Part 14: Pantanal

Somewhere in the past, I take the train that crosses the Pantanal – the dream of connecting the Atlantic to the Pacific – cutting across Mato Grosso state heading for Porto Esperança on the Paraguay River, en route to the city of Corumbá.

The train seems like a huge anaconda and I, the furtive passenger, have been swallowed into its metal entrails...  The tuiuiú, large and disjointed, with its long black neck, a collar of red spongy flesh around its throat, opens its immense white wings and flies over the train’s path, as if the train were a ship in a sea of grass.  Levino Conceição & Raquel Naveira

After little Sarah’s kidnapping and disappearance, Sam and Nellie Noble’s world collapsed.  Grief and sadness led to desperate despair, one numbed by alcohol in Sam’s case and strong sedatives in Nellie’s. 

As Nellie pleaded with God for help, and prayed and attended Church services daily, Sam grew bitter over his betrayal by a cruel and merciless God, one who had allowed his beloved little girl to vanish and he cursed Him – and he blamed himself which caused the pain of guilt to burn white hot in his soul and his hatred of the All Mighty consumed his thoughts day and night. 

In retrospect, Sam felt much later he should have displayed more inner strength, at least for Nellie’s sake to help her cope with the tragedy and not gone off the rails as he did.  It was a character flaw when the chips were down he always regretted.

            The family trip to Tacoma from Washington, D.C. was supposed to have been a happy one.  Sarah had just turned three and it was her first time riding on an airplane.  Sam was happy at work and was a new GS-7 working in the Courier Service of the State Department, traveling internationally almost non-stop.  The long July Fourth weekend was a welcomed respite and this was the year of the Bicentennial so the occasion was even more festive than usual. 

The Seattle-Tacoma region was booming economically thanks to the Trans-Alaska Pipeline being built up north because the big companies did their outfitting in Seattle, just like the old days of the Klondike and Nome gold rushes almost a century before. 

Sam had intended to take his family out on the town in Tacoma later in the day, out to the new Lakewood Shopping Mall and afterwards to dinner at Steve’s Gay 90s Smorgasbord, where as a young army recruit out on the town he had personally met the legendary professional wrestler Haystack Calhoun. 

            Earlier that morning, though, things went horribly wrong.  Their small and cheap motel was not far from South Tacoma Way, a seedier part of town, and Sam wanted to take Sarah to the B&I Circus Store to see a baby gorilla there named Ivan that had been recently brought in.  Although now visiting the place he might think of it as a junk store, back in army basic training when he saw it for the first time, for the Kentucky boy far from home the place seemed like Las Vegas. 

It was a huge independent discount store before the really big suburban malls came along, with pet shops, animal cages, shelves and shelves of consumer goods, bright lights, carnival decorations, and even a restaurant all under the same roof – golly and shazam it was beautiful! 

Sarah kept tugging on her daddy’s belt because she said she wanted to see the “luvaful” little monkey until finally he told her to just go on ahead and see Ivan’s cage, it was just up ahead a few feet, twenty feet maximum and slightly around an aisle, and he’d be right along in a second – he was looking for a present for Mommy who had stayed at the motel to rest.  That was the last time he ever saw her.  It was over in the blink of an eye. 

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Had Sam been an important man, a great man, the FBI would have jumped into high gear immediately, been on the case from the get go, and not contact him precious days later like they did.  As a wealthy man, he could have hired private detectives and spent whatever amount of money it took to find his little Sarah – but he was a nobody, just a hick, so no one gave a shit.  The police supposedly followed leads but came up empty handed in the end.  There were no surveillance cameras in stores and malls back then.

                As some point he just snapped and the official written record of what next happened said that he had stood up in the police station and began yelling obscenities at no one in particular but everyone in general – the words cocksuckers, worthless fuckheads, and goddamn city shitters appeared frequently in the police report, quoting Sam. 

When restrained by a police sergeant, things got violent as Sam pushed him to the floor and was quoted as saying next that if he had an atomic bomb, he’d blow up this entire motherfucking city and everyone in it if they didn’t find his little girl. 

Now Sam, rather than the unknown kidnapper of his daughter, became the target for legal action and he was arrested for striking a police officer.  He’d been jailed only a few hours and after calming down, was released with no charges pressed due to his aggravated emotional state, but he was required to stay in his motel room temporarily so the kidnapping case could be investigated. 

As the hours dragged on and on and turned into days, Sam was able to get special emergency leave from work so he could stay in Tacoma.  Nellie was so distraught that a doctor had to inject her with medication and wrote a prescription for strong sedatives.  After three weeks, Sam and Nellie returned home back east.  More weeks and months passed but nothing ever came of the investigation.

                Back on the job in D.C., no matter how hard he tried to concentrate at work, Sam could not escape his depression funk and the psychiatrist the State Department’s crisis-counseling office assigned to help him and Nellie cope with the tragic event did not help.  In lieu of more counseling, Sam asked to be given an extended leave of absence instead and his request was quickly granted. 

Given his mentally unstable state and stories that filtered back from his wild outburst at the police station in Tacoma, not to mention his military combat background, there was concern amongst his peers and supervisor that he may go postal – actually attack and physically harm someone.

Better to get him out of the building and as far away as possible from Washington, D.C. just in case he flipped his lid.  So Sam and his wife closed up their small rental apartment in Vienna, Virginia and flew to São Paulo, then Brasília, then Porto Velho, Brazil, then continued by bus ride to Nellie’s hometown of Campo Dourado, and slowly at least a small measure of sanity returned.  

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                They were down there fully three months and Sam sort of fuzzily recalled that a good portion of that time he spent in an alcohol-induced stupor even when traveling by riverboat to meet up with Nellie’s brothers, Moisés and Laércio who worked up in Itaituba, deep into the Amazonas and Pará states.  Then he traveled down the immense Madeira and Amazon and up the Tapajós, Tocantins, and Araguaia Rivers. 

He sailed up and back down the Rio Branco that joined the huge black-watered Rio Negro, itself flowing towards the sea until it eventually met up with its brown-twin Rio Solimões; both huge rivers refused to give ground to the other so neither color mixed with the other until miles later, well past the sweltering port city of Manaus when they formed, along with the Madeira, the river-sea called the Amazon.  

Sailors in the olden days used to dip buckets in the ocean fifty miles off the coast of Brazil and come up with fresh water, dumped there from the mouth of the Amazon River.

