Road fever : a high-speed travelogue

by Cahill, Tim

  In addition, clearing the forest has seldom proved profitable. The soil itself—battered by heat and constant rain—is poorer than many deserts. Rain rinses the soil of organic materials so that only the first few inches are fertile. In the Amazon, plants recycle up to 75 percent of their nutrient requirements: dead foliage dropping to the ground rots and is reabsorbed rapidly.

  The astounding variety of plant life is, ironically, an indication of the poverty of the soil. Each plant has slightly different nutritional needs, and there may be a hundred different types of trees in a single acre. A single type of tree, grown in a plantation, will quickly deplete the soil of needed nutrients. The trees will die.

  Traditional slash-and-burn agriculture will produce good crops for a couple of years, then the thin sandy desert that is the floor of the

  Amazon basin will assert itself. These failed farms, the failed cattle ranches, do not regenerate. They leave a baking red-dust desert.

  And still the forest is cut and burned.

  "People need jobs," a U.S.-educated Brazilian businessman once told me. We were seatmates on a flight that took us across three thousand miles of jungle. "Look," he said and glanced down into the limitless sea of foliage. "How could we even begin to affect that, cutting down a few trees?"

  "That's what we said in the United States. We said it about the buffalo. About the passenger pigeon."

  "What's a passenger pigeon 9 "

  "It's a bird. Flights of them used to darken the sky at noon. There was no way you could kill them all. Anyone could see that."

  "I never heard of them."

  "They're extinct."

  "So you don't have any buffalo, and you don't . . ."

  "There's some buffalo."

  "But none of those pigeons?"

  "Not a one."

  "But you have progress. You have prosperity."

  "We lost something of our soul, don't you think?" This is always a telling argument in South America, where a gringo is forever hearing about the great soul of Peru or Brazil or Ecuador in contrast to the supposedly spiritually barren life of the typical North American. "The great soul of Brazil," I said, "encompasses the forest. And the forest encompasses the soul of Brazil."

  The man glanced down at the jungle. "Personally," he said, "I love the forest. But if it's a matter of pigeons or prosperity . . ."

  There was prosperity in the Amazon once, specifically in the city of Manaus, the capital of Amazonas, the largest state in Brazil. This river port on the Rio Negro, about seven miles from its influx into the Amazon River, is the trading capital of a vast area. The rivers are the trade routes and there are one thousand known tributaries of the Amazon, seven of which are more than a thousand miles long. The Amazon basin encompasses the greater part of Brazil, as well as parts of Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia.

  Manaus is about nine hundred miles from the Atlantic coast, one thousand miles if you sail up the Amazon. In 1902 the town built floating wharves to allow for the fifty-foot rise and fall of the river.

  The Spanish explorer Francisco de Orellana, a conquistador with Pizarro during the conquest of Peru (1535), passed near the site of present-day Manaus in 1541 during a crazed voyage down the Amazon, a desperate descent of this world's largest river forced on him after he failed to find a city of gold in the Andean highlands. Lost, ill, out of provisions, de Orellana and his men fashioned a raft. They were two hundred miles from the Pacific Ocean, but they had to fight their way back up jungled foothills, back up over the Andes, and this eastward running river would surely take them somewhere. It would be easier than going back the way they came.

  De Orellana rode the river four thousand miles—he saw monkeys, bats, rodents, toucans, parrots, cayman 'a kind of South American alligator), anacondas, strange endemic beetles, butterflies, wasps, and mosquitoes—to its mouth in the Atlantic, where the river is 150 miles wide.

  The history Europeans and North Americans have written for themselves suggests that it was de Orellana who first realized the riches and extent of the Amazon basin. The Andes Mountains, a series of high plateaus surrounded by higher peaks 'Aconcagua in Argentina rises to 22,834 feet, the highest peak in the Western Hemisphere), stretch 5,500 miles from the tip of South America to to the continent's northernmost coast on the Caribbean. The mountains run generally north and south. For most of its length, the Andean chain of mountains is visible from the Pacific Ocean. In some places, the continental divide is no more than fifty miles from the Pacific coast. The great rivers of South America, then, run east, almost all of them. It is estimated that 20 percent of all the water that runs off the earth's surface is carried by the Amazon. One hundred seventy billion gallons of water are discharged into the Atlantic every hour, about ten times the amount carried by the Mississippi.

