We go pig hunting

The next morning Hymondo asked me if I would like to go pig-hunting.  He said that he had seen signs of a wild pig in the forest and was hoping to catch him today.  While I had balked the other day at what I had suspected was going to be the murder of some drowsing reptilian, and possibly staged primarily for my entertainment, a pig-hunt appeared a more seemly proposition and by this time I had no doubt that Hymondo did need to hunt to feed his family.

So I said ‘yes’ and we were off.  Hymondo was wearing only shorts  --  which was the only thing I ever saw him wear  -- and had an old, single-barreled shotgun and a couple of shotgun shells in a little bag that he wore around his neck and he immediately started off with his dog along a path through the high bush that grew behind his homestead and I scrambled along behind.

After about twenty yards we came out of the bush into a field that he was clearing by slash and burn, but while the trees had been slashed down, they had not yet been burned and the felled trees were lying in a jumble across the field, in some places higher than a man.  There was no path to follow and the late morning sun beat straight down on us as we climbed over and through the tangle of cut vegetation.  This was no problem to Hymondo who skipped nimbly from log to log while I climbed and teetered like an out-of-condition lab rat.  Hymondo was waiting for me at the edge of the forest when I eventually arrived, panting.  I suspected he might already be having second thoughts about our project.

Once in the forest we were out of the direct sun, but the humidity made up for any drop in temperature.  There was no path and the tangled vegetation was criss-crossed by fallen trees, making our way at least as obstructed as it had been in the field we just crossed.  And here there was high water everywhere, come up from the river, more water, it seemed, than there was land.

My first thought was that I could walk along fallen tree trunks, but I quickly saw that to keep up with Hymondo, who was skipping from tree to vine with the agility of a monkey  --  an agility that I did not have  --  I would have to go into the black water that I found in some places hip-deep.  

But the water did not bother Hymondo.  In his shorts he was dressed for the jungle more appropriately that the client of any adventure outfitter.  About this time I noticed that his minimalist gear did not include a water bottle and the water I was hip-deep in was most likely not safe to drink.  Not because of any pollution, but from all the deadly natural stuff it had in it, and when I mentioned this he cut a liana that poured out as much fresh, well-filtered water as we could want.

Back on the trail of the pig, Hymondo showed me the places where the pig had been digging.  It was all very interesting, but I felt bad because I though I was holding him back and he really needed the pig.

For his part, I am sure Hymondo didn’t know what to do with me.  He had said the day before that I was the first tourist that he had ever seen and while he may not have known what to expect of me, I was sure that by this time he had figured out that I wasn’t a professional pig-hunter.

Because I knew the pig was important to him, I wanted Hymondo to get on with the hunt and began to think I should tell him to go ahead, that I would get back home on my own.  As I look back on it now I realize it was a profoundly foolish idea and I would in no time at all have wound up inside a boa constrictor, but at the time I was not worried about getting lost, as I usually have a good sense of direction and was fairly sure that I knew where I was.  Though the jungle around us was quite dense, I did not think it was very extensive, but was confined to a point of land between the main course of the Tefé to the east and the smaller stream on which Hymondo’s home was located, which was to the south.  I had a compass and had been watching the sun and had figured out that Hymondo was not leading me deep into the jungle but was searching for the pig in an arc through the forest not that far from his homestead.  Of course if I got turned around and went west there was a thousand miles of blank green space on my map, with some squiggly rivers, but I wasn’t worried about that.  For the moment, though, I just wanted to keep up with Hymondo and not hold him back from getting his pig.

But if my mind felt up to the situation, my body was less so.  I am not fleet-footed under the best of conditions, which these were clearly not.  It was your basic Green Hell, a tropic sauna with everything growing everywhere and water dripping off it, criss-crossed by sloughs of high water of unknown depth.  I crawled over and under and through and tried not to think of what might be lurking in the water.  My legs were losing their strength and my feet were becoming heavy and I realized that I was stumbling through the jungle like those white bumblers whom Tarzan would have to rescue in the old movies.  But I gritted my teeth and vowed that the Jungle would not defeat me.

Now for all the exotic terrors of the jungle  --  the anaconda or the piranha or the fer-de-lance  --  the most likely peril is the pedestrian one of an infection.  In this hot-house climate a cut can go septic very quickly and you must constantly be on guard against cuts and scrapes and punctures.  And a likely author of such wounds is the palm spine, little needles that grow in clumps on palm stalks and are found everywhere, and if you lose your balance and reach out to catch yourself you can come away with a nasty handful of these little needles buried in your flesh.

As I did.

