Running the Amazon

by Joe Kane

  Late in the night a boat engine idled offshore, and a bright light ran over our camp. Voices argued loudly, but the boat sped away when Chmielinski ran down the bank.

  Later still, peering through his mosquito netting, Chmielinski spotted two shadows slouching through the mud right next to our camp. He grabbed his machete, sneaked silently from his tent, and pounced, simultaneously raising his machete and switching on his flashlight to blind our attackers, who proved to be—

  “—the life jackets, Joe! They are blowing on the drying line, I am thinking they are trying to get us!”

  By eight the next morning a fierce headwind had whipped the river into chop and waves that reduced our speed by a third. Buried in the troughs, I lost sight of Chmielinski, though he paddled only a few feet in front of me. I could not time my stroke. At the moment I pushed hardest, expecting my paddle to bite water, it bit nothing but air. Then, accelerating, it struck the water awkwardly. Executing several thousand such strokes wore me out. When my paddle hit water the shock ran through wrist, up forearm, along shoulder, into neck, and erupted through lips in a frustrated oath.

  Meanwhile, five days and two hundred and fifty miles into Amazonas, the clay banks occasionally gave way to low sandstone bluffs, and here and there a sturdy plank-and-frame house sat defiantly on stilts, right over the water. At the mouth of the Iça River we passed a mile-long village, Santo Antônio. The main street ran between houses of brick and wood and ended at either edge of town. As we paddled by, I watched a Volkswagen bug drive slowly along the street, turn around, drive back, turn, and so on, like a plastic duck at a shooting gallery.

  Perhaps a dozen settlements dot the six hundred miles of river between São Paulo and Coari, most of them hidden up swamps and small tributaries, and all of them poor. Alan Holman, an Australian who made a solo kayak descent of the flatwater Amazon in 1982, measured these villages according to how many eggs he could purchase. A six-egg village was an oasis.

  At the store in no-egg Porto Alfonso three men were leaning against empty shelves, drinking bottles of the raw cane spirit called cachaça. One asked Chmielinski where we were going.

  “Belém,” Chmielinski said.

  “Where do you sleep?” another asked.

  “In houses, or on a beach.”

  The third man did not look up from his bottle. “Where are you sleeping tonight?” he asked.

  “Maybe Fonte Boa.”

  “You will not get there today.”

  “A beach, then.”

  “That could be dangerous.”

  “We have big guns,” Chmielinski said, “and we are twelve.”

  “Where are the rest?”

  “With the soldiers.”

  “Soldiers?”

  “In the airplane. The one that follows us.”

  The first man asked, “How do they know where you are?”

  “Radio.”

  As we left the shack we met a distinguished-looking man (he wore shoes), a Colombian engineer surveying a nearby tributary for a dam. “Three weeks, no eggs!” he said in English. “No food, nothing.” He was living on instant rice.

  The lepers who inhabited Ilha do Jardim—Garden Island—said that a drought had left them short of food, but they gave us six papayas and three bunches of bananas. The bananas were delicious (in the heat of the day they were often the only food I could keep down), but later, when I tried to eat one of the soft ripe papayas, I thought of those people, the skin dripping off their faces, and though I felt guilty for it threw the fruit in the river.

  We paddled eight hours that fourth day below São Paulo, and our chart said we had covered seventy miles. We paddled twelve hours the next day—forty miles. On the sixth day we pulled hard, the banks slid by, the chart said we had gone nowhere. My shoulders developed a sharp, white-hot pain and made popping noises. Our chocolate melted, our bread turned moldy, and we discovered that our comida plástica, which I had selected hastily from the crate Bzdak and Durrant had hauled to São Paulo, consisted entirely of chili. After eating it twice a day for six days neither of us could stomach another spoonful.

  We paddled long hours in silence, past islands of floating grass and the occasional snake chugging along with its head raised out of the water like a periscope. The wildlife was oblique—a shaking in the bush at night, a tree limb bent by a hornet nest, squawking in a treetop, a dolphin breaching, the zigzagging triangle of a shark’s fin. (Several shark species breed in the Atlantic but forage as far upriver as Iquitos.)

