by Joe Kane
Chmielinski insisted on trying to kayak. After we put our boats in the water I paddled next to him, keeping close watch. His eyes were bloodshot, he could not sit up straight, and his boat veered erratically. Twenty minutes later I convinced him to return to the Roberto II. Capitan moored in a lagoon and we put Chmielinski in a hammock, where he quickly fell asleep.
When he woke up after lunch he again insisted on kayaking, an exercise that yielded the results it had earlier. He went back to sleep. If he had malaria, or any of the half dozen other afflictions that matched his symptoms, we had to get him to a medical facility soon.
It was too late in the day to begin a return to Santarém, however, and as the light of dusk is the photographer’s favorite, I agreed to accompany Bzdak on a kayak exploration of the lagoon. He had hoped to shoot jungle plants, but we found only marsh grass, low shrubs, and the occasional lonesome ceiba tree. A herd of water buffalo stood belly deep at the far end of the lagoon. Behind them, six emaciated white zebu cattle were squeezed onto a receding rise, slowly starving to death as the flooding river drowned their grazing land.
We paddled up to a ten-foot-square shack planted on thin stilts in the middle of the lagoon. Four toothless adults and eight bony children spilled out of it, their clothing gone to rags, their expressions listless. They said they had neither fruit nor fish to sell, and that the animals and the land that surrounded them belonged to a man in Santarém.
When we returned to the Roberto II Chmielinski was still asleep. Capitan was worried. He did not know the Amazon below Santarém, and he had come to rely on Chmielinski to help him decipher the river. Capitan, too, was in pain. It took Bzdak and me a couple of hours and a bottle of wine to convince him to submit to an examination by Durrant, but when he did, the reason for his reticence was clear—he did not want a woman poking around his infected, painfully swollen testicles.
After Durrant had supplied Capitan with a course of antibiotics she turned her attentions to me. I had new lesions on my legs, ankles, and jaw, and behind my right ear. Durrant suspected botfly larvae. She lanced the boils and cleansed them. Then I put up my tent and went to sleep.
In the dead of night I awoke to the sensation of the Roberto II rocking in an unfamiliar way. I climbed onto the deck. The air was thick with the sound of chirping crickets and the smell of musk, and I saw shadows rubbing up against the hull—the water buffalo had surrounded us. There was nothing aquatic about their rocking. It was an alien rhythm, thumping and irregular, and each knock seemed to shake the equanimity from my soul. The peace I had felt that first night out of Parintins was being overwhelmed by dissension and disease. In that sad lagoon the Atlantic seemed as far away, as unreal, as it had on the desolate puna five months before.
Dawn brought a good sign: Though not yet himself, Chmielinski felt stronger, and before the sun had risen he summoned us to the galley table and spread out charts bought in Santarém. We faced a critical decision. At the mouth of the Amazon an island larger than Switzerland divides the river. Some seven-eighths of the river’s volume flows north around the island, called Marajó. Many hydrographers say that only this course can be considered the Amazon, and that the system flowing to the south is another river altogether, the Pará.
However, it can be said—is said, particularly by Brazilian hydrographers—that because some Amazon water flows to the south of Marajó, through the Gurupá Canal, and joins the Tocantins and several lesser rivers to form the Pará, that this, too, is the Amazon.
At stake is the question of supremacy. Measured by the northern route, the Amazon is the planet’s second-longest river, seventy miles shorter than the Nile. Measured by the southern route, it is fifty miles longer than the Nile (and, as Brazilians are quick to point out, in either case carries some ten times the Nile’s volume of water).
Which route should we follow? Given the maze of canals and tidal currents in the Gurupá Canal, the northern route might deliver us to the sea as much as two weeks earlier than the southern. We discussed the question for an hour or so, but in the end decided as I suspected we knew all along we would. We had started from the river’s farthest source; it was only right that we also follow her longest course to the sea.
Although I believed this decision was the right one, I was not overjoyed at the prospect of spending an extra two or three weeks on the river. My muscles were strong now, but my joints ached. The popping sound my shoulders made with each stroke worried me despite Durrant’s assurance that I was causing no permanent damage.
