The Best American Travel Writing 2019

by Jason Wilson

  São Pedro has always been a hot spot for the conflict over indigenous land rights. Years ago, the people here rallied together and set fire to the barges that were running illegally cut logs out of the forest. If Bolsonaro wins, São Pedro could see a real uptick in the pressure on its surrounding forests.

  Today, São Pedro is one of many poor villages along the river, communities so poor that they’ve been called “Amazonian favelas.” In the village, bread is a luxury. “There used to be a bakery,” Margareth told me with a shrug. Margareth and her husband, Livaldo Sarmento, would be my hosts in São Pedro, and as we rode the Michael together, they told me about how things used to be in the town. Livaldo had been one of the community leaders who fought back against the loggers decades ago. Now, he was headed home to vote.

  As we arrived in São Pedro—a spit of sand jutting out into the Arapiuns River in a way that forces the boats to curve at almost a right angle to keep along the river—I realized I’d been sleeping quite a lot. The warmth of the boat, the cradle of the hammock, and the steady sway of the water had knocked me out for much of the voyage to São Pedro. But now, upon arrival, I was still tired. Margareth showed me to a dark room in her home, without a door or much more than hammock hooks, to which she tied my green hammock. I slept 12 hours that night, even though a block away there was a barbecue party hosted by the local politician, in an effort to drum up last-minute support, blaring country music all night long.

  By the morning, I felt feverish, and Margareth moved my hammock outside into the yard so I could get fresh air. Livaldo sat on a piece of wood next to me and watched me. I realized he was frightened for my health.

  Before I had left Santarem and embarked toward São Pedro, I’d asked my local contact about what I should do if I got sick or hurt while in São Pedro. “There’s a posto de saude there” (a health clinic), he’d told me. “And in case of emergency, you can take an ambulancha”—the local nickname for a boat ambulance—“and it can get you back to the city in two and a half hours.”

  I remembered that conversation when I saw Livaldo’s worried face. I asked him where the health clinic was; I thought I should probably be seen by a doctor. “The health clinic?” he asked, visibly surprised. Margareth chimed in. “There’s no doctor here. There’s only a nurse. But she’s in the city. And she’s only here one day a week. On Wednesdays.” It was Friday.

  Margareth told me I wouldn’t want to go to the clinic, even if the nurse was in town. A while ago, she said, the government claimed that it had been sending resources out to the health clinic. “But we never saw them. We never got any medicines or vaccinations,” she said, visibly disgusted, and went on to explain that, in response, the community had gathered together and broken into the clinic’s back room.

  “We found hundreds of medications piled up there, all expired,” she said. “They’d been expired for years!” I felt a warm wave come over my face and sensed incoming panic. I took a deep breath.

  “Okay, well what about the ambulancha?” I asked. “Could I take that?”

  Margareth laughed in response. “That hasn’t worked for three years.” I closed my eyes, took a few more deep breaths, and fell back asleep.

  That’s right around when the dog started talking to me.

  “Hot, right?” he asked. I agreed that it was, indeed, quite hot. He’d been dying beneath me for a while, seemingly forever. His hind hipbones were raw and red and exposed to the flies. I fell asleep while he was midsentence and felt a bit bad about it, but I was just too tired.

  I woke up as Margareth offered me a plate of bruised yellow cashew fruit. “You need to eat,” she said, and handed me the plate before leaving again. I tried to eat the cashew fruit, but couldn’t, so I tossed the rest of the fruit to the dog, who ate it up in a second. The dog then sat back, as if to smoke a pipe, and adjusted his spectacles. “Those frame your face really well,” I told him. “Thank you,” he said with a smile. A short while later, a helicopter made a slow landing in my hammock. I moved my legs a bit to the side, so they wouldn’t be cut by the propellers.

  When I woke up, I was soaking wet. Margareth touched me and said I felt like ice and insisted that I eat the fish broth she had cooked by boiling the local charutinho fish in water with a few bits of tomato, onion, and cilantro. I told her I didn’t think I could eat fish—the thought of it made me faint—so she offered me something else, in a white plastic bag. It was heavy and pokey. When I opened the bag, the nails on a foot scratched my hand. A beige shell covered in shiny hexagons had black grill marks on it, and there was no head; it appeared to be just the hindquarters of something, about the size of a volleyball. I pulled off some of the white meat inside the shell. It came off like Thanksgiving turkey breast, and tasted like it, too. It was endangered armadillo.

