by Joe Kane
The Amazon proper begins about five miles below Manaus, at the confluence of the Negro and Solimões rivers. In volume the Negro is not only the Amazon’s largest tributary but the sixth-largest river in the world, with a discharge four times that of the Mississippi. Where it collides with the Solimões the water boils with whirlpools and reflected waves. The silt-rich Solimões is tawny, the Negro coal black; the two rivers roll along side by side for almost six miles before their waters mix.
This spectacle, known as “The Meeting of the Waters,” may well be the most impressive natural display in the Amazon basin. Yet recently, on its left bank, the Brazilian government began construction of a cement plant. The project typifies what is happening to the Amazon. Like the Solimões, the Amazon courses through a floodplain, or várzea, but the growth along the banks of the Amazon is grassier, lower, and less dense. To a limited degree this is natural; to a larger degree it is the work of man. Between Manaus and the sea, a distance of over a thousand miles, there is no virgin jungle along the water. Every foot of riverbank foliage has been cut down or burned at least once.
The bush that one does see along the Amazon is what biologists call “modified” growth. Some 25 percent of the entire Amazon basin now consists of such modified forest, with the destruction heaviest along the rivers. “Destruction” is the right word—modified forest harbors but a fraction of the species found in primary forest. In the Amazon, the dimensions of this loss are staggering. Though man has identified some 1.5 million species on the entire planet, there may be three times that many undiscovered in the Amazon basin alone.
This destruction has many roots, but in recent years the main one has been cattle ranching, which is now the most important agricultural activity in the basin. Converting rain forest to pastureland is deceptively pernicious. The forest’s fertility is in its canopy and its floodwaters, not its soil, which tends to be poor. Once denuded of forest cover, the soil quickly bakes hard. Virtually every cattle ranch established in the basin prior to 1978 had been abandoned by 1983. In the eastern half of the state of Pará, which begins about three hundred miles downriver from Manaus, thousands of acres that were once rich rain forest are now uninhabitable desert.
It is difficult to determine how much of the Amazonian rain forest has already been destroyed, but it is generally believed that 15 to 20 percent has disappeared in the last twenty years alone. And there seems to be agreement on another point: The rate at which the forest is being destroyed is increasing exponentially. Philip Fearnside, an American-born ecologist who since the early 1970s has studied the Amazon basin from a station near Manaus, has predicted that if the destruction continues to increase at its present rate the rain forest will be gone by the turn of the century.
As Chmielinski and I worked our way down from Manaus, we witnessed a disconcerting irony. In the heart of a basin estimated to contain some five thousand species of fish (there are less than two hundred species in all of North America), it was often difficult to find fish to eat. Beef was more readily available. This might seem a blessing for the heavily exploited local fisheries, but consider the tambaqui, whose sweet flesh comprised nearly half the fish sold in Manaus and its environs in the 1970s.
Like much of the rest of the Amazon basin’s commercial catch, the tambaqui survives not on insects and worms but on the fruits and seeds of the forest itself. According to the Amazonian biologist Michael Goulding, one of the tambaqui’s primary food sources is the Spruce rubber tree, which produces seed capsules that mature at the onset of flood season. About a month later, on hot days, the capsules begin to burst open, ejaculating their seed for distances of up to twenty yards. The seed lands in the flooding river, where much of it is gobbled up by the voracious tambaqui. The explosions continue for two to three months, during which time a thirty-five-pound tambaqui may carry up to a pound and a half of seed in its stomach.
But as the rain forest disappears, torn down for pasture that bakes to death in a few short years, the Spruce rubber tree goes with it. As goes the Spruce, so goes the tambaqui. So it is not all that farfetched to stare at a plate of tough Amazonian beef and see dead fish, and, in turn, a diminished chance of the forest regenerating itself: In the Amazon, it is fish, not birds, that are the primary disperses of plant seed.
As I paddled out of Manaus that first day, singing deliriously into a cyclopean sun, the destruction of the rain forest was for me a horror more conceptual than real. The bush looked different from what I had become accustomed to—there was less of it, and it was lower—but the idea of land quickly became an abstraction. I could barely see the banks. Where we crossed the Meeting of the Waters and turned east into the Amazon, our kayaks rocking on the chop like hobby horses, the river was five miles wide and the waves were head high, which meant I spent most of my time buried in troughs.
