In Amazonia (5 page)

Boat-building with local timber is clearly one of the main economic activities in Igarapé-Miri today. But there are still fifty-two sugar mills in the municipality, some sending cane to Belém to be crushed into sweet juice, most producing cachaça. This is the bitter residue of a healthy market in artisanal liquor that collapsed when manufacturers of cheap, industrial rum from São Paulo established road contact with Belém and, repeating the pattern of Brazilian sugar history, drove local producers even farther into the margins. More important now for Igarapé-Miri and many of the other towns that line the estuary and dot the coast of Marajó within striking distance of Belém and Macapá are the trades in the fruit and heart-of-palm of the
açaí
palm, a floodplain staple and an urban fancy whose cultural and economic role in the contemporary
estuary is hard to overestimate. Despite its immersion in the açaí boom, Igarapé-Miri has little of the bustle of its larger neighbor, Abaetetuba, a town that is working this expanding market with a vengeance.

On making the obligatory hour-long homage through the canal, I was impressed by the amount of traffic. After a number of restorations, the canal is now fully as wide as the Rio Igarapé-Miri Velho into which it flows. Workers from town were on their way to and from the large sawmill on the Rio Moju, cargo boats and barges of all sizes were heading downstream to Belém laden with Brazil nuts, sawn timber, and sacks of açaí, returning weighted down with household goods for sale here and along the Rio Tocantins. Everyone was keeping to their side as if on a two-lane highway. Nowadays, it seems, there is no need for maintenance work on this route: the huge timber barges clear any debris out of the channel as they push their way through. Vessels of this size must play havoc with those residents of Igarapé-Miri who intensified fishing and shrimping activity on the canal, even moved out here to live, in response to the evaporating job opportunities caused by President Fernando Henrique Cardoso's
Plano Real
currency stabilization. If you look carefully, there are low breaks in the forest wall where people have cut narrow channels to take them by canoe to houses and fields set back from the main stream.

Something else you may notice traveling through the canal is a change in its microgeography. Starting at Igarapé-Miri, the broad channel meanders gently in a beguilingly natural manner. The forest on each side is characteristic of the estuarine floodplain: a confusion of species often associated with human occupation—açaí,
buriti, imbaúba, pau mulato
, and, less decoratively, bamboo. Once in a short while there is a wooden house, typically raised on low stilts to stand above the flood. Then, about ten minutes before you reach the Rio Moju, there's a subtle change. The width, the vegetation, and the houses remain consistent, but the channel stops meandering, and, for the first time, takes on the aspect of a
canal
: it runs straight, like a Roman road. Geraldo, the boat owner piloting us through, explained that from here on in the channel had been dug out of the forest. From Igarapé-Miri up to this point, the slave workers had followed the course of a tiny, seasonally navigable creek, cutting, clearing, digging, and widening as they went. But from here, it was an “
escavação
,” an excavation. Indeed, he said, pointing down over the side of the boat, at low tide you still need to beware of the
strong currents from the submerged waterfall that marks the headwaters of this stream.

So it would have been here that the mud caved in, sweeping away those eighteen slaves sent to die by Carambola. And that story of the slave deaths (with its evocative coda in the turbulent waters that mark their graves) was the recurring motif that had sedimented in popular commentary, preserving the troubled memory of Carambola, and fixing at least one meaning of the canal among the people I talked to in Igarapé-Miri: “Muita gente morreu … Aquela época dos escravos era dura” (“So many people died … Those days of slavery were really hard”).

T
HE
A
RAPIUNS
B
ASIN

More than 500 miles upstream, on the floodplain that surrounds the city of Santarém, economic history has been quite different from that in the estuary where Igarapé Guariba and Igarapé-Miri are located. Rather than the sugar trade giving way to timber and açaí, as at Igarapé-Miri, here the trajectory has been from jute, introduced in the 1930s by Japanese immigrants, to extensive cattle and buffalo pasture, and the human depopulation that follows in its wake.
²⁶