There was water, water everywhere – he heard some folks say that Brazil had almost half the world’s freshwater supply in liquid form.  And the water nourished plant life produced oxygen in such abundance that the Amazon basin was called the lungs of the world.  After traveling the waterborne highways and byways of this endless green-carpeted land, crisscrossed by scores of twisting, gigantic rivers – some tens of miles across – he felt like a speck of cosmic dust.

                When not traveling along the waterways of western Brazil, he just hung out back home in the small town, a village really, of Campo Dourado and most nights got so drunk on cachaça rum and chopinho draft beer that afterwards he would pass out on a bench in the little town square until the noise of thousands of migrated Canadian purple martin swallows roosting in trees, and the scorching sun, awoke him the next morning.  

Either that or the broom man selling his wares and screaming at the top of his lungs vassoureiro, it seemed right in his ear, shook him to a conscious head-pounding state.  So pitiful was this wretched, unshaven gringo that no one, not even the constable making nightly rounds disturbed his rest. 

Once his headache was so bad he entered the old-timey pharmacy right off the town square to buy aspirin.  Turns out the place was the village hub having a small ice cream parlor and general store to boot.  It had that same dilapidated charm of the old general store back in Mohlenburg with similar peculiar smells.   

He noticed on the counter a dark green apothecary mortar and pestle, with yellow flecks winding through the stone, but hefting it he found it heavy and believed it must have also contained some metal.  

The young pharmacist’s nickname was Bruxo, which actually meant wizard, and Sam asked him about the mortar.  Bruxo said he used it to mix up natural exotic herbs and roots sourced locally to make medicines to cure a variety of ailments. 

He said it was very old and made from a meteorite fragment.  Campo Dourado’s sky got many meteor showers so it wasn’t that unusual.  Also not unusual was the assayer scales on a wooden table in the corner because occasionally an artisanal gold digger would come in to have his ore tested and weighed.

Then it was back to getting hammered.  Cachaça was the national drink of Brazil, a version of light white rum made from fermented sugar cane with a taste reminiscent of tequila, and when mixed with limes, ice, and sugar, made a refreshing drink called caipirinha that got you drunk very quickly.  On Saturday afternoons it was customary to eat the national black bean stew called feijoada, invented by African slaves brought to Brazil, and chase down the heavy meal with copious quantities of caipirinhas.

He had the opportunity to see how gold was mined in the Amazon basin thanks to Nellie’s brothers.   He saw the raw beauty of nature in its original pristine setting and he witnessed how that beauty could be devastated by man’s lust for gold if there were no environmental controls.  And slowly, very slowly, his forlorn soul healed.

Sam’s trip up the Tapajós River to the town of Itaituba was an amazing experience.  Moisés told Sam that fearless gold diggers used to stay submerged for weeks at a time in the dense jungle called floresta, with just salt and bullets, and came back to the outposts with bags of placer gold dust and stories of newly discovered lands – those nostalgic days of yore still recalled and retold with much admiration by the old timers.  It was different by the time Sam arrived. 

Modern day garimpeiros like Moisés and Laércio had become too comfort-loving and preferred to stay in camp most of the time, eating food and watching television provided by the donos or owners of the gold mining operations rather than venture into the sertão hinterlands.  When younger, they had not been gold prospectors in the classic sense, like those images we conjure up with an old grizzled, bearded placer-gold miner with floppy hat bending over a pristine stream and panning for gold next to a sluice box. 

They were called gold diggers because that’s what they did – they removed rock and soil by the ton to get at the placer gold below ground.  They burrowed and tunneled and dug huge craters by hand.

Workers, rural peasants for the most part like Nellie’s brothers, started out as peões or peons then moved up to gold digger or garimpeiro, and after that up to a master digger level called the garimpeiro manso, earning more grams of gold in pay per day than the lower ranks.  In Brazil during the eighteenth-century, there were no legal artisanal miners because only a select   group of Portuguese elite was granted permission by the Crown to mine for gold. 

                But times had changed and gold claims were bought and sold on the black market in the remote jungle hinterlands.  Many villages near the claims were newer so had electricity and just grew up around a landing strip for small airplanes that re-supplied the mining camps, and even small villages had at least one brothel with prostitutes coming in from as far away as Cuiabá and Campo Grande in Mato Grosso state.  Sam got to know the saloons everywhere he went, and got stinking drunk most nights.

The bars and brothels were usually located at one end of the village or the other and tended to be more rundown than the rest of the structures, even those ran by the legendary whore merchant and former garimpeiro Dom Ricardo Marqueijo, who was rumored to have owned over one hundred low and high-end brothels in the region of Pará state. 

Sam met the man a few times and shared many a beer with him, and they became friends.  Marqueijo told him how hard it was to manage his business, yet he still managed to make a profit.  It occurred to Sam hearing that remark that the only whorehouse that consistently lost money was the U.S. Congress. 

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The 1958 Tapajós gold rush first started along the Madeira River in the region of the state of Rondônia in the western Amazon River basin when the state’s capital city of Porto Velho grew to encompass the gold lands, and then for no reason the government shut down the garimpos or claims in the 1980s.  Nellie’s hometown of Campo Dourado is just north of Porto Velho and the Madeira River and experienced a major economic downturn as a result.  This had been the largest gold rush by artisanal miners in Brazilian history.

The gold rush was also not that far from where the Estrada de Ferro Madeira-Mamoré railway was intended to be built in the early twentieth-century, which for a time was shut down due to various gold discoveries and workers abandoning their railroad construction work.  It was many men after completion of the Panama Canal who traveled to Brazil to build the Mad Maria railway.

There were repeated failures because the jungle was too thick and impenetrable, and natives too hostile, but after five years it was finally completed.  It is estimated some 6,000 workers died from disease, accidents, wild animals, and Indian attacks over the course of its construction.   

As old men today, Nellie’s brothers still reminisce about those days, when as young men from a poor village like Campo Dourado they went to the gold fields, just east of the Roosevelt River, to seek fame and fortune and had the adventure of their lives.  Sam had experienced just a glimpse of the garimpeiro world, and would never forget it.

                For gold prospectors along the Tapajós, regardless of rank in the hierarchy of things, their imagination concentrated on the idea of finding the big strike, the elusive El Dorado, buried out there in the jungle somewhere and as much as they dreamt of the wealth they hoped to find, so too they dreamt of what the gold embodied as an ideal of liberty and flight from poverty. 

