Part 18: Campo Dourado

A human life, I think, should be well rooted in some spot of a native land, where it may get the love of tender kinship for the face of the earth, for the labors men go forth to, for the sounds and accents that haunt it, for whatever will give that early home a familiar unmistakable difference amidst the future widening of knowledge... The best introduction to astronomy is to think of the nightly heavens as a little lot of stars belonging to one’s own homestead.  George Eliot

My, oh my, how time flies when you’re having fun.  As a youngster, I had envisioned an elaborate retirement party when as an old man I would be thanked profusely by the top honcho for my many years of service to the organization, and presented with a gold watch as a token of esteem from my boss and colleagues. 

Sometimes getting drunk in my younger days I had even imagined being some kind of national hero, like in school when they carried you off the playing field on their shoulders for winning the big game. 

Or having a bronze statue erected in my honor – as proof that I had once actually set foot on Earth.  Now it looks like the only engraving I’m ever going to get is what some complete stranger carves on my tombstone but ironically, I’ll never see it, and over time it’ll just fade away too.

After forty-five years with the federal government, including military service and continuous employment since 1963 except for those two years while I was in the Army Reserve attending community college, had my boss Kurt Rowan not put together a last minute send-off with Kool-Aid and sugar cookies in the basement cafeteria, my departure from the State Department on my last day of work would have gone virtually unnoticed.  

His boss, Larry Atwood, heard about the send-off and rushed downstairs to make a politically correct speech about how valuable I was to the team, and so forth.  He said I would be receiving the standard issue State Department commemorative plaque for retirees before I left for Brazil, but if he sent it, I never got it.  Good ol’ Larry, such a jerk.

But no hard feelings though, it was a great ride.  I did my best but if there were shortcomings, they were mine and mine alone and that’s the reason why I wasn’t more successful.  I could never make the personal commitment to the establishment hierarchy; I had to be my own man and couldn’t dance on a string like some puppet, be a yes-man for my supervisors over the years, and I suppose that cost me promotions – that and the fact that I ain’t exactly the sharpest knife in the drawer to begin with. 

Getting here to Campo Dourado meant flying from Washington, D.C to São Paulo, Brazil with connecting flight to Brasília and another connecting flight to Porto Velho, the capital city of the state of Rondônia.  From there you took a bus northward for two hours, including waiting for the ferry crossing over the Madeira River and then proceeded along a red dirt road out of town to the rural route setting of the fazenda, our farm, twenty minutes out of Campo Dourado. 

It feels like I’ve been down here forever, but only a few years have passed since me and Nellie left Washington.  We’re settled here in our new home, now a bustling “metropolis” of 20,000 people and I can still keep in touch with a few old friends thanks to the miracle of the Internet.  We almost live off the international current-affairs grid except for that link to the outside world. 

Problem is I have to go a few miles into town and use the computer at old Bruxo’s pharmacy because we still don’t have reception on Nellie’s farm, and even if we did I don’t have a home computer.  Bruxo showed me how to use that Google thingy too, so now I can read my emails and learn about what’s going on up there in God’s country.  I still try to read and keep up with the tragedy of what happened in Jerusalem that terrible Christmas Day.  What a shame, such a beautiful holy city, so much history and art up in smoke.  I’ll miss visiting that place. 

I saw that President Hapgood got reelected in a landslide in the last election.  All anyone talks about these days is America’s Mars space program and how great we’re doing mining gold on that planet.  The economy is booming and once again Washington is spending money like a drunken sailor.  It seems like everyone has jumped on the bandwagon, what with the Europeans, Russians, Chinese, and Japanese all sending missions to stake out their gold claims on the Red Planet. 

The newspapers down here talk about it every day, and Brazilians want their country to get a space program.  There are rumors we’re using atomic bombs to get at the gold but I doubt that, must be just more bullshit reporting by the liberal media. 

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                I had tried to see my best buddy Archie Jefferson before I left the country, and we almost didn’t connect.  I learned he got real sick soon after we had drinks that October day at our bar off DuPont Circle, and took leave from work to go home, back to Chicago to recuperate.  I saw him off at Ronald Reagan airport and we only chatted for a few minutes before he had to make his flight. 

I still remember the last words he said to me when we said our goodbyes, the same ones I wrote to him so many years before when he was recuperating from his car accident, “Don’t let them goddamn city shitters kick you down.” 

As it turned out, that was the last time I saw Archie.  He was admitted to the Veteran’s Hospital at Fort Sheridan with a severe urinary tract infection, and because of his paralyzed condition, his illness worsened over several months and he died. 

I was already in Brazil by then but I’ve always been glad I was able to see him that one last time before he passed on, and wished to God that I had had a magic elixir to help him, but it was not to be.  I never heard back from that nice Mr. Brown either and now with Archie gone, I don’t suppose I ever will. 

Not that it matters; I have no interest in writing books anymore, finally got it out of my system and made a little money on the side, and now all I care about is fishing and tagging along with my brothers-in-law, Moisés and Laércio, who are still digging around for gold. 

Just like many old men around these parts who have worked as garimpeiros in their youth, there still crops up along the banks of the Madeira River and its many small tributaries tiny artisanal gold finds from time to time, and when that happens all the old timers get whipped up into a frenzy.  I go along for the ride hoping I can find more of those metal clamps or come across some kind of Indian artifact, but haven’t so far. 

Nevertheless, it’s fun because we just drink beer and bullshit all day long and sometimes find a tiny gold grain or two.  Luckily, they know how to read a compass better than I do so we don’t get lost in the jungle.  They tell me our farm is located at 8°29’ south latitude and 63°52’ west longitude. 

