Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Come back in thirty years. Maybe there will be a proud
soyero
making a stand, refusing
to sell his farm for the construction of a mega-mall next to the Tapajós National Forest, and
we'll call him a defender of the Amazon.
“I don't know what you do around here after dark,” Rick said. “I don't drink. I guess if you
drink, if you like to party, you can go to a bar and visit with people.”
Adam and I had bumped into him in the park across from our hotel and invited him to
eat dinner with us. At an outdoor restaurant across from the waterfront, we sat on plastic
patio furniture and ate steak and chicken, and Rick pressed on us once again the need to
visit his forest. “We can swim, we can goof around,” he said.
Rick had first come to Brazil twenty-five years earlier, seized by the idea of importing
wood directly from Brazilian suppliers. In an era before e-mail or widespread fax machines,
finding those suppliers had meant coming down in person. So that's what he did, wandering
from city to city through the Amazon, knocking on sawmill doors, even though he spoke
no Portuguese. (Twenty-five years later, he still didn't.)
It hadn't taken long for the sawmill operators to figure out that, although he “looked like
a hippie,” as he put it, Rick wasn't there to protest, or to chain himself to a tree. He wanted
to
buy
trees.
It made him his fortune. He became a major exporter of wood from Santarém. He told
us that for several years in the 1990s, he was the biggest customer of Cemex—at the time,
the largest logging company in Santarém. The world's appetite for exotic lumber had been
one of the forces sending tendrils of destruction into the rainforest, and Rick had cut out
the middlemen, and fed it.
Yet he seemed less a businessman than a searcher of some kind. Whether it was the ex-
perience of seeing his business die back, or something else, he had been humbled.
He showed us a photograph of the river on his phone. Underneath the distant sliver of a
kitesurfing kite, a tiny figure rode the surface of the water.
“That's me,” he said.
He put his phone away. “You know how some people say that when you're surfing, you
connect with the water, or whatever?” he asked. “I can kind of relate to that now. When
you're kitesurfing, you're really in touch with the environment. You've got the water, and
the waves, and also the wind. You finally relax, and stop trying to control it. You stop fear-
ing it.”