That’s why the trailblazing explorers, the real pioneers amongst the gold digger population, were more valued than the other members of the team that excavated the strike since they symbolized the chance to leave slave-like servitude of the patrons and owners of the gold fields. 

The explorer symbolized the fantasy, the allure, and the illusion of gold.  He kept the dream alive – that somewhere out there was the bambúrrio, the mother lode, the mountain of gold where all the garimpeiro had to do was plunge his shovel into the soil and emerging from the womb of the earth was the liberated yellow metal, the elusive placer gold nugget, some as big as hen’s eggs.

                In the tiny human settlements that were the mining camps in the midst of the cavernous black jungle, the lonely diggers lived at the edge of civilization where wild animals and disease encroached easily.  In their barracks-like buildings, usually built on the banks of a river, gold diggers interpreted Mother Nature as a world of signs, and to be successful in their search for gold they sought to understand her codes spread out before them.  They were a superstitious bunch. 

Diggers who spent long periods of time in the jungle constructed a mystical world around nature, its unknown ways, the characteristics of streams, what actions were good luck and which were bad luck, and the topographical forms that possibly signaled the presence of placer gold along every step of the way during exploration. 

From a mining camp, a three-man team would outfit itself to explore a portion of land allotted to them by the boss of the camp, who in turn paid a public official for use of the land, or paid a fazendeiro or rancher to dig on his land – Indian lands were considered open areas but natives were paid anyway to avoid gold diggers disappearing in the wilderness, killed, hacked up, and buried by primitive natives.

                The team first stopped at the camp outfitting-shop which was well stocked and re-supplied by air regularly, and like every store in the nearby towns which supplied the camp’s shops, there were scales used to weigh the gold dust or nuggets brought back by the diggers. 

And everywhere in the region where gold was used like currency to buy consumer goods instead of money, there were assay engineers who determined the purity of the gold with chemical tests lasting only a few minutes – and like old forty-niner San Francisco saloons who employed ham-handed barkeeps to take a pinch of gold in return for a cold beer, a gram of gold was the baseline for establishing a barter system in the jungle. 

The team outfitted with coffee, rice, salt, and manioc flour, and carefully packed their picks, shovels, weapons, bullets, and mining pans in pieces of sackcloth.  Lanterns, plastic tarps, 12-gauge shotguns, .38-caliber revolvers, bottles of kerosene, hammocks, mosquito nets, and waterproof matches were packed in rustic knapsacks called jamanxims. 

The patch of land selected for exploration was done by scouting from small airplanes first to see the best trails in and out, and where re-supply could be dropped from low-flying planes; then the three-man team set out on foot using compass and dead-reckoning to find the new mining sight. 

Without a compass it was easy to get lost and if lost in the jungle, one could survive only as long as provisions lasted which meant only a few weeks.  Many men walked into the jungle looking for gold and never came back.

                Some of the land was flat but the region of the Tapajós River was a mountainous one so diggers took a chosen path, leaving markers hacked on tree trunks with machetes in their wake to be able to find their way back out of the dense jungle underbrush, and then began an intense forced march with very little chitchat by anyone. 

The goal was to get to the new mining site and set up camp as quickly as possible – there was always the sense of some supernatural spirit watching you in the jungle and over time, intense heat, insect hordes, torrential rains, and solitude in the wilderness could become so disconcerting that diggers could go mad, so that’s why three-man teams went out. 

After walking some hours, the patch spotted from the plane was arrived at, maybe like the one Sam hiked to with his brothers-in-law – a convergence of streams looking like the spine of a fish, with narrow rivulets running over and under dense vegetation with sandy riverbeds.  For Sam, going back into the jungle flooded him with memories of Vietnam which seemed like a million years ago.  It was like the Nam out here in the Amazon.  It was kill or be killed since you were just a piece of meat, just part of an unmerciful mother nature’s food chain. 

The objective was to test for gold in all the streams, starting at the lower reaches and moving towards the river source called the cabeceira.  Streams that flowed from rivers which had already passed through gorges and caverns were especially interesting because they produced gold-bearing rivulets.  Streams with very open slopes or that had only one deep slope were not considered good bets by diggers.

                 

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                The hut at the campsite was made from strong twigs tied between two trees, and roofed with palm leaves and plastic tarps.  Hammocks were strung between the trees for sleeping and wrapped in mosquito netting.  A wooden fence was built around the camp to protect the men at night sleeping in the hut – the night was a very dangerous time to be in the jungle because it belonged to the big animals at the top of the food chain, like the jaguars onças weighing up to 200 pounds and sucurís or anacondas 30-feet long, which were quite common far away from the villages and camps. 

If hungry, these animals showed no hesitation whatsoever in attacking humans and have been known to snatch gold diggers from their hammocks and drag them deep into the jungle, never to be heard from again.  The diggers were small men for the most part, just over five feet tall and weighing on the average 130 pounds yet amazingly strong for their size. 

For added protection a hardwood fire was built and kept going around the clock – the smoke also helping to keep buzzing insects at bay, especially the dreaded piú or tiny black chigger.  Men hunted turtles, dog-size deer, monkeys, peccaries, and other small game for fresh meat, and when staples ran out, the campsite was re-supplied by drops from small planes – the jungle did not furnish enough food for men to live on very long. 

Tapirs weighed over 250 pounds and although considered good eating, they were too heavy to drag through the dense jungle undergrowth.  The other problem was that tapir meat was too fatty for the malaria-weakened digestive systems of the garimpeiros.  Fish alone did not have enough vitamins and nutrients to sustain men in their strenuous efforts and took up much time to catch.  The diggers passed time when it got dark by playing cards or dominoes by kerosene lamplight and occasionally disputes arose over wagers, sparking diggers to slash each other with machetes. 

                The team stayed at this camp until the gold in the region was played out and then returned to the main mining camp with their gold to receive a ten-percent cut – but some gold was always kept hidden by diggers from the owners, which they returned for later, or hid so well they could never find it again.  No one was allowed to leave the camp until all left together – if it was determined somehow that one member intended on deserting the other two, he was killed and his gold confiscated. 

