The Footloose American: Following the Hunter S. Thompson Trail Across South America

by Brian Kevin

  The road we followed was built in the late 1800s by a Brazilian explorer and folk hero named Cândido Rondon, a sort of composite of Lewis and Clark, Davy Crockett, and Margaret Mead. Amid the wetlands, it’s a jostling seventy-five-mile ribbon of solid ground, crossing countless half-flooded fazendas by way of rickety wooden bridges. In the bed of the truck, the German girls and I settled onto a couple of wooden benches. It was too loud to converse, so we just smiled at one another and pointed to the animals we saw browsing on either side of the road. We hadn’t been off the pavement for more than a few minutes before we spotted several herds of capybaras nosing around in the brush. The world’s largest rodents, capybaras are basically guinea pigs the size of Saint Bernards. I had eaten one at a BBQ joint back in Bogotá, but I’d never seen one in person. They were oblivious to the truck, grazing nonchalantly on swamp grasses, snorting and poking at the reeds with their weirdly rectangular snouts. At least one capybara gets eaten in every wildlife documentary ever produced about lowland South America. They are the ecosystem’s quintessential prey species, the wildebeest of the Western Hemisphere and a hot lunch for jaguars, anacondas, pumas, ocelots, and caimans—all of which make their homes nearby.

  Most of these big predators are still a rare sighting in the Pantanal, but not caimans. During two weeks along the Magdalena, I hadn’t managed to spot a single one of the continent’s smallish alligators, but in the Pantanal they litter the swampy landscape like sidewalk earthworms after a good rain. I was stunned by the reptilian multitudes that the Germans and I managed to glimpse on a two-hour drive to camp. There were caimans sunning themselves on scrubby beaches, caimans swathed in blankets of mud, caimans dog-paddling through the shallows. In the Pantanal, caimans number in the tens of millions. There are so many that before the Brazilian government cracked down on poaching in the 1980s, armed leather hunters called coureiros killed as many as a million animals per year, and they didn’t have to work particularly hard to do it.

  Once we arrived at camp, I had a chance to get to know my fellow travelers, a pair of thirtyish chemical engineers from Aachen nearing the end of a two-week Brazilian holiday. Peggy was a doctoral student in mycology, nerdy about mushrooms and at home in the outdoors. Tara was a city girl putting on a brave face for three days of mosquitoes and pit latrines. Our camp consisted of a screened-in pavilion with a dozen hammocks tied to a central pole, plus a simple cooking cabin and a row of outhouses. A small brown stream flowed nearby, and after we’d dropped off our backpacks, Gabriel led us down to the water, where a dozen or so caimans were lounging next to a decrepit-looking rowboat.

  “You can walk right up to them, if you want,” he said, sauntering right up to one and crouching down beside it. “Just make sure you move slowly.”

  As a son of the reptile-light northwoods, I have a mild fascination for all things lizardlike. There is something enigmatic about the sleek taper of a crocodile’s jaw, and I’ve always appreciated large predators for the reminder they offer that my species and I are not always top dog. I watched Gabriel with what I imagine was an expression of childlike glee. The grandest caiman on the beach was probably eight feet long. The rest were in the neighborhood of five or six. I moved in closer.

  “They don’t want to eat you,” Gabriel joked. “Mostly they just stick to the piranhas. If you look closely, you can see that the piranhas eat them, too.” He pointed to the caiman closest to me, a graceful five-footer gazing tranquilly over the water. Along the serrated ridge of its tail, I could see where a few scales had been blunted. The piranha nibbles looked like the filed-down teeth of a well-worked handsaw.

  “Go ahead and touch them, if you want,” he said. “You just have to move slowly.”

  That was all the invitation I needed. I crouched down and waddled a few steps closer, careful not to lose my balance and arouse the caiman’s strike impulse. It looked back at me with statuesque indifference, the mottle of its scales like a soldier’s desert camouflage. I reached out and, very gently, ran a few fingers along the jagged crest of the caiman’s tail. It felt like a worn brick, much harder than I expected. Wow, I thought, piranhas must live up to the hype. I let my palm drape over the width of the tail. The caiman didn’t move a muscle.