  “I think you should leave on the next boat,” Livaldo declared. He told me later with a kind of morbid humor that he had been worried about having a dead gringa on his hands. Coincidentally, the next boat to leave was the Michael, and it was scheduled to depart São Pedro halfway through election day, making stops along the Arapiuns on its route back to Santarem, picking up voters who wanted to get back to the city in time for work the next morning. Livaldo helped me string up my hammock on the upper deck of the Michael, and then sent me off with a three-gallon bottle of water, some biscuits, and a nervous wave from the shore.

  When I would finally make it back to the mainland and to the public hospital many, many hours later, a new sort of delusional nightmare began. Several people in the waiting room of the Municipal Hospital of Santarem were missing limbs. Skinny elderly people were draped across chairs, sleeping or dying. A man with a gash down his back and burn marks—the results of a motorcycle accident, I guessed—bumped against me as he walked into the nurse’s office. I went to the bathroom to wash his blood off my arm, but the door was locked. A woman waiting outside of it spit on the ground in front of me. It was a hot room full of human need.

  By the time I made it to the doctor, hours later, she told me my diagnosis was one of four options: malaria, dengue, chikungunya, or Zika. I was sent to the lab to get my blood drawn, and as the needle went into my arm, I was suddenly nauseous. The exasperated nurse handed me a trash can half-full with someone else’s orange vomit. Hours later, my malaria test came back negative. The result was communicated via a handwritten note, with my name very misspelled, and the birth date of a 21-year-old in place of my own.

  The people of São Pedro travel nine hours by boat for these health services—just as they do to vote.

  When I set out on this assignment, I didn’t anticipate getting so sick, but the experience sent me into the depths of what life is really like for the riverside people in the Amazon; I saw their lives in a way I never would have had I remained healthy. At various points during my illness, I would awake in a sweat with a wave of anxiety and dark thoughts rolling over me: Am I going to die here? I wondered many times as I lay in my hammock in São Pedro, too weak to be able to seek out help. Death lurked in the corners of my mind like a shadow on a hot afternoon, and with it came a kind of primal fear, one that is regular in these communities, where help is so many hours away. During my time there, the community was abuzz with worry about a 14-year-old girl who had given birth a week earlier and now seemed in poor health, having lost all feeling in one leg.

  Even before the Michael pushed off from the sands of São Pedro, and before I made it all the way to the hospital, I summoned the strength to roam my way around the wooden deck of the Michael to ask my fellow passengers which presidential candidate they’d voted for that morning. Most had voted for the leftist Fernando Haddad, but there were some exceptions.

  Messias Gama dos Santos is a 20-year-old from São Joao, a community of 25 families up the Arapiuns River. He told me he had cast his presidential ballot for the former governor of São Paulo, Geraldo Alckmin, the man who—with his fancy suit and career of catering to the pro-business wealthy—seemed like the least likely candidate to
get dos Santos’s vote. But dos Santos said that he saw Alckmin as “capable”: “He did good things in São Paulo, and so he could be the one to get Brazil out of this situation.” Not enough Brazilians agreed with him: Alckmin ended up being knocked out in the first round of voting.

  Dos Santos was also in the minority on the vote boat: he was the only voter I encountered on the Michael in either direction who admitted to voting for anyone other than Haddad. In fact, in the first round of voting, in Pará state, Haddad ended up with 41 percent of the vote, beating Bolsonaro’s 36 percent; in most of Brazil, though, Haddad had fewer votes than Bolsonaro.

  The reason has a lot to do with economics. Most of the people on the boat voluntarily offered to me that they identified as “poor” or “very poor,” and said they saw Haddad as the best defender of poor people like them.