If it looked like the gold strike had still more potential, the patrons back at the main base camp may decide to start mining operations on a larger scale so sent Caterpillar bulldozers and other large machines to clear away trees and jungle. 

Two giant Cats would sling fifty feet of thick chain between them and slowly move forward, mowing down a wide swath of trees and jungle growth, then fire setters would come in and burn off whatever vegetation was still left.  More equipment was brought in to excavate the land, or high-pressure hoses powered by diesel generators were used to wash away acres of thin layers of topsoil and sand beneath to get at the gold.  

Working from tethered rafts, good swimmers could easily make much more mining underwater than diggers on land, but many divers died because they worked long hours underwater, up to eight at a time, becoming tired and getting stuck between stones so unable to pry themselves loose, they drowned.  Another hazard was when divers cut themselves by accident underwater and then the scent of blood attracted the ubiquitous piranhas who devoured the poor man alive before he could swim back to safety on the riverbank.

               

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                Mercury was used during the filtration and combing process and during dredging of river bottoms to search for gold deposits in order to leach the ultra-fine gold particles from the sand and sediment.  After the gold was washed, only about seventy-percent of the mercury was recovered on average and the rest left in the water and soil.

The manual diggers worked a garimpo or claim for three weeks like dogs.  Using this method they could come away with only eighty to a hundred grams of almost pure gold if they were lucky. 

Yet there was always the possibility that the next gold discovery could be the big one, so they continued because not to meant returning to a village and back to a life of utter poverty, with no hope of future for the family or better life for the children. 

The garimpeiro did not think of himself as a wage-earner or as a potential capitalist who accumulated and reinvested his money elsewhere – he regarded himself as a potential bamburrador and what really mattered was the sudden enrichment of finding the mother lode.  The dream of gold dominated the gold digger’s activity and provided him with the motivation to continue his drudgery, living a sort of existential precariousness day after day after day in the hot, humid world of the dark jungle.

                The manual garimpagem produced the folklore, the aura of the adventure of the single gold miner going into the bush, man against nature, and coming out with bags of gold dust – reminiscent of Humphrey Bogart in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.  

Despite the image of the digger toiling to extract gold from the ground, it was not the most efficient form of gold extraction in the Amazon – by far more gold was extracted mechanically than manually.  The old diggers complained when the machines arrived about how the noise of the bulldozers and excavators and the smell of the diesel fuel oil drove away all the wild game surrounding the mining camps, and one had to walk many miles to find a place to hunt. 

The introduction of on-raft machines to work riverbeds as well as dry ground greatly changed the nature of gold mining in the Amazon.  It became possible to reach deposits that were out of reach with previous methods of manual garimpagem. 

Gold production increased significantly and the spiral of investment and increased production began in earnest in the 1970s, and a whole new industry of commercial networks grew up to supply the needs of the booming gold economy.  Large-scale ecological disturbances started appearing like the diversion of riverbeds, water pollution, and wide scale use of mercury – and the high pressure hoses used to wash away topsoil devastated flora and fauna. 

The Tapajós goldrush ranked in significance with the rubber boom of the latter part of the nineteenth-century in Brazil, but left much more ecological damage due to the leaching process causing widespread mercury contamination. 

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Since Brazil’s discovery by the Portuguese in 1500 A.D., there had been countless search expeditions and actual discoveries of gold to the extent that rumors grew in Europe of a lost city of gold somewhere in the vast floresta or dense forest-jungle expanse of the Amazon basin. 

Few countries have produced more gold during the last five centuries than Brazil, yet legends still persisted amongst Indians and native folklore of the mother lode of all mother lodes – mountains of it somewhere in the dense, steamy jungle undergrowth and yet close to the Earth’s surface, where with very little excavation pure gold could be hacked right out of the hard-packed soil.

            Besides the Tapajós Valley gold rush, about 500 miles west was another massive gold strike near the small settlement of Serra Pelada in 1980, also in Pará state.  A child from the local farm discovered a gold nugget slightly larger than a pea while swimming in a river.  Ten years later neither the farm nor the river existed.  In their place was just one vast crater.  Over 200,000 people worked small claims there at the height of placer gold mining operations by 1983, primarily migrants from the very poor northeastern region of Brazil. 

So many mud-caked garimpeiros on rickety wooden ladders mined gold in the region around Marabá and the boomtown of Curianópolis that their ant-like excavations and tiny claims of four or five square yards called barrancos produced a scene reminiscent of Dante’s Inferno or of an Heironymus Bosch painting like his Garden of Earthly Delights. 

The giant hole left on the outskirts of Serra Pelada, nicknamed “Babylon” by garimpeiros, was some 600 feet deep and eight miles in circumference, and the largest excavation of earth in history to be dug out by human hands.  Ladders used at Serra Pelada slipped from the wet walls frequently, creating a domino effect down below.  During frequent tropical rains, pits not reinforced by timber or trench boxes caused mudslides burying men alive and meaningless disputes over claims produced frequent machete and gunfights. 

In 1987 another large gold discovery was made in northern Roraima, a very mysterious region on the border with Venezuela, where the Yanomami Indians lived and believed this area to be ancestral sacred lands.  So many miners were involved during these decades looking for placer gold along the Amazon River basin that they were able to search countless streams and riverbeds. 

Unfortunately, their search inflicted long-term harm to the environment because large quantities of mercury were used to separate gold from fluvial sediments; afterwards the remaining contaminated slurry was dumped back into the waterways. 

Logging too released mercury into the environment because it was captured by tree roots naturally and released when brought to the surface as stumps were dug out of the earth by bulldozers.  Sam never felt the same way about gold again after seeing how men tore up ground and poisoned the environment to get at even the smallest quantity of the un-noble metal.  It was sheer madness.

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When Sam wasn’t wandering aimlessly somewhere in the northeast Amazon jungle seeing how gold was mined, he traveled southward along the Paraguay River by passenger barge into the immense flooded grasslands on the Brazilian side of the river called the Pantanal, and drank beer and fished all day long, trying to squash the blues.  It was the most beautiful place he had ever seen. 

It lies in western Brazil and is the world’s largest tropical wetlands, the geographical size of Florida, yet is sparsely populated, reason being because it’s virtually uninhabitable.  That’s what makes it such a great place to go fishing.  And the fish you catch there are unlike any others anywhere in the world.  They look more like prehistoric monsters than fish, and with no scales but rather tough hides, they’re called locally peixe de couro or leather fish.

