Visit Sunny Chernobyl: And Other Adventures in the World's Most Polluted Places

by Andrew Blackwell

  I told him I was going to Santarém in a couple of days.

  Man, he said, I wish I were going with you. I was thinking about going, but I guess it’s too late now. Have fun. You’re going to love it down there.

  A breezy city of a quarter million people, Santarém occupies a broad corner of riverbank just where the Amazon meets the mighty tributary of the Tapajós. Rick was right—Santarém is nice. I was instantly glad that Adam and I had decided not to go nosing into lawless pockets of the countryside in search of illegal logging. We might have overcorrected with tourist-friendly Santarém, but that was okay. I needed to relax, needed a vacation from the cold weather that had been creeping down onto New York, and from everything else.

  We strolled out from our hotel in search of Gil, our fixer and translator. As we walked, we could see the meeting place of two massive rivers: on the far side, the muddy water of the Amazon, its opposite bank more than two miles away, and on the near side the Tapajós, famously dark and clear. Half a mile out from the bank, the two came together, mixing in a sinuous ribbon that looped downstream for miles.

  Although Gil had come highly recommended, I was a little apprehensive about meeting him. The last few days had seen an erratic series of e-mails culminating with an abrupt request for electronics. “Bring me a iPod touch 4G 32GB,” he wrote. “My girlfriend is pregnant if you bring me two i name our kid after you.” Our fixer had turned into an Internet scam from Moldova. Uncertain what to do, I had split the difference and purchased a single iPod. It was now in my backpack.

  Gil’s place was an old yellow house just a few steps up from the waterfront. A windsurfing board lay on the sidewalk out front, and the house’s door-like windows had been flung open to make a shallow terrace facing the river. Earsplitting rock music blared from inside. On tiptoe, I peered through a side window, looking for the mild-mannered face we had seen in a photo on his website.

  Instead, I saw a half-naked wildman in surfing trunks, hunched over an old computer. I knocked. He didn’t hear. He was glaring at the screen with a ferocious intensity, baring his teeth as he pecked at the keyboard. I knocked again, louder this time, and he looked up with a start, a flourish of hair tumbling down his shoulders. He had seen us. I felt the urge to run, but he had already sprung to his feet and was charging at us, shouting over the music. He was offering us caipirinhas—Do you know what that is? It’s our national drink! Do you have them in New York? You do?!—and welcoming us to Santarém, and telling us how excited he was that we had come.

  How to describe Gil Serique? He was a son of the rainforest, born in a speck of a village on the jungle bank of the Tapajós, a village without electricity or running water, accessible only by boat. “Paradise!” he called it. Now he was a multilingual river guide, a translator and fixer for visiting journalists, and above all, the prototypical Amazon beach bum. He wind-surfed every day he could, launching into the river directly across the street from his house.

  And he hustled. He had printed booklets to promote his guiding business, he cultivated contacts with the cruise ship operators who passed through Santarém, he obsessively updated his blog and his Facebook status (3,103 friends at last count). His house was a nexus for anyone interested in the rainforest, or its destruction, or in surfing, or in drinking, or in talking. He embarked at once on a series of absurd and exaggerated stories—about his neurosurgeon pilot friend who was descended from American Confederates, about having been in a Michael Jackson music video, about how, to his shame, he had once almost become an exotic-species smuggler.

  The iPod Touch, it turned out, was part of a scheme to supplement his guiding income. Accepting it as partial payment for his services, he told us that iPod Touches were rare in Santarém; he planned to sell it at a 100 percent markup. “I should have everyone pay me in iPod Touches,” he said. And then he told us some more about windsurfing. Always windsurfing. He was a man feasting on life like a crazed animal. If something was funny, or pleasant, or nice, then laughter was not enough. Instead his eyes would bug out, his teeth would flash, and he would emit a bloodcurdling scream. “AAAGGHH!!” He was a man afflicted with joy.

