Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
funding their corporate structures and high salaries in perpetuity when the fragile nature reserves
depended on irregular and often insufficient cash flow.
The driver left the main road, attempting to take a shortcut, and we soon appeared to be lost in
a shantytown, splashing through long mud puddles and over rubble that scraped the car's bottom so
violently that the floorboards rolled against our feet like a wave. Lightning flickered in the distance,
then shot across the sky, linking up one thunderhead after another. The filthy, narrow road snaked
between clapboard shacks and buildings of rusted metal sheets.
Dick and I stopped speaking when we realized that our car was stuck on the other side of a train
track from the main road. The driver weaved through weeds and trash, looking for a place to cross
over, and finally did. There was construction ahead, the airborne dust creating a sudden night, wind
swirling it up. Hundreds of people gathered along the shoulders, running for
les esprits des morts
.
A white pickup slowed, its bed empty, and the crowd charged it, clambering into the back. A pretty
young woman in a slim floral dress grabbed the tailgate just as a man, climbing up before her, ac-
cidentally kicked her in the face. She jerked her chin down but fought for a place, putting her bag
inside and pulling herself in, then cupping her mouth. The truck sped up, into the fog of dust, and
she vanished. Soon we could see only the vehicles directly around us, the bumpers of big trucks and
the vans with their mismatched panels.
Even with the windows closed, I felt grit on my face and between my teeth. I stared out, no
sense of space, as if in a vertiginous, underwater world. Oncoming vehicles appeared as dim head-
lights swimming toward us until the massive trucks materialized, loaded for the provinces, carrying
every possible ounce of freight. We pulled up behind one that emerged from the darkness like a
mammoth. The only light on the back was a single headlamp wired to the bumper and angled at the
ground. Goods were heaped nearly two dozen feet high, covered with tarps and lashed down, and
rows of jerry cans were tied to the sides like sequins on a dress. At the top, high above us, in the
gusting dust and lit by flashes of distant lightning, seven or eight young men sat, holding the ropes
that bound the cargo in place.
It was impossible not to feel that the country was in the throes of change, a violent, necessary
process that the people had been waiting for and demanding. But in the frenzy, once highways cut
across the country, opening the forests and linking them to markets, would the people know what
they were losing before it was gone?
Our driver accelerated through a clear stretch and braked. As the car moved onto a section of
road that had been gouged up, its floorboards scraped rubble once more. The storm was close now,
the dust around us even darker as we passed the hulking, indiscernible machines churning it up, the
driver hurrying, slowing, then racing again.