  Either it rained hard or the sun burned so intensely that in the middle of the day we dove in the river, hung on to the noses of our boats, and drifted downstream with the one-knot current. This was safer than one might think. According to a doctor Durrant had consulted in Iquitos, most Amazonian water snakes swim beneath the surface but are not poisonous, while land snakes, which sometimes are, travel on the surface and are easily spotted. Piranha are overrated—we met no one on the river who had witnessed an attack, much less a death—and the despicable candirti, which I have described elsewhere, was thwarted simply by wearing a pair of shorts while swimming.

  Several fishermen insisted that a pirarucú could eat a man. According to all available scientific evidence the species is incapable of such a feat, but having seen several of the monsters, I cannot blame the fishermen. The pirarucú (or paiche, as it is known in Peru) is one of the world’s largest freshwater fish—it can grow to ten feet and two hundred and fifty pounds—and in addition to gills has a single lung that it must service every few minutes, breaking the water with a loud rolling display not unlike a great scaly red-and-green log. After witnessing this act at close range several times, and being startled half to death, I was willing to believe that such a fish would eat not only a man but a horse.

  On our seventh day into Amazonas we stopped at the grassy head of hilly Acarara Island. A big-boned man named Luis paddled a canoe over from the mainland, and we asked permission to camp.

  “But of course,” he said. “The land is yours.”

  Like most of the peasants along the Solimões, Luis was a caboclo—a person of European and Indian blood who leads a catch-as-catch-can existence dependent mainly on a sunny disposition and traditional forms of fishing, trading, and slash-and-burn agriculture. Minutes later another caboclo, Mauricio, arrived on foot, at the head of a parade of goats, and also granted us permission to camp (though with somewhat more authority than Luis, as the land was actually his).

  The caboclos spoke Portuguese (sufficiently similar to Spanish that we could converse), and while I cooked and we watched a storm approach they taught me the words for knife, fire, rain, and thunder. The English equivalents pulverized them with laughter. Rain was hilarious, fire induced near-hysteria, and thunder—Luis could pronounce it only as “sunder,” and collapsed in a fit of snorts and giggles. Later, as he paddled away, his voice carried across the water and up to our bluff. “Sunder!” I heard, followed by his mulish laugh, and I in turn experimented with my new words—faca, fogo, chuva, trovão—rolling them around on my tongue like exotic fruit.

  Late that night the storm hit with a fury. It would have blown me right off the island and into the river if Chmielinski had not planted my kayak next to my tent as a protective wall. Hearing the commotion, I stuck my head out, shone my flashlight, and spotted Chmielinski running around in the rain stark naked. When I called to him, he yelled back, “I like this being wet!”

  Our hosts the next evening, the caboclo Francisco Gomez and his family, lived in a thatch-and-palmwood house set well back from the river. Several pocked tin pots hung beside the fire pit in back, next to five huts containing mosquito nets and nothing else. The house itself was a single room with a table along one wall and, against another, a wooden mantel that held two laminated pictures of a blue-eyed Virgin, a hammer, a wind-up cuckoo clock that did not work, and two bottles of antivenin. Below it were five machetes and three beaten cardboard suitcases. That appeared to be the sum of the family’s possessions.r />
  We put up our tents in the house, studying the chickens that ran beneath the floor, and Francisco introduced his tough old wife, Fatima, then a young woman with a baby, then another young woman, very pretty, who wore a short skirt, eye shadow, and a jaguar-tooth necklace. Fatima chased her from the room. Three boys came in, and two young men.

  “Francisco,” I asked, “how many people live here?”

  Two more boys entered, a girl, a young mother with a baby.

  Francisco thought for a moment. “Thirteen.”

  In walked an older man, António, who like Francisco appeared middle-aged. He had a small boy with him.

  “I count seventeen,” I said to Francisco.

  He thought for a moment. “Yes,” he said. “Seventeen.”

  “All live here, in this house?”

