Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes (8 page)

“The mosquitoes are really horrible here,” I complained.

“Really? There are hardly any out tonight” came Godo’s reply, tinged with a bit of defensiveness about his town. But I noticed that he held his T-shirt in his hands to slap regularly at his back, front, and sides.

We settled down for a dinner of beans heavily flavored with onions, salt, oil, and cilantro, accompanied by rice and some fish. I had very little money to pay for this food. We were living on the charity of the poor.

Men inquired and reported to me that the next boat to Humaitá would pass by in two or three days. This was a letdown. We would be stranded in this place. But at least Keren and Shannon could rest and we had help washing clothes and getting food. And we had hope that we would make it to a doctor.

“How will I know when the boat is coming?” I asked.

“A gente vai escutar de longe, seu Daniel”
(We will hear it from afar, Mr. Daniel) was the enigmatic reply.

How could they hear it from enough distance for me to get my family and things together in time to reach the riverbank and flag it down?I again wondered whether I had made the right decision to leave rather than wait for the plane.

Keren called me to her hammock and said that she wanted to go back to the village and wait for the plane. She seemed so much stronger and clearheaded that I considered returning after another night’s sleep. In any case, before the next morning when I might have returned to the Maici, Godofredo woke me up. It was about 2 a.m.

“O recreio já vem, seu Daniel”
(The recreation boat—a name that still causes me to scratch my head—is coming).

I started to get the family up and pack, but Godofredo said, “Relax. It won’t be here for a while. We can have some coffee first.”

We had coffee, I growing more anxious at the thought that the boat was going to pass by and we’d be stranded here for at least another week. As we finished our coffee, though, I heard voices outside his house. Men were coming, unbidden, to help me carry my family to the boat. After conversing for about fifteen minutes, the men slung ham mocks on poles and I gathered our belongings together. Keren and Shannon were put back in the hammocks. Cesária picked up Caleb, I got Kris in my arms, someone else took our bags, and we began walking in a procession illuminated by kerosene lamp and flashlight through clouds of mosquitoes in the humid blackness toward the port. There were no lights anywhere. But as we neared the bank, off in the distance like a spaceship, the boat’s searchlight intermittently roamed the bank and river, looking for floating logs that could damage its wooden hull, checking the distance of the boat from the banks, searching for rock shoals that could sink it. We began the precarious descent in the dark, down the steep bank, straining our eyes to see by the light of a flashlight. Suddenly I heard someone fall and tumble down a few steps. It was the man who had been holding the back end of Keren’s hammock pole. But even before he hit the ground, another man had taken his place and Keren didn’t seem to have noticed.

We blinked our flashlights at the boat to signal it that we wanted a ride. As it approached out of the blackness of the starless, moonless night, more than twenty feet high and seventy feet long, its enormous searchlight came to rest on us down at the river’s edge. It looked us over, puny little earthlings on this Martian shore.

The men unloaded Shannon and Keren onto the lowest deck of the three-deck boat. I put everything else on board, including Kristene and Caleb, and the boat pulled out. Suddenly the friends from the Auxiliadora were gone, swallowed up in the Amazonian night. Would I ever see them again? What would happen now? I hung all five hammocks that we had been loaned by folks at the Auxiliadora in a near frenzy, worried that Kristene and Caleb might fall into the river, that Keren or Shannon would be stepped on as they lay unprotected on the deck, and that someone might try to steal our few belongings. After hanging our hammocks, I moved everyone and our baggage to the second deck. Then I gathered all our bags underneath my own hammock, settled my family in, and tried to get some sleep. I put everyone close to me so that I could hear and feel if anyone awoke or needed me.

The top deck of our boat was a bar area. Underneath the bottom deck there was storage. The boat was dirty, with thick brown paint covering the floors, whitewashed rails about one yard high around the sides, and blue paint on the hull. It was painted white everywhere else. I had known about these boats from reading, but this was the first time I had seen one up close. There were perhaps one hundred passengers on the vessel.

