Road Fever

by Tim Cahill

  In the 747, as we passed over the approximate location of Kilómetro 85, it occurred to me that I had been traveling for thirty hours and had slipped back 125 years into the history of the United States. The scales at Kilómetro 85 were precisely like those used to weigh gold dust in the bars and brothels of the mining camp at Virginia City, Montana, during the 1860s. The stories I heard at the bar in Kilómetro 85 read like the history of the Montana gold strike. Claim-jumping was common. A man might bring gold or diamonds into town, an Indian might be hired to track him back to his dig. Men would come with guns. There were firefights over holes in the ground. Screams and blood in the jungle night. Sometimes men were robbed on the roads. Sometimes miners gathered together, tracked down the road agents, and killed them just as George Ives and Henry Plummer were killed by vigilantes in Montana in 1863 and 1864.

  I had once hiked through the forest just north of Venezuela’s border with Brazil to a small mining operation. There was a trail that led along a river which fell from a high flat-topped mountain. Presently I could hear the sound of a gasoline-driven generator. It seemed wise to hail the camp from a distance. A white man whose thin face was all cheekbones and sloping planes motioned me to the dig. There were three other men, two Brazilians and a black man from Guyana. They had dug a hole perhaps twenty feet deep in the soft red earth next to the river. The black man stood ankle-deep in the mud at the bottom of the hole. He was spraying the sides of the pit with a high-powered hose. When the red sludge at the bottom got knee-deep, the hose was somehow reconnected so that it pulled water and soil up out of the pit to a kind of mechanical panning device called a lavador.

  The men lived in small shoddily built lean-tos with dirt floors. There was a hammock in one shack, an uncomfortable-looking canvas cot in another. All these men did in camp, it seemed, was work and sleep. When such men finally came to town—so said the bartender at Kilómetro 85—they generally consumed numerous alcoholic beverages, stood the house to drinks several times, staked miners down on their luck, and ended the evening with a congenial fight.

  The white man, who spoke English with a central-European accent, said that there was gold in the old riverbed. He thought there were diamonds atop the strange, flat-topped mountains that surrounded the camp. These mountains—the Indians call them tepuis—caught much of the rain, and that rain formed rivers, and these rivers swept the diamonds from the earth so that when the water fell from high cliff faces, it contained the wealth of dreams. Showers of diamonds.

  We talked for a while about the theory of plate tectonics: how the earth’s continents once fit together like a jigsaw puzzle, how these pieces were drifting apart, how the hump of northern South America fit against the westward protrusion of northern Africa. And there were diamonds in both places. Fewer in South America, but they were there.

  Had they found many diamonds? Could I see some?

  “We have found nothing.”

  How long had they been working the claim?

  “Four months.”

  “Why would anyone work a dry hole for four months?”

  I noticed that one of the other men had come up behind me and that both of the miners wore holsters and handguns. A third strolled over to join a discussion in which nothing was being said. He was strapping on a holster. Asking about what they had found seemed to have been bad form. Maybe these gentlemen thought some claim-jumping gang was using dumb guys with notepads to gather intelligence.

  “I’m sorry about your bad luck here,” I said.

  No one replied.

  “No gold,” I said, “no diamonds here.”

  I found myself walking backward and the smile on my face felt ghastly.

  “Well, thanks again,” I said. Glancing behind me I could see the tree line another ten paces away. The three armed men stared at me with hard eyes. I waved what I hoped looked like a friendly good-bye. As soon as I hit the trees I would run. There came a brief vision of a character in an old western movie: the moronic dude reporter who asks the wrong question of the wrong man; the guy who gets to tap-dance with bullets zinging around his feet. Sometimes, in some westerns, the guy dies, shot dead so fast he doesn’t even have time to be surprised.

  The Amazon, I thought later, is John Ford with foliage. It’s high-plains history replayed in the tropics. Certain sad commonalities exist. In the jungles of Brazil, there had been genocidal tragedies: Amazonian Indians given blankets infested with measles, sugar laced with arsenic. The perpetrators of these astoundingly brutal and cowardly murders—they were enforcers for various development corporations—might have devised their strategy from reading the history of the United States.

  And it’s true, small groups of miners or missionaries were sometimes attacked by aboriginal people defending their land from the interlopers. Massacres on both sides. Mostly, these days, the “Indian problem” is considered to be under control. There are occasional reports of violence, but any North American driving the new roads through the Amazon will see the beginning of a forlorn and familiar pattern. Indian people, wearing the ragged clothes of their conquerors, beg alongside the road, engage in sex with truck drivers for money, or simply stumble about in an alcoholic daze.

  The people are driven from the forest by mining operations, by giant ill-conceived cattle-ranching schemes, by enormous agricultural projects. They stand alongside the roads where the forest once stood. Destitute and demoralized, they are the roadside symbols of progress.

  Progress requires that the jungle be cleared. The nearly three million square miles of rain forest in the Amazon basin, it is said, are the “lungs of the planet.” Wholesale deforestation, environmentalists warn, would sharply reduce the world’s supply of oxygen, increase carbon dioxide, and add to the greenhouse effect, raising temperatures around the world to such a degree that U.S. farmers, for instance, could expect devastating dust bowl-type droughts.

  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?”

  “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 spi
ritually 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 Río 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 purchased 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 Río 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 à 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 w
ere 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 Belém, 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.