Neither exploration nor exploitation was easy for early European conquistadores, although a few tried.  They were unsuccessful in their efforts to find a lost city of gold which was rumored to be in the region, a region rich in gold and many other natural resources.

  From a birds-eye perspective, the general appearance of the Pantanal is of a vast green carpet, a flat plain of endless cerrado or scrub vegetation to the furthest horizon dissected by rivers.  Its plateau bluffs rise over the plain from a few hundred feet in height to over two thousand feet in limited northern, western, and a few eastern regions, but the overall impression is one a continuous and flat-surfaced area, an enormous geological bathtub. 

Patches of weed-like mato are seen in abundance, which are massive stretches of tree and shrub savanna, a grassy country with very dense growth of bushes and low, often crookedly formed trees. 

The only other occasional interruptions on the endless panorama are located in the northwestern region, where Nellie’s family homestead is located north of Campo Dourado.  These are outcroppings of huge rock formations, which take on the appearance of clusters of small pyramids or mounds, but in fact are solid rock formations covered in earth.

These clusters or isolated mountain islands are called morrarias and each one is called a morro, which in Portuguese means small foothill.  These morrarias can be seen on the horizon and in the faint light of dawn and dusk look like ancient cities of large pyramids on the horizon.  Morros are covered with dense cerrado, layers of sediment a few feet thick, moss, and other thick vegetation.  Many have deep and wide veins of various minerals such as quartz, iron, and nickel inside the very hard outer crust of vegetation and baked sediment seaming the solid rock core. 

Pantanal temperatures are usually very hot and humid, where seasons are reversed from the United States.  Since the amphitheater of the region is open to the south, sometimes Polar-Antarctic atmospheric fronts called friagens advance into the area that can provoke extreme cold down to freezing from June to August. 

From a climatic point of view, the Pantanal is probably the most important window of evaporative freshwater loss on the globe.  Rainfall during the rainy season can be so heavy that water levels can rise twenty feet over these months and recede again during the dry season.

During the rainy season between December and March, rainfall averages four to five feet and the Paraguay River to the west and Amazon River to the north swell to such an extent that waters flood the low plain, covering it with deep water and thousands of thickly vegetated islands, interconnected by small fingers of water called corixos. 

Flora and fauna in the Pantanal and Amazon River basin to the north are in permanent states of struggling for survival, kill or be eaten by something higher up the food chain – and everything in this constantly transforming ecosystem is on the food chain, including man.  Yet it is relatively new from a geological point of view, with vast precious mineral deposits still unknown.  Unlike the Amazon basin, the Pantanal does not blossom beyond cerrado into a full stage of mature floresta rainforest so therefore does not have a dense protective shield of thick vegetation or tall trees.

The Pantanal is a fisherman’s paradise with pristine waters and fish that taste like no other in the world.  Some only eat fruit fallen from trees and are remarkably sensitive to any kind of pollution, even the tiniest amount.  The huge catfish species like the pintado and jaú can weigh over 200 pounds, and along with the smaller cousin the jurupoca, have no teeth but large filters behind their gills for catching water organisms to obtain nourishment.  

Other good eating fish are the pacu in the Pantanal and its cousin the tambaqui in the Amazon region because of their large ribs, similar to pork ribs.

The king of the fighting fish, however, is the tucunaré or Peacock Bass, pound for pound the meanest freshwater critter in the world, and anyone that’s ever caught one can tell you the experience is unforgettable.  The Pantanal, unfortunately though, is in trouble as more and more land is being burnt off and cleared for agricultural purposes.  Sam has traveled there beginning in the 1970s and has seen over subsequent decades how the area has been negatively impacted by encroaching “civilization” and environmental degradation.

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Sam had fished the entire length of the Pantanal region, from Porto Murtinho in the south, to Corumbá in the center, and to Cáceres in the north traveling by slow barge along the waters of the Paraguay River.  He had even fished along the very isolated Roosevelt River east of there. 

It had been at Porto Murtinho where the former American President Theodore Roosevelt met his host in December 1913 to begin a historic expedition, a Brazilian legend in his own right by the name of Cândido Rondon, aboard a stern-paddle-wheeled steamship the Nyoac.  The state of Rondônia, where Nellie’s hometown Campo Dourado is located, was named in his honor. 

Roosevelt, or Colonel as he liked to be called, had been invited to Brazil by the government to give a series of speeches with the idea of attracting more immigrants and foreign investment to a country so vast it was larger than the continental United States, but had far fewer people.  Only twenty-four years an independent republic, the rubber boom was dying out so the country needed to exploit its vast mineral wealth and attract new white settlers. 

As a side show to the big show, knowing that the Colonel was an avid outdoors man, hunter, prolific writer, war hero, Nobel Prize winner, and adventurer, the government also organized an expedition to the headwaters of a river known locally as the River of Doubt starting in the highlands of Mato Grosso.  Roosevelt liked hardship and risk and called it “the strenuous life.”  He accepted the invitation saying, “It was my last chance to be a boy.”

The doubt came about in the form of not knowing where the mouth of the river was located.  The source of the river was first discovered by Rondon in 1909 and was located in the region of Tapirapuã, a very remote and mysterious part of the country, but no one knew where the river ended. 

Rondon was three quarters native Indian and a trained army engineer, surveyor, and telegraph commissioner.  Sam marveled that only a hundred years ago there were still regions of Brazil which were completely unexplored, where lived only indigenous tribes.  In 1913 Rondon was 48 years old and Roosevelt 55, so for the times they lived in both began the journey to explore the River of Doubt as relatively old men. 

The Colonel and his team sailed 400 miles from Porto Murtinho to Cáceres by early January 1914, then another week-long journey by shallow-river steamer down the Sepotuba River 140 miles to Tapirapuã.   They passed the Utiariti waterfalls and the old Jesuit ruins along the way.

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Shortly thereafter a white-lipped peccary and deer hunt was organized for Roosevelt by one of Rondon’s full-blooded Parecí Indian scouts, Antonio, and that evening an animated discussion was held around the campfire about “the old-time Spanish conquistadores who explored this region in search of the gilded king.” 

This led to discussions concerning Portuguese bandeirantes or early explorers who believed local Indian legends concerning a lost city of gold somewhere in the Amazon jungle.