  There were beers in our hands and we were leaning against the terrace, watching the good citizens of Santarém stroll the waterfront. Gil was the luckiest guy in the world, he told us breathlessly. He didn’t know how he could be happier. He loved Santarém, loved the forest, loved his girlfriend, loved guiding, loved us. At forty-six, he was about to become a father. He shared the crumbling four-room house with his pregnant “bride-to-be.” She was seventeen—not much more than a third his age.

  “I’ve got the best life here, really,” he told us, and then seemed to become overwhelmed by what he had just said. His eyes widened. “I love this town! I really love it! AAAGGHH!”

  The conversation turned to deforestation and soy. It was disorienting the way Gil, with a maniacal gleam in his eye, somehow made screaming and drinking and cogent conversation all work together. He talked about the Cargill terminal, about the patterns of deforestation in the region.

  “The roads in the Amazon were all built in the seventies,” he said, his accent a reedy mix of Brazilian, British, and surfer. “Before that all the human pressure was along the waterway. With the roads, it’s gone into the land.”

  The Amazon is a frontier forever under the sway of a new rush. Just the past hundred years have seen rubber booms, timber booms, gold rushes. Now soy and bauxite were taking the lead. But exploitation came in many forms. Even something as simple as boats with onboard refrigeration, which allowed fishermen to stay out longer, meant huge pressure on the fish in the river.

  Would we like another beer?

  In Gil’s view, though, the exploitation had a flip side. “I got a lot more interesting work once they started devastating the Amazon,” he said. “Normally, I’d be guiding nature lovers, but as Amazon conservation and everything gets bigger, I do more and more work with people like you, who want to see nature’s problems.” He was operating on the bleeding edge of ecotourism.

  But cruise ships were his bread and butter. During the season, ships packed with hundreds of tourists made their way from the mouth of the river up to Manaus, stopping for the day in Santarém.

  “Cruise ship industry, this is a beautiful industry,” Gil said. ’Cause they come here, they’re all old, and they’re loaded. But they’re cool—they’re really cool. Anyone who comes to the Amazon is cool.”

  I had noticed a few tour-boat tourists turning circles on the waterfront, binoculars in hand. Cruise boats can ruin a town; in Juneau, where my father lives, the entire downtown area has become overrun with cruise ship passengers and the insipid economies that spring up around them. But that hadn’t happened here yet.

  Gil put down his beer. “I love whorehouses!” he cried.

  I couldn’t quite remember how we had come to this part of the conversation, but here we were.

  He became serious for a moment: “I mean, the way we treat women in this country is terrible. Really.” Then he brightened. “But still. There is this one whorehouse in Manaus…”

  Was I supposed to nod? Oh, yeah…Whorehouses!

  Our host went on, oblivious to our discomfort. He said you could get a girl for twenty reals—about ten dollars. Here was another form of exploitation in the Amazon, one Gil didn’t mind participating in.

  A pair of young women crossed into the park, strolling arm in arm. Gil assured us that the girls who walked by his house were the most beautiful girls in the world. “You’re going to love the girls here,” he said. “They’re amazing.” Concerned that he would start making introductions, we hastened to let him know that we both had girlfriends. Somehow, even for me, this remained true. For reasons unclear, I still lived with the Doctor.

  It was dark. The park had filled with young couples, and families, and bands of teenagers. Children tumbled through the playground. A soccer game scuffled on the basketball court. Gil had turned philosophical. He felt so lucky to be al
ive, he told us. His sense of gratitude was oddly specific, though. He was grateful, first, for his carbon fiber windsurfing board. This was an amazing piece of technology.

  “My first board weighed a ton, but this one is only like ten or fifteen kilos,” he said. “I’m so grateful for that. And I’m so grateful that I’m forty-six and can get lots of little blue pills that can give me an incredible erection.”

  Adam choked on his beer.

  “Not Viagra, man,” Gil continued. “Viagra will give you a big erection, but it will make it very wide, you know.” He gestured. “Very wide. But these little blue pills, I get them right around the corner. They cost like nothing. You take one of these pills, you will have a serious erection. You haven’t taken those pills?”

  We confirmed that we had not.

  “So those are the two things I’m so grateful for at this time, that I can have in my life,” he said.

