The Burning Season

by Andrew Revkin

Well before dawn, Chico and his family would rise. His mother would brew some thick, strong coffee, and he and his father would quickly eat some manioc flour and maybe some dried meat. Then they would grab the tools of their trade—a shotgun, a faca de seringa, a machete, and a pouch to collect any useful fruits or herbs found along the trail. They left before dawn, because that was when the latex was said to run most freely. Although most tappers now carry a chrome flashlight, when Chico was young his father wore a poronga, a sheet metal hat that held a kerosene reservoir and a wick and had a curved wind guard. In the flickering light from this headlamp, they started their rounds.

  They circled the trail quietly, purposefully, the silence of the forest broken only by the steady slap of the machete on the thigh and the brisk padding of feet on the trail. As they reached each tree, the elder Mendes grasped the short wooden handle of his rubber knife in two hands, with a grip somewhat like that of a golfer about to putt. The palm of the right hand would apply even pressure as the short blade dipped into the corky bark, routing out a shallow channel. It was important to get the depth just right: the ducts that produce the latex are in the layer just outside the cambium, the generative tissue where the growth of the tree occurs. A cut that is too deep strikes the cambium and imperils the tree; a cut that is too shallow misses the latex-producing layer and is thus a waste. That same kind of subtlety extended to the entire complicated biological system that was Chico’s only school.

  There were different styles of cuts. The flag style was considered the best—an oblique gash that ended in a little downward twist. At the beginning of each tapping season, the first gash would be made high on the tree. Each successive cut would be just below the last one. As the seasons passed, a tree’s bark would come to read like a calendar kept by a prisoner on a cell wall. Each gash represented another day of tapping. In areas where the trees are overworked, the tappers often have to use a ladder, made of a sapling with steps notched out of it, to reach uncut portions of the tree trunk. In parts of Acre, it is common to see ladders with thirteen or more steps. It is also common to meet tappers with a perpetual limp or back problem that resulted from a 20-foot fall.

  Tappers feel strongly that the trees come to know the touch of individuals. Even the sophisticated Guilherme Zaire, who had been the seringalista to both Chico and his father, agreed on this point. “Every time a new tapper starts cutting a rubber tree, the tree has to get used to the guy,” he said. “Otherwise the tree doesn’t produce very well. A tree feels who’s doing the cutting. Every tapper has his own style, his own amaciamento de seringa.”

  Chico learned how to position a tin cup, or sometimes an empty Brazil nut pod, just beneath the low point of the fresh cut on a crutch made out of a small branch. Two or three spare cups were always hung on top of a stick embedded in the ground near each tree. The white latex immediately began to dribble down the slash and into the cup. But by then Chico and his father were already walking briskly down the estrada to the next tree.

  Chico quickly adopted the distinctive, fast stride of the rubber tapper. Tappers have a unique way of walking. Their legs swing straight from the hip and pump incessantly, regardless of the steepness of the trail or the slickness of the footing. Their stride bears some resemblance to that odd Olympic sport called race walking but is more graceful. The pace has evolved from the nature of the tapper’s day. The 150 to 200 rubber trees along an estrada are exasperatingly spread out. A simple, minimal bit of work is required at each tree, but there is often a 100-yard gap between trees. Thus, a tapper’s morning circuit can be an 8- to 11-mill hike. And that is just the morning. Many tappers retrace their steps in the afternoon to collect the latex that has accumulated from the morning cuts.

  A crucial part of the morning circuit is the hunt. Chico loved hunting. The larger the game the better—that was the rule in a place where a shotgun shell cost two or three pounds of rubber. Most of the shell casings were reused, packed by hand with black powder and lead shot. Tapir were at the top of the list of available game. These calf-size, ancient cousins of the horse followed a predictable routine, so a tapper could hide at known wallows or near a tree that was dropping its fruit. Often tappers had mental calendars of when a particular tree would be ready to drop its fruit and so knew when to watch for animals attracted to the feast. Occasionally, the tapping routine would be interrupted by signs of a particularly prized animal. In such an instance, as one tapper explained, “you follow the tapir and attack when she goes to sleep. She walks a little differently when she is getting ready to sleep. She eats different things, then takes a bath, cleans herself, and then sleeps. That is when you shoot.”