Still other stories told by Rondon dealt with ancient folklore of a race of white men that once lived in the Amazon and built magnificent cities with pyramids rivaling those of Egypt, but which had since been swallowed by the jungle and all traces vanished.  Rondon believed these stories were also connected in some way to the ubiquitous Indian mounds but he would not go into more detail when pressed by Roosevelt.

Then the expedition began a rugged and difficult overland journey ascending to 2,000 feet above sea level, using tall-wheeled carts pulled by mule and oxen, and descended using Studebaker trucks to the River of Doubt headwaters at Bonifácio 600 feet below.  The trip down the River of Doubt started on February 27, 1914 eventually leading to its mouth which flowed into a bigger river at almost sea level called the Aripuanã River.  The general course was northward towards the Equator, along an elongated fishhook.

The total downriver, downhill journey was almost 500 miles through dense jungle and Indian country, whose tribes were generally pissed off at having intruders on their lands.  Rondon deduced this after awaking one morning to find his dog shot full of arrows.  To complicate matters further, there were many waterfalls and rapids along the way so heavy dugout canoes had to be portaged along fresh cut jungle trails and then re-launched back in the river again and again. 

Small trees were cut down to make wooden rollers, placed on the trails to roll the heavy dugouts along.  In some places it was ten minutes of clear paddling and eight hours of portaging.  The initial plan called for the usage of new-fangled canvas boats and the then state-of-the-art 3.5-horsepower Evinrude two-stroke outboard engine with magneto instead of battery.  It was the peak of the rainy season so the river was especially fast and treacherous.

But the canvas boats ripped apart easily on rocky riverbanks in the strong current and the 110-pound outboard engine was just too heavy, as were the many ten-gallon kerosene fuel cans.  It seems the primitive wooden dugouts were the best alternative although clearance from water level to gunwale was only a few inches.  For two months they saw no other human beings, but knew they were being watched by natives, some of whom were purported to be cannibals.

Rondon was with the Colonel from the beginning to the end of the journey as part of a 22-man team.  Besides Roosevelt and Rondon, there was the Colonel’s young son Kermit who spoke Portuguese and his friend and naturalist George Cherrie.  Kermit brought along his small Kodak 3A camera and developed his own black and white photographs along the way. 

Most of the other 18 men were guides, porters, paddlers, and choppers of mixed blood or collectively “tatterdemalions” as the Colonel liked to call them.  Locally these men were called caboclos. 

No white men had ever seen this unmapped land before.  It was summer in the Southern Hemisphere and high humidity with heat hovering at 100° every day.  Tinned food rations ran low so men grew hungry as there was little game to hunt and river fish lacked nutrients.  Dysentery was common.  Mosquito bites spread malaria to the expedition members while poisonous ants, termites, giant spiders, snakes, killer bees, and alligators drove the men nuts.

At evening camp on March 18th Rondon read an official dispatch he had carried since Corumbá in front of the assembled men saying that the Government of Brazil would henceforth refer to the Rio da Dúvida by its new name Rio Roosevelt and then called for three cheers for the old Colonel who stood there beaming with pride.

On March 22nd Roosevelt, riding with Rondon and a very young Indian paddler named Anacleto, steered their canoe east into a small tributary called the Rio Cardozo by pure chance, to collect specimens of river otters who just happened to swim along at that precise moment. 

Minutes later a very strange discovery was made on the bare rocks of a cliff inside the river’s gorge, at the base of a series of minor rapids at 11°0’ south latitude and 59°52’ west longitude.  Three vertical symbols had been carved very deeply into the rock face about twenty feet from the top of the gorge and thirty feet up from the free flowing water. 

The top-most symbol Roosevelt recognized instantly from his trips to Egypt and seeing it there, in the remote reaches of the Amazon jungle, gave him goose bumps.  It was the pharaoh’s symbol for the breath of life called ankh ☥ about three feet high; essentially a cross with a loop at the top.  The second symbol was a series of concentric circles made into a spiral, and the third was a grouping of three smaller spirals, each about two feet by two feet in measurement.  The circles and spirals he recognized as Celtic symbols.

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This discovery proved very disconcerting to Roosevelt as he could not believe primitive Indians could possibly have carved an ankh, since not even Rondon had been by this spot before, or so he said, and ostensibly neither had Anacleto.  His gut feeling was that these carvings were probably a hoax of some kind, while another part of him wondered if they could have been made by a culturally advanced civilization long since disappeared, and he immediately made drawings of what he had seen and recorded them in his diary.

Rondon, upon seeing the symbols drawn by Roosevelt later that evening, feigned ignorance as to how the carvings got there but truth be told, both he and Anacleto had seen similar ankh and spiral symbols throughout the Amazon basin, as far south as Porto Murtinho in Mato Grosso, as far east as Maranhão, and as far north as the mysterious lands of Mount Roraima made famous in Arthur Conan Doyle’s Lost World. 

But nowhere had produced more such strange symbols, found in thick jungle and vegetation-encrusted stone ruins, than Anacleto’s homeland of the seven sacred hills in what was then known as the Guaporé Territory along the Rio Madeira -  in the region of Campo Dourado.  And no place produced more nightly shooting stars or meteorite fragments scattered on the ground.

            Late that night after everyone was asleep, Rondon and Anacleto sat around a dying camp fire alone and talked in their native Nambikuára dialect about Roosevelt’s startling discovery.  The expedition had passed through the rough wilderness home of the Nambikuára Indians who lived a Neolithic lifestyle in the sertão highlands. 

            The tribal members wore no clothing, scraping off all body hair, and did not make shelters at night; they just laid down on the ground to sleep.  They were a wondering tribe with no home base.  They lived off whatever a hostile mother nature provided, such as monkeys, bugs, lizards, fruits, nuts, and berries.  Their only ornaments were straws both men and women wore through their nose septum and upper lip.  They used primitive bow and arrow, but arrows were tipped with the lethal poison curáre.

“It was not to be prevented, the otters showed the way and he steered too quickly.  Such is the will of the spirits.  They wished him to see the surveying signs left by the ancient ones, and now we must decide,” the young teenager Anacleto whispered in a language of soft grunting noises.

“I lied to him,” replied Rondon, “I said I had never seen anything like his drawings.  We must be very careful now.  Like all white men of ambition and power, he craves the yellow metal above all else.  But we must not kill him.  He is a great morubixaba chief of a very powerful tribe far to the north, and they have as many fearsome warriors as stars in the heavens and magical, terrible weapons of war.  If we kill him, they will surely come here to seek revenge and then all will know the secrets.”