Suddenly, I was overcome by chills and vomiting. In a doctor’s office in Manaus I had seen a map of the Amazon basin. Along the river it was peppered with dozens of colored pushpins denoting outbreaks of disease. There in the kayak, puking over the side, I envisioned the pins as so many bumpers on a pinball machine, Chmielinski and I bouncing among them.
The range of disease along the Amazon proper, always extraordinary, has grown dramatically as the rain forest has been cut down. Host insects once content to ply their business in the canopy have come in closer contact with human prey, and standing water trapped behind large new dams provides fertile breeding grounds. Malaria is epidemic. The next-most-common affliction, leishmaniasis, can kill, but it is more widely feared for the leprosylike disfigurement its worst form can cause—victims eventually lose nose and ears. “Leish” can be controlled with antimony, but it can’t be cured. The first Brazilian case of dengue fever was discovered in 1982; the virus has since moved into urban areas, as has yellow fever, which once was contracted only deep in the forest. (Tefé had suffered a violent outbreak the year before.) Oropouche fever, virtually unheard of before 1980, infected more than a quarter million people between 1980 and 1984. Something called Mayaro fever, only recently discovered, has torn through Indian populations with terrible force, killing almost 60 percent of those who contract it. Over the last decade there has been a huge increase in infectious hepatitis, one form of which often leads to cirrhosis of the liver among children and adolescents.
Botflies bury larvae in the skin that erupt months later as inch-long maggots. Mosquito-injected worms work their way into the eyes, causing blindness. Chagas disease, spread by beetles, causes a victim’s internal organs to atrophy so slowly that he can live twenty years without knowing he is infected; then suddenly he drops dead. As for the usual suspects, the intestinal worms, the doctor in Manaus had said, “Don’t concern yourself with avoiding them. You cannot. They are everywhere.”
On our second day out of Manaus we arrived after dark in Itacoatiara, a brooding shantytown huddled around a jute mill. While I slumped in my kayak Chmielinski persuaded a bald, walleyed man with boot-black skin to let us sleep on his wooden fishing boat, one of perhaps a hundred nuzzling the port. As Chmielinski pitched our tents the man hurried into town and returned with a pot of scrambled eggs, onions, and bread. He and Chmielinski worried over me and urged me to eat, but I couldn’t hold food. I fell asleep on the galley table.
In the morning, to save time, Chmielinski packed my kayak and put me on the river while he scoured Itacoatiara for supplies. I paddled my boat into one of the floating grass islands that clog the river below Manaus, hoping it would pull me along faster than I could drift against the headwind.
After I had settled in and propped my feet up on my deck, I looked back toward Itacoatiara and picked up the steady white flashing of Chmielinski’s paddle. White dots rose and fell quickly—he was racing to catch me. He drew within shouting distance, forty yards to my port side, still without seeing me. When I started to yell I vomited. I retched uncontrollably for three or four minutes. By the time I regained my voice Chmielinski had sped past me and was nearly out of sigh
t.
It was hopeless to think I could catch him. I spotted a fishing boat and paddled out of the grass island as quickly as I could and hailed it. The driver looked at me, gunned his motor, and raced away.
“STOP, YOU SON OF A BITCH!” I screamed, but that had absolutely no effect on anything save my already burning throat. I watched Chmielinski’s flashing blades shrink.
I did not know what to do. Desperate, I tried telepathy.
I formed one thought and concentrated on it as hard as I could: Piotr, this is Joe. If you cannot see me in front of you, I must be behind you. Piotr, this is Joe. If you cannot see me in front of you, I must be behind you. Piotr, this is Joe. If you cannot see me in front of you, I must be …
After two or three minutes of this I saw the white flashing of his blades slow down, then stop.
Piotr, this is Joe. If you cannot see me in front of you, I must be behind you.…
Then a yellow line appeared beneath the place where I had last seen his blades. He had turned his boat broadside. The line disappeared; he had turned around to face me. The flashing began again, slowly. By and by, the blades grew.