Throughout the Amazon River system, whether in Brazil, Peru, Colombia, or any other Amazonian country, a passenger boat is built pretty much the same. One begins with a massive frame for the hull, built from three- or four-inch-thick planks of a water-resistant, sturdy wood, such as
itauba.
The frame for a smallish boat will be about ten yards long and three yards wide. The rest of the heavy wooden structure of the hull is fashioned from two- to three-inch-thick boards, with spaces between them filled tightly with rope or other fiber and caulk, then covered with putty and paint. The rope and fibers are driven in with a caulking mallet and a caulking iron (like a chisel). The hull (
batelão
in Portuguese) has to be able to withstand blows from floating logs, some longer than the boat itself, in the rainy seasons, and survive grounding on the sand or rocks in the dry season.

The lower deck of the boat is used for storage at the prow and for the motor and drive shaft at the stern. Over this is another deck and over that, more often than not, a final deck. Each deck’s ceiling is about five feet, ten inches high. These passenger decks often have no walls, at least in bigger commercial passenger boats, because of the heat—only short railings like picket fences and support posts. The ceilings usually have one-by-three-inch boards placed just for hanging hammocks. In case of rain, a plastic tarp can be lowered at the sides. The boats leak but they are by and large reliable and practical vessels. And since their design, motors, and operation are standard throughout the Amazon system, parts and labor are abundantly available—so long as you stick with this standard. Deviating from the norms of construction and operation or using engines that are uncommon is asking for trouble, because a breakdown or need for technical assistance can go unanswered. You can be inconvenienced and stranded if the parts and labor you need fall outside normal expectations.

Once these boats are constructed, they go to those who have commissioned them, usually relatively well-off traders. They are used as passenger boats or as trade vessels. Those owned by traders are used to purchase jungle products from Indians and jungle-dwelling Brazilians, who receive in exchange manufactured goods, such as matches, powdered milk, canned meats, tool files, machetes, hoes, shovels, needles, thread, rolled tobacco, liquor, fish hooks, ammunition, guns, and canoes. Many traders possess fleets of such craft. The most common home ports for these fleets of trade boats are Porto Velho, Manaus, Santarém, Parintins, and Belém—the major cities of the Amazon system. The boats transport a never-ending supply of
kopaiba,
Brazil nuts, hardwoods, latex, and other jungle products. The crews of these boats purchase the raw jungle products from Indians like the Pirahãs, the Tenharim, the Apurinãs, Nadëb, and dozens of others, as well as from caboclos.

The crews are usually caboclos as well. A typical crew consists of two to four men who operate the motor, steer the boat, repair the hull, and so on. During the hours of operation, the crew can relax. So long as the motor is operating normally, they can lounge in their hammocks or sit and talk. When the boat stops during work hours they load heavy cargo off or onto the boat, repair the engine, dive under the boat to plug leaks or repair the drive shaft or propeller, and do other tasks. It is a Huckleberry Finn kind of life, seasoned with intense labor.

There is an inherent contradiction in the lives of these caboclo crews. In spite of their generosity and friendliness, many of them have violent backgrounds. Some crew members are fleeing from a city life that they never adjusted well to—failed marriages, debts, enemies, the police. In the isolation of the Amazonian tributaries, a violent land populated by violent men, a certain thickness of skin is required to endure.

Just as I began to sleep, Keren said she had to use the toilet. She and Shannon still had severe diarrhea. Countless times during this voyage I would need to help them use the chamber pot (which I had luckily thought to bring with us), covering them with a blanket for privacy, then carrying it and its contents through the crowd that gathered on the boat to stare at this sick American family, to the stern to empty and wash it in the boat’s bathroom.

As I got back from cleaning the chamber pot, Shannon said, “I’m sorry, Daddy. I’m sorry.”

“For what?” I asked.

I went near her and could tell by the smell that she had soiled herself. I looked and saw that she and her hammock were covered in diarrhea. She was so ashamed and so sorry. I should have been watching her better. I got a bucket of water and hung a blanket up from the hammocks to give her a bit of privacy. Then I washed her off and helped her change clothes. I washed out her hammock as well as I could and gave her the blanket to lie on in the hammock so that she wouldn’t feel the wetness. She was still apologetic. I then washed her clothes and hung them over the railing around the deck to dry.

