Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
In the evening we ate dinner in Antonio's yard and then retired to Rick's cabin in the rain-
forest. From the clearing, I watched bats transit the moon as it rose over the jungle. Howl-
er monkeys groaned in the distance. Nearby, a troop of frogs set up a ceaseless knock-
ing rhythm, anchoring an aural tapestry of peeping and piping and cricketing, cicada-like
sounds that glimmered in the darkness. Adam thrashed around with a flashlight in his
mouth, dosing himself with choking clouds of bug spray.
At the edge of the clearing, Tang produced a guitar and began strumming, singing a
plaintive tune into the dark.
“What is that, Tangy?” asked Rick. “That something from your home village?”
“It's Dire Straits,” Tang said.
Gil had passed out in his hammock, a lumpy pod hanging between two trees in the dark.
We walked out past Antonio's house, past a pair of drowsy cattle, to where the soy fields
began. Tang lay on the road, his arms behind his head, and Rick and Adam and I stared at
the night sky. Our original hope had been to see the distant glow of fires in the south. In the
days of the free-for-all, Rick told us, it had been possible to see the night sky aflame with
apocalyptic color, the radiant flush of a forest casting off its earthly bonds. The awestruck
way he spoke reminded me of Hilton Kelley's description of refinery flares in Port Arthur.
There is a kind of destruction that has beauty in its weapon.
Tonight, though, there were no horizons of orange and red. It wasn't really burning sea-
son, if they even bothered to have a good burning season these days. And so we were left
with silent flickers of lightning in the far heat, and the stars. The last time I had seen the
stars so well had been on the
Kaisei,
listening to the Pirate King digress on Orion, on the
Pleiades, on Cetus.
A large bat flapped out of the night and passed over our heads. “Here they come—agh!”
Adam cried, ducking for cover. Even in the middle of a soy field, the forest was out to get
him.
The bat followed its erratic flight path out over the soy field behind us. I looked at the
field, how it stretched out of sight in the dark. Just how did they clear this stuff?
Years ago, Rick told us, a rancher down the highway had bought a large piece of forest
and wanted to clear it. “He hired five hundred guys, bought five hundred chainsaws, and
just went at the forest,” he said. “In one season, I don't know how many thousand hectares
he cleared, just
brrrrcchh!
”
Rick had said he wanted to be portrayed as one of
the guys that have got good intentions.
And I thought his enthusiasm for the rainforest was genuine. But the fact that he had been
a major exporter of wood from Santarém also meant that his business almost certainly had
been built on illegally logged wood. As recently as the mid-2000s, 60 to 80 percent of the
