Running the Amazon

by Joe Kane

  “This will help,” Chmielinski said, and handed him a river chart he had purchased in Manaus.

  Capitan studied the chart, nodding his head and grunting, then returned it.

  “I cannot read that,” he said.

  “Why not?” Chmielinski asked.

  “I cannot read,” Capitan said. “But it does not matter. A pilot who needs such a thing does not belong on the Amazon.”

  That night the members of the Amazon Source-to-Sea Expedition were honored guests at a dance kicking off the carnaval season. It was held at Club Knapp, a patio and bar overlooking the river. The quartet (saxophone, conga, bass, drums) specialized in forro, which in Parintins is danced with the torso held rigid, the hips gyrating wildly, and the partners clinched so tightly they seem, as Durrant described it, “as if they are attached at the groin.” Each chorus is quicker and more frenzied than the last, and a single dance can last up to an hour.

  To the crowd’s delight, Durrant was the best forroist among us. Bzdak made up in enthusiasm what he lacked in grace. The dapper Chmielinski was the favorite of the Parintins women, but raised on waltzes and minuets, he found the forro on the lewd side. “What is this they are doing?” he asked me during a break, and made a grinding motion with his hips.

  I tried my best. My fever had passed; I was ready for anything. Isabella, a buxom, dark-skinned woman a head taller than I, wanted to trade dance lessons for English lessons. She hoped to move to Manaus and become a guide for American tourists: “The Spanish talkers gots more pipples, but da Englitch talkers gots more monies!”

  The first few dances went all right, but during one particularly long round I found myself suffocating in Isabella’s considerable cleavage. This distracted me from our delicate thigh-beneath-groin connection, which, given the high speed at which the forro is danced, all at once caused me great pain.

  I escorted Isabella off the dance floor slowly. We sat at a table and ordered beer. She smiled and said, “The pipples of de Amazonas eats menly fitches en maniocs. In Chenuar da ribber he floods and da island she sinks. I like da Ford Escort wit da stick ships.”

  I excused myself and wandered out to the river. Chmielinski was sitting on a bench, studying the water. For the sixth time on our journey the moon was coming full. It cast a rippling bronze path across the river, a path that dissolved into darkness—even by the moon’s strong light the far bank was invisible. In bronze and black the Amazon looked as beautiful as she did powerful, but Chmielinski seemed sad, an emotion rare for him. I asked if everything was okay.

  “It is a nice town here,” he said, “but it does not feel right.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Even one day off the water and I am not comfortable. That is my home.” He pointed to the river. “I feel like now I know this Amazon. I do not want to be away from it.”

  To my surprise, I found myself agreeing with him.

  In the morning Capitan invested the whole of our first payment to him in a shiny new Formica-topped table for the ship’s galley. When the table was in place, Chmielinski and I climbed into our kayaks, Durrant and her two Polish escorts boarded the Roberto II, Afrain undid the mooring lines, and the Capitan-Almirante guided his fleet out of the harbor and into the Amazon. Then he sniffed the wind and set course for the Atlantic, still some eight hundred miles to the east.

  While the Roberto II hugged the right bank, Chmielinski and I paddled into the middle of the Amazon, where the current ran swiftest. Though the sky was clear, I had to squint to see the thin green strips of land two miles to either side of us. Then the sky fogged over and settled on the river, and I could not see land at all.

  We met no one on the river until late that afternoon, when, pitching on the oceanlike swells, the Roberto II lurched into our gray cocoon. As she took form in the mist voices broke the daylong silence and arms waved from atop her high white hull. When she pulled abeam a can of cold beer dropped in my lap.

  Then Afrain shouted—he had spotted a bushmaster snake, or surucucú as they are called, wriggling toward my bow. Afrain jumped onto my boat and slid my kayak paddle under the critter and lifted it from the water. It was about two feet long, small as bushmasters go. Bogucki, a pack rat by reputation, dumped the contents from a jar of mayonnaise and filled the jar partially with cachaça, figuring the alcohol would both drown the snake and preserve it. Afrain grabbed the bushmaster behind the head and dropped it into the jar, which Bogucki quickly capped.

