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“Not Viagra, man,” Gil continued. “Viagra will give you a big erection, but it will make
it very wide, you know.” He gestured. “Very wide. But these little blue pills, I get them
right around the corner. They cost like nothing. You take one of these pills, you will have a
serious erection. You haven't taken those pills?”
We confirmed that we had not.
“So those are the two things I'm so grateful for at this time, that I can have in my life,”
he said.
“Carbon fiber and little blue pills,” I listed, by way of a recap.
“That's right,” Gil said, holding two fingers up. His eyes widened with realization.
There's not a third thing! AAAGGHH!
We took off. We had hardly rested since New York. “Don't go!” Gil cried. But then he
relented and walked us to our hotel, two blocks away. He had decided to go around the
corner for a blue pill.
“I'm going to have some serious sex tonight,” he said. “Thank you for this wonderful
day!”
Highway BR-163 begins in Cuiabá, at the southern end of the Brazilian state of Mato
Grosso, and runs north for more than a thousand miles, plunging directly through the
Amazon. Built in the early 1970s, it is still mostly unpaved where it passes through the
jungle, and during the rainy season it becomes a river of mud. Trucks founder in its
legendary ruts and potholes, their progress slowed to less than a hundred miles a day.
BR-163, it would be fair to say, is one of the world's crappiest major roads.
It has the distinction, however, of being one of only two roads that traverse the Amazon
from north to south. As the Economist put it, BR-163 joins “the 'world's breadbasket' to the
'world's lungs.'” It links Mato Grosso—the agricultural powerhouse that has made Brazil
the world's second-largest soy producer, after the United States—to the forested expanses
of Pará. As such, the highway is a focus not only of commerce but also of some serious
environmental anxiety. As Gil had pointed out to me, roads bring deforestation. You only
cut down forests you can reach, and only turn jungles into ranches and farms if you have a
way to carry off the beef and soy.
Once there is a road—even a crappy one—civilization begins to course along it, pushing
out into the bordering forest. Humans like to think of themselves as builders and conquer-
ors, but their presence spreads more like a vine, sending out tendrils, building a network,
growing into the gaps until it forms a smothering blanket. Satellite images show that by the
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