The Lunatic Express

by Carl Hoffman

  I raced back to my hotel, checked out, bought a hammock and some rope, and was there by noon. A bit late, as it turned out—the Moreira was filling up fast. The first deck, just two feet above the water, was one open space stacked with crates and sacks; I had to weave my way through narrow passageways between them, and they unnerved me. They must have weighed tons. The second deck, open too, was a tangle of hammocks tied to the rafters; they were next to each other and above each other; I tied mine among the tangles, only inches to spare above and next to me.

  The top deck was open, except for a roofed bar area with a few tables and plastic chairs, and the party was already cranking. The sky was high and wide and epic, the breeze like a big-bladed fan on low, the double-time beat of accordion-fused samba coursing through from a pair of three-foot-high speakers. Two women were dancing, swaying their hips like their spines were worms, around a table heavy with empty beer cans. Ten little kids ran around the deck, and two played naked under an outdoor shower spigot. “What’s your name? Where are you from?” asked Irma. She had long black hair, skintight blue jeans, and a belly that hung five inches over her waist.

  Off to one side swayed a black cowboy with green eyes, wearing cowboy boots and high-waisted jeans with a huge metal buckle and a ten-gallon hat. He looked like he needed a horse. “This is the best boat,” said Roberto, an agricultural economist in a polo shirt and loafers. “The food is good and there’s a lot of it and there are a lot of women!”

  It was like I’d stumbled into a dormitory on the first day of college. Irma, Val, Kleyton, Lucia, and Antonio were dancing and drinking and none of them had ever met each other before. Irma slipped off her wedding ring and slid it onto her right hand. Antonio, already shirtless, did the same. Kleyton smiled, clapped me on the back, and said, “All Brazilians think about is sex!”

  “We’re not leaving until seven,” said Val, who had two huge dimples and was almost bursting out of her halter top.

  I bought them all a round of beers and settled in, and at five the engines started rumbling and we pushed away from the dock. But out in the current we stopped, going nowhere. Aluminum johnboats sped out, full of men. “Look,” said Carlos, an older man from Venezuela. “There is supposed to be a line down there, the waterline.”

  I peered over the rail and saw nothing. “Yes,” he said, “You can’t see it. We are overloaded!”

  He was a former accountant from Caracas who’d taken up long river trips in his retirement. He’d been on enough ships to be worried. In late February, just a month before, the Altamonte Montiero (a carbon copy of the Moreira) also en route to Manaus, had struck a fuel barge during the darkness of a lunar eclipse. No one knew exactly how many people were on board, but the Monteiro rolled and sank, killing at least eighteen. Three months later another ferry, carrying eighty, overturned in a rainstorm, killing fifteen.

  It took an hour to sort out; instead of offloading cargo to reduce the boat’s overloading, money exchanged hands. Disaster films are filled with ominous foreshadowing: dramatic music plays; the camera lingers on, say, the payoff. But this was the stuff of everyday life. It was utterly banal and commonplace, hardly even worth mentioning. Until, that is, a storm rolls in or two boats collide and tragedy ensues. On these riverboats it was usually those sleeping in the tiny, hot windowless cabins toward the bow who drowned, as had happened on the Monteiro. The Venezuelan shrugged and made the sign of the cross. There was nothing to be done about it; we would be in God’s hands. As the sun dipped low we finally eased down the wide, silver-brown river.

  There’s nothing better than the vibration of a ship’s engines gently surging underfoot. It’s the sound of travel, a long journey. The Madeira was a mile wide and seemed to go on forever. I had grown up sailing on Chesapeake Bay, had a sailboat on the Potomac River now, and I was struck, not for the first time, by the idea of the earth defined and dominated by water, the continents but islands in a great pool of liquid that is more the original road than any highway. From here we could float to the Amazon, from the Amazon to the Atlantic; from the Atlantic we could go anywhere. Deep in the jungle, I still felt strangely connected to everywhere. And though roads are, by definition, new constructs, rivers flow as they always have; here in the Amazon Basin, as we slid past wild green banks and forest, it couldn’t have looked too different from what Francisco de Orellana had seen along the Amazon itself in 1542.

