Road Fever (15 page)

The French writer Lucien Bodard described the riches of the rubber barons, the madness of Manaus, circa 1895:

A new cathedral was built. A court of law. Men competed to construct finer, more baroque or rococo castles in the land of the weeping trees.

When the opera house, the Teatro Amazonas, opened in 1896, Enrico Caruso sang for the assembled rubber barons. The greatest actors and singers and dancers in the world sailed a thousand miles upriver to perform under the four white Italian marble balconies. Sarah Bernhardt. Pavlova.

And then, in 1920, the boom was over. Rubber trees grew in the Amazon and nowhere else, though there seemed to be no reason why the great trees could not be cultivated anywhere ten degrees north or south of the equator, provided the climate was warm and humid with heavy spring rains. The billionaires of Manaus, the men who simply made their living in the forest, the brothel owners, law-enforcement officials, everyone agreed: the seeds of the rubber trees must remain in Brazil. Seed smugglers were executed. Foreigners were followed, everywhere.

Nevertheless, in 1877, an Englishman named Henry A. Wickham,
an explorer and hunter who was trekking the jungle supposedly in search of certain rare orchids, managed to smuggle 2,400 seeds out of the jungle. In the springtime flood, when the river rose fifty feet and inundated the land, when the Brazilians agreed that a man in the jungle would die, Wickham collected his seeds and—“taken by surprise on the plain by the rapidity of the flood”—walked and swam “desperately towards high land that I saw on the horizon.”

He was rescued by an English trawler carrying scrap iron. To this day, Brazilians find the “rescue” so highly providential as to be planned. The seeds were hidden at the bottom of cargo boxes, and the trawler made its way down the river to the final port of Belém, where—it is said—certain hands were greased.

The seeds eventually ended up in the richer soil of Malaysia, and the trees were grown in groves, row upon row of them, so that the latex was easier and more efficient to harvest. It took thirty years before the trees were ready, but when they were, rubber bought out of Singapore was cheaper than rubber from the Amazon.

The grand palaces fell into disrepair, the opera house became a town meeting hall. It would be tempting to report that today the opera house stands abandoned and that monkeys swing from the white marble balconies. In fact, during the Second World War, when Japan conquered much of Malaysia, rubber from Brazil again became valuable. There was a minor boom.

Today, Manaus is now a major inland port, a collecting and distribution center for the upper Amazon. Principal exports are rubber, Brazil nuts, rosewood oil, and jute, the material used to make coffee sacks. Industries include brewing and oil refining (the oil is from Peru and barged downriver). This town of 1.2 million in the heart of the Amazon jungle makes electronic equipment, motorcycles, plywood sheets, and—this is not entirely a surprise—refrigerators. Tourism is a growing industry and there are botanic and zoological gardens, and a natural jungle park on the outskirts. It is the headquarters of the National Institute for Amazon Research and has both a university and a leprosarium.

It is also a town where smuggling is not unheard of; where officials, remembering the lessons of 1877, are likely to look unfavorably upon foreigners with little good reason to be in the country. Even comparatively innocent persons, such as myself, have reason to be apprehensive if they have no visa.

*   *   *

A
S WE TAXIED
into the cargo terminal, I saw a ruined 707 off to the side of the runway. The on-board mechanic told me that the plane had come down on an incorrect runway, and sheared off part of a wing by plowing into a semi-truck. The Brazilians had simply towed the plane off the tarmac. It would never be airworthy again. There was a scaffold that was little more than a series of stepladders erected against the plane. The insides had been stripped. It was a metal shell slowly going to rust in the humid heat of the Amazon. It sat against a red mud bank, and over the years this shell of a plane would become the color of the Amazon mud. “I don’t think that’s real good for their tourist trade,” the pilot said.

I went down into the cargo hold and looked at the truck. Workers were moving some gear. Two of them simply pushed the truck on its rollered pallet to a different position using mechanized rubber wheels. Moving the nine-thousand-pound truck seemed to cost them almost no effort at all. With the cargo in the hold and the cabin unpartitioned by compartments as passenger flights are, the interior of the plane looked huge. The pilot, a sandy-haired fellow who had come down to look at the truck, said, “Sorta like the Holland Tunnel in here, isn’t it?”

I got into the truck and crouched down in the passenger seat. The pilot leaned into the window and stared at me.

