a stop, swung around, and backed down a muddy landing. It was almost dark.
We were in a clearing in the Amazon forest. A small creek seeped through a gloomy tunnel of tangled vines and branches. Molly and Skyler jumped down, and Peter and I spilled out of the cab. Down in the slough, two men lounged in a thirty-foot-long aluminum canoe, mounted with a forty-horsepower Yamaha motor. Although night was falling fast, nobody rushed.
“Seu nome?” Peter asked, as one of the men waded ashore and they shook hands. He had a lithe, athletic build and a soft smile.
“Anderson,” he replied, pronouncing it Ahn-deh-sohn.
It was not a name I’d pick for a Yanomami—for a son of the headman of one of the Amazon’s most traditional and famously fierce tribes. But I’d found in Brazil first names seemed to be as easily, and randomly, imported as T-shirts. He was Berto’s brother.
While I was off using the bushes, Orlando, the other boatman; Coelho, the truck driver; and Anderson somehow managed to roll the barrels of oil and gas we’d brought—one thousand and forty pounds worth—out of the truck and into the canoe. It sat unnervingly low in the water. Valdir, the two boatmen, Peter, the kids, and I climbed in carefully. We said good-bye to Coelho. I didn’t envy him the trip back through the gumbo in the dark.
Anderson pulled the starter. We slipped quietly into the channel. I felt like Nancy Drew in the Florida Everglades.
As we twisted down the narrow creek, Orlando sat facing for
ward, straddling the bow. He swung a flashlight beam from side to side. Was he looking for caiman eyes? Sunken logs? Both?
“Em baixa! Em baixa!” Anderson shouted. “Get down! Get down!”
We ducked under a thick, overhanging branch just as Anderson gunned the motor and rammed the boat over a fallen tree, deftly lifting the Yamaha to clear the propeller at the last minute. Anderson did this run a lot, anytime anyone in his village wanted to go grocery shopping.
No one spoke. At every bend of the creek, the boat rocked sideways nearly to its gunnels. Lightning flickered. It was going to be miserable if it rained. But for the present, I felt totally relaxed, almost elated.
We snaked our way into larger and larger channels. By the third one, Valdir, Molly, and Skyler had wrapped themselves in a tarp on the wooden floor of the boat to sleep. Peter and I sat in back with Anderson, our hair streaming in the wind, and stared into the blackness, into the backs of our minds. It occurred to me that when you travel, you often put yourself in the hands of people you barely know. We were in an overloaded boat—at night, on a small creek in the Amazonian jungle, going somewhere toward the Venezuelan border—with our children and two men we’d just met and one we’d known for a day. The only people who had any idea where we were, and then only in the most general terms, were Peter’s and my mothers in the United States.
I’ve always loved that feeling of speeding in the wind in fast boats, and there, in the dark, I came the closest I ever had to flying. Peter had taught me that when white-water canoeing, I should look for the V in the water, the place where the bulk of the water squeezed through the rocks in a rapid. Here, Anderson was looking up for that narrow slot through towering trees, that V in the sky whose point kept bending right, then left, then right as the tangled banks twisted their distant nose, leading us farther in. In the slit of sky, furrows of cloud lighted by the moon separated, and there was Orion! Upside down. It was comforting somehow, to have one of our own up there, a constellation I recognized. Eventually, Peter and I, too, lay down, squeezed in between the gunnels and gas cans. My nose was inches from the stream of white water that split from the bow, giant catfish whiskers. It spattered like distant applause.