Running the Amazon

by Joe Kane

  “Guys,” Chmielinski said to them, “I am sorry. Now is the hardest time. We cannot make it without you. We are in the kayaks, you are in the boats, but it is all the same. We are not here if you are not here.”

  He also had a card up his sleeve. He had phoned Casper, and learned that the “Save the Amazon Expedition” committee had raised enough funds for us to finish our trip. The money would be waiting in Manaus. Meanwhile, we would use what remained to hire a boat, and make the three-day run to Manaus as a team.

  When we heard that we exchanged hugs all around. Bzdak rummaged in the hotel kitchen, emerged with a transistor radio, and tuned it to a station in Tefé broadcasting the infectious forro. And then, there on the darkened rooftop, in the middle of wild Amazonas, we danced.

  At dawn Bzdak and Durrant went to the port to hire a boat and buy supplies. Having arranged to meet them downstream, and half-asleep, Chmielinski and I departed Coari. By midday, under a hot blue sky, I was still paddling dreamily along the gently rolling river. Then a soft wind picked up and waves began to build so slowly I barely noticed them. I stroked, crested each wave, and as it passed beneath me slapped the paddle down.

  All at once I realized the waves were over my head.

  I looked up. The sky turned bright red, then purple, then so black the river, whipped into whitecaps, glowed against it.

  An air horn honked to my right and I saw a cargo boat twenty feet abeam and lurching wildly. The Coronel Brandão, according to the lettering on its hull. A blue tarp hung amidships. A hand drew the tarp back. Bzdak thrust his head out and waved to me. As best I could I returned the gesture. He waved again.

  But he wasn’t waving—he was signaling frantically for me to head for the bank, which, as I crested the next wave, I saw a mile to my left. He disappeared behind the tarp and the Brandão swung hard to port. Pitching in the waves, it broke for land.

  At the top of the next wave I looked for Chmielinski, and spotted his long white kayak far away, near the left bank.

  Mesmerized, I watched the storm finish its approach. To my left, treetops bent and flattened at the foot of the black sky, and seconds later the bank disappeared behind a frothy white wall. Then the storm hit me—my face felt as if it were being stung by a swarm of bees—and the wind gusted so hard I had to fight to hold on to my paddle. Everything went white around me, then gray. Blinking rapidly against the driven rain, I focused on the tip of my kayak. My little coat-hanger tree was now bent as severely as the trees on shore.

  Thinking I would try to follow the Brandão, I turned left, broadside to the waves, and felt my boat begin to roll. My stomach tightened. Reflexively, I braced as Chmielinski had taught me, extending my paddle to my left, like a pontoon, and leaning away from the wave, down its face. When the wave had passed beneath me I righted myself in the trough and paddled toward shore, until the next wave forced me to brace again.

  Brace, paddle, brace, paddle. To say I proceeded in this manner for the next twenty minutes sounds as if I were in command. Actually, as I went up and over each wave I heard, as if it belonged to someone else, my own quavering voice shouting “no … No … NO!”

  A cargo boat suddenly appeared and was within five feet of running me down when I turned my stern to a wave and surfed its face. I was proud of that maneuver until the boat’s wake caught me. Moving at right angles to the river waves, it tipped me sideways, and I surfed the next wave with my boat almost on its side and me hung far out to my right, bracing with my paddle.

  Though scared silly, I did manage over the next hour to pull within sight of the left bank, where I saw waves pounding the shore, long stretches of bank and trees collapsing into the river, and five or six big boats pitching about. One looked like the Brandão. Trembling, I paddled back out, then turned my nose downstream and held on there for an hour or so, waves breaking over my bow, until the storm abated.

  Another hour and I saw Chmielinski silhouetted against the skyline, waving his paddle in an arc.

  “Hey!” he yelled as I approached. “Now you are a big kayaker!”

  I wouldn’t have said that, but I did feel as if I’d undergone a kind of baptism. I had new confidence in my ship. She’d held her own in the waves and the wind, and I had never felt, as I had with the white-water kayak, that I was fighting her. We were one tight little unit.

  Chmielinski shouted, and pointed behind me. I turned to see not one but two spectacular rainbows lighting up the south bank of the Solimões for miles.

