February 17 - 25 2007 / Brazil: On The Rio Negro: A Week Along the Rio Negro
A tiny riverboat takes us 200 miles up the largest tributary of the great Amazon.
Part 2 - River and Forest Dwellers
On our early morning dawn ride we listen in shocked silence to the ungodly roar of howler monkeys, two troops, one on either side of the river. If there were a hell, this is what it would sound like. Ghastly roars, muffled screams, echoing howls—but "howl" is a nice word. These sounds are not nice in any way. Edi wants to take us across a flooded defile into a lake within this large island, where he says the monkeys are, and we get pretty far up it, in a way John and I recognize quite well from paddling our kayak, but then there is a turn which is too sharp for these long boats, and we have to paddle back out.
There are dolphins round about, chasing small schools of fish. The dolphins snort emphatically as they surface, and the gray ones gently break the surface with their dorsal fins. There are pink ones, too, the famous pink Amazon River Dolphins, and I guess those are the ones that snort, but I never see any pink, although John did yesterday.
On our forest walk this morning I learn another tree from Aguinaldo. I am very pleased to be able to, if not name the trees I have learned, to recognize them and tell them from all the others. There's an excellent grasshopper, too, a female with her ovipositer stuck into the bark of a tree. I get a picture or so. People call me now when there is a spectacular moth to be seen. On the boat this morning I had one on my finger and helped another woman get it on hers, and she was pleased, and I of course was pleased.
The forest, though it is a rain forest, is dry. The underfoot is dry, covered with leaves which seem not in decay at all but only dry. The leaves have been chewed in many places, obviously by different creatures, but I have no sense of decay. I know the story, that all the life force is contained in the living plants, but it is hard to square that with this dryness.
Edi wrenched open a decayed log at one point, to see what might be there: termites. But I have been hanging in the end of the line so as to have my modicum of privacy and to take pictures, so I was not up there when he did that.
One thing I very much appreciate about his guiding technique is how he very often simply shuts off the boat motors, or stops in the forest, and we just listen in silence. A lot more silence than any of these people are used to I am sure.
This afternoon they were taken to a tiny beach for "swimming" but I was played out and stayed behind. Now I have about five minutes to get ready for another village visit.
For contrast, we visit a small village, of about 15 families. There is a president of the village, who greets us.
Our boatmen go off immediately to the soccer field and begin a pickup game with some locals. There are also girls playing soccer, their own game.
In the village is a store, or several stores, and out in front of the biggest one a handsome man with curly white hair is cracking Brazil nuts. I am given one along with a beautiful smile.
Edivam tells us, when we ask, that perhaps 60% of the people who live in this state of Amazonas live in these tiny villages or singly along the river or in the forest.
One of our number, a corpulent busy type, has brought gifts for the kids, and, playing Lady Bountiful, is delivering them, insisting on having her picture taken with the kids and so on. It is tiresome and embarrassing. I think she is unaware of the responses of the rest of us to this unseemly and patronizing thing. The way to do this is to give your gifts to the guide, who will privately pass them on to the president or whoever is in charge—a priest or whoever—who will in turn pass them along to those needing them most.
Here in this village there is a way to use a satellite telephone, and there is electricity all the time, and a water tower with a pump. There is a two hundred year old church, and a school that goes up through high school
I ask if there is a clinic, and we are taken to see it. A tiny building of one room, décor a few AIDS and dental health posters, and a shelf or two of medicine bottles.
When our two canoes arrive back here to the boat, it seems that some people have come over to show us their catch--they've been out gathering palm fronds for a roof, and have caught a turtle, with a yellow shell and thick yellow-green legs, now of course tightly drawn into the shell. The boy holds up the turtle proudly as his parents watch from their boat. They will eat the turtle and surely use the shells for something, too.
This evening, after dinner, Aguinaldo tells us, in his quiet way, about some of the beliefs the "countryside" people have. The stories and legends are similar to those of our own Indians, about things to be wary of in the forest, and how crafty the spirits are. Aguinaldo is restrained in his voice, his gestures, all of his body. He is short and broad, with curly graying hair cut short, fine teeth, dark eyes and skin, and, at times, a good smile. It is hard for people to listen to him because he takes his time, speaks carefully. If you took a movie of an anglo and this man telling the same story, and speeded it up, he would be so still, and the anglo would be flailing about.
On the way to visit the big kapok tree this morning, we see our first monkeys. I remember from other times that they are very hard to see, and in fact I believe the last time I saw monkeys I did not have my good binoculars yet, and could see almost nothing. But we are very lucky this time; the squirrel monkey we saw came up to the top of a tree to check us out, I think he probably was doing, and there he was, with his heart-shaped little face and innocent look, just there at the top of the tree, a fine view of him for us and of us for him.
