For Sale: 1,907 acres (766 hectares) of prime forest land adjacent to the Tapajos National Forest in the Amazon region of Brazil.
Rainforest for sale? I called at once. Soon I was talking to a gravelly voice on the other end of the line. His name was Rick, and he lived in Michigan, where he ran a business importing high-quality Amazonian wood.
“I own two thousand acres of what I consider the finest rainforest in the world,” he said. “I made a lot of money in the exotic lumber business. So I bought it because…well, ’cause I could do it, I guess. It would be a soy farm or a cattle ranch by now, otherwise.”
Since then, though, the economy had crashed, and business was bad. His company had shed most of its employees, and he couldn’t afford to keep his rainforest anymore. And even though he had made his fortune in wood, he wanted to find a buyer for his forest who wouldn’t just cut it down. Much of the land around it had already been converted to soy fields.
“I planned on making so much money in the business that I’d give my piece of forest to the state, or a college, or a nonprofit,” he said. But for the past few years it had been a struggle just to hang on to it.
I told him I was going to Santarem in a couple of days.
Man, he said, I wish I were going with you. I was thinking about going, but I guess it’s too late now. Have fun. You’re going to love it down there.
A breezy city of a quarter million people, Santarem occupies a broad corner of riverbank just where the Amazon meets the mighty tributary of the Tapajos. Rick was right—Santarem is
We strolled out from our hotel in search of Gil, our fixer and translator. As we walked, we could see the meeting place of two massive rivers: on the far side, the muddy water of the Amazon, its opposite bank more than two miles away, and on the near side the Tapajos, famously dark and clear. Half a mile out from the bank, the two came together, mixing in a sinuous ribbon that looped downstream for miles.
Although Gil had come highly recommended, I was a little apprehensive about meeting him. The last few days had seen an erratic series of e-mails culminating with an abrupt request for electronics. “Bring me a iPod touch 4G 32GB,” he wrote. “My girlfriend is pregnant if you bring me two i name our kid after you.” Our fixer had turned into an Internet scam from Moldova. Uncertain what to do, I had split the difference and purchased a single iPod. It was now in my backpack.
Gil’s place was an old yellow house just a few steps up from the waterfront. A windsurfing board lay on the sidewalk out front, and the house’s door-like windows had been flung open to make a shallow terrace facing the river. Earsplitting rock music blared from inside. On tiptoe, I peered through a side window, looking for the mild- mannered face we had seen in a photo on his website.
Instead, I saw a half-naked wildman in surfing trunks, hunched over an old computer. I knocked. He didn’t hear. He was glaring at the screen with a ferocious intensity, baring his teeth as he pecked at the keyboard. I knocked again, louder this time, and he looked up with a start, a flourish of hair tumbling down his shoulders. He had seen us. I felt the urge to run, but he had already sprung to his feet and was charging at us, shouting over the music. He was offering us caipirinhas—
How to describe Gil Serique? He was a son of the rainforest, born in a speck of a village on the jungle bank of the Tapajos, a village without electricity or running water, accessible only by boat. “Paradise!” he called it. Now he was a multilingual river guide, a translator and fixer for visiting journalists, and above all, the prototypical Amazon beach bum. He wind-surfed every day he could, launching into the river directly across the street from his house.
And he hustled. He had printed booklets to promote his guiding business, he cultivated contacts with the cruise ship operators who passed through Santarem, he obsessively updated his blog and his Facebook status (3,103 friends at last count). His house was a nexus for anyone interested in the rainforest, or its destruction, or in surfing, or in drinking, or in talking. He embarked at once on a series of absurd and exaggerated stories—about his neurosurgeon pilot friend who was descended from American Confederates, about having been in a Michael Jackson music video, about how, to his shame, he had once almost become an exotic-species smuggler.
The iPod Touch, it turned out, was part of a scheme to supplement his guiding income. Accepting it as partial payment for his services, he told us that iPod Touches were rare in Santarem; he planned to sell it at a 100 percent markup. “I should have everyone pay me in iPod Touches,” he said. And then he told us some more about windsurfing. Always windsurfing. He was a man feasting on life like a crazed animal. If something was funny, or pleasant, or nice, then laughter was not enough. Instead his eyes would bug out, his teeth would flash, and he would emit a bloodcurdling scream. “
There were beers in our hands and we were leaning against the terrace, watching the good citizens of Santarem stroll the waterfront. Gil was the luckiest guy in the world, he told us breathlessly. He didn’t know how he could be happier. He loved Santarem, loved the forest, loved his girlfriend, loved guiding, loved us. At forty-six, he was about to become a father. He shared the crumbling four-room house with his pregnant “bride-to-be.” She was seventeen—not much more than a third his age.
“I’ve got the best life here, really,” he told us, and then seemed to become overwhelmed by what he had just said. His eyes widened. “I love this town! I really love it!
The conversation turned to deforestation and soy. It was disorienting the way Gil, with a maniacal gleam in his eye, somehow made screaming and drinking and cogent conversation all work together. He talked about the Cargill terminal, about the patterns of deforestation in the region.
“The roads in the Amazon were all built in the seventies,” he said, his accent a reedy mix of Brazilian, British, and surfer. “Before that all the human pressure was along the waterway. With the roads, it’s gone into the land.”
The Amazon is a frontier forever under the sway of a new rush. Just the past hundred years have seen rubber booms, timber booms, gold rushes. Now soy and bauxite were taking the lead. But exploitation came in many forms. Even something as simple as boats with onboard refrigeration, which allowed fishermen to stay out longer, meant huge pressure on the fish in the river.
Would we like another beer?
In Gil’s view, though, the exploitation had a flip side. “I got a lot more interesting work once they started devastating the Amazon,” he said. “Normally, I’d be guiding nature lovers, but as Amazon conservation and everything gets bigger, I do more and more work with people like you, who want to see nature’s problems.” He was operating on the bleeding edge of ecotourism.
But cruise ships were his bread and butter. During the season, ships packed with hundreds of tourists made their way from the mouth of the river up to Manaus, stopping for the day in Santarem.
“Cruise ship industry, this is a beautiful industry,” Gil said. ’Cause they come here, they’re all old, and they’re
I had noticed a few tour-boat tourists turning circles on the waterfront, binoculars in hand. Cruise boats can ruin a town; in Juneau, where my father lives, the entire downtown area has become overrun with cruise ship passengers and the insipid economies that spring up around them. But that hadn’t happened here yet.
Gil put down his beer. “I love whorehouses!” he cried.
I couldn’t quite remember how we had come to this part of the conversation, but here we were.
He became serious for a moment: “I mean, the way we treat women in this country is
Was I supposed to nod?
Our host went on, oblivious to our discomfort. He said you could get a girl for twenty reals—about ten dollars. Here was another form of exploitation in the Amazon, one Gil didn’t mind participating in.
A pair of young women crossed into the park, strolling arm in arm. Gil assured us that the girls who walked