  The Coronel Brandão found us at sunset. Bzdak motioned us to follow, and after the boat was tied up to a sturdy tree on the right bank we went aboard. The captain, Edison, and his first mate, Miguel, were large, swarthy, middle-aged caboclos, and, like most I’d met, confident and imperturbable

  A trio of young boys scrambled about the legs of these giants, mopping the Brandão’s deck, cleaning the galley, greasing the engine. When they had finished, Edison fired up a generator that roared so loudly we could not hear one another even when we shouted. The generator’s sole function was to power a television. Though we were too far from anywhere to pick up a signal, the boys sat before the set transfixed, as if desire alone could pull an image from the snow-white screen.

  The crew’s last member, and the Brandão’s jewel, was Maria, a dark beauty who claimed to be eighteen but looked a mature fifteen. On her small shelf in the stern she kept a tidy collection of cheap jewelry, dolls, perfume bottles, deck shoes, and a pair of shiny cobalt-blue pumps, and beneath the shelf a hamper of skirts and blouses. I took her to be Edison’s daughter, until that evening, when the charged grunts issuing from the stern quarters she shared with Edison suggested otherwise.

  Not dissimilar grunts rose from the mosquiteiro Miguel shared with the three boys.

  The three-day run to Manaus was a kind of holiday, although Chmielinski, adamant that he and I travel entirely under our own power, refused to let me set foot on the Brandão until she came to a dead stop. But at night we slept aboard. Freed of the burden of making camp, we put in long days on the water, from an hour before sunrise to an hour after sunset. My shoulders ached, and Durrant had to outfit me with elastic wrist braces, but we ate fresh fish every night and drank cold beer.

  That third night, long after dark, we met the Brandão in the port of Manacapuru, the last town on the river before the metropolis of Manaus. Edison, by authority of his physical bulk, had simply bulled his way between two other boats, one of them empty, the other occupied by a frail old woman whose skin hung from her head in loose folds. Her boat had probably not been on the river in years—the hull was so covered with muck I could not see wood—and she stared at us for only a moment before she crawled into her hammock, shattered by the blast of the Brandão’s generator. The boys had picked up a Manaus station and were immersed in Os Flintstones.

  This being a Sunday night, Edison and Miguel dressed for church. They donned bright yachting caps, clean polo shirts with reptilian insignia (“Caiman!” Maria squealed), bleached white trousers, and white tennis shoes. Maria dressed up, too, in a white cotton dress and her blue pumps, but Edison would not allow her to leave the boat. She stamped her feet and pouted, but in the end settled in with the boys and Fred and Wilma.

  We four gringos followed Edison and Miguel through the old woman’s boat, passing her hammock without a word, then descended a gangplank to the waterfront and climbed a set of stairs into town. Dozens of young couples were strolling Manacapuru’s one small plaza. Illuminated by a single streetlamp, two ancient Chevrolets circled the plaza, chased by several new Volkswagen bugs (which are still manufactured in Brazil). The churchgoers went to seek their god. We four expeditioneers went in search of beer. We found a bar overlooking the river, but a band was playing loud disco music, and I returned alone to the Brandão.

  Maria, still in her fancy clothes, stood atop the boat and stared up at the bar. The music rushed down as clearly as the stars shone overhead.

  “You do not dance?” she asked, though I did
not understand her until she placed one hand over her stomach and the other in the air and executed a hip-wiggling circle.

  “Yes,” I said, “but I am too tired to stay in there.”

  She sighed. To be here in Manacapuru was for her quite an occasion, but however unwillingly, she had outgrown dancing and courting. Her mate was in church and she was at home where she belonged.

  I put up my tent in the boat. To my surprise and gratitude, the boys turned off the television and silenced the generator. Maria lit a candle. The four of us talked for a while. They did not attend school, and they could neither read nor write. They did, however, have an intimate knowledge of the television show Dallas, which I had never seen. Unable to answer their questions about J.R., I felt as if I had broken an agreement I had not known I had made.

  I crawled into my tent. Music continued to pulse down from the bar. When they thought I had gone to sleep, Maria and the boys began to dance.