  “All live here.”

  “All one family?”

  He smiled. “Two families.”

  “Three,” António said. “But I am not always here. I have children in other places.”

  “How many children?” Chmielinski asked.

  “Forty-four,” António said.

  “Forty-four?”

  “Yes. I have forty-four children. With ten women.” He nodded seriously, and I thought of Emilio Lozano, on the forlorn Puinahua Canal in Peru.

  “Where are your children?” Chmielinski asked.

  “Everywhere!” António said. “That is why I come to Francisco’s home. Only two of them live here.”

  An hour later all seventeen inhabitants had crowded into the room. The women and children sat along the walls and the men huddled around Chmielinski, who spread open our chart on the table. The men exclaimed when Chmielinski showed them their house, marked by a square. The chart also indicated a canal near Francisco’s home, but it was not clear whether the canal cut all the way across a bend in the river. If it did, we would save a day by following it. If the canal petered out too early, however, we would lose two days backtracking.

  Did any of the men know about the canal?

  “Yes,” Francisco said. He pointed knowingly to the chart. “There it is.”

  Chmielinski sighed. “But does it exist?” he asked. “Is it on the river?”

  Francisco shrugged. António, however, said it was, and the other men nodded vigorously.

  “Six hours from here,” António said.

  “Four hours,” one of the younger men said.

  “One day,” Francisco said.

  Chmielinski knew that routine. He gave up and cooked our chili, cooked all we had left, and Fatima brought bowls and farinha, the lumpy powder made from toasted manioc that can be, as this was, nutty and delicious. She passed the bowls around and we distributed our chili and everyone sat on the floor and ate. She gave me a Portuguese lesson: knife, spoon, stove, rain, yesterday, today, tomorrow.

  I read my Portuguese Berlitz: “Waiter, my fish is cold.”

  “Your fish is cold,” Francisco said. “But you have no fish.”

  “My fish never gets cold!” António said. The young men laughed.

  I read on. “Are you alone tonight?”

  “Stupid question,” António said.

  After dinner Chmielinski continued to work with the map, but I was tired and said good night. I crawled into my tent and wrote in my notebook. I woke up with my nose on the page. When I rolled over on my back four tiny faces were staring down at me through the netting. I closed my eyes and sometime later woke to António and Francisco arguing about, I think, a calf. Then the young men got into it, and the women, and the place was in an uproar. Finally, Chmielinski called out from his tent, in slow, precise Spanish, “Excuse me. I know this is your house, but you have invited us to stay, and we have much work tomorrow. So please.”

  The Gomez family retired. I fell asleep. When I woke again, an hour before dawn, they were sitting along the walls.

  Chmielinski and I spent all of the next day searching for the canal, and all of the next two days backtracking. Perhaps we had misunderstood the Gomezes, lost something in the cracks between Portuguese and Spanish. Perhaps the canal had simply dried up. Or perhaps in their generosity the Gomezes had given us completely false information, because it was what they had thought we wanted to hear.

  The next night, our tenth on the Solimões, we stayed with a thirty-two-year-old caboclo named Eduardo. He had silver-blue eyes and strong square features, and he lived in a stilt house right on the river, at the mouth of a lake the color of his eyes. Six other houses along the water made up Cabo Azul, or Blue Cape. Eduardo’s wife had gone away somewhere, and in both celebration and sorrow he was drinking rum.

  A monkey troop of young boys stuffed our boats into Eduardo’s house and fetched water from the river while Eduardo cooked bodó, a fish with a lobsterlike exoskeleton. The meat flopped out in a steaming hunk, redolent of peppers. When we finished, the boys washed the plates in the river. Then, as one, they demanded “A song!”

  Eduardo pulled a guitar from beneath a pile of rags and badly but loudly played four-chord ballads of romance, drink, and fishing. We unloaded the kayaks and the boys turned them over and set to a fierce drumming, six to a boat, building a mellifluous, smoothly syncopated whole. Eduardo played until my fingers hurt for watching him, but the boys pleaded for more.

