Crossing the River (19 page)

23
23

Compatible Travelers
Compatible Travelers

W
E WERE GEARING
up for the arrival of our American friends, the Kadas-Newells, whom Skyler and Peter had gone to pick up in Salvador, and Molly's friend, Brooke, who would come a week later. Maybe this would help Christmas feel a little more normal, a little more celebratory. While I loved the white-light-draped gazebo in the
praça
in front of our house and the flame tree branches wrapped in twinkling color, it still felt strange; the lights melted in the sun rather than sparkled in the snow.

But we were apprehensive about our friends' arrival, too. I wondered whether it would interfere with our efforts to adapt to life in Penedo. It would be exciting to share all that we'd learned, and perhaps their excitement would bring back our feeling of adventure. Peter and I missed my father in this way. He'd joined us almost everywhere in the world, and his affirmation, his pleasure in our traveling, had helped us get through the rough parts.

But were we going to have to adjust all over again after our friends left? Especially Skyler. Carson Kadas was one of his best pals. But it might be hard for Peter and me, too. It would be exhilarating to talk politics and compare cultures in full-length sentences, maybe even reeling off paragraphs. It would be a relief to have the ease that comes with shared backgrounds, to not have to explain the inside jokes.

Martha, Mike, Carson's older brother Bowen, and Carson arrived from the
Estados Unidos
, as we would repeatedly explain to everyone in Penedo. It had been a while—basically since we'd left the States—since I'd heard Skyler laugh with such unabashed hilarity as he did with Carson. I soaked in his laughter, like refilling a sponge that had been squeezed dry. Skyler and Carson made a good pair in their physical daring and their total willingness to sacrifice their bodies at the
altar of soccer. Carson's bare feet were skinned and blistered by the second day, just as Skyler's had been five months before.

Wanting to treat our friends to something special, we'd waited for their arrival to explore the inland part of our state, the towns upriver along the Rio São Francisco. We caught a van to Arapiraca, the town with the trauma center, then clambered into the back of a pickup truck, the only conveyance available for transport to the smallest towns. Once in Piranhas, a picturesque town strung like beads up and down a couple of hillsides, Peter spontaneously contracted with eight
moto-taxi
drivers to take us to view the Xingó Dam. Martha, tan and blue-eyed, with her graying hair in a braid, laughed out loud. “This is why our families work so well together. I don't know how many moms would be so cool about seeing their kids go off on motorcycles, in Brazil!”

I've often thought an important requirement for good traveling companions is a matching tolerance for risk, discomfort, and unpredictability, which may be one reason Peter and I manage so well. Peter and I had thought through our worst nightmares before every trip abroad. But when it was just the two of us, our perception of the risks was different. Hiking across China for our honeymoon or crossing borders into small African countries on the brink of revolution didn't feel particularly risky. We had that youthful sense of invincibility. But then we had kids.

“Having kids opens you up to death in a whole new way,” our birth-class instructor had said. When we were choosing where to go with newborn Skyler, we'd said no malaria; we chose Spain. When the kids were six and ten, we chose the capital city of Mozambique, close to Johannesburg and good medical care. Traveling with kids, Peter and I have both imagined our children stuck in the outback, bitten by a snake, too far from the anti-venom; or our children, without sufficient language skill or cultural understanding to stand up for themselves, being sexually abused by adults; we have both envisioned dengue fever, typhoid, cholera, malaria, hepatitis A, B, and C. And together we have redrawn our plans accordingly, but gone ahead.
Peter decided we should try to float home, from the town of Piranhas down to Penedo, one hundred miles. Few locals seemed to have done this. Asking around, he'd found Hugo, a fisherman.

Hugo was a football player of a man with a sensual mouth and soft brown eyes under thick black brows. He said we should leave at five thirty in the morning to get to Penedo well before dark. He showed up at six. The trip would take nine hours, or so he said.

Hugo clearly knew the river, “stone by stone,” as we'd been told by one of his boating comrades that he would. We slid past dry, knuckled hills, river water boiling around us, Hugo's double-wide canoe with its canopy top surprisingly comfortable, even for nine. He steered the green-and-yellow craft, with its tiny propeller the size of my hand, close into steep-sided sand banks, out into the roiling middle, and around copper rocks—going wherever he needed to make maximum use of the current.