  De Orellana, perhaps crazed by hardship and the constant death of his men, still managed to sail to Trinidad and finally returned to Spain, where he spun tales of gold and spices and fierce tribes led by women who reminded him of the Amazons of Greek mythology. De Orellana was granted the right to explore and exploit the basin of this river of Amazons. He returned to South America in 1546 and, near the mouth of the great river, his ship sank and de Orellana drowned. The great mass of water in the Amazon turns seawater brackish to one hundred miles. De Orellana's last breath was filled with the brackish water of the river he named.

  Outside Manaus, there are great trees 125 feet high, huge trees with smooth white bark and silvery leaves, "trees that weep." At about the same time gold was discovered in Montana, borracha. a kind of foul-smelling gum derived from the "tears" of the trees, became the "black gold" of Manaus. For centuries Indians had decorated their ears or lips with tubes and disks made from cachucho, the wood which wept.

  Columbus had described this substance on his second voyage to the New World. In 1495 he watched Indians in Haiti play with balls made from the gum of a tree. Some of the stuff eventually got back to Europe. The English found that it could be rubbed over paper to eradicate pen and pencil marks. Such a device was called a rubber. The name caught on: the substance itself became known as rubber.

  Amazonian Indians also brushed the gum on their clothes as protection from the rain. The waterproofing was effective. The clothes, however, were also sticky, brittle, and odorous. In 1820, a Scottish chemist named Charles Macintosh placed a solution of rubber and naphtha between two fabrics to create rainwear that did not stick, smell, or crack. British people, to this day, describe any double-textured waterproof coat as a mackintosh.

  It was, however, the American inventor Charles Goodyear's work which created the boggling phenomenon that was Manaus in the 1890s. Rubber tends to harden in the cold, soften in the heat. In 1839, Goodyear invented a curing process that came to be called vulcanization. This new form of rubber could be used in machines, especially as drive belts. Previously, these belts had been made from cured buffalo hide, but by 1890 there were virtually no buffalo left in Montana or the rest of the United States. At the same time, the rise of steam and electric power brought a huge demand for proper belt material: rubber. And in 1888 John Dunlop—Goodyear and Dunlop: old tired names—patented a pneumatic tire for bicycles and tricycles.

  What these events meant to Manaus was money. The rubber boom of 1890 to 1920 made Manaus arguably the richest city in the world.

  The rubber was collected by men who lived alone in the jungle, seringueiros. They worked as many as two hundred trees separated by swamp and twisted foliage, for trees in the Amazon cannot grow in groves. The men walked over trails that needed clearing every few days. Gashes were made in the trees, the sap was collected in ceramic pots, then cooked over an open fire in a copper pot. Stirred with a wooden spoon, the pots would, after days, yield up a hard, black, foul-smelling ball weighing perhaps forty pounds: borracha. When the

  seringueiro had thirty such balls—they might take months to accumulate—he carried them to the river, loaded them into a boat, and paddled them to Manaus, where they were purc
hased by a "patron."

  The French writer Lucien Bodard described the riches of the rubber barons, the madness of Manaus, circa 1895:

  Manaus, the metropolis, was the Babylon, the Sodom, and Paris of the borracha, all in one. ... A throbbing distracted city of inequable wealth, of extraordinary luxury in the splendors of its vulgarity. Manaus flung its rubber out onto the world and received in return countless billions and all the treasures of bad taste. Steamships from Anvers, from London, and Le Havre made fast mid-river in the Rio Negro to floating docks.... Diamonds twinkling on every finger.... Brothels everywhere. Mean brothels, splendid brothels, the most beautiful brothels in the world with the girls from the rue Saint-Denis at a premium.