The next day, Caleb and Kristene said that they had slept well. At lunchtime I tried to feed everyone. I sat Caleb and Kristene down on the bench against the railing around the deck. Then I got them each a small plate of beans and rice that was being served to the passengers. I turned to get something for myself and heard the sound of a plate falling and glass breaking. Caleb, only two years old, had dropped his plate. He was very apologetic. I got him some more and kicked all the glass and food over the side into the river. Then I asked Keren if she needed anything. She wanted a cold Coke, so I bought her one from the boat’s snack bar, one deck up. After everyone had eaten, I went back to worrying.

The morning after we boarded the
recreio,
I approached the one-armed owner of the boat, Fernando. He wore the ubiquitous flip-flops and was bare-chested. About five feet nine inches tall, with a smallish build and a prosperous Brazilian’s paunch, he hardly looked intimidating. But here he was the law.

Cesária and Godofredo had told me about Fernando. He was a hard case, with little sympathy for the poor, according to them. He would not go out of his way to help anyone. They said that some people were afraid of him and that his crew, about twenty hard-looking men, would do whatever he ordered them to. I thought about what I was going to say to him. I wanted to be eloquent in Portuguese and persuade him to do me a huge favor.

“Hello,” I said. “My wife is very ill and I need to get her to a doctor as soon as possible. I will pay whatever it costs if you can take my family to Humaitá in the motorboat you are towing.”

“I don’t rent out the motorboat,” he replied gruffly, barely looking at me.

“Well, then, I will pay whatever it costs for you to take the main boat itself straight to Humaitá and not stop to pick up anyone else.” I didn’t really care that many people depended on this boat for their own health and food needs and that I could be condemning others to a fate similar to Keren’s if Fernando accepted my offer.

Fernando replied, “Look, comrade, if your wife is supposed to die, she will die. That’s that. I won’t speed up for you.”

If he hadn’t had a crew to back him up, I might have reacted violently. I went back to my family. I was impatient and tense—more than I could ever remember being. As I was thinking and praying about this situation, the boat slowed down. Then, as I stared, it came to a complete stop near a few houses, to pick up more passengers, I supposed. But then the motor stopped. Silence. I thought that there might be an engine problem. Then, incredulously, I watched the entire crew and Fernando leave the boat wearing identical soccer uniforms. At the top of a hill I could see a clearing. More men in different soccer uniforms were waiting. Most of the passengers also got off. For two fucking hours I thought of ways to kill these people for playing soccer while my wife and daughter were dying on their boat. I would have stolen the vessel and left them all there, but I couldn’t operate it alone. I found the meanest and cruelest thoughts I’ve ever had bouncing around my brain. These were not the thoughts of a Spirit-filled missionary, I admit. They were thoughts worthy of my barroom-brawling cow boy dad.

Everyone eventually came back to the boat, laughing, flirting, and happy, ready to continue our journey to Humaitá. What was wrong with these people? I wondered. Were they totally devoid of any human sentiment? Years later, when the trauma of this trip was less raw, I began to understand the Brazilian perspective.

The hardship that I was experiencing, so out of the ordinary for me, was just life, just everyday misfortune to all the passengers on this ship. One did not panic in the face of life, however hard. One faced what there was and one faced it alone. In spite of the willingness of Brazilians to help, there is also a strong underlying sense, among caboclos at least, that one must handle one’s own problems. Something like, “Although I will always be willing to help you, I don’t want to ask you to help me.”

The days on the
recreio
were the longest of my life. It was like being on a floating prison. I tried to relax by sitting on a bench close by Keren’s hammock and watching the flora and fauna on the banks go by very slowly, as we pushed upriver at about six knots. The lack of privacy for Keren and Shannon, the constant staring of the other passengers, was hard on me. Even though people were mostly kind, it was hard being talked about in the third person constantly as though I wasn’t even there.

“She is going to die, isn’t she?” one woman asked another.

“Of course she is. That gringo was stupid to bring his family here. They have gotten malaria.”