Marajó Bay worried me, too. According to what little information we managed to glean from fishermen, we could expect severe storms, breaking waves, and gale-force winds blowing straight from the Atlantic into the bay’s broad, unprotected mouth.
But the next day, when we slid south, then northeast into the Gurupá Canal, we were rewarded in ways that I had not anticipated. The Gurupá is actually the first in a webwork of canals weaving through a type of floodplain we had not yet encountered, an estuarine várzea governed by tidal currents rather than rainfall. Unlike the main trunk of the river, which floods five months out of the year, the estuarine várzea floods twice a day, backing up and releasing in response to ocean tides three hundred miles east. Instead of running through well-defined banks, the river floods into the forest. The vegetation, denser than any we had seen in the eight hundred miles of river below the Solimões and dominated by palm trees (at least a dozen species grow along the canals), looked like a herd of giant houseplants set free. Sounds that we had not heard in too long—howler-monkey roars, parrot screeches—ricocheted through the bush like greetings from old friends.
Chmielinski’s health seemed to improve with the scenery. Shortly before we entered the Gurupá he broke his silence with Bzdak. The exchange was in Polish, but Bogucki told me later that Chmielinski had simply requested that Bzdak take a series of photos in the canals. That had been enough. Bzdak was soon scrambling about the Roberto II, shooting film at a rapid clip.
Meanwhile Chmielinski kayaked into a side canal and returned with his deck festooned with orchids, trumpet vines, and irises. These he presented to Durrant, along with a shy apology. That night the flowers sat brightly on the galley table in a plastic vase.
As we pushed deeper into the humid estuary, we passed a handful of small logging towns all of a pattern: one tiny, gas-powered, belt-saw lumber mill flanked by ten or twenty austere shanties. Food was scarce. In the shanty towns we found farinha, or, more often, nothing. We ate the last of our oatmeal, our last rusty can of Peruvian sardines.
Three days into the estuary and a few miles short of the Pará we met a parade of dugout canoes and funky motor-driven heaps that were not so much boats as collages of twine, rotting plywood, pieces of tin, and scraps of leather and cloth. Always a man at the tiller and a man bailing, and between them a dozen worried black heads or a load of palm wood or a heap of red clay. The names painted ornately on these leaky hulks were the wildest of boasts: Queen of Belém, Grace of God, Princess of the Sea, the word Princesa all but obliterated by soot from her farting engine.
The dugout canoes now bore crude triangular sails for negotiating gusty Marajó Bay. Chmielinski stopped to ask one intrepid navigator how his dugout, which had neither keel nor centerboard, remained upright in the bay’s notorious winds.
The man shrugged. “Canoe blows over, I fall out, wind stops. I climb back in.”
This was new country for Capitan, and he was baffled not only by the tides and the canals but by the fact that Chmielinski always knew in advance that we were approaching a town. However, once Capitan had determined that what he saw on the charts corresponded to what he later saw on land, he undertook a vigorous program to master map reading, (His unfamiliarity with nautical charts was easily explained: The ten Chmielinski had purchased in Santarém would have cost Capitan a month’s earnings.) He tacked the charts above the wheel and often spent an hour at a time gazing at them.
One day I gave him my compass. He held it in his
palm and turned slowly in a circle, his eyes fixed on the dial. When he finished his experiment he nodded solemnly and said, “It works.” Then, after my too-brief lesson in the instrument’s use, he tacked it up next to the charts. I never did see him employ the compass, but several times I noticed him staring at it intently, as if wondering what strange demon drove it.
We had hoped to run the estuary’s spiderweb of canals in three days, pick up the Pará River, follow it into Marajó Bay, and then paddle down the bay to Belém. But we had not figured on the tide, which now that we were within two hundred miles of the Atlantic ran three to four knots at its peak. From one canal to the next the currents never flowed in the same direction. We would navigate one canal and find the tide running with us, turn into a second and find the tide against us, turn into a third and meet water standing dead still. Though we had planned to travel fifty miles a day, we were lucky to make twenty. Ten days after leaving Santarém we were out of food, tempers were short, and it seemed we might never reach the sea. In Breves, the largest town in the canals, we could rustle up only one scrawny chicken.