  “Carbon fiber and little blue pills,” I listed, by way of a recap.

  “That’s right,” Gil said, holding two fingers up. His eyes widened with realization. “There’s not a third thing! AAAGGHH!”

  We took off. We had hardly rested since New York. “Don’t go!” Gil cried. But then he relented and walked us to our hotel, two blocks away. He had decided to go around the corner for a blue pill.

  “I’m going to have some serious sex tonight,” he said. “Thank you for this wonderful day!”

  Highway BR-163 begins in Cuiabá, at the southern end of the Brazilian state of Mato Grosso, and runs north for more than a thousand miles, plunging directly through the Amazon. Built in the early 1970s, it is still mostly unpaved where it passes through the jungle, and during the rainy season it becomes a river of mud. Trucks founder in its legendary ruts and potholes, their progress slowed to less than a hundred miles a day. BR-163, it would be fair to say, is one of the world’s crappiest major roads.

  It has the distinction, however, of being one of only two roads that traverse the Amazon from north to south. As the Economist put it, BR-163 joins “the ‘world’s breadbasket’ to the ‘world’s lungs.’” It links Mato Grosso—the agricultural powerhouse that has made Brazil the world’s second-largest soy producer, after the United States—to the forested expanses of Pará. As such, the highway is a focus not only of commerce but also of some serious environmental anxiety. As Gil had pointed out to me, roads bring deforestation. You only cut down forests you can reach, and only turn jungles into ranches and farms if you have a way to carry off the beef and soy.

  Once there is a road—even a crappy one—civilization begins to course along it, pushing out into the bordering forest. Humans like to think of themselves as builders and conquerors, but their presence spreads more like a vine, sending out tendrils, building a network, growing into the gaps until it forms a smothering blanket. Satellite images show that by the time it reaches the Tapajós River, BR-163 is sprouting cleared land in dense, perpendicular gashes, each a dozen miles long, like the teeth of a giant rake.

  The road terminates, finally, in Santarém, at the western end of the waterfront. And it is here, not a hundred yards from where BR-163 runs out of places to go, that Cargill Incorporated of Minnetonka, Minnesota, built its soy terminal.

  The terminal is Santarém’s most conspicuous structure, a metal barn that stretches several hundred feet, with a huge Cargill logo on one side. A grain conveyor more than a thousand feet long extends from the northern end of the building to a tanker dock in the river. On the day we cruised past it, on a riverboat rented from a friend of Gil’s, we saw a bulk carrier receiving its cargo, beans pouring out of massive downspouts, and plumes of soy dust floating out of the ship’s compartments. Docked at the next moorage upriver was a Holland America cruise ship, a little smaller than the soy ship, and blinding with its bright wall of cabins. Next in line, smaller still, was a timber transport waiting for the cruise ship to vacate the dock so it could resume loading containers of wood. At a single glance, we could see the comings and goings of three major Amazonian industries: soy, tourists, and timber.

  Construction of the Santarém terminal began in 1999 and was finished in 2003, even though Cargill had failed to do the necessary environmental impact study—a fact that resulted in the terminal being declared illegal by the Brazilian courts multiple times. Nevertheless, it opened.

  For Cargill—the largest privately held corporation in the United States—building the terminal was a strategic move that allowed soybeans to get to market faster and more cheaply than before. Soy from Mato Grosso could be shipped north by river or trucked along BR-163. At the Santarém terminal, the soy could then be offloaded and stored before being shipped directly to Europe via the Amazon River. The fact of the terminal would therefore be a further incentive for the Brazilian government to pave the rest of BR-163. And that would mean yet another launching pad for assaults on the rainforest. (Paving a thousand-mile-long highway through the jungle, though, is easier said than done. As of 2012, it is still unfinished.)

  There was incentive, too, for any farmer in Mato Grosso who cared to do the math. Why bother sending only your crop to the Cargill terminal when you could send the entire farm? Land was cheap around Santarém, and a soy farm built close to the Cargill terminal would save on both land and transportation costs.