I pushed too hard and lost my balance and fell into a nest of palm spines.  Then I stood up and fell into another.

I called back Hymondo and showed him my hand, now a bloody pincushion.  We sat down on a log and with a needle from my kit he dug out about twenty of them and I put antiseptic on the wounds, but a dozen or so were too deep so we started back for his place.  Being a hunter, Hymondo seemed to be philosophic about the thing: some days you get the pig and some days you don’t, though I felt bad that I was the reason for it.  As he was barefoot, I asked him if he worried about the spines and he showed me the soles of his feet, thick with callouses, and said that the spines didn’t bother him.

Back at his homestead, his wife and I sat on the edge of their platform and she dug out the remaining spines.  I offered her a needle from my kit but she preferred a thorn from a tree that grew at the edge of the clearing and I had no doubt that she knew what she was doing.

I was exhausted from the heat and exertion and sat very quietly as she dug the spines out of my hand.  Ricardo was watching the process and asked if it didn’t hurt.  “Yes,” I answered, as calmly as if I were in shock, “It hurts very much.”

That night after supper there was only the soft glow of the open wick of two small tin oil lamps about the size of a coffee cup.  Ricardo and Hymondo talked and his wife held the baby in her lap and the children lay back and listen and the young girl with large brown eyes rests her chin on the edge of her hammock and watches me.  And I am tired and sit for a while trying to follow what is being said, then lie back in my hammock and quit listening to the conversation and begin to listen to the sounds of the forest and study the fragment of sky between the jungle canopy and the fringe of palm fronds hanging down from the roof of Hymondo’s shelter and wonder at the unfamiliar southern stars.  And then I pull the mosquito netting over my hammock and think sometimes about the children we saw the other day and wondered what would become of them, or of what we did that day, or about the little girl with the large brown eyes watching me from her hammock, but eventually the world around me slides into a dream and I go to sleep in the safety of the jungle.

We went a bit farther up river and had good weather on our trip.  The rains came mostly at night, when we were sheltered, but Ricardo thought that was going to change and it seemed to be in the process of doing so, and so we headed back to Tefé.  The sky was glowering and there was a heavy chop on the water as we crossed the wide expanse to the south of the town, so much so that our boatman asked if I were afraid.  I remembered his question because I was sitting at the bow as we bounced through the rough water and was getting very wet and was blissfully happy and if I were in any sort of peril I was blessedly unaware of it.   And anyway, I had always thought dying in the jungle would be marvelously romantic and my friends back home, unburdened by any actual knowledge of the matter, would make up wonderful stories about it, possibly involving jaguars and headhunters.  But, alas, I did not perish and we reached Tefé that evening.

The next day I settled accounts with Ricardo and in late morning he took me on his motorcycle down to the River to catch the boat back to Manaus, where of course we found that the boat was delayed and when it might arrive was another mystery of the Amazon, but as it certainly would arrive eventually I said good-bye to Ricardo and found a place to sit in the shade and write in my journal and wait for my boat.  It was midday and the shops were closed and the sun sparkled off the black feathers of the vultures festooning the rooftops overlooking the riverfront.

Then there was some activity and someone told me that a boat was coming, but it wasn’t the one I was waiting for.  It was going the wrong way: it was going upriver.  

Then a thought flittered across my mind: why didn’t I continue on upriver?  All I had to do was get on the boat.  I didn’t have any appointments or commitments and it didn’t make any difference whether I got back to Manaus that week or the next.  I opened out my map.  There was still a lot of Amazon left.  By this point I knew how distance translated into time in river travel.  It would be about four days to Benjamin Constant where, if I wanted to take my life into my hands, I could cross the River into Colombia, or stay on the River perhaps two more days into Peru to Iquitos and then fly out of there.  Or stop somewhere along the way, some little place along the River that looked interesting and that I had never known before that it existed.  And even if there were no guest house there, by this time I had no doubt that I could ask people and find a place to stay, and I had my hammock and mosquito net and I had no doubt that I would be just fine.

an ordinary day on the boat

In the heat of the tropical afternoon a pretty young mother of two girls stopped by my hammock to chat, her voice in those soft, graceful sibilants by which the Portuguese justify the conceit that their speech is the Language of the Angels.  As usual, I understood about twenty percent of what was being said, but I smiled amicably and agreed with everything and as she left she touched my wrist and said “ciao”.  An interesting word, as it is a short form of schiavo, meaning “I am your slave”, which, while today it has no servile connotation, was in those tropical surroundings, redolent in my mind of plantation and patriarchy, still a bemusing association, one of the little pleasures of my largely useless education.