  Capitan recoiled from this effort. “That is grotesque,” he said. “In Brazil we do not eat snakes with mayonnaise.”

  The sunset, an hour later, was one of those Amazonian spectacles that I had been taking too much for granted. Turning to scan the horizon behind me, I saw the yellow ball of the sun, small and distant in the equatorial sky, sneak from beneath a bank of purple clouds. It lit up the now-placid river like a silver sheet, flashed crimson against the black front of a northerly storm, and glazed the marshy várzea a deep mustard green. A light wind rose and died, stirring the river into wavelets that chinked the silver with painterly brown splotches.

  In front of me, to the southeast, the moon rose full and yellow, then as she climbed above the blanket of humidity turned a fierce white. Our last full moon, if all went according to plan. We hoped to reach the sea in less than a month. In memory, at least, my first full moon south of the equator, the one that had risen over the frozen puna the night we had descended from the source of the Amazon, was twice the size of this tropical one. But I had been lonely then, and short of hope.

  Now I paddled in the moonlight bone tired, but also peaceful and happy. For the first time in the six long months since I had arrived in Peru I found myself daring to believe that we would actually make it all the way to the Atlantic.

  The Roberto II hummed along beside me, her powerful diesel low and barely audible. On the bow, silhouetted by the moon, Bzdak sat with his arms around Durrant. In hiring Capitan and the Roberto II we had drained some of the adventure from our trip—no longer would Chmielinski and I bang on strange doors seeking shelter—but that was a small loss compared to the enormous gain of traveling with such boon companions as the photographer and the good doctor.

  Capitan led us into a black-water lagoon set below a high, gladed bluff. The lagoon was alive with the sounds of insects and nightbirds and splashing fish, and ringed with thick bush. Intending to tie up my boat, I stood in my cockpit and leaned into a ceiba tree. I heard a branch snap and felt it droop over my right arm. When I finished securing the kayak I reached with my left hand to remove the branch and found a pair of tiny eyes rising up to meet mine. I jerked involuntarily and flung the snake far into the night. Then I fell out of my kayak, into the shallow lagoon, which only scared me more.

  Capitan witnessed this fiasco from start to finish. “Yo,” he shouted to me as I climbed out of the water, “do you want some mayonnaise?”

  18 • The Pará

  Thirty miles below Parintins the Amazon entered the state of Pará and day by day grew more oceanic. Although a procession of freighters plied the river between Manaus and Belém, we seldom saw more than a silhouette on the horizon, suspended in a seamless gray wall of river and cool rainy-season sky. The birdlife was pelagic—terns and gulls—and, though still nearly eight hundred miles from the Atlantic, we noticed an eerie tidal change of some ten feet a day. Eerie because the tide had no current. The river rose and fell like a bathtub filling with water. Or, as I began to think of it, like a snake slowly filling and emptying its air sacs.

  In navigating the two hundred and twenty miles from Parintins to Santarém, Chmielinski and I traveled with the Roberto II as we had with the Coronel Brandão from Coari to Manaus. We hit the water before dawn, coffee thermos strapped to my boat, and paddled alone through the day except in a storm, when Capitan would crisscross the river to find us and ride alongside until the bad weather passed. This was far more dangerous for him than for us. Our little boats handled the storms well, but the shallow-keeled
Roberto II pitched wildly in the waves, and more than once seemed close to capsizing.

  At night, after Capitan had moored the Roberto II in a lagoon or creek and we had washed ourselves and settled down for a meal, he held court around his shiny new galley table, speaking slowly but constantly in even-toned Portuguese. He did not mind if we only half understood his stories, for they delighted him no end. He told the same ones every night. His favorites were Portuguese jokes: “Caboclo finishes his dinner and says ‘Thank you.’ Portuguese finishes his dinner and says, ‘I want more.’ ” He also told scarifying tales, and seemed all the more satisfied when we did not believe them. Like the one about the anaconda that only the month before had risen up and squeezed the life out of a boat the size of the Roberto II itself.