In their typology of Amazonian floodplains, botanists João Murça Pires and Ghillean Prance distinguish these “true”
várzea
floodplains washed by the Andean sediments of the whitewater rivers from the flooded
igapó
forests of clear and blackwater rivers such as the Tapajós, the Arapiuns, and the Rio Negro.
²⁷
This is a helpful clarification if you want to map an economic geography of the region, as the links among rivers, soil, and vegetation can be almost linear in Amazonia.
²⁸
Classification based on optical properties of rivers is standard here, in both academic and local notations, and the terminology is more than descriptive. The turbidity of whitewater rivers indicates their high silt and biotic content. Clear water rivers, generally flowing from the harder pre-Cambrian shields, are transparent because of a lack of particulate nutrients. Blackwater rivers take their color from the often toxic humic and fulvic plant acids that leach in soil organic matter from their
terra firme
(upland forest) watersheds.
²⁹
Logically enough, these blackwater and clear water rivers, the so-called rivers of hunger, have greatly reduced animal populations, and, as one indication of this, on arrival
there is immediate relief from the armies (and air forces!) of biting flies and mosquitoes that make life on the whitewater Amazon so uncomfortable.
³⁰

Three rivers converge in the glistening bay in front of Santarém: the whitewater Amazon, the clear water Tapajós, and the clear water Arapiuns. It is a wonderful place to see the
encontro das águas
, the meeting of the waters—bands of different-colored water flowing parallel to each other for mile after mile, barely mixing because of their distinct sediment loads and densities. The more famous contrast between the Amazon and the blackwater Rio Negro just below Manaus is certainly impressive, but here at Santarém, several bands of water are clearly visible—Amazon
café-au-lait
, Tapajós green, and the blacker tones of the Arapiuns. Often, during the low summer tides, one stream will part on meeting an island or sandbar, somehow another will slip into the breach, and this cosmopolitan river will flow on in an ad hoc pattern of four or five stripes. Yet despite such natural drama, it was Manaus (under the aggressively entrepreneurial Governor Gilberto Mestrinho) that captured the eco-tourist itinerary of the Amazon, and visitors to Santarém are often surprised to find that this town too is a site of fluvial spectacle.

As all this might lead us to expect, ecological conditions on the várzea of the Amazon River and the floodplains of the Tapajós and Arapiuns are significantly different. It would be a mistake to assume, however, that edaphic poverty leads automatically to human poverty. It is true that the white and reddish sand igapós found bordering the Tapajós and Arapiuns support a distinct and, to my eye, lackluster vegetation with a scrubby Mediterranean look, and few of the tall, graceful palms that lend such vitality to the estuarine várzea. But the Arapiuns is sprinkled with small villages and there is an active trade with Santarém in those Amazonian carbohydrate staples
farinha d'água
and
farinha de tapioca
, gritty manioc products that are produced only with difficulty on the inundated floodplain. Mapping the lower Arapiuns basin in the 1920s, the pioneering German anthropologist Curt Nimuendajú—the inspirer of Claude Lévi-Strauss' South American inquiries—reported compacted trails known as
estradas
.
³¹
Farmers still use these as routes to deep and extensive deposits of
terra preta do índio
, fertile black soil, probably of pre-Columbian anthropogenic origin, on which they maintain productive agricultural colonies. These deposits were commonly found in dry upland forest and linked by the estradas to riverine settlements,
often several miles away. People travel back and forth between these locations along this remarkable network of trails, many of which, worn deep and tunnel-like into the ground, also evoke an ancient history.
³²

Leaving Santarém, it takes a full four hours to cross the mouthbay of the Tapajós and reach the Arapiuns. Even here, so far from the estuary, the volume of water in this river system is astonishing. The vast bay resembles an inland sea or one of the North American Great Lakes, and is subject to the same restless weather. Henry Bates, returning from a voyage on the Tapajós in 1852, almost died here as well:

We were driven back on the first night (October 3rd) by a squall. The light terral was carrying us pleasantly round the spit, when a small black cloud which lay near the rising moon suddenly spread over the sky to the northward; the land breeze then ceased, and furious blasts began to blow across the river. We regained, with great difficulty, the shelter of the point. It blew almost a hurricane for two hours, during the whole of which time the sky over our heads was beautifully clear and starlit. Our shelter at first was not very secure, for the wind blew away the lashings of our sails, and caused our anchor to drag. Angelo Custodio, however, seized a rope which was attached to the foremast and leapt ashore; had he not done so, we should probably have been driven many miles backwards up the storm-tossed river. After the cloud had passed, the regular east wind began to blow, and our further progress was effectually stopped for the night. The next day we all went ashore, after securing well the canoe, and slept from eleven o'clock till five under the shade of trees.
³³

Bates might have expected something similar. The dry season, the period Amazonians call
verão
, acknowledging it as a form of summer, is a time of unpredictable winds, sudden storms, and dangerous tides. In Santarém, there is a 36-foot drop in water levels between the height of the seasons, and sandbars, islands, and beaches migrate, to reappear almost out of nowhere, challenging the reflexes of local sailors. Vegetation standing on dry sand at this time of year may have been completely submerged in the long, wet
inverno
, the Amazonian winter, and how it manages to photosynthesize for months on end under such conditions is still not entirely clear.