  Night falls quickly on the Equator; one minute it was sunny, the next it was dark, the Southern Cross low in the sky and the Milky Way thick overhead, the blackness of the river and its unpopulated banks impenetrable. Heat lightning flashed along the horizon, and I played a simple card-slapping game with Kleyton and five kids. But after the afternoon’s beer, sun, and heat, we were all suddenly exhausted. Irma and Val stopped dancing and plunked down on plastic chairs. Kleyton disappeared. And I ducked and shimmied under hammocks and swaying bodies and slid into my scrap of hanging cloth. It was a long night. Bodies above me and beside me pressed and bumped into me every time one of us shifted. The boat rumbled. My rear end touched the floor. The night grew damp and cool; I threw on extra shirts but couldn’t stop shivering. In the middle of the night I awoke to find us docked, a line of men throwing whole frozen fish, one by one like cut wood, from a truck into the hold.

  A Klaxon sounded at six a.m., signaling breakfast, and again at eleven and five, for lunch and dinner. We ate around a long table, twenty at a time, big bowls of rice and beans and noodles and chicken, with copious amounts of farina and homemade hot sauce, finished with black coffee as sweet and thick as ice cream. No one spoke; we shoveled it in and hurried out for the next group standing in two lines on either side of the door. We dozed in our hammocks. We paused at villages where crowds of people nearly sank the floating docks, and took on sacks of charcoal, bags of ice, motorcycles, pots and pans, and people. At one village the sound of our Klaxon was answered by a string of firecrackers. We passed miles and miles and hours and hours of nothing but a tangle of green trees. Sometimes we were but a few yards from the riverbank; at others we were midstream, amid a swirl of languid currents and floating islands of water hyacinth. The river held no buoys, no markers; navigation was by intuition and experience. We played cards and read; we drank too much beer; we baked in the sun. We observed each other. Not for one second was I bored.

  There was nowhere to go, nothing to do; we drank as much as we liked. We talked, mostly—visited, as my mother would say of the long conversations people had in her native North Dakota. Kleyton was a half-Peruvian doctor from Rio Branco, being posted to a boat out of Manaus to tend to small river towns for six months. He was small, with wire-rimmed glasses and a baseball cap. Yesterday he had been all over Val and Irma, dancing with them, touching their shoulders, trying to make them laugh. Neither one had shown any particular interest, though, and now he was angry.

  “Those women,” he said, shaking his head and nodding toward Irma and Val, dancing and swaying in their own world, “they are prostitutes.”

  “I don’t think so,” I said.

  “No, they are,” he insisted. “They are bad women! You shouldn’t talk to them.”

  Kleyton was a man obsessed. Every conversation turned to women, as it often did throughout my journey when I talked to other men. If there was an international language between men in the world, it was about women. The truth was, we were all obsessed. “In Brazil, all the women have curvy backs,” he said. “But in America, their whole bodies are curvy, right?”

  We were in a bubble, the world of the boat on the river our own; it was strangely liberating. In the old days, I mused, every trip across the country by train, every trip to another continent by boat, was like this. An escape. A suspension of time, and a time for reflection.

  The Moreira was clean—a crewman was always mopping—but there was only so much you could do with 200 people on a boat with four bathrooms. They were wet, stiflingly hot wooden rooms the size of closets, and smelled so strong I couldn’t breathe. To b
athe, you turned a faucet and eighty-degree river water poured from the ceiling. Communal sinks lined a wall of the hammock deck; I stood in line and shaved and brushed my teeth in front of an audience. Personal space, cleanliness, silence, safety—I was getting used to not having any for long periods of time. But I was also starting to realize they were an unbelievable luxury. In America, the richer you were the more things you had and the bigger they were—but money didn’t just buy things. After so many days on crowded buses and boats, it was becoming clear that more than anything else, money bought insulation and protection. From wind and rain and heat, from other people, from noise, from pollution. The deeper I went, the clearer this became.