  Later on, back at the campsite, we had a campfire with another guide and a couple of Israeli backpackers who were passing through on their way back to Campo Grande. They brought a bottle of Brazilian sugarcane rum called cachaça, and we mixed it up with lime and sugar to make a pitcher of caipirinha, Brazil’s sweet and potent national cocktail. For a while that night, we heard the ferocious growls of howler monkeys in the trees. The sky was a nonsense map of unfamiliar stars. I joked that I’d probably ignored Knowles’s advice about jaguars and short sticks that afternoon by petting the caiman, and this touched off a conversation about regional aphorisms. Gabriel knew a good one, he said, about piranhas biting caimans on the belly, which he translated as “In a river full of piranhas, a smart caiman swims on his back.” One of the backpackers raised his caipirinha and shared an Israeli saying about the three things a person never gets tired of looking at: campfires, waterfalls, and strummed guitars. Peggy the German, who had spent some time living in Rio, remembered a Brazilian proverb that, right then, struck me as the most appropriate.

  “God is big,” she recited, the campfire flicker playing off her face, “but the forest is bigger.”

  We spent the next few days hiking, trucking, and boating throughout the Pantanal. Gabriel was a man of few words, but a knowledgeable guide with a knack for animal calls. I couldn’t get him talking much about life growing up in the Pantanal, but I did watch him call a whole pack of suspicious wild boar to within ten yards of us, using a series of snorts and grunts. I particularly liked Peggy, who got comically excited about any fungi she encountered and who vocally preempted my own concerns about whether we had enough beer in the truck for any given drive. On a long hike one afternoon, the four of us spotted howler monkeys, armadillos, countless herons, and a pair of the five-foot, black-hooded storks that the pantaneiros call tuiuiú. During another walk in the woods, I stumbled right up to a family of coatis, long-snouted raccoons that looked at me a bit startled, then quickly skittered up a fat tree trunk in front of me. The four of them grabbed seats on a low branch and chattered excitedly, staring down with bright and curious eyes.

  The Pantanal itself was a study in green, a staggering reminder of just how many shades of any one color can appear in nature. Was it the wilderness primeval that Thompson had envisioned? Probably not. In some ways, it hasn’t been for centuries. Along the road, we drove past weathered cowboys in pickup trucks or on horseback, periodic reminders that the Pantanal has been a working landscape for quite some time. Today, many of the ranches we passed seem to incorporate a light tourism component. Many fazendas had signs out front advertising eco-tours or guest bunkhouses, while others sold basic provisions (like beers for Peggy and me) out of makeshift convenience stores.

  In other ways, the Pantanal’s wilderness character is still being eroded by the land rush that Thompson anticipated. One morning, we drove out to an old dock on the meandering Rio Paraguay, where we climbed into a skiff for a couple hours of piranha fishing. Gabriel motored us upstream to the mouth of a wide tributary that he said was the Rio Taquari—the same river where Márcia Rolon’s grandfather had once run his cattlemen’s store. The confluence itself looked healthy enough. Sure, the water was muddy, but there were other fishermen nearby, trolling in the reeds. I got skunked, but the girls pulled in a few well-fed piranha. Later, though, while Gabriel and I were cleaning the morning’s catch, I asked whether the silting of the Rio Taquari had affected the fishing there. Characteristically succinct, he kept his gaze on the piranha he was scaling and grunted in a way that suggested I didn’t know the half of it.

  “It is a very different river now from when I was younger,” was all he said. A recent report by the Brazilian government answered the question in more detail. According to researchers,
fishermen in the Taquari caught somewhere between 300 and 620 tons of fish a year in the late 1970s and early ’80s. Since the mid-’90s, that annual catch has dwindled to less than 100 tons.

  Toward the end of the weekend, Gabriel pulled the truck over as we crossed one of the stream-spanning wooden bridges. In the lagoon below, four caimans were floating belly-up in the lagoon, their stubby arms spread out in something that looked like surrender. All four of them had gaping red holes where their tails had been. Onshore, a posse of vultures was strutting back and forth, alighting occasionally to pick at the nearest corpse.

