The Amazon, as we know it, begins at the confluence of the Ucayali and Maranon Rivers in Loretto, Peru and proceeds east north east into Brazil and gathers strength as it is fed by numerous tributaries of the Amazon basin until it exits into an estuary on the Brazilian coast one hundred sixty miles wide. At that point it is flowing three hundred thousand cubic meters per second into the Atlantic. My grasp of flow rates is at low ebb, so to speak, but suffice it to say that the Amazon discharges more fresh water into the world’s oceans than the next seven rivers combined.
Just a few other stats are in order if only to titillate your imagination. As you might think, it’s a little difficult to measure the Amazon’s length precisely, but the consensus is that it is approximately four thousand miles long and varies between one and a half and forty miles wide depending on the season and terrain. It’s drainage area is thirty per cent of the land mass of South America, and it averages eighty five feet in depth. Having described it thusly with feet and miles, it remains impossible to comprehend until you’re face to face with it. This is one big, effing river. Let me come at it from a slightly different angle. The Amazon is to the Mississippi as the Mississipi is to Baker Creek that runs through my farm.
For all of the area that it covers (almost three million square miles) it is sparsely populated. The largest two cities on the river are Manaus, population one and a half million, in Brazil, and Iquitos population five hundred thousand in Peru. Iquitos, btw, is the world’s most populous landlocked city. There are no roads in or out. In 2010 the first and only bridge crossing the Amazon was completed near Manaus. Four thousand miles and one bridge! Go figure. Makes your average commute a little tough. And we complain about the Triboro.
The Amazon, as I’m sure you all know, was named after Amazonia of the greek myth which was populated by warriors of the female persuasion. Huh? Why’s that? Well, there’s always more to the story. A senor Icambiaga, one of Pizarro’s lieutenants, was doing a little follow up searching for gold and ran across some diminutive warriors deep in the rain forest and commenced to do what armies always do, kill all the natives. Somehow in his report back to Pope Charles V, he conveyed to His Eminence that these small warriors were really women (I guess he didn’t do a specific gender test). The Pope, like others of his ilk, felt compelled to give these folks and the river where they lived, a name and recalled the aforementioned greek myth; hence, the Amazon River.
My personal petite exploration did not follow the pattern of Pizarro. We flew to Iquitos and were whisked by limo to the MS Aria, a purpose built luxury river cruiser of sixteen suites and a crew of forty including a gourmet chef trained at the International Culinary Institute. I don’t know what Pizarro ate, but we did quite well, thank you. Our first exposure to los ribiernos (the people of the river) was actually aboard ship as most of the crew were only a few years removed from small villages and isolated huts that give succor to the indigenous population.
The Amazonian peoples are small, averaging perhaps five feet five inches in height. They are of all hues of the brown scale and tended to have weight disproportionate to their height. There are few pure indigenos (native peoples) remaining except for those few who escaped the colonizing Spainards. Those that survive, do so living deep in the rain forest far removed from the onslaught of civilization. Most of the river people have blood lines that have been crossed and recrossed with a mix of spanish, portuguese, italian, german, chinese, indian and even japanese blood. The most recent ex-president of Peru, now in jail, is named Fujimori. The spanish, of course, cast the longest shadow on these peoples. They have a legacy of language, religion, and disease imported and implanted by the conquistadores and enhanced by succeeding waves of spanish colonialists.
Part of the charm of this particular expedition was that it had more than a passing focus on the river communities and the peoples who reside there much as their ancestors did long before Pizarro and his minions began to tame them. The river gives them life, but it also takes life too, often, too early. The river is their source of water. It provides their food. It cleans them, and it serves as a septic system. Their infants are plunged in the river not long after they are born, and their children struggle to survive the parasites and bacteria they ingest before their systems have developed resistance. We visited several villages and were tutored in the ways of the Amazon by the head man of each village. I tried to understand the political structure of the villages, but the explanations were more byzantine than I could solve for. Most were organized with the river forming one boundary, with their stick and palm frond houses strung out along the river but with a scattering of communal buildings in a rough U shape with a hard scrabble soccer field in the center.
The children outnumber the adults about five to one as contraception (or any other health care) is not easily available nor culturally acceptable. Large families in the Amazon are a function of the machismo factor of a male dominated society and the Catholic church, both of which continue as obstacles to overcome. There is most often a one room primary school that serves as a community center, emergency shelter, and educational facility. Every village we saw had a church, most often of the Catholic persuasion unless they had been shouldered aside by some energetic Mormon missionary or one of the many evangelical faiths that seem to roam the region looking for converts and something useful to do. We were told by several locals that the churches were accepted but largely ignored when push came to shove in the spiritual realm as Animism is the natural spiritual philosophy of the native peoples. It seems natural to them that every creature and object that composes their rain forrest home has its own spirit. It also seems natural to them that these spirits could co-exist with the great white god brought to them by the Dominicans and other christian missionaries.
In one of the villages we noted a hub of construction activity on far edge of the soccer field/village center being directed by a number of Americans. I approached one of these to find out what they were doing and why they were doing it. He told me they were a “mission group” from a church in Minnesota who had come to this area of the Amazon to build churches in two villages. He said their objective was to have them completed in nine days, and then, I guess, declare a victory for god and man and go back to St. Paul or Mankato, or wherever they came from in Minnesota. On of his fellow missioners, approached me with hammer in hand and commented that they would only be able to accomplish this with the grace of the lord and the power of the almighty. I asked him, in parting, if they had to bring their own nails.
S. and I joined a conversation in process with a thirty something mother of the village as she was painting her own picture of family life in the rain forrest. She was self assured, even poised in speaking to us…who must have seemed to her no more strange than beings sent down from the moon. She was speaking to us in her language which seemed to be based on spanish but was accented by her own native dialect. She spoke of village daily life, her family, and of her desire to survive to a different and better life. She said that she had limited her family to two children because of the challenge of feeding, caring for and educating too many children. When asked if her husband agreed with her, she said that he did, but then again, she hadn’t give him much choice. Sounded kind of like the conversations I often have with my own darling wife. I asked what her village needed the most, and she didn’t hesitate with her response. She said, “we desperately need clean water, electricity, and better education for our children”. I pointed to the new church under construction and said, “what about that”. She said their old church that was being replaced was good enough, but that their children were dying from drinking river water. This same woman laid out a number of trinkets near the boat as we were leaving and S. of course, vastly overpaid for what she bought from this lovely lady.
One of our cruise companions was a mechanical engineer in a former life, and he and I spent several hours over cocktails back aboard our luxury ship designing a cheap, sustainable water pump and filtration system. We knew it could be done, and would certainly save lives, but we knew equally well that we wouldn’t be the ones to do it. We would resume our lives of privilege in Texas and Florida and the good people of Minnesota would keep sending mission groups to build more churches.
