In Amazonia Read Online Free Page B

expanding Igarapé Guariba, Viega’s upstream cattle post, and the property on the Rio Preto had become a source of considerable frustration for the landowner. Above the waterfall, beyond the the pirizal, hunters reported an upstream forest well-stocked with valuable hardwoods and animals. To get there, hunters would spend hours crossing the swampy lake, pushing and dragging their unladen canoes. On the way back several days later—if everything went according to plan—they would have salted meat strapped to their backs or be carting sacks of seeds or fruit. The forest, although productive and desired, was a largely non-functional source of value.
    Raimundo Viega was proactive and thoroughly instrumental in the face of this dilemma. He organized the men of Guariba into teams. He handed around cane-liquor, gave his orders, and, in the most elaborate accounts, climbed a large tree to supervise the work.
    Benedito Macedo and the other men broke through the waterfall. On the far side, they were faced with densely packed barriers of aninga and pirí. Slowly, with axes, hoes, and machetes, they dug out a narrow channel, maybe 4 to 6 feet wide, all the time enduring insects and the threat of larger animals. And, from his vantage point high above the flat landscape, Raimundo Viega kept them on track for the forest in the distance.
    For close to ten years, the digging in Igarapé Guariba continued during the lean, dry summer months. Once the headwaters had been breached and the lago had been opened, the huge volumes of water that enter the northern channel of the Amazon estuary with the twice-daily tides rapidly swept soil and vegetation out into the main river—into what people here, in poetic recognition of its vastness, call the rio-mar , the river-sea. Without a definable watershed and surrounded by land too flat for a drainage area, the Rio Guariba is a long, narrow inlet, repeatedly scoured by the erosive tidal action of the Amazon. With the barrier of the waterfall removed and a passage opened into the low-lying campo , the flood of the Amazon poured into the upstream basin,excavating and widening the main channel. Today, people recline on the wooden boards of their front porches and watch as fallen trees, big chunks of riverbank, and islands of grass flow evenly out to sea on the tide.
    Transport to the upstream forest soon became possible not only by canoe, but also by sail and motorboat. And it was then that the residents of Igarapé Guariba, independently of the Old Man, and often without his knowledge, began to cut their own routes. They formed communal work teams, and they maintained the openings by taking his buffalo and driving them repeatedly through the new gullies. Two of the Macedo brothers who had done much of the digging told me that this was the only reason they consented to Viega’s punitive project in the first place. They had known where they wanted to go from the outset, they claimed. While women worked downstream—fishing, collecting forest products, managing children—men camped in the upstream forest, cleared fields on good-quality land, dug out more and more canals into the forest for themselves and their neighbors, and created the storied expeditionary spaces I am describing. 17
    The landscape within which these activities took place was radically transformed. The narrow mouth of the river now gapes open more than a half mile across where it meets the Amazon, capsizing motorboats on a windy day. The swampy pirizal—unmistakably a lake now—is a sweeping expanse of water itself nearly a mile wide. The closed upstream forest is threaded with a dense tracery of creeks, streams, and broad channels.
    Take a look at the images on pages 60 and 61. The first is the infrared aerial photograph made by CPRM that starts this book. It was taken as part of a mineral survey of the eastern Amazon at a moment when the region was in the grip of unrestrained speculative