  “That isn’t right,” Gabriel said flatly. A couple of miles back, we had passed a lean-to that housed a work crew doing maintenance on the bridges. They had probably done this, Gabriel guessed. The tails were the best part of a caiman for eating, he explained. “People fry it, have it with some beer. Then they just leave the rest.” The white bellies of the dead animals gleamed in the bright sun, and they looked out of place, the only splotch of white against an otherwise verdant canvas.

  The tail harvesting struck me as less barbaric than simply irresponsible. Maybe it would have been more jarring to me if we hadn’t gone on to see another hundred or so caimans that day before sunset. For better or for worse, this is something the Pantanal does: it provides the illusion of inexhaustibility, a glimmer of what it must have felt like to be a New England colonist watching flocks of passenger pigeons blot out the sun, or a westward pioneer staring at bison herds on the Great Plains, or a Polynesian arriving on Easter Island to find an endless forest of palm trees. It’s easy for us now to dismiss those folks as simply stupid or villainous, greedily ignoring the fallout from their actions, but it’s a rare thing these days for an American to be afforded the illusion of limitlessness. The supply of caimans in the Pantanal really does seem boundless. The outspread canopy and the shallow, mirrored floodplains give every suggestion of the infinite. The sheer biomass of the place is unfathomable. And this, I think, is what truly defines the “wild country”—not the absence of humans but the tension between inexhaustible possibility and the foreknowledge of our capacity to subdue.

  That’s what a frontier is, after all—a physical manifestation of that tension. It’s a space where humanity confronts its own consequences, where a person can look out and see both the beauty of a breathing marsh and the bloody cavity between the legs of a caiman. I think that Thompson understood this. He called South America “the last decent frontier,” and I suspect that part of his growing cynicism about the United States stemmed from a realization that we were fast running out of these kinds of spaces. In another era, I could even see him as a swashbuckling essayist-naturalist in the mold of Charles Waterton or Ernest Thompson Seton. In the late-twentieth-century United States, however, our few remaining physical frontiers were giving way to a new cultural one, and it was in this wilderness of biker gangs, youth politics, and drug culture that Thompson eventually immersed himself.

  We spent our last evening in the Pantanal trolling in the skiff, heading a few miles up each tributary in the hopes of spotting a jaguar or another of the big cats that emerge from their dens around dusk. No luck. And no maned wolves, either. But the water was glass, and the sunset frosted the horizon like a pale pink cupcake. Herons tiptoed through the reeds, and caimans drifted lazily past, just the tops of their heads poking above the waterline. I’ve heard the snout of a submerged caiman likened to a twig drifting against the current, but that comparison only holds at a distance, because twigs don’t have eyes, and a caiman’s eyes look at you like they know all of your secrets.

  Campfires, waterfalls, and guitars, the Israeli backpacker had said—the three things that a person never gets tired of staring at. It’s a good list, but I would add big, slow rivers like the Paraguay. As the German girls clicked their cameras at every rustling bush, I leaned back and tranced out on the rolling waters, giggling at the ripples whenever a fish made a pass at the dragonflies. It’s possible that I’m just easily entertained, but if being enthralled by a long, lazy current makes me a simpleton, then I hope I never wake up a sophisticate.

  When I came back to Corumbá the next day, I found a weekly waterfront street party in full swing. It seemed like everyone in town was gathered down by the docks, drinking frosty bottled beers and listening to a band play Morrissey covers in stilted, phonetic English. I grabbed a beer and bobbed my head through the end of the set. When the band finished, a dreadlocked MC came bounding onto the stage.

  “Let’s hear it for the band!” he yelled, and the crowd hooted appreciatively. Behind the stage, a tied-up tugboat sounded two quick blasts on its horn, and the crowd cheered even louder.

  “Let’s hear it for our river!” the MC shouted, gesturing behind him. The tugboat sounded again, and Morrissey himself never heard such an ovation.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  An Unaffected American

  I really suggest you join the Peace Corps. I would if I weren’t such a reprobate, but then I can be twice as effective for the same idea by writing as I could by joining.