Pondering for a few moments, lost in deep thought, the young but wise pagé or shaman finally said, “We will not kill him, but our journey henceforth will greatly weaken his body, and he will die a natural death from festering wounds and disease a handful of seasons from now – for this I have read in his face.”  The two men never again talked of this episode.

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Three of the caboclos died during the trip downriver and Kermit himself almost drowned.  Roosevelt cut his leg on a sharp river rock trying to help with a flipped over canoe on April 6th  which infected and developed blood poisoning that almost killed him, the same leg that had laid him up back in 1902 during the Pennsylvania coal strikes.  That evening was blessed with a startlingly beautiful night sky when a meteor shower appeared, as did a waxing Moon with especially clear penumbra. 

The Colonel was in bad shape by the time the expedition reached the big waterfalls on April 19th just north of the Madeirinha River tributary where it met the newly christened Roosevelt River.  There he begged to be left behind but Kermit refused to listen.  Sam Noble had been to that very spot and it was still isolated, scary, and mysterious so many decades later. 

Here the party had to portage the dugout canoes once again on rollers through the jungle and physically carry the sickly Colonel, who could not walk.  By April 25th Kermit thought his fevered father might die that very night, but somehow the Colonel managed to survive by the time the expedition reached its end on April 27th at the small town of São João just past the mouth of the Aripuanã River when they came upon a rubber man’s hut. 

The mystery of where the River of Doubt ended had been solved after a brutal two-month journey.  There the native crew, including Anacleto, were paid and cheerfully parted company while Roosevelt, Kermit, Cherrie, and Rondon proceeded onward to the Madeira River by paddle-wheel steamship, then to the Rio Negro River, and then by the Amazon River to Manaus and to the city of Belém where Roosevelt said good bye to Cândido Rondon after giving him his trademark bear hug on May 7th.

 From there it was home to New York via Barbados.  Upon returning to New York from Brazil a week later still a very sick and shaken man, he told members of the press waiting on the pier:  I never saw, nor know of a project equal to the Strategic Telegraph Lines Commission headed by Colonel Rondon… America can present to the world as cyclopean achievements: to the North, the opening of the Panama Canal; to the South, the work of Rondon – scientific, practical, and humanitarian. Upon seeing his old friend and commanding officer from the days of Cuba years before, Leonard Wood, Roosevelt told him, “The jungle fever hangs on and I am now an old man.” 

Roosevelt had acquired malaria in Cuba and even before his Brazilian trip had bouts of the recurring fever that had never left his system.  Doctors who attended him back in the States after the Amazon expedition did their best to purge the illnesses and parasites from his body over many months, but he never again regained his former state of fitness and died in his sleep January 1919.  And he still carried in his chest the .38-caliber bullet fired by John Schrank’s assassination attempt in Milwaukee during Roosevelt’s 1912 presidential campaign.

The River of Doubt adventure was grueling, it was epic, and eventually it took the life of an emaciated and exhausted American legend who had lost one-fourth of his body weight in the Amazon.  He is one of only four presidents carved in Mount Rushmore.  Theodore Roosevelt was authentically American, fearless and one of the country’s best leaders of all time, and we can thank him for our National Parks system.  What president before or after him could have done what Roosevelt did?  He was Sam’s favorite president bar none.

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                In October 1717 Count Dom Pedro de Almeida of Portugal, governor of two provinces, was on his way to Minas Gerais from São Paulo to visit the city of “Black Gold” or Ouro Preto, a gold mining boomtown.

             Along the way, the people of the small village of Guarantinguetá along the Piraíba River decided to hold a great feast to honor the Count when he rested there, so a large quantity of fish was needed.  Three fishermen were unsuccessful after many hours of work and had nothing to show for their efforts as the governor’s party drew closer, so the honor of the village was now at stake. 

They prayed hard to God and the Virgin Mary, Holy Mother of Jesus for divine assistance and at the precise moment that they had almost given up all hope, their net felt as if it had caught something, so they pulled it in and inside the net was the body of a statue.  They cast the net again and next the head of the statue appeared caught. 

Joining the two pieces the fisherman saw it was a statue of Virgin Mary, so taking this as a good omen they cast their net one more time and instantly it filled with fish.  Soon they had filled their boat to the gunwales with all the fish the village needed to host the great man and maintain its honor; the statue grew increasingly famous for this miracle of providing “manna” in the nick of time. 

It is not known why the three-foot high terracotta statue was thrown into the river or why the head and body became separated, but its artist had been a monk by the name of Frei Agostinho de Jesus who created it in 1650.  The little statue came to be known as Nossa Senhora Aparecida or “Our Lady Who Appeared” and a special feast day of October 12 was set aside as a national holiday after two Vatican popes declared her the patron saint of Brazil.

                Nellie’s crutch during the rough time was not alcohol and eventually she stopped taking sedatives, once she found a renewed inner spiritual strength through her Catholic faith and new-found beliefs. 

While Sam was exploring the wilds of the Amazon basin, Nellie visited one church after another, consulted with priests, and traveled to a village noted for its spiritual healing powers called Abadiânia in the state of Goiás, and the Casa de Dom Inácio.  While there she met other pilgrims from all over the world with troubled souls and life-threatening illnesses and heard stories of personal sadness, equally as painful as hers, some even more so. 

As Nellie’s husband meandered aimlessly traveling to grimpos of gold mining locations in remote parts of Brazil to hook up with her two brothers – and did a lot of fishing – Nellie learned how gold and its host rock, quartz crystals, had a long history of healing physical and psychological wounds using the power of Earth’s energies. 

The New Age believers she met told her that crystal healing on a metaphysical level was being rediscovered after centuries of decline, a concept first introduced long ago by alchemists and doctors of the Middle East under the tutelage of the Prophet Muhammad. 

The more she learned, the more she wanted to learn so she studied chakra healing, psychic and faith healing, the Eastern herbal medicines, Vedic astrology, aromatherapy, and the paranormal with the hope of somehow communicating with Sarah – either in this world, if she was still alive, or in the next if she was not.