The next two days passed in a roller coaster of chills and sweat and blinding headache. Chmielinski paddled beside me and spoke to me all day long. I heard his voice, but few words. I do know that he asked me if I wanted to stop and that I said no. By now I was obsessed by the idea of paddling to the Atlantic. In that way the fever helped me—I was too far gone to think.
Each day, all day long, either the sun flashed off the river and seared the eyes and skin, or cold, slashing rainstorms flew across the sun and blocked out the light. The river-sea straightened its course and lumbered east unimpeded by islands or curves, as if in its lust for the Atlantic it had wiped all obstacles from its path. With nearly a thousand miles of straight fetch the wind roared up the river and raked it into a choppy mess. We had nowhere to hide. Our world was nothing but water and sky and the thin band of green that bonded the two.
The third afternoon below Manaus I watched the waves toss, willy-nilly, a passenger ship the size of an ocean liner. By then the river was thick with such boats, and each one, it seemed, had a dark urge to run us down. The big boats would veer sharply toward us, their props throwing four- and five-foot waves, their passengers leaning over the rail and shouting at us. As the ships blew by and we desperately surfed their wakes, their Portuguese names appeared like Blakean visions: Under the Shield of the Lord, Faith in God, Ship of the Angels.
For hours on end it seemed the wind would never cease or the sun set. The sound of my paddle hitting water hypnotized me. Once, awakened by a sharp pain behind my left ear, I slapped at it and came away with a dead bee. My ear hurt like hell, but I was relieved to have been attacked by a single bee. Killer bees travel in swarms.
Sometime late in the day I found myself chattering wildly at Chmielinski, who was chattering wildly right back at me. It took me a couple of minutes to figure out where I was, having blocked out the slap … slap … slap of paddle on water as if some other being were making that sound. Then I was forced once again to confront the endless brown flood before me. I picked out a landmark, a far-off hut, but we seemed to paddle for hours without drawing any closer to it.
The sun had set when we landed in Urucurituba. The dot on the map suggested a sizeable town; in reality, Urucurituba was a wretched hole that merited its dot only because there were no other candidates for miles. A ragged crowd gathered at the foot of the mud bank—stooped old men, three young toughs in pointy leather boots, a dozen children with bloated stomachs. Chmielinski climbed the bank to search for lodging. No one spoke as he muscled through the crowd, but when he disappeared the three hoods slid down the bank and stood over me. One of them flicked a cigarette on the nose of my kayak. The other two laughed.
I did not know how to react. Finally, I offered the smoker my paddle, and said, “Why don’t you try the boat?”
A hard rain began to fall. It was dark and cold. He rubbed his boot in the muck. The people on the bank watched, waiting for a reaction. Then a deep voice boomed, “Bring those boats up here!”
The owner of the voice was tall and broad, his thick gray hair cut short and combed straight back. The hoods did not hesitate. They hauled the boats one after the other up the slippery bank and along the town’s one muddy street into a cement shell that might once have been a house.
The shell belonged to the gray-haired man. As he watched us unpack he said it was a good thing we’d brought our own food, because there was none in the town. Then he returned to Urucurituba’s one bar.
The clouds lifted and the half-moon revealed Urucurituba to be poor even by the Amazon’s meager standards. No cars, no mill, no harbor. Canoes and launches were simply tied up along the bank, there to be pounded to splinters in a storm.
Rain continued to fall, but the big-bellied children stood outside the shell most of the night, staring at us through its cracks. At dawn, before anyone was awake, we slipped down the streets and put our boats on the river.
Slap … slap … slap: The next day was another with the world askew. I forgot that I was on the Amazon. I lost myself in dreams. When I came around late in the afternoon, Chmielinski informed me that we were well short of the ninety miles we had planned to paddle. So, beneath a moon waxing full, we continued into the night, hoping the current would increase and drag us into Parintins, some three hundred miles from Manaus. We had told Durrant and Bzdak we would try to meet them there.