  When a tapper is on the trail, his peripheral vision and ears are continuously scanning his surroundings for a different kind of noise from the usual trill of birds and buzz of insects—a rooting peccary or armadillo, a rat porcupine or monkey high in a tree. When he notices something, he freezes. High above in the canopy, some branches sway as if caught in a zephyr. But there is no wind. In a seamless instant, he slips the shotgun, which has been slung over his shoulder, into his hands and points it at the treetops. “Points” is the right word; a forest dweller does not aim along the barrel. His whole body seems to lean toward the movement in the branches, and the shotgun is more an extension of his hands than his eyes. A tapper rarely misses.

  Chico’s intimate knowledge of the rain forest was gained in those early mornings with his father. As they walked from tree to tree, Chico learned the names and uses for dozens of jungle plants. The bark of the yellow-flowering ipê tree was said to fight cancer. The hard, tumorlike termite nests that grow out of the sides of mature forest trees were ground and brewed in a tea taken to cure pneumonia. The heart of a plant called monkey cane made a tea taken for heartburn. This forest lore was later studied by a new breed of scientists called ethnobotanists, who sift through the pharmacopoeia of the forest in search of useful drugs. Tappers have been found to use sixty-seven different plants for a wide variety of purposes. Some Indians have been known to recite the names and uses for two hundred plants.

  The forest itself was an effective, unforgiving teacher. One of the first lessons that Chico would have learned is to look before touching. Along with products that human beings find useful, such as latex, the forest is also full of defense systems that can be dangerous. Walking through the jungle, you find yourself staring down at your feet and then glancing up quickly to avoid the draping lianas and newly fallen tree trunks that are always threatening to engulf any trail. As your feet rise over rotting logs or slither along the narrow sapling bridges that the tappers build to cross swampy spots or gullies, your hands are always tempted to seek support on the surrounding trees and vines. But many trees are decidedly unfriendly to fingers. Astrocaryum palms, for example, bristle with bands of black spines the size of toothpicks but sharper than sewing needles. Evidently this is an adaptation that wards off climbing mammals that might otherwise eat the palm fruit—which in one common species happens to be three times higher in vitamin A than carrots.

  The hazards are both animal and vegetable, and the more famous jungle denizens, such as snakes and tarantulas, are not nearly as common as some of the more subtle threats. There is Lonomia achelous, a green caterpillar the size of a cigar. The caterpillars spend the night feeding on leaves in the canopy, protected by darkness from bird predators. At dawn, they descend on the tree trunks and congregate at or below eye level. Their long, branched hairs hide delicate spines that exude a chemical remarkably similar to tissue plasminogen activator, one of the new wonder drugs that can save the life of a heart attack victim by dissolving a blood clot in a coronary artery. It is not rare to hear of a tapper who has brushed up against a mass of Lonomia. Within moments, every orifice of the body streams blood; any cut begins to bleed. (Douglas Daly, the botanist from New York, has collected Lonomia for a biochemist working on new heart drugs.)

  By the time Chico and his father came full circle on an estrada and returned to the hous
e, it would be close to midday, time for a lunch of beans, rice, manioc flour, and maybe some meat—depending on how the hunt had gone the previous few days. Then, they would retrace their steps on the same trail, to gather the latex that had flowed from the trees during the morning. Only rarely would they return home before five o’clock. By then, they would be carrying several gallons of raw latex in a metal jar or sometimes in a homemade, rubber-coated sack.

  When latex is collected the same day that a tree is cut, it is still liquid. The very best rubber is produced when this pure latex is immediately cured over a smoky fire. The smoke particles prevent the growth of molds or fungi that can degrade the rubber. Thus this rubber will bring the highest price.

  The smoking of the latex was done in an open shed that was always filled with fumes from the fire. The smokier the fire, the better. Usually, palm nuts were added to the flames to make the smoke extra thick. Chico would ladle the latex onto a wooden rod or paddle suspended over a conical oven in which the nuts and wood were burned. As the layers built up on the rod, the rubber took on the shape of an oversize rugby football. The smoking process would continue into the evening. After a day’s labor of fifteen hours or more, only 6 or 8 pounds of rubber were produced. The tappers often developed chronic lung diseases from exposure to the dense, noxious smoke.