  The next day we slid left off the Solimões, north, into a canal we hoped would drop us into the Negro River a few miles downstream from Manaus. The Brandão took the lead, Chmielinski followed her, and I followed him.

  Entering the canal was like leaving a freeway for a narrow green alley. For weeks the jungle wall had seemed hard and solid, but now, not ten feet to either side, it looked porous and revealing. Here and there I spotted ratty huts, tilted and ajar, thatch full of holes, stilts splintered and collapsing, and once I saw a pair of glittering eyes and, as I drew closer, a dark, naked man frozen in place.

  “Bom dia,” I said, but he did not respond.

  When I paddled still closer, he turned and fled.

  In front of me, the canal appeared to end abruptly. A solid gray wall stretched across its mouth like a dam. When our little fleet left the canal and entered the broad, ink-black Negro River, however, the wall revealed itself to be the hull of a supertanker, the Evros, anchored a thousand miles from the Atlantic. At six stories, it was the tallest man-made thing I had seen since Lima.

  A sleek powerboat glided past us. Three very fat but elegantly barbered men sat in the cockpit, holding drinks, and four young women in tiny bikinis were sunning themselves on the deck. One of the women blew Chmielinski a kiss. The man at the wheel scowled, the boat sped away, and soon it was nothing but a cloud of white foam swallowed by the skyline of Manaus.

  17 • The Amazon

  The Manaus waterfront differs from other tropical waterfronts only in that it is bigger than most, a broader anarchy of mud and garbage, thicker rivulets of refuse flowing down the bank and over one’s bare feet, a louder cacophony of unmuffled engines, more house-of-cards shacks serving bowls of starchy stew the ingredients of which you do not want to know.

  We did not linger there. Dragging the kayaks, Chmielinski, Durrant, Bzdak, and I ascended the stairs into the city, absorbing the cool night air fragrant with the stuff of the next dawn’s market, the cilantro and garlic and onions and lemons stacked in vague mounds next to other vague mounds which upon close inspection proved to be sleeping caboclos. Chmielinski rousted one of the men, who in turn rousted several others. We struck a deal, they hoisted our boats to their shoulders, and we followed them into the gray-black streets.

  Half an hour later, standing in the handsome lobby of the Hotel Tropical in downtown Manaus, we could as well have been on Rodeo Drive, or Fifth Avenue. Dripping river slime onto the rich red carpet, we contemplated what a room would cost for the night, then returned to the street and spoke with the caboclos. They took us to a hotel near the waterfront that did not have carpets anywhere.

  When we arrived we thanked the men for their wisdom and climbed to our room, hauling the kayaks behind us. I took a cold shower, soaping up several times over, and studied the infections in my crotch and arms and legs, the swollen arthritic middle finger of my left hand, and, in the mirror, the face burned to leather. I speculated about the lingering numbness in toes and heels.

  Then I put on the clean clothes stored so carefully in the nose of my boat and walked back to the Tropical. I sat at a table on the sidewalk out front and had a beer, and another. At the next table a woman with coal-black skin, dressed head to toe in a body-hugging leopard-skin leotard, her eyes wide and bloodshot, flung a slurred oath at a groomed, silver-haired man in a white linen suit. He left. The fine-boned young woman began to cry, then approached me with an offer of “something from Bolivia or Peru.” I declined.

  I hailed a cab from the fleet of yellow Volkswagen bugs that are the city’s ball bearings and proceeded northwest along the Negro River, trying to make sense of the architectural chaos, the skyscrapers and shacks, the suburban homes, the prefab warehouses, the Victorian mansions that early in the twentieth century were considered among the finest in the world. I tried to picture Manaus in 1910, at the height of the rubber boom, the third city in the Western Hemisphere to have electricity. Her population of ninety thousand spent $8 million a year on jewelry. They shipped their laundry to London, their children to school in France.

  In 1912 rubber trees smuggled out of Brazil by an English botanist began to thrive in the Far East. Manaus died, then rose back up. Nineteen sixty-six: The Brazilian government declares the city a free port. Foreign manufacturers bring in component parts free of the stiff import taxes in effect throughout the rest of the country and assemble them at the hundreds of boxlike instant factories that soon ring the city. Sony, Sharp, Honda—the principal exports of “The Capital of the Jungle” are stereos, televisions, motorcycles. From all over Brazil people fly into the jungle to shop. Manaus becomes a giant flea market. In ten years her population quadruples to eight hundred thousand.