We are bound early this morning for a small settlement, I think of two families, where there is a magnificent kapok tree, perhaps 700 years old and whose buttresses flare above our heads. Its canopy disappears into the sky. A trail has been cut to it and leads around it. It is a spectacular organism.
When we arrive in the settlement, I notice that Aguinaldo has brought some plastic bags of food items—crackers and some other things, and gives them to some men lounging about. I imagine we are not the only boat full of tourists to visit this great tree. A far cry from the lonely single family homestead we saw, or even the small village yesterday, with its president, and quiet kids and adults.
At water’s edge is a boat perhaps as long as ours (about 30 feet I think), and an entire family is living in it: old lady of probably my own age--man, woman, sullen teenage boy, little girl, and black and white cat.
I am not yet certain what to make of this trip. I think what it is is that we have an early morning boat ride, to find what we can find. Then later in the morning we walk in the forest, hard for most of the folks, because it's humid and several of them are not much on walking, and we see the plants and whatever else we can notice. In the late afternoon there is another boat ride, and then our favorite: the night ride.
But what is the message?
I think in some measure the message is that life along the rivers is not fantastically different from what it has been for a long, long time. We learned, at the first village, that on the saint's day for each village, people come from miles up and don the river for the party. First there is a do in the church, and then there is the party, with music and dancing and feasting and it can go on for several days. It's one way for people to meet each other and find mates. These saints' parties are described in the Walter Henry Bates book The Naturalist on the River Amazons, written about his eleven years here in the middle of the nineteenth century. Although some of the folks have some electricity now, and t shirts and batteries, they all farm manioc and live on it, they still know the forest and the river, and they still believe in essentially the same things.
After lunch we go out again to visit some ruins of a Portuguese settlement from during the rubber boom times. Living near the ruins is a caretaker family, the man a Japanese who came to Brazil after WW II, a strange strange thing, and there he is with his wife and some kids, a flea-ridden dog, intense heat, the crushingly-lonely cemetery—so far from Portugal!-- the ruins, some fruit trees, and a view of the river. Now and then visitors come. I notice that we take back to the ship some fruit from here, and I probably ate some of it this morning.
Bates talks endlessly about how taciturn and emotionless the Indians are. Aguinaldo is somewhat that way, although the actual words he uses, especially when talking about conservation, are passionate. If you live in the humidity and the heat and the forest, you need to be spare in your expense of energy. You do not wave your hands about and emote. Emotion takes energy.
We saw the women and girls hauling water up from the river yesterday, as they doubtless have done for--forever. If you have to haul water that way, you don't waste its effects in expressing yourself.
We went out late in the afternoon in the canoes, almost past dusk when we got back to the boat. That is when we saw the sloth. Or rather, one of the boatmen spotted the sloth. A three-toed sloth, hanging upside down in a low tree, almost right over our heads. It was hard to see more than its palely-speckled fur, coarse and long, and what I believe were its three claws, long and flat, wrapped around the branch from which it was hanging.
Edivam loves to take the long canoes into these narrow waterways, which would be dry between bluffs when the river is not high. He turns off the motors and we either drift or paddle quietly. Cicadas hum deafeningly from either side. The deep brown surface of the water is spangled with tiny waxy flowers, pieces of bright green leaves, bits of bark. In some places the image: flooded forest: is quite realized. The green boat rubs past thick tree trunks. Tops of bushes whip past our faces. The easy waves from the two boats spreads and propagates among dozens of tree trunks. The water patterns are irresistible for picture-taking.
This time, however, I did ask our guide, so what is it about this liana that tells you that it is a water-containing one, and by golly, he did and I could then recognize them again. It is so hard to do this kind of thing with a big group and not have time to be taught.
Right now the river is wide ahead of me and the tangled shore close behind.
Darwin's tangled bank.
On this evening’s paddle there is an exciting encounter about a caiman. The same boatman who spotted the sloth is allowed to try to catch this one. We are in the far boat and so I cannot see too well what is happening, but he sneaks stealthily through the water towards it, GRABS it swiftly behind the head and on the tail, and it's caught. This kind, though, has a necklace of very large dragon's scales along its neck, and the boatman’s hurt a bit. Edi and Agi get a piece of rope and tie up the caiman's mouth, and then the boatman proudly shows it around so we can make its picture, and his. It seems this is the first one he has caught. Letting the caiman go is of course somewhat fraught, but finally he's able to be the one to loose it in the water. It sits motionless for an instant and then THRASH off it goes. We give the whole operation a round of applause.
And so to bed. I have some chigger bites on my ankles, and in the morning I discover a small blistery rash on my wrist, I think from us shoving through the branches last night in the dark, but otherwise I am fine.