  This was the only method of curing latex when Chico was a child. Lately, it has been replaced by coagulation with acetic acid (vinegar). Rubber produced by the new method does not fetch as high a price. And the worst rubber is produced when the latex is not collected the same day. After two or three days, it coagulates on its own and must be peeled out of the collection cup. The result resembles half of a soft yellow-brown rubber ball, but it can be full of impurities, such as insects—not to mention chemical contaminants that can leach out of the container itself. This presents a problem for manufacturers in the factories down south, and often such rubber—called biscoitos, biscuits—is rejected. At best, it can be sold only at a discount to factories producing cheap goods such as sandals.

  Once the smoking of the latex was finished, the Mendes family ate dinner. The tapping routine was repeated three or four times a week but along a different estrada each day, to allow the trees that had just been tapped to rest. Tappers with three estradas could simply progress daily from one trail to the next. By the time a tree was visited the second time, it would have had at least three days without a cut. In this way, no tree would be drained of its vitality.

  Before climbing into his hammock each night, Chico frequently convinced his father to give him a few reading lessons. They sat on the veranda and squinted by the glow of one of the smoky oil lamps that are still the major light source in tappers’ homes. Chico would finally fall asleep, only to be awakened the next morning long before the roosters began to crow.

  By the time Chico was eleven, he was harvesting rubber full time. The family moved to Seringal Equador, next to Cachoeira. They lived and worked on a colocação called Pote Seco, Dry Pot. Chico could now read a newspaper aloud to other tappers, earning him a reputation as an unusually intelligent boy. Francisco Siqueira de Aquino, a friend of Chico’s father’s, recalled that the youngster presented a contrast. He had a look that was somewhat daft, but he was clearly gifted. “As a kid, you’d never have thought that Chico could grow up into such a man. He used to walk around with his mouth hanging open, and he drooled. But he fooled you. Everyone admired how such a small kid could read so fluently.”

  Chico learned more than simple reading skills; he also began to learn the arithmetic of debt. The rubber collected through the dry season would be taken to the barracão toward the end of the year, when the boss would subtract any debts that were owed and the rent for each estrada; he also cut the weight by 10 percent to account for any water that might be trapped in the balls of rubber. Francisco always chafed about paying the rent and having the weight of the rubber reduced. Often, little was left for the tappers.

  Toward December, with the return of the rainy season, the tappers stopped harvesting latex and began collecting Brazil nuts. The nuts, each about the size and shape of an orange section, are sheathed in individual shells and encased in hard, softball-size pods—about a dozen nuts to the pod. The pods are collected only after they have fallen to the ground from the high branches of a castanheira, Brazil nut tree, one of the tallest species in the rain forest. Biologists were long puzzled by the heavily armored casing of Brazil nuts. It seemed impossible for any animal but a man with a heavy machete to break open such a pod. The question was, how are the nuts liberated and dispersed? By careful observation, it was found that the agouti, a rodent like a beaver, is able to gnaw through the casing. The rodent then does what North American squirrels often do with a hoard of food: it buries the nuts in scattered locations up to 150 feet from the source. Many of the nuts are later uncovered and eaten, but enough survive that the tree’s progeny are effectively spread throughout the rain forest.

  During the rainy season, the Mendeses often crouched on their haunches around a pile of Brazil nut pods, hacking off the top of each one with a sharp machete blow, then tossing the loose nuts onto a growing pile. For tappers in regions with Brazil nut trees, the nuts can provide up to half of a family’s income. One tree can produce 250 to 500 pounds of nuts in a good season and some tappers’ trails pass enough trees to allow them to collect more than 3 tons of nuts each season. While that might sound like a potential windfall, even as late as 1989, tappers received only 3 or 4 cents a pound for the harvest—which later sold for more than $1 a pound at the export docks.