  Farmers flooded north. By 2004, a year after the terminal opened, cultivation of soy in the area had jumped to 35,000 hectares (about 85,000 acres, and a five-year increase of more than 2,000 percent) and land prices had shot up by a factor of thirty. Local farmers were under ever-increasing pressure to sell their land to the soy farmers. Soon, soy was being touted as rainforest enemy number one, and Greenpeace activists were crawling over the Cargill terminal building—in much the same way as they had crawled over the machinery of the oil sands mines—and demonstrators in the UK were showing up at McDonald’s dressed as chickens to protest the use of Brazilian soy as chicken feed. The soy rush was on.

  The highway in the dark. BR-163. The kilometers ticked by. This close to Santarém, the road was paved and free of potholes. Our driver sped south with abandon. He was a cheery, hulking man whose nickname translated as “Mango.”

  Locations on the road south of Santarém are found not by signs or named roads but by their kilometer number. We were headed for a turnoff somewhere in the low 70s. There, we would meet some people who spent their days ripping trees out of the rainforest. It was all perfectly legal, though—part of a sustainable logging project, and nothing to get upset about, unfortunately.

  Dawn brightened by increments behind the tinted windows of Mango’s car. We saw where we were. The rainforest. Right! After a couple of days in Santarém, a morose foreigner could almost forget that he had come here to see the jungle, to walk around inside the vast hydrological pump that is the Amazon, which lifts and distributes an ocean’s worth of water across the Americas, shaping and driving weather patterns around the continent. Now, the Amazon canopy flew past, mist rising among the treetops. On the right, at the boundary of the Tapajós National Forest, trees approached to the edge of the road. Gil squinted through his window, looking for kilometer markers. On the left, the vista modulated between forest and rangeland—and then would fall away into the flat blankness of a soy field: mile-long rectangles of bare earth, stretching away to a residual wall of forest in the distance.

  We reached the logging camp at around seven in the morning. The loggers were meeting in a bare, wooden room in the main building. Men and women in hard hats and work clothes stood in a circle and made announcements. There was laughter and applause. They joined hands and said a prayer. Then we went out and got into the back of a large, covered truck and bounced and shuddered down a rutted dirt road in the direction of the Tapajós River, into the heart of the national forest. We were riding with the Ambé project.

  The idea of logging in a protected forest is probably abhorrent to most people, at least those who aren’t loggers. After all, what’s protected supposed to mean? Here in the Tapajós
, though, a collective of people who live on the margin of the forest have been allowed a “sustainable” logging concession. The idea is that this will offer them alternatives to slash-and-burn agriculture and illegal logging, and provide economic development and improve living standards in the community without severely degrading the forest.

  The key is that the people making money off the forest are the ones who call it home. Once they are living off it, they become critical stakeholders in its preservation; the community can only be sustained by the forest so long as the forest continues to exist. Suddenly it isn’t just a few napping forest wardens who stand between the jungle and an army of illegal loggers and rule-bending soy farmers. The forces of not in my backyard are hitched to the cause of preservation.

  The air changed as we entered the forest, becoming suddenly rich and earthy, the heat of the day eased by moisture and shade. The truck dropped us off and drove away, leaving us to follow a small survey crew on its morning rounds. I listened to the jungle: squeaks and whoops, squawks and trills, sounds that must have been coming from a bird or an insect but that sounded like someone blowing across the mouth of a bottle. Cascades of insect noise, almost electronic. Calls and responses. Sounds that were weirdly familiar—that I had heard before in movies and museum exhibits. The soundscape makes the jungle.

  The survey crew went about its work. I tagged along behind a cheerful man with a machete, doing my best to stay out of the swinging whirlwind of his blade.

  I wondered why I was sweating so much. In the deep shade of the canopy, it wasn’t even hot—yet I sweated. Never in my life, not even in moments of optimal gym-nirvana, had I sweated like this. My shirt was soaked. My hair was soaked. My arms were soaked. I could not have been more drenched by a sudden downpour. The very hard hat on my sweating head was itself sweating. Moisture dripped from its brim. How? The question asked itself. How does a plastic hard hat sweat?