  It was symbolic; the jungle was not far away, but what people saw was a temple of glazed tile, bushes pruned like wedding cakes in the flowerbeds. . . . There were almost as many palaces as brothels: brand-new palaces in all the ancient styles—Gothic a la Versailles, Venetian, Buckingham Palace. . . . There was a whole population of flunkies and ladies' maids who knew how to flatter their mistresses, most of whom were former shrill-voiced whores. Men sent their shirts to London to be ironed.

  A new cathedral was built. A court of law. Men competed to construct finer, more baroque or rococo castles in the land of the weeping trees.

  When the opera house, the Teatro Amazonas, opened in 1896, Enrico Caruso sang for the assembled rubber barons. The greatest actors and singers and dancers in the world sailed a thousand miles upriver to perform under the four white Italian marble balconies. Sarah Bernhardt. Pavlova.

  And then, in 1920, the boom was over. Rubber trees grew in the Amazon and nowhere else, though there seemed to be no reason why the great trees could not be cultivated anywhere ten degrees north or south of the equator, provided the climate was warm and humid with heavy spring rains. The billionaires of Manaus, the men who simply made their living in the forest, the brothel owners, law-enforcement officials, everyone agreed: the seeds of the rubber trees must remain in Brazil. Seed smugglers were executed. Foreigners were followed, everywhere.

  Nevertheless, in 1877, an Englishman named Henry A. Wickham,

  an explorer and hunter who was trekking the jungle supposedly in search of certain rare orchids, managed to smuggle 2,400 seeds out of the jungle. In the springtime flood, when the river rose fifty feet and inundated the land, when the Brazilians agreed that a man in the jungle would die, Wickham collected his seeds and—"taken by surprise on the plain by the rapidity of the flood"—walked and swam "desperately towards high land that I saw on the horizon."

  He was rescued by an English trawler carrying scrap iron. To this day, Brazilians find the "rescue" so highly providential as to be planned. The seeds were hidden at the bottom of cargo boxes, and the trawler made its way down the river to the final port of Belem, where— it is said—certain hands were greased.

  The seeds eventually ended up in the richer soil of Malaysia, and the trees were grown in groves, row upon row of them, so that the latex was easier and more efficient to harvest. It took thirty years before the trees were ready, but when they were, rubber bought out of Singapore was cheaper than rubber from the Amazon.

  The grand palaces fell into disrepair, the opera house became a town meeting hall. It would be tempting to report that today the opera house stands abandoned and that monkeys swing from the white marble balconies. In fact, during the Second World War, when Japan conquered much of Malaysia, rubber from Brazil again became valuable. There was a minor boom.

  Today, Manaus is now a major inland port, a collecting and distribution center for the upper Amazon. Principal exports are rubber, Brazil nuts, rosewood oil, and jute, the material used to make coffee sacks. Industries include brewing and oil refining (the oil is from Peru and barged downriver). This town of 1.2 million in the heart of the Amazon jungle makes electronic equipment, motorcycles, plywood sheets, and—this is not entirely a surprise—refrigerators. Tourism is a growing industry and there are botanic and zoological gardens, and a natural jungle park on the outskirts. It is the headquarters of the National Institute for Amazon Research and has both a university and a leprosarium.

  It is also a town where smuggling is not unheard of; where officials, remembering the lessons of 1877, are likely to look unfavorably upon foreigners with little good reason to be in the country. Even comparatively innocent persons, such as myself, have reason to be apprehensive if they have no visa.

  As we taxied into the cargo terminal, I saw a ruined 707 off to the side of the runway. The on-board mechanic told me that the plane had come down on an incorrect runway, and sheared off part of a wing by plowing into a semi-truck. The Brazilians had simply towed the plane off the tarmac. It would never be airworthy again. There was a scaifold that was little more than a series of stepladders erected against the plane. The insides had been stripped. It was a metal shell slowly going to rust in the humid heat of the Amazon. It sat against a red mud bank, and over the years this shell of a plane would become the color of the Amazon mud. "I don't think that's real good for their tourist trade," the pilot said.