  WE ATE, WE DOZED, we bumped against each other, the river flowed on. Once I stumbled on the captain having nits picked out of his hair. By the afternoon of the third day we passed more and more small cattle farms carved out of the green, surrounding weatherbeaten shacks on stilts near the river’s edge. My hammock mates packed their bags, brushed their teeth, washed their hair, and waited. By nine, as we plowed up the Rio Negro, lights began to appear, and then more and more. They were so bright—a shocking industrial brightness illuminating huge oceangoing freighters, a world of metal and power and muscle, after nothing but wood and water and sky and green. “It’s scary-looking,” said Kayla, a hairdresser returning to Manaus after three months visiting her father in Bolivia. Like Marina on the bus to Lima, she, too, had seen so much and so little—nowhere but Santa Cruz, Bolivia, and Manaus and hundreds of miles of rain forest and river in between. “I’ve never been to Rio, to São Paulo,” she said, as we averted our eyes from the blinding sodium vapor lights.

  We slid past piers where hundreds of similar riverboats were berthed and tied up at the end of a floating wooden dock, and in a mad rush dispersed. One moment we were all together, the next everyone was gone, real life grabbing us by the lapels, pulling us in all too fast. For a few days I had been part of a community, and then it was gone, evaporated, and I was alone again.

  . . .

  I’D BEEN TRAVELING almost nonstop for a month, and it was time to go to Africa, and the only way to get there was from São Paulo, Brazil. I booked my flight from Manaus through Porto Alegre on TAM, Brazil’s national carrier. While Cubana was statistically the most dangerous national airline in the world, TAM was rated the third most dangerous in Latin America—and that was before two recent crashes. The problem was fairly straightforward: Brazil was booming and it was big and its roads were terrible. Lots of Brazilians were making money; more and more of them were taking to the skies, flying on a system that was being overwhelmed and that required nearly every plane to fly in and out of São Paulo, one of the largest cities on earth, through one of the most crowded and urban airports on earth.

  Delays of hours and sometimes even days were frequent at Congonhas, the oldest and busiest of São Paulo’s three airports, with notoriously short runways that were surrounded by dense blocks of high-rise apartments and frequently pummeled by heavy rain. The runways at JFK in New York stretched for more than 14,000 feet; Bogotá’s were over 12,000 feet. Congonhas’s longest runway, however, stretched a mere 6,362 feet. In 1996 a TAM jet plowed through an apartment building on takeoff, killing all ninety-six people on board. In 2006 two Boeing 737s nearly skidded off the end of the runway (and a Gol Airlines 737 collided in midair over the Amazon with a private jet and fell to earth, killing all 154 passengers). In February 2007 a Brazilian court banned all Boeing 737 and Fokker 100 jets from taking off at Congonhas—the airport had been closed an average of three times a month because of heavy rains—citing short runways, decaying tarmac, and slippery conditions. People protested, however—the ban forced passengers to the much farther away Guarulhos International Airport—and an appeals court reversed the ruling. Soon after, the International Airline Pilots Association issued a pointed warning to all pilots flying in Brazil, citing “a lack of proper government oversight and control” of aircraft. Then, just five months after that, on July 16, 2007, a turboprop ATR 42 had skidded off the runway, though no one was injured. And the next day, TAM flight 3054 landed in heavy rain and it, too, failed to stop as the runway ended.

  I booked a ticket on the very same flight. And found myself in shock when I hit the airport in Manaus, not twelve hours after stepping off the Moreira. The floor was nubbed rubber, clean enough to eat from. Diamonds and gold and pearls sparkled behind glass counters. Men in suits and women in skinny jeans and silver flats padded past. After a month on bad buses and in the near constant mud and dirt of mountain and jungle roads and winding rivers and wooden boats, it all looked hard, shiny, slick. I was overwhelmed by the orderliness of it all. A disembodied voice called out my flight; I handed my preprinted boarding pass to a woman in lipstick and big hair and heels, and strolled down the Jetway to the shiny new air-conditioned Airbus 330 filled with seats upholstered in orange plastic. A stewardess passed out hard candy in individual wrappers from a wicker basket. Everything about flying, about operating airplanes, was the polar opposite of the buses and boats and cars I’d been traveling. Schedules, technology, pilot and safety training, baggage handling and tracking, maintenance, air traffic control, radio communications, and fuel management—the whole enterprise required a quantum leap in skills and organization and government intervention above the bus drivers with their gold teeth and tattoos and the river captain with nits in his hair. The wooden riverboat, the buses, they all had schedules, more or less, but not really; they left when the boat or bus was full; they arrived when they arrived. People expected no more. The schedules took a back seat to reality. Ditto with maintenance and safety: tires were bald, buses were overloaded, the system was upended with corruption. Usually the only consequence was a flat tire and a delay, and when tragedy did strike, its victims were poor, people whom no one but their immediate family and friends cared about.