“What are you doing?”

“I’m afraid someone is going to ask me for my visa.”

“You don’t have one?”

“Not for Brazil.”

“I don’t think you’ll have a problem.”

“But I could have one, right?”

“It’s possible.”

“I’ll stay here.”

“And hide?”

“Yes.”

“Then maybe it isn’t such a good idea for me to stand here talking to you. If you’re hiding.”

“Right.”

“It’s going to be hot.”

A team of men moved the insecticide out of the plane. It would be used in those areas where the trees, the lungs of the planet, had been cleared. Slash, burn, then pour a 747 full of insecticide on that land so that the poisons can be washed down the river and flow out into the
ocean, along with twenty percent of the freshwater on the face of the earth.

After the drums of insecticide were off-loaded, electronic equipment manufactured in Manaus was stacked on pallets around the truck. Parts made in the United States or Japan were assembled here in the Amazon jungle and sold in Argentina.

We, Garry and I, had decided against coming up through the Amazon. The road past Kilómetro 85 was now paved, but the rising cost of petroleum, a major component of asphalt, had defeated plans for paving many of the roads that crossed Brazil’s lowland jungles. Instead, we would drive that narrow strip of desert between the Andes and the Pacific. The Pan-American Highway.

It was sweltering inside the plane, hotter still inside the truck, and the special racing seats were not made for slouching with the head below window level. I went through the papers in our document case to pass the time. There was a six-page letter Garry wrote to GMC entitled “Progress Report #5, Pan-American Challenge.” The letter was a report on our recces and conclusions, and formed the basis of our master plan. In essence, what the letter said was that we had decided to go all out, do the drive in under twenty-six days, forgo press conferences along the way, and change the look of the truck. The road through Brazil—the most scenic and difficult route—would be abandoned.

As for security, especially in regard to Central America, Garry wrote that

Garry wrote that we had learned of an unpublicized, self-financed drive from Prudhoe Bay to Tierra del Fuego in twenty-six days. “Although the forty-day time period had been discussed, this was in the event we took the Amazon basin route.” We would be shooting for twenty-five days or less. “With this approach to the project, there are a few changes to the project vehicle which would alter the image of the truck somewhat from an expedition vehicle to a very serious road machine.”

Those recommendations were:

The results of this treatment, Garry wrote, “will considerably cut down on fuel stops, lower the center of gravity to substantially increase stability and handling, and produce a vehicle more in line with the ‘it’s not just a truck anymore’ slogan.”

And then Garry went right ahead and told them what it was. “It’s an aerodynamic, one-ton, long-range, high-tech, head-turning, fuel-efficient, record-breaking, one hell of a road machine.”

The public-relations plan was proceeding apace.

The paper was sticking to my fingers, which were damp with sweat. I had been slouching in that seat for more than two hours. It was very quiet in the cargo hold. The workers seemed to be gone. I glanced up into the side mirror and saw, in the distance, a man wearing a short-sleeved uniform shirt and carrying a clipboard. He was walking toward the truck. His face was bronze and he wore a thin black mustache: just the sort of man who might ask a stowaway for a visa. I slipped lower in my seat. All this thought poured into the project and here I was, hiding in what amounted to a Dutch oven. When I checked the side mirror again, all I could see were an enormous pair of sunglasses above a bunch of white letters that read:

“
W
HAT DID HE SAY
?” the pilot asked. We were airborne, flying south over the jungle, toward Buenos Aires.

“I don’t understand Portuguese,” I said, embarrassed.

“He didn’t speak English?”

I had to admit that he did.

“So?”

“He asked me if it wasn’t hot in the truck.”

“That’s all?”

“I told him it was real hot in the truck.”

“Ah.”

Irregular regulations: it’s a pattern of frustration familiar to people who travel in South America. Someone who ought to know, someone like a cargo agent for Flying Tigers, tells you something—like you need a visa for a cargo stopover in Manaus—and the information turns out to be entirely incorrect. In Latin America, it is best to ask several different people familiar with important regulations what will be required. In general, you will get as many interpretations of the rules as you have informants. These conflicting bits of information are collated and considered until you arrive at a reasonable matrix of expectation. Formalities in South America are rather like IRS regulations in the United States: no one can know all the intricacies or keep up with all the changes, so that everyone is at risk. This puts the government in the catbird seat.