  I went down into the cargo hold and looked at the truck. Workers were moving some gear. Two of them simply pushed the truck on its rollered pallet to a different position using mechanized rubber wheels. Moving the nine-thousand-pound truck seemed to cost them almost no effort at all. With the cargo in the hold and the cabin unpartitioned by compartments as passenger flights are, the interior of the plane looked huge. The pilot, a sandy-haired fellow who had come down to look at the truck, said, "Sorta like the Holland Tunnel in here, isn't it?"

  I got into the truck and crouched down in the passenger seat. The pilot leaned into the window and stared at me.

  "What are you doing?"

  "I'm afraid someone is going to ask me for my visa."

  "You don't have one?"

  "Not for Brazil."

  "I don't think you'll have a problem."

  "But I could have one, right?"

  "It's possible."

  "I'll stay here."

  "And hide?"

  "Yes."

  "Then maybe it isn't such a good idea for me to stand here talking to you. If you're hiding."

  "Right."

  "It's going to be hot."

  A team of men moved the insecticide out of the plane. It would be used in those areas where the trees, the lungs of the planet, had been cleared. Slash, burn, then pour a 747 full of insecticide on that land so that the poisons can be washed down the river and flow out into the

  ocean, along with twenty percent of the freshwater on the face of the earth.

  After the drums of insecticide were off-loaded, electronic equipment manufactured in Manaus was stacked on pallets around the truck. Parts made in the United States or Japan were assembled here in the Amazon jungle and sold in Argentina.

  We, Garry and I, had decided against coming up through the Amazon. The road past Kilometro 85 was now paved, but the rising cost of petroleum, a major component of asphalt, had defeated plans for paving many of the roads that crossed Brazil's lowland jungles. Instead, we would drive that narrow strip of desert between the Andes and the Pacific. The Pan-American Highway.

  It was sweltering inside the plane, hotter still inside the truck, and the special racing seats were not made for slouching with the head below window level. I went through the papers in our document case to pass the time. There was a six-page letter Garry wrote to GMC entitled "Progress Report #5, Pan-American Challenge." The letter was a report on our recces and conclusions, and formed the basis of our master plan. In essence, what the letter said was that we had decided to go all out, do the drive in under twenty-six days, forgo press conferences along the way, and change the look of the truck. The road through Brazil—the most scenic and difficult route—would be abandoned.

  Since my meeting with various associations in northern South America, [Garry wrote] I have been receiving warnings and signals to forget the transit of the Amazon area. Apparently, wh
en the dry season is north of the Amazon, the wet season is in the southern area and vice versa. We have reports of one road of about 1,000 kms that takes up to ten days in the dry season. North of Manaus the road is not much better, so aside from the delays involved in taking the Brazil route, there would be very difficult terrain for the truck, coupled with virtually no service support for thousands of miles. In a nutshell, we are going to forget the Amazon route and stick to our original mandate of obtaining the best possible time for the record by heading up the west coast of South America.

  As for security, especially in regard to Central America, Garry wrote that

  we have heard of a number of cases where people have safely transited this area in recent months. However, I am concerned with the conse-

  quences of the many . . . guerrilla groups, etc., knowing our route. For this reason, and the very real threat of kidnapping or attack, I think we should consider a press blackout until we have at least reached Mexico City. There are other advantages in that if, for some reason, problems with the vehicle interfere with the success of the project, then GMC will not be out on a limb with a lot of advance publicity. Also, we will not be hampered with making a number of untimely stops for press conferences while en route through South and Central America. Essentially I feel we would be able to make the best possible time through the areas where there are few advantages and many disadvantages in gaining exposure.

  Garry wrote that we had learned of an unpublicized, self-financed drive from Prudhoe Bay to Tierra del Fuego in twenty-six days. "Although the forty-day time period had been discussed, this was in the event we took the Amazon basin route." We would be shooting for twenty-five days or less. "With this approach to the project, there are a few changes to the project vehicle which would alter the image of the truck somewhat from an expedition vehicle to a very serious road machine."