  My driver ignored the cab’s meter and pulled a rate card from the glove box. With inflation running at 200 percent per annum, it was impractical to continue to adjust the meters. New rate cards were issued weekly.

  In the morning I chose to live dangerously. I went shopping for a pair of shoes. The “free zone” was a mob scene of Manhattanesque proportions. In street after street, in stall after stall the size and shape of a one-car garage, people were jammed shoulder to shoulder, tearing at bins of cheap goods. Overwhelmed, afraid to dawdle and judge, I found myself sweating harder than I ever had on the river. I panicked and bought the first pair of shoes I saw, only to discover as I fled that they were not shoes at all but slippers, the sort of thing my grandfather wore padding around his house.

  Distracted, shoved into another stall, this one offering German tennis rackets, Chinese shoes, French shirts, American computers, Japanese motorcycles, and Italian espresso machines, I was confronted by a clerk who tried to sell me a plastic hat with a built-in solar-powered radio. At first it seemed the perfect thing for those long days in the kayak—it would help my Portuguese—but the only station I could find was playing Lionel Richie.

  Back in the street I was quickly trapped again, blocked by a crowd watching a television on which Moses was speaking to a wig-haired American Indian maiden wearing a fringed buckskin dress. She had long black hair and blue eyes. Pointing at Moses, someone in the crowd shouted “Ronald Reagan,” but the man on the screen was Charlton Heston, and he was playing not Moses but an Indian fighter. The Indian maiden in his arms was an American housewife, Donna Reed. War raged around them. A blond Indian on horseback plugged Moses with an arrow. The man standing next to me yelled the Portuguese equivalent of “Fucking Indian.”

  The jungle life.

  I bought the shoes (the slippers) because I had been asked to speak at a radio station, the most popular in Manaus. To reach the station, situated on the top floor of the city’s tallest building, I first passed the famous opera house, built in 1896. With its golden dome, its Florentine facade of Italian stone, and, inside, its plush overstuffed chairs, velvet opera boxes, ornate balconies, florid murals, and gilded columns, it is a fitting testament to the city’s halcyon days. It looks, as the writer Catherine Caufield so aptly described it, “like an oversized Italian biscuit tin.”

  The radio stat
ion, by contrast, looked as if it had been built in a hurry—bare walls, uncarpeted floors, cracked glass windows. Twenty stories below, Manaus was drenched in a smoggy yellow haze. The engineer who led me to the broadcast booth was a very pretty young woman wearing what seemed to be the uniform of the pretty young women of Manaus, a tight neck-to-ankle body stocking. She blew the disc jockey a kiss and closed the door behind me. The disc jockey was on the far side of middle age, big-bellied and bald save for long gray sideburns. Most of the records stacked in front of him were American (Willie Nelson, the Beach Boys, Michael Jackson), but the one on top was Brazilian. When it began to play I recognized the tune as “Sunny,” a pop hit in the United States twenty years ago. This version was called “Sonia,” and the lyrics were Portuguese. The disc jockey translated:

  Sonia, I would like to have anal intercourse with you.

  Sonia, I would be very happy if you masturbated me.

  Sonia, please place your tongue upon my rectum.

  And so on. He said “Sonia” was the most-requested song in Manaus, and offered it as evidence that a “new” Brazil was emerging with the recent ending of military government.

  I spoke with the disc jockey until a different tightly clothed young woman entered the booth. She leaned over and stuck her tongue in his ear. Time to leave.

  As I did the pretty young engineer asked me who I was. A rock musician on a concert tour, I wanted to say, and I love you. Instead, I tried to explain, in my idiot Portuguese, that I was paddling a kayak down the Amazon. She looked disappointed, and, rejected, I suffered a moment of painful epiphany. For weeks, for months, I had reveled in the role of the sophisticate. I had brought news of the modern world to wide-eyed primitives. But there in Manaus, standing in that high-rise, dressed in my grubby khaki pants and those goddamned granddaddy shoes, I understood that I belonged on the river, something with which Manaus had very little to do.