  After an hour or so I walked out to wash myself in the Solimões, then strolled along the duckwalk that connected the six houses. The drumming and Eduardo’s earnest crooning filled the cool night air. This, I thought, is Brazil.

  I returned to the house. The boys made room at my kayak, and I pounded and banged in honky time and drank rum until dawn painted the river.

  Later, as we packed to leave, two men paddled up in a long canoe. One held a rifle, and in the floor of the canoe, bathed in blood, were a dead fifteen-foot caiman, green and scaly, and a shorter, baby caiman, also dead. I might have felt bad for the critters or happy for Cabo Azul, for this would be community meat, but as I stared at the lifeless eyes frozen open in horror I could think only, That is the face of my hangover.

  We paddled right past Tefé, hidden a couple of miles up a tributary of the same name, and on to Coari, which after our twelve days on the Solimões looked like Paris. The village sits on a black, silt-free lake that is cool and perfect for swimming, ringed with white sand and green jungle, and so big it would take an entire day to navigate the shore by motorboat, but so empty that you might see one fisherman, or a woman doing wash, or no one at all.

  The port held two dozen small boats, and people on foot and bicycle crowded Coari’s score of mud streets. Sensuous forro music gushed from shops and homes, and the air was rich with the aromas of meat roasting in the town’s churrascaria. We met Durrant and Bzdak at the clean, quiet, and nearly empty Palace Hotel, unpacked the boats, and then sat in the churrascaría and ate barbecued chicken and drank vicious rum-and-lime batidas.

  Coari was a pleasant place in which to suffer a nervous breakdown. Despite Durrant’s cautions, I had not noticed Chmielinski’s exhaustion, had not understood that he reacted to stress much differently than I did. I flat-out collapsed, without grace. But the wearier Chmielinski grew, the harder he drove himself. He had slept little on the river, working late into the night on his maps or rigging some new apparatus for the kayaks, and during the days he delivered an endless stream of chatter—on the twelve-day run from Tabatinga I had heard, in detail, the history of Poland since the Huns.

  Nor did Chmielinski rest in Coari. Though isolated, the town had a radar dish and a public phone, and Chmielinski spent two long, fruitless days trying to contact the international wire services in Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo. He had gambled heavily on the Amazon expedition—had quit his job, invested most of his savings, jeopardized his marriage, and obligated himself to half a dozen sponsors who had donated food, equipment, and money. Our journey, if completed and publicized, would both fulfill those obligations and promote the New York travel company Chmielinski had started with two Polish partners the year before.


  Durrant and Bzdak, too, were showing the strain of five months of river travel. They were locked into our kayaking schedule, forced to travel from port to port in suffocating, often hazardous riverboats, and had constantly to find ways to stretch our little money. Worst of all, Durrant said after the four of us had climbed to the hotel roof and sat beneath a black, overcast night sky, Chmielinski and I were excluding them, acting as if the expedition were only the two of us.

  She was right. My excuse was that I was so worn out that whenever we met up with them I could do little but eat and sleep. I felt bad that they interpreted this as an attempt to exclude them. Though Durrant, Bzdak, and Chmielinski had been strangers to me when I had arrived in Peru, in the five months since then we had shared what was the most intense experience of my life, and, as far as I could tell, of theirs as well. Yet we had stuck together through it all, and until then I had not doubted that if the skyline of Belém ever rose up before us, we would see it together.

  As best I could, I told them that.

  The situation was harder for Chmielinski. He was our motor, but to operate at the pace he did, he needed Bzdak’s undivided loyalty. That need, and the enormous mutual trust that went with it, had been demonstrated dramatically on the Apurimac. If Chmielinski now asked Bzdak to perform more mundane duties—finding supplies, changing money, hustling shelter in advance of our arrivals—that underlying need had not lessened.

  Chmielinski couldn’t run without Bzdak, but Bzdak had fallen in love. There was only one graceful solution: Chmielinski had to trust Durrant as he did Bzdak. Her work was impeccable, her courage demonstrated beyond doubt. She deserved that trust.