  While we set up tents and hammocks after dinner Capitan would sip from a glass of wine and talk with Afrain, instructing him in the river’s ways. Afrain listened, nodded, said little. Capitan never raised his voice with Afrain. One day, however, while Afrain kneeled on the afterdeck scrubbing a batch of exceptionally dirty dishes, the river reached up and hauled two burnt pots overboard.

  When Afrain informed his grandfather of this, Capitan said nothing, but a while later, as the Roberto II passed a row of wretched huts along the south bank, Capitan swung the boat’s nose to shore and pointed. “Work hard,” he said quietly to Afrain, “or you will end up in one of those.”

  Afrain did not attend school, but he had a searching intelligence. He was amused to find that my Berlitz lacked the Portuguese words for sex, penis, vagina, and breast, and taught me several ways to refer to each. He also had what may have been, after a gut understanding of the river’s moods, the talent most critical to a budding caboclo river captain: the ability to repair anything on his boat with little more than spit, sweat, and a meager tool kit, in Afrain’s case two screwdrivers and a spanner wrench.

  On Afrain’s sixteenth birthday Durrant gave him a thing akin to jewelry—her multi-bladed Swiss Army knife. Afrain sharpened the blades and oiled the knife and hung it from a string, which he tied around his neck. The knife remained either there or in his hand for the remainder of our voyage.

  Admiring this gift, Capitan said, “It is my birthday in four days.”

  Bzdak said, “Prove it,” but Bogucki gave him his spare sunglasses, and I donated my San Francisco Giants baseball hat. That the hat had traveled all the way from the source of the Amazon meant as much to Capitan as the idea of baseball, which is to say nothing at all. But hat and glasses somehow invested him with great power when dealing with the river locals, and from that moment neither one left his head when the sun was in the sky.

  In return Capitan tried to give Bzdak his watch. By then, however, we all knew about the watch.

  “What time is it, Capitan-Almirante?” Bzdak would ask each night at dinner. Solemnly, Capitan would consult the broad silver orb on his wrist and wait for silence before reporting what he had found there. These reports, though accurate according to his watch, were seldom within two hours of the actual time. When Bzdak would point this out, which he never failed to do, Capitan would only shrug and say, “Portuguese watch.”

  Then he would carefully wind the watch, as if to confirm that in this part of the universe, our notions of time did not apply.

  When Chmielinski woke me before dawn on our fourth day out of Parintins I could hear rain beating on the roof of the Roberto II. Serious rain. Eye-stinging, monster-wave rain. The previous afternoon something had snapped in my back. As I rolled over to take the cup of coffee Chmielinski offered, a bolt of pain tore through my left side. I did not want to get in the kayak.

  Procrastinating, I asked, “What kind of day is it?”

  “It is a beautiful day.”

  “That is Polish bullshit.”

  “There you go. Start the day talking about my nationality.” Immediately he climbed into his kayak and left the Roberto II without me. I got going as quickly as I could, but he would not let me catch him. During the entire day we did not speak. Finally, at sunset, he slowed down, and I drew alongside. We paddled in silence for several minutes, until he asked, “Why did you say that?”

  “Say what?” The incident had not stuck with me.

  “ ‘Polish bullshit,’ ” he said, imitating my own wise-guy tone perfectly.

  “I’m sorry. I thought you were joking with me about the beautiful day. It was raining.”

  “I was not joking. All day I am furious. Maybe I am too sensitive. But that is the way I am.”

  I apologized again and promised to exercise more care in my choice of language. I felt terrible about my gaffe, and I was also worried. Chmielinski and I had disagreed about things before, but most of those disputes had concerned strategy—how far to try to paddle on a particular day, how much food to carry. They had never been personal. Despite the long months we had spent together, we had never really argued about anything. Usually I simply deferred to his judgment.

  I suspected that his reaction was symptomatic of a much deeper problem. He, Bzdak, Durrant, and I had been traveling together for six months, and though we were still at least three weeks short of our goal, each of us, in his own way, was cringing in anticipation of the psychological jolt our arrival at the Atlantic was sure to deliver. The river had demanded so much from us, every day, that we could no longer quite imagine the world outside it.