  —Personal correspondence, December 17, 1962

  I

  On Easter morning in Asunción, Paraguay, the sad transvestite prostitutes of the Hotel Sheik leaned like toppled statues against a parked taxi out front. It was a couple of hours before dawn, and their cigarette smoke seemed to coagulate in the light of the streetlamp. The only sound on the block was the rattle and hum of the ancient air conditioners upstairs, clinging perilously to the hotel’s window frames. The drag queens tugged listlessly at their skirts. Church bells would be ringing soon, I thought.

  It was four a.m., and I was expounding passionately on American tax policy in the lobby of a brothel on Calle Tacuary. The conversation had started in a drowsy expat bar a few hours before, just an innocent late-night drink with a British couple and a Danish guy who were staying at my hostel. When last call came around, we had yet to divine the meaning of Occupy Wall Street, but the Dane said not to worry—he knew a place where we could get a drink after hours. So twenty minutes later we were settling into the dingy couches downstairs at the Hotel Sheik, getting eyeballs from the working girls while a surprisingly gracious manager served us beers from a fridge behind his desk.

  No one starts a night on the town discussing economic policy. Our conversation had drifted organically in that direction after I asked the Dane about the closure of a famous commune in Copenhagen, which I’d read about online. His answer incorporated some light criticism of the permissiveness of Scandinavian governments, noting, among other things, their generosity with welfare for new immigrants. From there, the Brits had taken over, talking about the recent waves of immigration in England and what they saw as the pitfalls of European Union membership. That led unavoidably to some good-natured complaining about the United Kingdom being the United States’ lapdog in the War on Terror, at which I threw up my hands and relinquished responsibility. During our fourth or fifth round, I fielded a barrage of questions about the Obama administration’s foreign policy, and by the time we settled into our transgender bordello, I was holding forth on the transgressions of the 1 percent and the myth of the progressive tax system.

  It’s funny how travel abroad turns every one of us, to one degree or another, into unwitting junior ambassadors. Even in a setting like the grimy lobby of the Hotel Sheik—about as far from a United Nations conference room as you can get—each of us becomes a kind of reluctant dignitary for the country we left behind. For example, a significant portion of what I now purport to know about Denmark, I picked up during a six-hour drinking binge with a single Danish guy in Asunción. If you’re lucky, you’ll never find yourself in the worst-case scenario: having to face down someone who holds you personally accountable for your country’s perceived flaws. But if you spend enough time mingling in hostels, riding in taxis, or drinking in airport bars, you will sooner or later be called upon to explain, if not defend or condemn, some policy, tradition, or cultural idiosyncrasy of your homel
and.

  This is particularly true if you’re American, since the United States is one of those countries about which everyone has an opinion, regardless of whether they have any strong ties to the place itself. You can’t say the same thing, for example, about Estonia. No Estonian has ever introduced himself at a party, then had someone who’s never been there casually remark, “Estonia, eh? Let me tell you what’s wrong with Estonia.… ” In my experience, Americans abroad tend to respond in such situations with a kind of nervous, apologetic resignation. It’s a tough scenario for any traveler to navigate: owning up to the role of cultural emissary without letting your country’s shortcomings hang around your neck like an albatross.

  Millions of Paraguayan émigrés had to pull off just this balancing act for decades. In his Observer article from January of 1963, provocatively headlined IT’S A DICTATORSHIP, BUT FEW SEEM TO CARE ENOUGH TO STAY AND FIGHT, Thompson notes that almost one-third of all Paraguayan citizens in the early 1960s lived someplace other than Paraguay. The reasons for this are complex. For starters, the country has a long history of fighting devastatingly stupid wars. Paraguay lost almost two-thirds of its population in the War of the Triple Alliance, a violent and quixotic nineteenth-century bloodbath that makes the US invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan look like West Side Story dance-offs. In the 1930s, Paraguay’s Chaco War against Bolivia was the bloodiest South American conflict of the century, resulting in more than 100,000 casualties. Waves of Paraguayans fled the country during and after both wars, and then yet again, following a brief civil war in 1947. By 1954, the country was in economic shambles, paving the way for conservative dictator Alfredo Stroessner to come to power via a military coup. General Stroessner launched a terror campaign of kidnapping and torture against dissenters, and by the time Thompson showed up ten years into his reign, some 500,000 out of 1.8 million Paraguayans were living in exile—some forced, many voluntary.