This landscape of the middle Amazon has a chimerical quality all its own, a bewildering instability different from that of the estuary. In those lower deltaic reaches, people sit on front porches overlooking the water and watch giant fallen trees and big chunks of riverbank flow out to sea with the tide. In winter, with the heavy rains and swollen rivers, an eerie long-distance procession forms, and the estuary takes on a surreal aspect, filled with floating islands of long
canarana
grass descended with small animals and clouds of insects from who-knows-where, possibly hundreds of miles upstream—the very same islands I saw bobbing quietly at the mouth of the Tapajós outside Santarém, readying themselves for the long voyage down to the sea.

Unlike the Tapajós and the Amazon, the Arapiuns moves unnervingly slowly, especially in its broad lower course, where, as Harald Sioli, the eminent limnologist who first worked here in the 1950s, observed with descriptive precision, the river represents “an elongated lake.”
³⁴
Upstream, above the Cachoeira do Aruá (a wide and violent set of rapids beyond the division of the Arapiuns into the Rio Aruá and the Rio Maró), the dark water coils around in great meanders, doubling back on itself, passing silently between steep walls of high forest. To evade the rapids in summer when the waters are low, people take one of the estradas, the land trails described by Nimuendajú. These paths take them past fields planted with manioc and by huddles of clay-and-thatch houses built close to the low, swampy bank of the Aruá. The people who rely on these routes maintain them with machetes and
enxadas
(heavy, sharp-edged hoes) in organized annual
limpezas
, or cleanings, keeping them wide enough for oxcarts and smooth enough for bumpy bike rides, scraping off the accumulated litter from a broad passage that sinks lower each year.

Still, if you are paddling a canoe between the dispersed settlements on its banks, a river like this is hard work. And the big, slow bends that lead almost nowhere are particularly frustrating. On the Rio Aruá, residents have made their lives easier by cutting short channels that chop off a loop, allowing a canoe to pass in a more or less straight line through a forest tunnel and out again onto the open river. People living beside the Aruá also describe communal limpezas that serve to maintain these canals. I arrived here with my friend Michael Reynolds and we met up with Joe McCann, who has been conducting research on the history and uses of terra preta in this area. An elderly man told us that he himself had cut one of these channels across the river from his house,
digging out the tree roots through the forest with an enxada to access a tiny, seasonal
rego
, a creek. The slow current gradually stripped away the heavy clay
tabatinga
soil, he said, and opened a channel 3 or 4 yards wide. He lent us a canoe, so we followed his directions and paddled up to take a look. Sure enough, there was a narrow break in the forest wall, and we left the almost silent river to slip into a coolly shaded atrium about 50 yards from end to end, where the transparent, shallow water flowed rapidly before scooting us out into the bright sunlight once again.

People here used the word
varadores
, a term I had not heard before, to identify these anthropogenic channels.
³⁵
As you might expect from those who live in a landscape dominated by water and tides, their vocabulary, like that of other
ribeirinhos
—as people who live along the rivers are sometimes known in the region—is particularly rich in designations for watercourses. Precise distinctions are drawn between waterways according to length, depth, type of water, seasonality, and other relevant factors. At least, so it would appear at first glance. As well as igarapé, rego, rio, canal, várzea, and igapó, words I have already used in this chapter, after a few days in a village on the Amazon floodplain, a visitor might also have heard
rio-mar, riacho, atalho, mupéua, furo, paraná, córrego, caminho, água grande, água pequena, água parada, reponta, préamar, pacuema, lancante, remanso
, and
mondongo
. Many of these, especially those derived from Tupi, are regionally endemic. Others are more generally Brazilian but have specific local associations. All are likely to be complicated by their diminutives:
regozinho
, for instance, or, even,
águazinho
, little water.