There are large boats on the river.  Barges loaded with semi-trailers and cattle boats and ocean-going container ships on their way upriver to Manaus.  The river, unimproved, is navigable almost to the Andes.  The huge catchment basin of the forest constantly fed by tropical rain, the flow of the River so strong that it has no delta but sweeps all its sediments out to sea. 

I was told that ocean-going vessels may navigate the River as far as the city of Iquitos, in Peru, and that a 300-mile plume of fresh water extends from its mouth into the Atlantic, and that the River tears loose great mats of floating vegetation that carry off  men and large animals and the unbelievable volumes of fresh water that each day the River washes down to the sea, and on and on . . ..  Or that hidden in its vast, dark waters there are catfish large enough to swallow a human or along its jungle banks fishermen have mated with dolphins who then gave birth to creatures stranger still.  What is interesting to me is not whether these stories are true, but that the presence of the River inspires such awe that these stories seem plausible.

A woman had come on board at Santarém.  She was from Itaituba, a town up the Rio Tapajós.  She said she had to leave because her husband had been killed in retaliation for a killing by his brother and important people were involved and so the police were not interested in the matter.  I have no idea how much of that was so, but it was widely believed that this was how things were done in the Amazon.  As with other stories about the River, the vastness of jungle and the remoteness of settlements and widespread sense of the law’s unreliability makes plausible other stories, as that on remote plantations poor whites are still held as slaves, but there are wonders here enough without trafficking in hearsay.

Past Óbidos the land along the north bank is more and more cleared.  There is almost no forest and some signs of erosion.  It is tame, agricultural land.  The south bank, which I can see only from a distance, seems more forested, though even there I see more small dwellings.  There seems so much empty land in the Amazon.  It is easy to see how it could be thought to be “a Land without Men for Men without Land.”

     At six that evening we came to Juruti, a small, pleasant-looking framing community.  There was a circus in town.  The barkeeper on the upper deck asked my opinion of a hundred-dollar bill. He assumed that an American must know this sort of thing, though I don’t know that I have ever seen a bogus dollar, but I went over it with a hand lens and said it looked fine to me.  Broad patches of vegetation torn loose from the bank and trunks of large trees float past us down stream.  

     There are large, red-hooded carrion birds along the river and white, heron-like birds and black birds that look to have a three-foot wingspan.  I am sure this would all be hugely fascinating if I cared about birds, but I do not.

     An ordinary day on the boat.

from Santarém to Óbidos

Our boat stayed close to the northern bank to avoid the downstream current and the River was so wide that we only had a near view of this one side.  Once past the few settlements, there are vast stretches of forest with only the occasional open pasture land and only here and there a flimsy structure of cane and matting and plank came out on stilts from the muddy bank, where families quietly and expressionlessly watched us pass.  There were husbands and wives and sometimes an old parent, and many young children, but almost no one who looked like a teenager or young adult, as if when the children reached a certain age they leave and go somewhere else, though I have lost track of the days of the week and perhaps it was only that some of them were at school, but I saw this everywhere along the length of the River.

We saw fires on the far bank.  In several places thick smoke came up from a broad stretch the forest, though the fires seemed separated, as if only certain tracts were being burnt, probably being cleared for cattle.  Brasilian land owners have a problem with forest, for if they do not clear it and put it into use they fear they will be accused of holding idle land and threatened with expropriation.  This insecurity of property makes it very hard to develop a farm, let alone manage a forest.  This policy, ostensibly hostile to latifundia,  in fact favors large enterprises with the capital to immediately put their land into use and makes it difficult for small ranchers who would grow their operation over time to hold contiguous undeveloped land until their herd has grown to need use of it.  

At dawn on the 15th we were back in the main channel, headed for the town of Óbidos.  The River is brownish-white again, colored by sediment of upstream runoff.  As I had feared, my hammock at the railing, fine a view as it provided, proved a bit of a problem when it rained, but a small adjustment brought me under shelter and tropical rain is very good about falling straight down.

The packs of children  --  I would guess them about eight to twelve years old and all of them well-behaved  --  who roam the boat have made my hammock one of their regular stops and I entertain them with the low-tech wonders from my shoulder bag.  An odd thing I noticed was that they didn’t seem to know how how to use a magnifying glass, insisting on holding it up to their eye like a monocle.  Or perhaps they simply found the idea of a monocle more interesting than a magnifying glass.  Though we had plenty of sun there were no ants at hand, so I had no occasion to teach them that childhood staple.  The idea of adjusting binoculars also seemed uncongenial to them.  They are very considerate children who, when they found me in my hammock writing or concentrating on something they would not disturb me but just pass by and some of them gently touch my shoulder.  At Óbidos, a little girl woke me from a nap so that I could see the town.