After an hour, we stopped at a settlement with an open-air restaurant and a log cabin. We wanted to hike up into the
mata branca
, the white forest, to visit the former hideout of the bandit Lampião and his gang. Following a red-dirt path over rocks, we climbed through the low scrub of small-leaved
caatinga
bushes and long-fingered cactus. We followed Valkyrie, a guide we'd picked up at the restaurant, to the site of the shooting of Lampião and ten of his gang, including his wife, Maria Bonita. I was struck by how Wild West the story was. Despite the abolition of slavery in 1888, wealthy landowners, popularly dubbed the “colonels,” had continued to exploit laborers and amass fortunes in cattle and sugarcane. A white man, Lampião, had emerged as the strongest leader of the Robin Hood–like bands rebelling against them. Leaving their children in town to be raised by others, these
bandidos
and their women hid out in the hills, in places like this rocky draw, where they'd been surprised one early morning in 1938 and shot. Twenty-four had escaped, but the colonels' police carted away the severed heads of eleven others, to parade them around the region. We picked our way back down the rocky path.

Back at the restaurant, we went swimming in the cool teal of the river, waiting to be summoned for our lunch of fried fish. This spot,
now inhabited by descendants of Pedro—the man who'd been sent to town to buy food for Lampião's band, who was captured, tortured, and threatened with the death of his pregnant wife into revealing the band's whereabouts—seemed idyllic. The restaurant perched high above the riverbank, surrounded by groves of mango, cashew, and papaya trees and a thriving vegetable garden, watered by a solar-powered pump that floated on the river like some strange metallic insect. Several women stitched with embroidery hoops; a couple of young men taking a break from an excavation project played dominoes under a tree. Zooming out to an aerial view of their small oasis, one would have seen miles and miles of empty hillsides, turning white in the summer as the
catingueira
lost their leaves.

I felt lulled, caught in some timeless twilight zone, though somewhere in the recesses of my mind, I knew we should probably get back on the river. When we left, we bought lumps of jellied cactus wrapped in foil to suck on as we continued our journey.

Skyler and Carson stretched out on cushions in the bow to sleep. Molly read. Bowen wove backpack pulls out of strands of plastic. I was grateful for the relaxed camaraderie of old friends. Having them there made me feel proud of the life we'd managed to fashion, of our fluency in Portuguese, of the Brazilian friends we could now share.

Floating along, we listened with a mixture of delight and distaste as Hugo imparted, and we translated, the local lore. Such as the bit about a black snake that crawled into houses at night and found the nipples of nursing women to suck out the milk.

“
É verdade
.” He nodded seriously. “It happened to my wife's mother. They killed the snake, and when they cut it open, it was full of milk.”

I shivered with distaste.

“Cliffs!” Skyler exclaimed a few hours later, scanning the riverbank. “Look at those cliffs. They're perfect for jumping. Can we stop? Can we?” He pointed eagerly at the sheaves of rock rising above us.

Shortly after, Hugo pulled into a
prainha
. This little beach was tucked behind a set of rocks, under a tree. I threw my legs over the canoe's side and unexpectedly dropped into water up to my ribs. It turned out the river reached depths of ninety meters in places. Skyler and Carson clambered out, shedding their shirts. Molly joined them,
then Peter, then Mike, all flying off the fifteen-foot-high rocks in ecstatic shapes—tucked, splayed, arched—before splashing into the current and drifting down to a landing spot.

When we regathered at the canoe, Hugo was whacking at a brown coconut with a large machete. He drained the water, chipped off the shell, and broke the moist, white meat into pieces. He handed them to us with chunks of
rapadura
, dark brown raw cane sugar, miming one bite of coconut, one bite of sugar, and gave it the thumbs-up. “
A comida dos pescadores
”—The food of fishermen. It was fabulous—sweet, moist, and crunchy. This was hour five, theoretically more than halfway.

We'd left the rocks and swirling currents behind. The small wattle-and-daub farms in their desiccated draws were starting to be replaced by towns. Colorful houses lined the bank like a parade leading to the ubiquitous church with flanking towers. A clutch of boys tossed a volleyball over a line strung above the water.

By hour ten, we wondered if we would really make it home before dark. Remarkably, no one was restless, no one was getting irritable from claustrophobia or hunger. We'd all fallen into the soothing lull of the current. Peter and Mike examined a map, measuring distances and calculating time passed. It looked unlikely.

The rolling land was subsiding, and greening meadows swept away to the horizon, weeping green trees replaced scratchy scrub. Black cormorants yielded to white egrets lazily grazing with cattle.

“Maybe we should pull over in Propriá, since there's a bridge there and a road, and take stock of where we are,” I suggested an hour later. It was now five and would get dark at six, like the curtain closing on a play.