                For mineral healing, she learned that certain crystals and gold worked best for purifying the spirit, improving the flow of information through the body, and had the power to ease severe mental depression and provide an inner comfort in coping with tragedy.  Nellie was told by spiritual soul mates she met along the way she must visit mystical places, those with a strong energy vortex, like the Giza Pyramids in Egypt or Sedona, Arizona or Monument Valley, Utah.

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                And so the rough time passed slowly, and during her final days back home in Campo Dourado, Nellie paid a visit to her two very old babás, or nannies, living now in a tiny but immaculate blue house just off the village square. 

They were ironing their starched white flowing dresses when she arrived, using a huge, old-fashioned iron heated by small chunks of charcoal inserted through a tiny door in the appliance’s rear.  They had laid out sweet pastries and strong cafezinho, very sweet espresso, for her visit and Nellie spent all afternoon chatting with Dona Indinha and Dona Joana. 

By now both of these black women were truly ancient – Indinha was 96 and her older sister, Joana, 104 – and both had been born slaves well before Brazil outlawed slavery officially in 1888.  Amazingly, the two would live another decade before passing on only one month apart.  Both sisters, although devote Roman Catholics, were also believers in the powers of macumba or African spirit worship. 

Slaves brought to Brazil by the Portuguese incorporated their ancestral beliefs of the healing power of nature into the country’s staunchly Catholic culture, and plantation owners allowed the practice because it kept things peaceful down on the farm.  It was macumba that protected slaves through personal hardship and travail, who made their difficult lives endurable, held displaced families together in spirit, healed them when they were sick, and punished those who did them harm. 

Alarming the Catholic Church was the belief that the Great Spirit was all around you, that He was not in temples made of wood or stone, that you did not need to use golden icons to appease Him in His house of worship, and that the priesthood was unnecessary as the self-anointed middleman between man and God.  If you opened a piece of wood, He was there.  If you turned over a large stone, you could find Him.  If you knelt before a stream to drink from its cool waters, He would hear your prayers.

                As Nellie and Sam prepared for their departure back to the United States and return to some semblance of normal life once again, joining in the family farewell scene at the bus station were the two nannies, remarkably spry and mentally alert despite their advanced age. 

Along with the many other gifts received upon departure from friends and family that day, both Sam and Nellie always held near and dear the gifts they received from the two nannies.  Nellie received a one-foot tall terracotta statue which was a replica of Nossa Senhora Aparecida – and every anniversary since Sarah’s disappearance has lit a candle in front of Her shrine praying for the little girl’s soul. 

The only thing more precious to Nellie than the statue was the simple white plastic rosary that once belonged to little Sarah that Nellie always wore.  Sam, for his part, received four tarnished metal ingots about ten inches long and shaped like a bowtie that the two old women said were called grampos, or clamps, that were once used by an ancient people for building their temples, whose civilization once thrived around Campo Dourado long before the white men came looking for gold. 

There were still ruins of these vast cities somewhere in the region, but now they lay buried under the dense canopy of the tropical rainforest, swallowed by the mysterious jungle and no one knew where they were. 

The grampos had once been found in abundance when the nannies were young girls but since then very few had survived, so to own one was considered very good luck – to own four was even better luck.  Sam also learned that the fazenda or family farm belonging to Nellie and her family was on land considered one of seven spiritual vortices and holy sites by indigenous people in the region.  “Huh, who knew,” Sam had muttered to himself upon being told. 

The only person not sad to see Sam leave was the creepy old caseiro or caretaker of Nellie’s fazenda by the name of Anacleto.  He was Nellie’s great-granduncle and pure-blooded Indian.  For some reason, the small brown man was rather standoffish and the only discussion Sam had ever really had with him was when he showed Sam an old black and white photograph, a very worn and faded picture, of Theodore Roosevelt and a group of men that was taken somewhere in the jungle. 

Anacleto pointed to one of several paddlers in a canoe and said that was him, and he had accompanied Roosevelt and the great Rondon on a trip to explore an unknown river called the River of Doubt that flowed from the highlands down into the Amazon.  It was probably Sam’s facial expression of skepticism that pissed off Anacleto or insulted him, or whatever, but did he really think Sam was stupid enough to believe he had met Roosevelt way back in 1914?  At any rate, Sam and Anacleto did not become good friends.

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                Sam returned to work within the Courier Service of the U.S. State Department, refreshed and somewhat reinvigorated from the extended leave he took in Brazil, but after 1976 things were never the same and what had once looked like a golden opportunity to possibly enter the Foreign Service Corps elite brotherhood of professional diplomats abroad in the service of the United States, permanently fizzled.  His first diplomatic courier trip overseas upon returning to work was to the Embassy in Bogotá, Colombia. 

There, word had already spread that Sam was damaged goods but the Ambassador, Lloyd R. Jones, took Sam under his wing and helped him get by – even having him over to his residence for dinner.  Sam would always fondly remember the kindness showed to him by Ambassador Jones and his lovely wife Ellen during the rough time. 

Although political correctness and possible legal considerations ensured he was not treated, at least above board, as a head case, he was a marked man and his display of emotional and psychological frailty in Tacoma pretty much guaranteed future promotions even within the ranks of the civil service would be very slow in forthcoming. 

And it wasn’t like he had a lot of employment options anyway – returning to Mohlenburg to work in the coal mines meant returning to hell on Earth, and not many agencies around D.C. were interested in employing a thirty-something nut job with only two years of college. 

So for years and years he toiled as a GS-7 at State and grudgingly he earned promotion to the GS-10 level, but that’s as far as he got.  He traveled millions of miles as a diplomatic courier and had to leave Nellie alone for weeks on end. 

On long flights sometimes he would daydream about escaping a life of poverty in Mohlenburg, and about the years he spent in military service, when he rose from buck private to Staff Sergeant E-6 in such a short time, and in retrospect wondered had he erred in not pursuing an army career as a “lifer,” deciding instead to become a “sillyvilian.”  But then he realized that was just a stupid pipe dream, how could he have ever imagined a road-not-taken scenario that might not have included his two beloved girls, luvaful Nellie and little Sarah.

(This is a work of fiction.  Although some real-world names, organizations, historical settings, and situations are used to enhance the authenticity of the story, any similarities to actual persons, organizations, or situations are coincidental and all portrayals are purely the product of the author’s imagination.  This is the second edition abridged version 2019.  First edition Copyright © 2006.  All rights reserved)