Instead, we got lost in a swamp and washed up on a clean, mosquito-free beach tended by a chorus of gently croaking frogs. We unpacked the boats and scrubbed them out. Chmielinski brewed tea. I sat against a log and tried to write in my notebook.
“Joe, what are you thinking about today?” Chmielinski asked when he brought the tea.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I can’t remember.” I couldn’t recall a damn thing about the day—my notebook page was blank.
He returned to the stove to cook dinner. I put down the notebook, fetched a bucket of water, and listened to the frogs.
“Cars,” I said when I brought him the water. “Cars and motorcycles.”
He stirred the cookpot. Tonight we would eat the last of the comida plástica we had carried all the way from Arequipa. He poured chicken cacciatore into our little bowls.
“What were you thinking about, Piotr?”
“That big hole on the Apurimac. The one where Zbyszek pulled Jack out. Do you remember this?”
It seemed long ago, another river altogether. How far we had come since then: the lower Apurimac, the Ene, the Tambo, the Ucayali, the Marañón, the Solimões. Three thousand miles of river. Though I had paddled every foot of it, it didn’t seem quite real.
And though it had been three months since we had navigated the Acobamba Abyss, I had a recurring nightmare about it. A green monster surrounded me, threw me head over heels, and would not release me. The curious part was that I did not get wet, but neither did I escape. Not, that is, until I woke up in a cold sweat, not an easy feat in the tropics.
“We are lucky to make it through that place,” Chmielinski said. “I think it is lucky even that we are here now.”
“I suppose you’re right,” I said, but I didn’t feel it.
The next afternoon, as we drew near to Parintins, the banks narrowed and the constricted river rebelled with such strength that it ripped the rudder off my kayak. The boat developed a head of its own, bucking like a spooked horse. I was not surprised to see that Parintins had a seawall, a protected harbor, and a cement ramp that descended from the wall like a castle drawbridge.
Despite that ominous entrance, the town appeared to be pleasantly and agreeably unspectacular, with the easy feeling of rumpled harmony that comes with age; the Parintins church, an immense red-brick affair built in the eighteenth century, is the oldest in the state of Amazonas. A graceful, tree-lined promenade runs along the river, and leafy palms ring the plaza. On the street surrounding the pla
za I counted seven mules, three of them pulling carts; nine rickety three-speed bicycles; four Volkswagen bugs; and one dusty Mercedes-Benz sedan. That, in a nutshell, seemed to sum up not only Parintins but the Amazon itself.
The only hotel was a cool, cinder-block affair built around a garden. We found Bzdak and Durrant waiting for us, and with them a new addition to our troupe—Jacek Bogucki, who had left Poland with Chmielinski and Bzdak in 1979. Bogucki and his Peruvian wife, Teresa, now lived in Casper, Wyoming. He had brought Polish sausages, chocolate, a motion-picture camera, and what was left of the bank loan he had taken out to purchase his plane ticket.
He had also brought the money the people of Casper had raised for us and which they had requested we invest in a support boat, so that we would all reach the sea together. There were hundreds of cargo boats in port in Parintins, all but one of them wood, and by the time Chmielinski and I arrived, Durrant, Bzdak, and Bogucki had hired the eighteen-meter Roberto II.
The captain was a tall, wide, placid sixty-year-old caboclo named Deomedio, who, depending on the light, could have passed for Indian, Portuguese, or Asian. Bzdak had quickly dubbed him “Capitan-Almirante,” the Captain-Admiral of our fleet. Until I shook hands with him, Capitan had never met a North American. In fact, he had made the sixteen-hundred-mile round trip from Parintins to Belém only once, in 1951. His first and only mate, Afrain, a shy, skinny fifteen-year-old and the youngest of Capitan’s twenty-one grandchildren, had never been more than ten miles from Parintins.
We would have left port that day, but a dream had revealed to Capitan a leak in the Roberto II. He hauled the boat out and spent the day repairing the leak, which as it turned out was right under the wheel.
While Capitan worked on the boat, Chmielinski discussed the voyage with him. Capitan said he knew the river as far as Santarém but from there would have to rely on his nose and eyes.