I get hot when I put on even my sunglasses.  How did Indiana Jones do it in a felt hat and leather jacket?  I discover that the fellow from San Francisco who runs the bar also sells bathroom tissue, something which the ship owners had apparently not considered part of our passage.  Also I discover that in the morning the soft drinks and beer are actually cold, which is not the case later in the day.

On a crowded boat there is of course a great deal of litter produced and I discovered that there were only two ways to dispose of it.  I could throw it into the river myself, or I could put it in one of the two small trash receptacles I have found on our deck and a member of the crew will throw it into the river on my behalf.  Embracing the ethical defense of an intervening moral agency, I chose the second of these.  It could be argued that there is a third option: to carry my trash with me when I leave the boat; but I suspect I would need to go quite some distance inland to be confident that it wouldn’t wind up back in the river, and futile actions are not ethically required.

As we sprawled about, perspiring, in our T-shirts, a German fellow showed me a glossy advertisement from our shipping line that showed a dapper traveler in a pith helmet and a text promising that a trip up the Amazon on one of their boats would be a real adventure.  He thought the ad was quite amusing.

     I am constantly moving about, trying to find a breeze or at least someplace less hot.  Even moving with tropical economy, I perspire continually.  Quite a few got off at Santarém, but there still seem almost as many on board as before.  In the constant press of people there is privacy only in my dreams.  And constant noise. A hard place for the spirit.  But on board the ship is the brown man’s tropics, not the white man’s tropics of verandahs and porters and servants with iced lemonade and long naps in the shade.  There are a few people on board who do not have hammocks and they sleep on life vests spread on the deck like a mattress , which however adequate it may be is less so when the deck is awash with rainwater, which they gamely ignore.  On board our boat it is not the tropics of those insulated by money and race and class.  Not some literary tropics where expats sip rum and write novels.  Despite all this, I am actually finding it interesting, as if there were some pleasure in the discomfort.  This was something new for me.

under way

I was comfortable in my perch at the stern rail, only occasionally bothered by trash thrown down from the deck above.  If I can sleep and eat the food and stay out of the rain and not come down with some chiropractic affliction from sleeping six days in a hammock, this could be a pleasant trip.  So I curled up among my fellow bats.

Our hammocks, however widely spaced they might have appeared when they were strung up, once they had a person’s weight in them they hung down and bumped against their neighbor and someone's twitching six spaces away was transmitted from one hammock to another.  But, as there was nothing to be done about it, no one bothered with “desculpa” and everyone seemed to take on faith that we were all doing our best and soon enough we seemed to find some sort of tonic stasis that made it bearable.  The bat to my right was smoking, but there were also some pretty lady bats hanging not far away, and what is adventure but inconvenience rightly understood?

Later, I wandered to the upper deck where I found the bar and bought a bottle of water.  The bartender was short and mustachioed and snarled at his customers and barked out prices as if they were a challenge.  I wondered if he could keep that up for six days.

The nice lady at the boat office had told me that we would depart at seven in the evening; we got underway at 11:30.  It made no difference to me and apparently to no one else.

I slept little that first night, with dreams about awful things happening to little children, though this may simply have been from all the little children running past and bumping against my hammock.  I got up at 5 a.m. when there was just a touch of color in the eastern sky.  I ate a cracker and drank a bit of water and wondered when I should face the ship’s food.  I had seen some of it the evening before and it looked like Dickensian gruel.

Breakfast was interesting.  The four or five hundred people on board reduced down to a single line (actually two lines: there was a separate one for women and children) with some junior crew member in charge, the first person in authority I had seen.  The process took over an hour.

We are ladled an eight-ounce cup of sweet, creamy coffee from an iron pot large enough to cook a missionary in and forked a crushed piece of sweetish bread and then spewed out of the line, with no place to sit.  I wandered back upstairs and sat on the deck with my back against a vibrating bulkhead.  I assumed I would figure this out as the trip progressed.

Though it is said that Belém is at the mouth of the Amazon, this is true only in a general sort of way, as the main channel lies to the north, on the other side of the island of Marajó, a huge riverine island the size of Switzerland which we must pass along narrow channels in order to reach the main course of the River.  These tight, winding passages looks like a place where someone on their own could get lost.  There are few settlements and now and then a flimsy house perched along the bank on stilts, its back to the jungle.