Propriá loomed larger, its city lights beginning to sparkle as the sky grew dark. It was by far the biggest town we'd come to and had the first bridge we'd seen in twelve hours. Hugo headed toward shore.

There was the
Maravilhosa
moored at the bank. I'd seen this rental boat, a double-decker like a Mississippi paddle wheeler, next to the ferry slip in Penedo. Before we knew it, Hugo was lifting our backpacks out of the canoe and handing them over to the crew of the larger boat. Told we'd be traveling the rest of the way with them, we
obediently filed up the gangplank. There was no one on board but the crew and their kids. They'd tow Hugo's canoe behind. Inside, they put out rolls and cheese, a thermos of sweet, black coffee, and beer. “Just the ticket,” as my father would have said. Our kids ran up to the top deck to watch as we passed under the bridge, then retired below decks to the hammock room to play Uno. The rest of us stayed above, surveying the oily dark river under a full moon.

“My son said, ‘It's the woman and boy from capoeira!'” Anterior, the riverboat captain, told me in Portuguese. Our capoeira group had given a demonstration at this boy's school in Penedo, and, as usual, Skyler and I were hard to forget.

We slowly zigzagged our way downriver. “How do you know where to go?” I asked the captain.

“
Prática
,” he said. Practice? They were steering this huge boat, around shifting sandbars in the dark, from memory?

Peter, Mike, Martha, and I stood at the top rail, faces to the wind, and peered lazily into the dark water and shadows of overhanging trees. I marveled at the fortuitous turn of events and how often this kind of thing happened to us. A month earlier, we'd taken a similar motorized covered canoe to the “
foz
,” the mouth of the Rio São Francisco, where it emptied into the Atlantic. There, the canoe's motor had broken down out at the ocean, and it looked like we'd get home long after dark; we'd been saved that time by a high-tech catamaran and had been invited to join their gourmet buffet on deck. It felt like we'd jumped from backwoods Mississippi to the Riviera.

The trip to Penedo took not nine but thirteen hours. We gratefully lumbered down the gangplank and headed for an outdoor restaurant, hungry but pleased by our adventure.

There are lots of ways to travel. My mother prefers advance planning and lots of preparatory reading. My father preferred wandering on whim. There's something to be said for both. But either way, things inevitably go awry, especially when traveling off the beaten path. It helps to believe—believe things will turn out all right. I think that changes not only one's perception of the experience but maybe also what actually happens. One of our Penedo acquaintances had introduced
us to a visiting friend, an Uruguayan professor teaching in the United States. He'd said he comes to Brazil to write because he finds there's more inspiration in the unpredictable. I understand that. There's something magical in not knowing. We've been surprised and delighted by what we've pulled out of the hat.

24
24

Holidays Unraveling
Holidays Unraveling

W
E ROLLED INTO
Christmas with a bang, starting the night of December 21. First, Brooke's mom called from the States to let us know that Brooke had missed the first of her string of four flights and would therefore arrive not thirty
minutes
away in Maceió, the original plan, but ten
hours
away in Salvador. (We had already moved into the rented beach house in Praia do Francês to be closer to Maceió, putting us now farther away from Salvador than we would have been if we'd stayed in Penedo.) Next, the power in our rental house went out (taking with it the air conditioning, in the middle of Brazil's steamy summer), and then the vomiting began—three kids, six times by morning.

By the next day, the power had returned and the kids' vomiting had mostly stopped. We never figured out what had caused it. They spent the day lounging in the living room, plowing through Christmas presents from my mother, DVDs transported by our friends—
Jurassic Park
,
Forrest Gump
. We decided to break them out early. Meanwhile, I tried to figure out how to meet Brooke at the airport in Salvador. She would be arriving the following night at midnight. I felt it would be too much to expect a high school student to arrive in a huge foreign city where she didn't speak the local language and then string together buses, vans, and ferries to make her way to a small town three states away on her own. After fruitless hours at the Internet café trying to book seats on the bus, I reluctantly dug my phone out of my straw bag and dialed the station. I dreaded making arrangements over the phone in another language, but this time I was spared. My phone server was down. Where was this world at our fingertips?

I trudged back to the rental house in the blazing sun, no further toward picking up Brooke.

Then one of those surprising things that happens in Brazil happened. Amid all the technological malfunctions, businesses closing
early, and people being out, Peter managed, in about fifteen minutes, to hire a taxi. It was like finding a taxi in our small Montana town to drive us 1,200 miles to Seattle and back, nonstop, on Christmas Eve. At home, that would never happen.