  That question loomed largest for Chmielinski. He carried the expedition’s heaviest emotional burden, and not only as leader. He was also our publicist, a talent he had demonstrated dramatically in Manaus. We had entered the city penniless, caked in mud, and with barely a pair of shoes among the four of us. Over the next few days, in a country whose language he could hardly speak, Chmielinski had mounted a whirlwind public-relations campaign, playing the national tourist board against the state tourist board against the city media against the local politicians. We had left Manaus not only as the toast of the city but with guarantees of free hotels and meals in Santarém, Belém, and Rio de Janeiro and a free ride home. Given our fiscal condition, which despite the help from Casper continued to be shaky, that assistance was substantial. But the effort had drained Chmielinski.

  At the same time, he still had to keep his rendezvous with his wife, Joanna. It had been six months since he had last been able to telephone Poland. As far as he knew, Joanna was due in the United States within a matter of weeks. He had not only to meet her there but to find a way to support them both. Joanna had earned master of science degrees in both pharmacology and clinical chemistry, but it would be months, at least, before she could expect to find work in the States.

  As we drew closer to the Atlantic Chmielinski drove himself harder and pushed the rest of us to keep pace. We did not always react well. Now that we were traveling together, there was less room in which to release the expedition’s mounting internal pressures.

  I probably had the easiest time of it. If Chmielinski and I had not learned by then to forgive each other’s transgressions, we would long since have parted. So we dismissed this latest outburst as a mere contretemps. For Durrant and Bzdak, however, life within the confines of the expedition had become increasingly difficult. For them, too, our incipient finish was unsettling. Bzdak had no choice but to return to Casper after we reached the sea. He had a job there, and, like Chmielinski, he was in the last year of his residency requirement for U.S. citizenship. It had been risky to depart the United States for the Amazon, but moving to London would be a step almost as bold as leaving Poland.

  Durrant’s situation was no easier. What kind of life could she expect in Casper? Getting licensed to practice medicine in the United States would require another year of medical school, and with a recent drop in world oil prices, Casper, an oil town, was suffering an economic depression. In all probability, she would have to return to London.

  The next day we crossed the sharp line, almost as spectacular as that at Manaus, where the translucent blue Tapajós collides with the silty brown Amazon. No soo
ner had we glided into Santarém and checked into our hotel room (Capitan and Afrain, unwilling to leave the Roberto II, chose to sleep aboard) than Chmielinski began to pepper Bzdak with demands for photographs to distribute to the local papers, instructions for purchasing maps and supplies, and requests for food.

  This was not unusual, except that his tone had a curt edge. When he announced a plan to send Bzdak ahead to Belém to do advance work, rather than all of us arriving there together as we had planned, the usually unflappable Bzdak exploded. His anger shocked Chmielinski, who, in turn, was indignant. Durrant tried to keep out of the confrontation, but in the end she, too, lashed out at Chmielinski, telling him that his hunger for publicity threatened to ruin us.

  I was left out of this, our worst crisis since Luisiana. While they argued around me I sat and worked on my notes. I felt guilty about that, for I was only then beginning to understand what the expedition’s end would mean for them.

  We left Santarém the next day under a hot blue sky. Chmielinski and I paddled far ahead of the Roberto II, cruised north along the Tapajós, bounced across the encontro das águas and into the Amazon, and took aim on Belém, five hundred miles downstream.

  “It is that woman,” Chmielinski said. “We have never had this kind of problem on an expedition. A woman has never come between Zbyszek and me in that way.”

  I tried to explain what I saw as the root of the conflict, the strain each of us was under. Chmielinski listened and did not disagree, but that night and all of the next day he refused to speak to either Durrant or Bzdak. Bogucki told me he had never seen such hard feelings between his countrymen. Bzdak was quiet, his expression vacant, and Durrant spent long hours sitting alone atop the Roberto II.

  The next night, as if something had snapped inside him, Chmielinski was wracked with chills, fever, violent shakes, and bouts of severe vomiting that left him too weak to climb out of his tent. In the morning he looked pallid and confused. Durrant’s preliminary diagnosis was malaria, although she could not be certain until the symptoms had established a pattern.