Most of my fellow passengers seemed to be wearing tee-shirts with something written on them.  A sweet old lady was wearing one that said “Oh, Shit”.  I choose to assume she does not understand English.

taking ship

The nice lady at the boat office had said my vessel, the Rondônia, would be “mais tipica”, which I took to mean something like “very traditional”.  I had encountered the word “tipica” several times earlier in the trip, where it had been used on menus to describe dishes that had proven something of a challenge to my taste, but I did want an authentic Amazonian experience and the lady went on to explain that this meant that passengers were to supply their own hammock, which sounded simple enough, so I bought my ticket and asked directions to where I might find the hammock district of Belém and was sent back to Ver o Peso Market where I found a fine selection of inexpensive hammocks.  Since I would need some rope to put up my hammock the fellow cut a length of hemp rope for me with a quick blow of his machete which not only cut the rope cleanly but also took off about an inch of the corner of his counter.  As this did not seem to bother him I assumed he must replace his counter regularly and this was but another small illustration of that great truth that in other countries they do things differently. 

Taking Ship

I arrived at the pier at six p.m., when the nice lady at the boat office had told me boarding would begin.  I passed through a turnstile and saw a handsome vessel with a few passengers lounging at the rail and asked a porter if that fine ship might be the Rondônia.  He shook his head and indicated the next ship down.

I will not trouble Gentle Reader with my romantic expectations regarding the M/V Rondônia, its passengers and appointments, as they were none of them to be.  There would be no white suits on the promenade deck as we watched a glorious tropical sunset.

Oh, there would no doubt be glorious tropical sunsets, but of the Rondônia itself, alas, it resembled nothing so much as a floating Black Hole of Calcutta.  A waterborne sauna crammed to the roof (or bulkhead or whatever they call them on boats) with a steaming mass of humanity packed into open stalls and passageways and hanging bat-like in hammocks.

  I stood there draped in my impedimenta, aghast.  There were jostling people everywhere.  I looked about in vain for a steward or purser or anyone in apparent authority, but there seemed to be no one in charge.

I stumbled into the crowd, making my way down passageways, over bundles of belongings and under hammocks seemingly hung wherever there was an open space.

I had signed on for six days of this.  The twenty-five dollars I had paid for my passage suddenly seemed less a bargain than I had at first thought.

As I stood there, dazed, an old fellow saw my distress and took me in hand and led me to the stern rail and found me a place to hang my hammock and showed me how to put it up and smiled and nodded and disappeared.  My hammock hung on the outside at the exact height to allow me to lie in my hammock and look out onto the river.  It seemed to me the perfect place to be, though I remembered that I should probably withhold judgment until I saw what happened when it rained, as it would once or twice a day.  I bought exorbitantly-priced oranges from a shipboard peddler.  As this would be a water journey, I looked for the nearest flotation device: I did not see any.  I settled back into my hammock out of the way of the roiling crowds and thought about Third World disasters, of ferries sinking within sight of land with extravagant loss of life.

panthers and catfish in Belém do Pará

There is a nice zoo in Belém do Pará and there one afternoon two young girls practiced their English on me and we were later joined by their mother.  They had been to Europe, but though they lived on the banks of the Amazon they had never gone up river.  In my two weeks or so in the South I had watched quite a bit of television in the futile hope that it would help me with the language, but during that time I saw no nature programs and was coming to the suspicion that we foreigners were more impressed with the Amazon than the Brasilians were.  A fellow in the South had told me that three days looking at trees would be more than enough.

I enjoyed the Zoo.  I am usually not an eel person, but electric eels have such sweet faces, little round eyes set wide in a featureless oval face.  A spotted panther with large, light blue eyes looked at me as if I were supposed to say something and large cats greedily watched the large, slow mammals on the other side of the bars, remembering the old ways.

In preparing for the trip I had seen photographs of pirarucú, an Amazonian catfish that once grew to the size of a family sedan, but in recent years has been fished down.  So when I saw it on the menu one evening at the Círculo Militar I of course had to try it.  Which was a mistake.  The flesh was unpleasantly gamey, even with a liberal application of lime juice.  I worried that it was going to make me sick.  

I had already discovered that the only people at work between the hours of noon and two o’clock are those whose job it is to tell you that the office will not be open until two, and so at two o’clock I went to the boat office to arrange my passage up the Amazon to Manaus and determined that I would depart day after the next at eight the evening aboard the M/V Rondônia on a six-day, thousand-mile river journey that would cost approximately $25, all meals included.  My alternative was a vessel of the middling class, which would cost about $10 and take about the same time, so I decided that at those rates I ought treat myself.  The lady at the boat office, smiling and friendly, told me quite a bit about what I should expect, though as she was speaking Portuguese I apparently missed some details, but the phrase “mais tipica” stuck in my mind.