Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
portant, it also had a swimming hole. Finally, Adam and I understood what Rick had meant
by
goofing around.
He had meant there was a rope swing.
The swimming hole was down the path beyond the cabin, where a stream—a tributary
of a tributary of a tributary of the mighty Amazon—eddied into a wide pool surrounded by
trees. A small wooden swimming dock had been built out into the water.
The Americans had brought their swimming trunks, the Brazilians their briefs. There
were the requisite jokes about piranhas, and we dove in. Rick climbed the slanted trunk of
a collapsed tree, holding the rope swing in one hand. He surveyed his kingdom—and then
jumped, carving a magnificent arc, his mane of gray-blond curls trailing behind him, a late-
career Tarzan in board shorts.
If anything, his arc was a little too magnificent. It brought him over the platform of the
swimming dock, and for a moment I thought he was going to break his neck. Instead, the
Michigan-born Lord of the Jungle watched with a bemused grimace as the dock passed
underneath him, and then he swung back, still seizing tight to his vine, his feet dragging
through the creek, and at last he let go, collapsing ingloriously into the water.
We were on an island in an ocean of soy. Out at the property line, Rick's forest fell away
into a huge, flat expanse of dry earth. We had gone to take a look.
It wasn't yet planting season. Heat wavered over the crumbled dirt. A trio of silos stood
in the distance. Gil danced back and forth taking video with his iPod Touch. Rick pointed
out the line of green running alongside the field. It was the border of his forest. He had
owned it for ten years.
“This huge, thousand-acre soybean field here, at one time was all forest,” he said. “One
year I came through here with some people, and there was a huge pile of logs, still burning.
They just cut that piece out.”
It wasn't just the small farmers who had felt the pressure to sell, but anyone who owned
uncut forest in the Santarém area. When I asked Steven Alexander—another American who
owns a tract of uncut forest in the area—whether anybody had offered to buy his land, he
laughed.
“I had a line of people trying every day to buy it!” he said.
A gentle, white-bearded man in his early seventies, Alexander had been living in the
area for thirty years, working for a health and education NGO, and later as a forest guide.
He had bought his land back when it was cheap. Now it, too, was an island, and he took a
dim view of the Amazon's long-term prospects.