  When the Mendeses were not harvesting latex or nuts, they tended small fields of corn, beans, and manioc. The family followed the Indian method of cultivation, periodically abandoning one clearing and cutting another. The rhythm of the rubber tappers’ life was thus harmonious: they extracted value from the forest without devastating it. This is not to say that they had no impact; the pressure from hunting usually caused the largest mammal species to diminish, particularly such valued prey as tapir. But unlike the caucheros of neighboring Peru and Bolivia, who killed the trees and moved on, Brazil’s seringueiros lived in relative balance with their environment. Ninety-eight percent of the average colocação remained covered by forest. Overall, these were people who walked softly on the land. It was this instinctual respect for the forest that caused such anger to rise in Chico Mendes when he was later confronted with a flood of newcomers bent on destroying the forest.

  Chapter 5

  Coming of Age in the Rain Forest

  A FOUR-WHEEL-DRIVE Toyota flatbed truck bounced along the rugged white clay trail leading to the rubber estate called Seringal Cachoeira. The trail wound across a blackened, smoldering pasture like a chalk squiggle on a blackboard. It was September 7, 1989, Brazilian Independence Day, and the burning season was well under way in much of Acre. Humpbacked white cattle, the long-faced Nelore breed known for its resistance to the rigors of tropical life, nuzzled through the ashes in search of a few green sprigs. The air was a hazy tan color that dimmed the sun to a flat disk. Each pothole and rut threatened to shatter the bottles of cachaça that jiggled in cartons in the back of the truck. Sacks of rice, tins of cooking oil, and other goods heaved back and forth, as did several rubber tappers, who were hitching a ride out to the seringal from Xapuri.

  Stashed among the food was a roll of freshly printed posters depicting the smiling face of the slain rubber tapper Chico Mendes. The truck belonged to the rubber tappers’ cooperative in Xapuri that Mendes had helped create in the last year of his life. With their own truck, the tappers could take their rubber to markets themselves, bypassing middlemen and using the savings for books and medicine and other necessities. On the return trip later that day, the truck would carry a load of empty bottles, recycled tins, and heavy slabs of rubber bound for factories in the south.

  The truck passed through several wooden cattle fences; at each one, a tapper jumped down, opened and then carefully closed the gate, polit
ely adhering to a universal law of ranching etiquette. Finally, it left pasture behind and entered the deep shade of the forest. Traveling around eastern Acre was a bit like crossing the checkerboard landscape of Alice in Wonderland—forest, field, forest, field. As the truck was engulfed by the forest, one of the tappers riding in back smiled and said, “This is Cachoeira.” A cousin of Chico Mendes’s, his name was Sebastião Mendes.

  Cachoeira was very important to the rubber tappers of Acre. Before Chico Mendes had moved to Xapuri in 1971 to pursue a career of union organizing and politics, he had spent a decade tapping in these forests. His youth had been spent on the network of winding trails that linked Cachoeira with the surrounding rubber estates. It was in these forests that his life course was determined when, as a teenager, he met a stranger with different, radical ideas who taught him that the rubber tappers did not have to tolerate the cruel conditions under which they worked. And it was here that events mounted to a crescendo and led to his death. This was the forest tract fought over by the tappers and Darly Alves da Silva, who had hoped to turn the land into something resembling the blackened landscape that the bouncing truck had just left.

  The truck leaned dangerously to one side as the teenage driver negotiated a sagging bridge built of heavy split logs. Then it swam through a flooded section of road that looked like one of the snaking oxbow lakes that parallel river bends in the Amazon basin, marking the former course of a river. On straightaways, the driver floored the accelerator, and those in back had to duck quickly to avoid getting snagged on the dangling vines, some nicely barbed, that festooned the forest. All along the road, tendrils and roots had crept onto the bare clay; they needed to be trimmed back every month. Here men had to work hard to hold back the forest.

  In the dry season, Cachoeira was an hour from Xapuri by truck or most of a day’s walk. In the rainy season, it could only be reached by boat. The seringal sprawled over 61,000 acres, 98 percent of them forested, and ran up to the banks of the little Xipamanu River where it formed a portion of the border with Bolivia. Sixty-seven rubber tapper families lived in the forest, including quite a few Mendeses—all relatives of Chico’s.