Amazons: A Love Story

Part II - Salvador

PART II SALVADOR � Amazon Snapshot #4 Long before I saw the rain forest, its mist-draped banks, its canopy-like green clouds; long before I knew its distinctive scent—a smoky mix of tea and loam, mulch and bog and blossoms; before I stepped from a low dugout canoe onto its soft bank and felt the earth give beneath my feet like a body; before I ever saw an enormous, iridescent, blue Morpho butterfly glide by like a mobile jewel (broad as my open hand) over tea-brown water or woke to the eerie, haunting cries of red howler monkeys, their roars like a fierce wind raging down a canyon then dying back (or like powerful gusts over the American prairie as they must have sounded to my maternal grandmother when she homesteaded on the Dakota plains a century ago); long, long before I walked beneath the rain forest canopy dense with bromeliads, vines, strangling fig, kapok, mahogany, hundreds of varieties of trees, birds, insects and saw the luminous white bark of the manguba, its fruit raised above the river like red paper lanterns; long, long before I saw any of this, I loved the forest. I was moved by its measurement—the descriptions of its vastness and its peril. � 65 Making a Life Those first few weeks in Salvador, while I waited to go to the Amazon, I made a life for myself. I made plans with a lowercase p. But I always thought of myself as on my way elsewhere, destined for bigger things: the Amazon. Waiting was nothing new for me. As a child, I’d often felt that I was in the wings preparing to make my entrance, that my real life was yet to begin. I remember vividly the horror I felt one afternoon in fourth grade as I stood in line with the other children in a hallway of my elementary school, waiting to be let out for recess. There in the waxed linoleum-tiled hallway, the light of midday distorted through the warped surface of the block glass wall that formed the hallway’s only window, I stood with the other kids—who like me were buckled into rain slickers of thick shiny plastic in red and yellow, our galoshes huge on our little feet—and thought with lucid horror, “I am a fully adult consciousness trapped in a tiny body.” I waited to grow into what I knew I already was but could not as yet be. Like lonely kids everywhere, I felt growing up that I was destined for some remarkable end, future greatness compensation for a present lack. I felt I was meant for something important, though I didn’t know what that might be. At twenty-one, I thought at last I knew. The Cabby At Barbara’s suggestion I had bought furniture at a secondhand shop a few blocks away and had it delivered to me, so I had a mattress to sleep on, a guardaropa (an armoire), a small coffee table, and an end table (an oddity given that there was no couch for it to sit at the end of). In those days it didn’t occur to me to buy or build bookshelves. The few books I had I kept with my jewelry on a shelf of the armoire. Why I thought to forgo a dining table and chairs of any kind is harder to explain. I suppose I thought it vaguely Japanese to seat my guests on a mattress on the floor, a Zen minimalism that was gaining currency in America in the 1980s (like Hellenized Rome, we absorbed postwar what we had conquered ). More likely I simply thought comfort not worth spending money on. I wanted a life of the mind; the body could make do with less: what did I need with a kitchen table, a couch, a lamp, or chairs? 66 � 67 Salvador By the end of that first day, however, it became clear to me that in order to eat I’d have to buy a fridge, a stove, and the tiny tank of gas called a buj ão. The British tutor—whom I continued to pay for advice, though it had long ago become apparent that she could not teach me Portuguese (she was neither a native speaker nor a skilled teacher, and I was a lousy student)— recommended that I go to the hypermercado, a massive...