Up the Rio Solimones with a Paddle

Only a few kilometers from the docks of Manaus, the Rio Negro and Rio Solimones converge and blend their colors. Below here, the mighty river is known, especially to foreigners, as the Amazon River. The Rio Negro is clear, dark, and much less buggy; the Solimones is "the color of coffee and milk mixed together," one local told me, and full of insect and fish life. Upstream on the Solimones, five hours by the sleek express boats and 12 hours by larger boats, lie the two communities of Botofogo and Sao Francisco- two of several remote communities located on the Parana tributary. A few families live between Botofogo and Sao Francisco, either in floating houses or in homes built on stilts, set back from the river. Locals told me that river levels here change annually by as much as five meters, so houses are built to accommodate this.

The da Silva family lives in a floating three-room house, six meters by ten meters, with a wrap-around porch of sorts, made of salvaged boards. The foundation of the house is simply enormous tropical logs spiked together, buoyant enough to keep the house six inches above the water. A series of boards provides an access ramp to land. Between five and seventeen people call this home, depending on the day. For the past two weeks, my hammock swung from the da Silva´s rafters, as yet another addition to the large household.

Coming upriver in an overcrowded skiff, (capacity, incredibly enough, read 42 persons, painted by hand on the covered roof; I counted 45 people, along with a couple tons of staples- hard bread, dry milk, rice, beans, oil, coffee, fuel, and colorful heavily-sequined clothes.) I watched a few canoes pass along the river´s edge. As we entered the tributary of Parana, the number of small, low-lying canoes increased to impressive numbers. Men, women, and children passed and were passed, unalarmed by the wake our burdened vessel, which seemed certain to swamp the sleek canoes.

People here have muscles. Toned muscles, Oscar de la Hoya-like muscles, I first thought. Then I realized that instead, these are muscles honed from paddling, muscles like champion marathon canoe racers. Chopping muscles, from clearing brush and wild grass with machetes, clearing the way for corn and other crops. And fishing muscles, from picking through net after net, set for food and for profit. Many families in the Amazon, the da Silvas included, rely on fishing both for their primary protein supply, and as a way to make money in order to buy other food, tools, or pleasures in the big bad city- Manacapuru. This is the end of the known world for many of the young kids living along the Paraná.

Throw all Amazon stereotypes you may harbor aside- today`s Amazon, at least the part I´ve seen, is a blend of old and new, fast and reliable, and this is not an indigenous community. This is a rural life that is decided water-based and is refreshingly simple in many ways, but not ignorant of outside life and extravagant lifestyles. A very few of the houses around the centers of the communities have electricity, but none have running water, phones; words like Facebook and YouTube mean nothing. Old women wear trendy pink teeshirts boasting statements like, "Power girl with power attitude!", or "Extreme World Surf Team" (written in English) while they wash their family`s clothes in the river. The young girls in the family were fascinated by my ability to write so quickly, and I was equally astounded at their abilities to cook so expertly.

The bugs in these parts defy stereotype as well. The Rio Negro and its tributaries are known to be teeming with life, including mosquitoes, but during the day they are entirely absent. Like clockwork, at 6:30 pm they appear, and around 6 am they vanish, afraid of the sun like the vampires that they are. Watch your neck a night though, because during the witching hours they´re thick.

Some canoes are powered by clever five-horsepower lawnmower engines outfitted with a six-foot shaft, at the end of which spins an economical propeller five inches in diameter. The motor "mounts" onto the canoe with a single pin on the bottom of the engine block, which is fitted into a hole in the stern of the wooden canoe. Speed comes at the cost of expensive gasoline, and even though the engines are remarkably efficient, paddling costs nothing. More than half of the fishing canoes are human powered, and every six year-old paddles prodigiously.

The variety of fishing methods is as diverse as the fish species targeted, which is as diverse as the range of eccentric shapes, sizes, and colors of these fish…which is huge. Hooks are handy at certain times of the year, and bow and arrow are used from trees when the forest is flooded. Indigenous groups sometimes use a potent tree bark which, when pulverized and tossed upon a confined body of water, stuns the fish for a while. The fish float to the surface and the fishermen pick those they want and let the other recover. Here on the Paraná, and at this time of year, gillnets and spears are the preferred tools. The trick is finding the fish in the side channels and lakes nearby. Like a colossal tetris game, huge chunks of floating plant mats shift and open. This is the tropical version of shifting ice floes in the Arctic. Around and under the mats and in lakes seeming to boil with life, fish seek refuge from the current, and from giant river catfish, river dolphin, birds of prey, and most of all from the primordial Jacaré- the caiman (think crocodile!), armored fish-eating robot of the Amazon. Here swims the lifeblood of the Parana.