Fifteen minutes after Molly and I climbed into the car, the driver and his pal announced they'd never been to Salvador, or in fact to the state of Bahia. We would eventually discover, as we wandered blindly through highway interchanges, that they had no map. I'd considered phoning Peter with their license plate number, in case we mysteriously disappeared into one of the “love” motels out in the middle of nowhere with names like Le Plaisir, Eros, and Korpus. But as time passed, I began to relax.

In fact, I must have dozed because I jerked awake as the car lurched to a halt and opened my eyes to see that we were backing up an exit ramp in the dark. We just made it back to the highway before another car shot down the ramp. Two U-turns later, it turned out that had been the right exit after all, and we found ourselves shunted onto a four-lane highway. As we cruised along in the left lane, ignoring the car behind us flashing its high beams, it occurred to me that maybe our driver had never driven on a four-lane road.

Nevertheless, we made it to the airport before Brooke appeared out of customs, hit the Subway in the food court, then found our driver in the airport parking garage, asleep. Remarkably, we arrived in Penedo at our front door at 8:00
AM
on Christmas Eve. The trip cost about $800, which Brooke's parents gladly reimbursed.

Peter and I threw our feet out of bed. “Is someone throwing up?” he whispered. I opened the door to see Skyler precariously perched on Molly's shoulders in stifled hysterics at the end of the hall. “Go away. Go back to bed,” they hissed.

“You can't come out!” they shouted an hour later when Peter tried to get up to go to the bathroom. It sounded now as though all five kids were awake.

“Okay, we're ready!”

We emerged from our refrigerated cell into the startling heat and bright whiteness of the hallway. Snowflakes dangled from the ceiling.
Hundreds of pieces of cut-up white paper were strewn around the floor. Molly cranked the tunes on her computer: “Rock around the Christmas Tree” and “Baby, It's Cold Outside.” We sang along with Bing Crosby.

“Want to trim my tree?” I batted my lashes at Peter. Finally, it felt like Christmas.

Just as we began to open presents, we heard a shout through the front door. “
Petair
!” Dalan was leaning up against the side of the house. “
Minha mãe está morrendo
”—his mother was dying in Maceió. Could he borrow some money to go see her? As Peter gave him the hundred
reais
, he said, “Dalan,
você precisa trabalhar
”—work to make some money. Dalan explained shyly that he couldn't read. He'd dropped out of school after second grade.

“Oh, and by the way,” he said as he left, “Junior is in jail. He knifed a man.”

By midafternoon, we managed to straggle out into the heat and head down to the river for a family game of soccer. We aimed for the
campo
, the field of lumpy dirt and sad grass where the grown men played. As we passed their houses, Ricardo and Victor joined the group.

I loved these games of family soccer. They were the only time I played. Aniete and Gel came along. They hadn't been able to go home for Christmas because no buses ran to the country that day, and Aniete declined to take the longer vacation we'd offered. They found it amusing that we were all going to play, even Martha and I, being not only women but also old when it came to Brazilian sports.

Afterward, dusty and sweaty from a hard hour of running after the ball, we waded through a lagoon to get to the river, the sun disappearing fast behind the ridge across the São Francisco. Gel and Aniete stood, feet in the water, while the rest of us peeled down to swimsuits or underwear and drifted out into the current. Neither one of them knew how to swim.

The bottom was sandy, the water soft. This was the first time we'd swum in the river here, leery of the sewage dump upstream. Keeping my mouth above water, I slipped along in the cool dark, feeling like an otter, dark wet head skimming along the surface.

We pulled on our rumpled clothes and began the trek back up the ridge. Skyler and I fell behind.

“It just doesn't feel like Christmas,” he said a little wistfully.

He'd had a hard day. I wondered if part of it was because since Brooke's arrival, his friend Carson had shifted to the older kids, Molly, Brooke, and Bowen, who liked to just lie around and talk. Lying around and talking was the last thing Skyler wanted to do when you could climb trees and jump off walls.

It reminded me of myself at the same age, living in Cairo and receiving handwritten letters from friends at home. Somewhere during that year and a half of middle school, the letters changed. Suddenly my friends wrote about kissing boys. I'd felt bewildered, left behind.

We walked along in silence. “I know,” I ventured. “This does feel weird; all wrong.”

Despite the businesses in the
baixa
festooned in white lights, and the cashiers at Ki-Barato in red Santa hats, it was hard for us Northerners, used to snow and cold and Santa arriving in a sleigh, to wrap our minds around this hot, sweaty, fans-whirring, people-asleep-in-hammocks day.

“Still,” I reminded him, “it was pretty fun, all the same.” I put my arm around him. “There will be lots of other Christmases. This one is just different.”