We had worse luck when we left the canals and entered the five-mile-wide Pará River. That first night we stopped at Curralinho. Aside from its smart red-brick church it was a dingy town, with dozens of dilapidated thatch huts, a loud, joyless bar, a garbage-choked port, and, other than a hearts-of-palm cannery, no food anywhere.
But we arrived on the first weekend of carnaval, and that night all of us but Capitan walked into town and tried not to think about our stomachs. A trash fire burned in the middle of the flat clay plaza. A wiry, shirtless black man beat fiercely on a big drum. His pants were ripped off at the thigh and his right foot was bare, but his prosthetic left leg bore a spanking new orange sock and a neon-blue tennis shoe, the only shoe I had seen since we had cruised into the Gurupá.
Several lesser percussionists, playing tambourines and congas, surrounded the drummer. The troupe’s personnel changed constantly. Someone arrived with the family drum, sat in for an hour, left. Two lithe young women danced in skirts torn to mid-thigh, shaking, as Durrant described it, “things where other people don’t have things.”
The pounding drums, the sweaty, kinetic women: Distracted, I forgot my hunger. Which, days later, and on a full belly, I decided had been precisely the idea.
From Curralinho we traveled forty miles along the left bank of the east-running Pará, arriving after two days at the point where the broad Tocantins River enters the Pará from the south. There, the river widens abruptly to about ten miles and a little further on is known as Marajó Bay. We temporarily parted with the Roberto II, which could not handle the bay’s swells and sudden storms. Capitan would work his way back upstream, descend through a system of canals on the right bank, and rendezvous with us in the port of Abaetetuba, tucked safely behind an island.
Late that afternoon, with storm clouds hovering in the east, Chmielinski and I sprinted across Marajó Bay. Luck was with us. The bay threw high rolling waves but no breakers and the skies darkened but did not storm. Yet when we reached Abaetetuba my jaws ached—my teeth had been clenched during the entire crossing.
The Roberto II met us as planned and moored for the night in Abaetetuba. Shortly after dark, drumbeats drifted down from town. Carnaval was the year’s high point for Afrain. He grabbed his whistle and hurried to the plaza but returned an hour later profoundly disappointed. Carnaval in Abaetetuba meant a solitary drummer, drunks passed out in the street, and a handful of dazed locals walking in circles. Most of the townspeople were gathered in a bar, watching a television broadcast of festivities in Rio de Janeiro.
That night the lights of Belém reflected off the dark sky, as did those of a passing jet, something I had not seen since Lima. While we slept, Durrant’s windbreaker was stolen from the Roberto II’s clothesline. It was our first theft in Brazil.
The next day Chmielinski and I paddled twenty miles along the right side of the bay and, just as a storm hit, ducked into a canal, the Furo do Arrozal. (Rather than risk the bay, Capitan had motored up the Tocantins and then east through a system of small rivers, arranging to meet us in Belém.)
Had I not known from our maps that we were within fifteen miles of the largest and, I presumed, most civilized city on the Amazon, I would not have had the slightest clue, based on what I saw in the Furo do Arrozal. The faces that now and then peered from behind a palm or mangrove were desperate and frightened—a consequence, I decided, of the estuarine rain forest, which was damp, dark, and suffocating. The only light drifted down from the thin opening in the canopy directly above the canals, and even at midday no direct sun reached the forest floor. The few people I saw appeared torpid and inert, save four men cutting chunks of clay from a bank exposed at low tide. Alerted by the slapping of our paddles, they turned to look at us. Their backs were broad and muscular, but their eyes were flat and dead. They stared but did not speak.
We turned into the Furo do Cavado, a canal so narrow we had to kayak in single file. The shacks were little more than rotting trash piles, the people few and spiritless. No birds sang, no fish jumped. From time to time herds of two-inch opaque-yellow salamanderlike creatures would burst from the shadows in a ghostly cloud, inflate themselves as they leaped, float for a few seconds when they hit the water, then sink from sight. Those ten miles struck me as the most primitive of our entire journey. The only suggestion that we were in the twentieth century was a rusting yellow Volkswagen bug propped on a small, decaying pier. But the car had no tires, no doors, and no engine.