  Brazil’s airline system was expanding by leaps and bounds—in fact, more people were starting to fly all over the world in places they hadn’t ever before; planes were becoming much more democratic. New low-cost airlines were popping up everywhere, not just in Brazil but in every country that had a burgeoning middle class, from Indonesia to Nigeria to India. But the underlying systems that made flying safe hadn’t caught up. In America the days of planes filled with sexy, eye-candy stewardesses were long gone, and planes themselves often felt like unkempt cattle cars. Stewardesses were more often than not stewards, who stomped down the aisles brusquely jerking your seatbacks forward on final descent. But behind the cranky utilitarianism of flying on, say, United lay a powerful statistic: at that point in my journey no regularly scheduled commercial jet operated by a U.S. airline had crashed in two years. Behind all those aged flight attendants American businessmen complained about lay decades of seniority, women and men whose real job wasn’t passing out pretzels or looking good, but simple passenger safety should anything go awry.

  On TAM, the old, romantic patina of flying as luxury was all there; the Brazilians had it down pat. The stewardesses wore tight-fitting blue skirts and clingy white tops with plunging necklines and four-inch stilettos, the Airbus was spotless, and they handed that candy out to us before we even took off. But as we roared down the runway and rotated up, no one checked to see if any seatbelts were fastened or the seatbacks were up. Behind the façade lay an air traffic control system run by the Brazilian military that was in complete disarray.

  All of which was on my mind when I boarded TAM flight 3058, from Porto Alegre to São Paulo the next morning, nine months after the very same flight—then called 3054—had killed every passenger on board. That morning, like this one, had been completely routine. Nothing special. No prescient foreshadowing drumbeats. Just a full load of businessmen and businesswomen in dark suits and creased designer blue jeans clutching cell phones and BlackBerries and slim attaché cases. I looked around. None of us expected to die. People had meetings to get to. Families to see. The captain in his starched white shirt, four gold bars
on his epaulettes, stood at the door to the flight deck and greeted everyone. Disasters happened quickly, I realized. One minute you were watching Rambo on the TV screen, the next the bus was diving off a cliff. I fastened my seatbelt. The woman next to me chatted on her phone; I thought of how many people on that TAM flight had talked to friends, family, and colleagues from their seats—their last conversations.

  We took off. Sun streamed through the windows. Had the same flight ever crashed twice? I wondered. I looked around. On that flight, as on this one, nothing but the usual banal movements. People leafed through their in-flight magazines. Adjusted the airflow overhead. Sipped Coca-Cola in plastic cups. Movements that meant nothing, except that on 3054 they meant everything because those passengers were doing them for the last time in their lives. I knew I wasn’t going to die, that this time this flight wasn’t going to crash. But, no doubt, that’s exactly how they’d felt nine months ago, on this same trajectory, dropping an hour later out of the clouds over the endless acres of São Paulo’s rooftops, coming closer and closer, so close you could almost see through the windows of people’s apartments. On 3054 there had been one piece of information that the passengers didn’t know, though the pilots did: only one of the airplane’s two thrust reversers was working.

  I tightened my seatbelt, looked out the window. Sun and puffy cumulus clouds; on 3054 that morning the ceiling was low, rain pouring down—that was the only difference. As far as I knew, that is. Were both of this plane’s thrust reversers working? Had all its maintenance been done? I had no idea; none of us did. And that was the rub with airplanes like this one: everything looked so good. On a bus in the Andes I braced myself for disaster, but on a shiny, new-looking airplane with pilots in white shirts and stewardesses in tight skirts, what could go wrong? I knew what was happening up in the cockpit because I had a transcript of 3054’s cockpit voice recorder, and because it was a closely followed script that never varied from one flight to the next.