  That’s the case for Maria Aparecida de Aquino, a schoolteacher who takes the boat twice a month so she can restock supplies for her students. “I think Haddad is a supporter of the poorest people,” Aquino said, adding that she was voting for Haddad also because she was frightened by the way Bolsonaro seemed to endorse violence in his campaign, with calls for increased gun ownership and overtures to military rule.

  The boat’s captain, 31-year-old Robson Souza, lives in a riverside settlement of the Landless Workers’ Movement, a land-rights movement that thrived in the 1980s in Brazil and that still drives the politics of many rural voters across the country. The settlement where Souza lives, called Bom Futuro, or “Good Future,” was one of about 10 stops the Michael made on the way back to Santarem from São Pedro. We waited on the boat as Souza ran up the banks of the river to vote and then, 15 minutes later, ran back. He’d cast his ballot for Haddad.

  “I think Bolsonaro will end the welfare program, and I think he won’t let us live in the settlement anymore,” Souza said. Even though Souza said he was not on welfare, thanks to the boat job, he said he had family members who were. He added: “I think he would end up being the worst president in the history of Brazil.”

  And then there was Zica Lopes Ferreira, who goes by Diva. The 59-year-old resident of São Pedro twisted her mouth and anxiously breathed in through her nose when I asked her who she had voted for. “Look,” she said. “I’m going to be sincere with you.” She fiddled with a stray domino on the boat’s table. “I didn’t know which numbers to press,” she said, “so I just guessed.”

  Years ago, Brazil moved to a system of assigning numbers to each candidate, as a way of allowing people who were illiterate and unable to read the names to still be able to vote. But Diva’s level of electoral literacy is so elementary, that even the numbers assigned to the candidates got scrambled for her. After taking the boat nine hours to the voting station, she ended up pushing random numbers just to get out of the voting booth.

  Diva looked at me sheepishly as she told me this, but her answer broke my heart. Here was this woman, way out in the middle of the Arapiuns River, on this creaky old boat Michael, on her way to places that most people would describe as “nowhere,” and she was still trying to somehow play a part in this national election with global consequences.

  “I would have voted for Haddad,” Diva continued, looking across at the riverbank drifting by. “I think he would offer a lot to the riverside people. The ribeirinhos could use the help.”

  NOAH SNEIDER

  Cursed Fields

  from Harper’s Magazine

  The Yamal Peninsula juts up from the northern edge of Russia like a thumb sticking out into the Kara Sea. A matrix of lakes and streams stretches across the barren surface, beneath which lie layers of permafrost that can reach deeper into the ground than Moscow’s tallest buildings rise into the sky. When the temperatures drop in the winter, the waterways freeze over and the sun recedes, leaving the region shrouded in darkness for 20 hours a day. During the summer, the ice splinters, and the tundra turns into a boggy, mosquito-infested maze.

  In the language of the native Nenets people, yamal means “the edge of the world.” In medieval times, outsiders took to calling the surrounding lands “midnight country.” Early travelers wrote of mountains, as high as the heavens, that sloped down to the sea and emitted unintelligible cries. Others told of a savage local tribe who served their children to guests for dinner. Explorers from the Novgorod Republic, who arrived in the eleventh century to trade iron for furs, took back with them tales of a place where little reindeer fell from the clouds and scattered across the earth.

  Neither Yamal’s remoteness nor winters during which temperatures can reach −55°F drove the Nenets south to warmer ground. Instead, they developed a lifestyle dependent on the reindeer, which were as plentiful as the stories suggested, and well suited to the harsh northern environs. Native legend has it that the gods created reindeer just after they created man; the spirit responsible for the animals is known as Ilebyam pertya, which translates literally to “giving life.” The reindeer serve as a mode of transport, as well as a source of sustenance, warmth, and meaning. Soviet anthropologists came to study Yamal’s tribes in the early 1920s and remarked on this relationship. As one observer wrote, everyone he met there

  dreams of owning his own herd and never stops collecting reindeer, he does not treat his herd as capital, as a means of obtaining profit and exploiting others (he has no notion of rational economy) . . . The nomad’s reindeer herd is his guarantee against hunger and the elements.