The canal twisted, turned, and shrank until it was but a paddle-length wide, while growing ever darker and spookier. We rounded a bend and then—boom—the skyscrapers of Belém rose up before us, two miles and centuries across the choppy Canal da Das Oncas.
19 • The Atlantic
February 16
Belém, Portuguese for Bethlehem: Unbelieving, we slouch toward our goal of six months, four thousand miles, three million paddle strokes. “Where are you going?” I have been asked hundreds of times by people who will never see what I am seeing now. My reply has been unvarying: “A Belém!” Dulled with use, the words have lost all meaning.
The Roberto II awaits us in port. While Capitan fills his hold with onions (he will sell them on his return voyage, in the produce-starved hamlets between here and Parintins), we take Afrain into town and buy him dinner and a pair of rakish sunglasses. He is stupefied by the city’s size, as am I—its population of a million and a half is probably ten times the number of people living along the entire two thousand miles of river between here and the Peruvian border. (With the exception of Manaus, which, in fact, is on the Negro.)
After dinner we return to the Roberto II with a bottle of ersatz Brazilian champagne. Under the influence of this and, I will realize days later, the onions now stored in the ship’s hold, Capitan breaks into tears. At first we fear that we have somehow offended him, although we have paid him considerably more than contracted for (and he has delivered considerably more than promised). As it turns out, he is upset only that he cannot accompany us to the sea, still seventy hard miles north and east. But the Roberto II, so mighty in tiny Parintins, is dwarfed by even the smallest fishing boats in Belém, all of which sport high, defiant, wave-cutting bows.
We finish the champagne and exchange hugs and farewells. Then the good ship Roberto II sets course for the west, where she belongs. I will miss her crew, and remember them fondly.
We climb back into the city. Bogucki has already left on a jet bound for freezing Wyoming and his worried wife. As if born to them, Durrant and Bzdak have settled into the five-star hotel rooms arranged for us by Embratur, the Brazilian office of tourism.
Chmielinski and I, however, have work ahead of us. After embarrassing myself in the hotel sauna—for no reason I can explain other than homesickness, a Frank Sinatra song piped over the loudspeaker reduced me to tears—I climb to my room nervously clutching a cold bottle of beer. I am not looking forward to the
last leg of our journey, the passage through Marajó Bay into the Atlantic. I have no confidence in my ability to handle the open sea, a fear reinforced by the size of the boats in port here.
But there is no question of quitting now. Tomorrow, as I have for months, I will simply plow along behind my good friend Piotr Chmielinski.
February 17
At first light we descend to the port. Surrounded by shouting fishermen and the smell of fresh coffee, we slip our little plastic boats into the flat gray Das Oncas and paddle north.
Bzdak and Durrant escort us through the morning in a small power launch provided by the Brazilian navy, Bzdak snapping the last of the seven thousand slides he has taken on this journey. Once, turning at his shout, I lose my sunglasses, which slip into the deep without a sound. Over the last week the river has snatched my knife, my thermos, a hat, two pens, and the silly slippers. It is as if she wants to purify me, wants to send me to the sea stripped of all but thought and memory and the bonds of friendship.
“When we first come west,” Bzdak tells me, “we learn that every river must take something. Better some thing than some body.”
Soon, after wishing us luck and promising champagne and muita festa in three days, half our team turns back for Belém. Chmielinski and I turn into Marajó Bay, and east.
The water is flat and the horizon clear. To take advantage of the strong outgoing tide we paddle far into the bay, until land drops away on all sides.
Here the bay, the river—in my mind they are the same—is over fifteen miles wide. In one way the Amazon basin recalls the high Andes: Its immensity encourages contraction. So often my universe has been defined entirely by the Polish fellow who is stopping to share coffee with me as I write these notes. Back at Atalaya, when we were first setting out in two kayaks, I had feared the intimacy the river would force upon us. Since then Chmielinski has seen me at my worst, sick and afraid and despairing, and has not abandoned me. I hope I have been half as good a companion. It is true that our days pass with long silences, but it is the silence of brothers. (He is one of nine children, I one of six.)