Our second monkey species on the dawn canoe search today: woolly monkeys, a whole troupe of them. Their thick plush brown tails curled and swinging, they search the treetops for fruits. I have seen them in zoos, of course, but I would trade every zoo view for one view of a tail in a tree on the river.
Long periods of silence on this morning time. Colors only green, brown, blue, white. Very very occasional red or yellow, of bird or flower. Only tiny dots of those colors, here and there.
Otherwise, green, brown, blue, white.
Later, oh exciting indeed. Our last forest walk, and John and I are with Edivam. We pick our way through a wonderful tangle of plants, though now I am slowly beginning to see this one, and this one and this one and that one, and a tiny bit about the underfoot--and he finds us a snake!!
Our snake has arrayed himself along a log, and he is about we think at least seven or eight feet long, brownish greenish in color especially under his chin, he has a slender tail and altogether is rather slender overall. Edivam says he is not venomous, but nonetheless there he is, our big snake. We are all able to come closer to make pictures. After a while he starts to flick his tongue, and then finally slides away, not in any particular hurry, and vanishes into a tangle of tree roots.
It's not known what kind he is, Edivam says he has not seen him before. Which considering how much time he has spent doing these trips, is remarkable I think.
It's a great walk, briskly moving along, stopping for a few things, smelling the forest smells, once a loud crash possibly of a branch (and on one walk we heard maybe a whole tree falling. This time, however, I did ask Edivam, so what is it about this liana that tells you that it is a water-containing one, and by golly, he told me and I could then recognize them again. It is so hard to do this kind of thing with a big group and not have time to be taught.
It will be hard to leave the slowness, the quietude, the intense LOOKING. The multitude of plants of which I still know almost nothing. Now that I think about this, I wish and wish that I had been more forceful about asking, every time, How do you KNOW that this is this plant? What are the field marks? I did learn four plants, and I treasure that knowledge, for it is a start on knowing a new place. I have not got a lot of more time to learn more new places. This trip though has shown me that I can still learn about them, still wander through them and deal with heat and humidity and various inconveniences.
Last night a pleasant time on the top deck, drinking what purports to be the national drink, a lethal rum and lime thing which loosened tongues--at least of some of the folks, and we had a nice evening, in the pacific air.
This morning I do not remember what in particular we got to see, and I don't care. In the night we passed Manaus and went beyond it, and after lunch we passed through the famous blending of the waters, where the milk chocolate of the Amazon, filled with sediments from the Andes over a thousand miles away, meets the bitter chocolate of the Rio Negro, the black river, with only the acidic content of the multitudinous leaves of that forest to color it. For twenty miles or more these two streams flow side by side without mixing.
The people roundabout build their houses so as to float. Upriver where we have been, they just put them on stilts and hope for the best, being perhaps unable to afford a houseboat. So here the shores are lined with these houses, their families, their dogs, their laundry, their boats tied up next to.
We got to see the giant lily pads, with their nasty spines below, and their elegant patterns above. Our excellent boatman once again spotted a sloth, and this time we got to see his strange rounded head. A praying mantis landed on John's shirt and after I took pictures of it I passed it around so others could enjoy it.
So this part of our trip is nearly over.
We are to go out one more time tonight, but it is raining right now, the first rain we have seen in this rainy season, so maybe we won't, I don't know.
Later, indeed we had a short night water trip, but in the distanced we could hear the city's noises, as we were only a few miles away, see its sky-glow, and there were other boats to beware of. Still, Edivam and Aguinaldo took us to the end of a quiet waterway, where we all sat in peaceful silence for some minutes. In the distance hearing some thunder, seeing a few lightning bolts in the clouds, listening to frogs and crickets and other nighting creatures and then back to our little boat, jaunty in the black water, its cabin windows lit invitingly.
Our goodbyes were said over coffee on the top deck this morning, and we docked here at the foot of the hotel, where we began a week ago. We've been far Out, at least I think some people think we have been. But I know there is more to go, farther to go, farther away from here. There are other people out there, along the great rivers Amazon. We did not see them. But we have seen, just a glimpse of it, the forest in which they live, the water which they fish and travel, the peculiar earth they cultivate. The bounties of the forest and river, turned so skillfully to their uses, with the apparent ease that comes only from deep knowledge and familiarity.
I went to Papua New Guinea, long ago, because I wanted to go as far back in human time as I thought possible. Here might be another distant time. We did not see any people living in that past, but we saw their shadows. Their shadows and their reflections laid across the river, their shadows in the forest. Their faint movements, along the tangled bank.
I will treasure the few things I have learned. I will return to these scenes, to the tangled bank I got to walk, if only briefly.