  To this day, Nenets herders will follow their reindeer hundreds of miles each year, up and down the peninsula in search of new pastures. They come to know their animals so well that they can identify individuals in a herd of thousands. These grueling journeys along the reindeer trail have taught the Nenets to be wary of long-term plans, to recognize the fragility of their existence. Ethnographers note that they often add the phrase ta eltsyand tevba na (if we live till then) when discussing the future.

  As the Nenets made their yearly migration north in July 2016, Andrei Listishenko, the head of Yamal’s veterinary service for the past 15 years, began receiving puzzling messages. “It all begins with the fact that it was a very hot summer,” he told me when I visited him in Salekhard, the regional capital. Herders reported that their reindeer had become groggy and sluggish; they were falling behind and had stopped reacting to commands. “They come and immediately lie down,” one herder told local media. “They’re sleepy.” Another, Alexander Serotteto, recalled walking nine hours to reach a camp with a working satellite phone, hoping to alert the authorities that the reindeer were dying.

  Initially, local officials paid the news little mind. “They’re extreme animals, they can live in almost any conditions, but extreme heat is much tougher on them than extreme cold,” Listishenko told me. His wide, flat nose, full cheeks, and rounded forehead lend his face the gentle aura of an otter. He grew up in a farming town in central Russia, surrounded by cows, pigs, and chickens, and enjoyed physics, chemistry, and biology, as well as the popular Soviet-era magazine Science and Life. His hands are so calloused that they have become soft. “We thought it was heatstroke,” he recalled.

  As reports from the tundra grew more urgent, Listishenko took off for Yar-Sale, a small town some 120 miles northeast of Salekhard. He made his way to the surrounding camps and saw a scene that shocked him: reindeer clustered on the ground, shaking and panting. Patches of their fur seemed to have fallen off, leaving them splotchy; the animals were emaciated, their ribs visible. “The reindeer grows feeble and exhales sharply,” Listishenko said. “The pain is visible, he drops his head because it hurts, his temperature starts rising rapidly, he’s breathing heavily, he sticks his tongue out, and, in a fit of convulsions, he dies.”

  Listishenko began to suspect that he was not facing a case of simple heatstroke. “We didn’t know the scale of it,” he said. “Every day it kept growing.” Dozens of dead reindeer became hundreds, then a thousand. The infrastructure of the region—or the lack thereof—complicated the process. “You have to understand, we’r
e not in Europe, where there are roads everywhere, or in Moscow, where you can get anywhere within an hour,” Listishenko continued. “Once you’re in the tundra, and your helicopter has left, that’s it—you’re one-on-one with nature.” He gathered a team and began collecting samples. They told the herders to avoid contact with the sick reindeer and tried to limit the animals’ movement while waiting for answers from laboratories in Tyumen and Moscow.

  On July 25, the results arrived. They were unequivocal: anthrax.

  For most of us, anthrax evokes fearful memories of white powder in envelopes. The disease, however, is an ancient one. God’s fifth plague upon the Egyptians—“Behold, the hand of the Lord is upon thy cattle which is in the field, upon the horses, upon the asses, upon the camels, upon the oxen, and upon the sheep: there shall be a very grievous murrain,” Moses told Pharaoh—may well have been an anthrax outbreak. The same goes for Apollo’s bane upon the Greeks at the beginning of the Iliad. (Homer dubbed the disease “the burning wind of plague.”) Perhaps the most striking description from antiquity of what we now know as Bacillus anthracis comes from Virgil’s Georgics:

  Nor was the manner of dying a simple matter:

  After the thirsty slake-seeking fever had gone

  All through the veins and withered the pitiful limbs,

  Then a fluid welled up in the suffering body, and

  Piece by piece absorbed the melting bones.

  B. anthracis is a cruel organism. In their passive form, the bacteria live as hard, oval-shaped spores with thick, nearly indestructible walls that allow them to survive for decades. When the spores colonize a victim’s bloodstream, they enter a vegetative state, dissolving their walls and gathering into neat chains that Robert Koch, the nineteenth-century German scientist whose pioneering work helped identify the disease, described as “graceful, artificially ordered strings of pearls.” In order to survive, the bacteria must kill the host and reproduce inside it before escaping back into the world and returning to a resting state.