Except for me, Nellie and the great-granduncle Anacleto, the rest of the family lives in Campo Dourado but where we live is pretty much considered the family fazenda so everyone drops in whenever they feel like it.  There’s a mom plus brothers and sisters and aunts and uncles and nieces and nephews and grandchildren by the score and they all talk at the same time.  Nellie’s elderly mother lives with the sisters.

I took the money Mr. Brown gave me and spruced the place up a bit.  We have the main house, a cottage really, and there are two older structures out back.  One is a storage shed and the other a shack where Anacleto, the ancient caseiro caretaker and shaman still lives.  He was old when I first met him and that was almost forty years ago, but you should see him now.  His dark brown skin looks like ancient parchment with wrinkles inside wrinkles, but those beady little coal-black eyes of his are still as clear as a bell and he’s as sharp as ever. 

He misses nothing. I thought I was doing him a favor by fixing up his humble abode, and buying him a small color TV and taller roof antennae so he could watch his favorite shows but never received a thank you.  My Portuguese is pretty good but he mumbles words in Portuguese and then most of the time lapses into his native Indian dialect Nambikuára which sounds like a lot of grunting. 

Nellie understands him but I’ll be damn if I do.  I piss him off whenever I can, like when I fly my American flag on the front porch every day.  He still carries a grudge for me doubting his story about meeting Teddy Roosevelt and Cândido Rondon during the famous River of Doubt expedition in 1914.  Am I really to believe he’s 115 years old give or take?  I guess it’s possible but just not very probable.

                About six months after I left D.C. I got an email from Kurt saying he had received a new promotion to head the department.  His boss, that asshole, or babaca as we say down here, Larry Atwood had been offered a high-level position at the new Federal Gold Trust Corporation and during his background and security check, the FBI boys found out he was a pedophile – unbelievable, the prick was a closet pervert the whole time he was working at the State Department! 

Can’t really say I’m sorry he’s heading for the slammer.  I got another email from Kurt the other day saying he’s retiring next year and is going to work for Georgetown University as an adjunct professor of American history full time.  It’s nice to see that once in a while the good guys win.

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            My best friend out here in the boondocks is a guy a few years younger than me, name’s Joe Patch, and the reason we’re such good friends is because he runs a pousada or fishing lodge up river that caters to tourists who come here to catch the peixe de couro, those big suckers that look like catfish and weigh upwards of two hundred pounds.  Joe’s an interesting guy with a rather large proboscis so everyone calls him Tucano.  His parents came to Brazil from Canada as Mennonite missionaries when he was a little kid so he speaks, acts, and looks like a native caboclo. 

He went back to Canada to serve in the military as a younger man and learned how to fly helicopters, so besides his fleet of a dozen outboard-engine-powered aluminum boats at his lodge, he also has a tiny two-seater amphibious plane that we go up in sometimes and scout the area.  He’s also a genius when it comes to fixing internal combustion engines; he can repair anything, from car, to truck, to outboard, to airplane motor. 

His reputation for repairing engines is so good that whatever outboard he uses to power his aluminum boats, regardless of manufacturer’s brand name, they’re considered the best motor on the river so people call them “Patch” motors. 

As long as the water is deep enough on the river and the current isn’t too fast, he can set down in some pretty remote locations with his plane, and there’s no end to finding new fishing spots in this vast, still virtually unexplored region.  Mostly, though, I just go down to the river to meet him when I hear him coming – the two-stroke engine powering the boat makes a high-pitched whining sound that in the utter silence of the place can be heard miles away.  Out here in the mud and the muck and the bugs and the beer, the “Patch” is king of the jungle.

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              Over the years, I had given money to Nellie to send home to help take care of her rather large family and pay taxes on the homestead, but when I got here to Campo Dourado, unpaid back taxes were still due so we had to drive into town.  As it turns out, that was a good thing.  To live in Brazil as a permanent resident, you have to obtain a taxpayer ID card and the local equivalent of a Green Card. 

The tourist visa only lasts ninety days so that’s how long you have to get your shit together before they kick your butt out.  I hired a despachante or paralegal to help me with the mountain of forms needing to be filled out, and additionally I had to travel to the U.S. Embassy in Brasília and the U.S. Consulate in São Paulo to get copies of my American documents notarized, like my passport, birth certificate, and marriage certificate.

             A condition for getting a Green Card is that you have to show a level of income high enough to keep you off local welfare.  Another condition is that you have to show proof of having a residence or investment in a dwelling for federal income tax purposes.

The entire process took over a year for finally obtaining my official documents allowing permanent residence in Brazil, but upon submitting the paperwork to the department of immigration at the beginning of the bureaucratic process months before, I was given a protocolo or temporary permission to set up our household, open a bank account, buy a car, and so forth.

To help me get the process started in the first place and meet the conditions for permanent residence, Nellie and her family had all decided it only fair that farm ownership should be in my name so they had the property deed and title signed over to me at the local cartório or land registry office – at least until I kicked the bucket and then a clause said ownership would revert back to the Vasconcelos family and Nellie. 

The office manager of the cartório had reproductions of black and white photos hanging on his wall of Teddy Roosevelt taken during his famous expedition.  Roosevelt never actually visited Campo Dourado but he came close towards the end of his trip, weakened as he was, and so became the adopted hero of local townsfolk and his picture was everywhere.

                Of the famous men who had passed through Campo Dourado and all in the space of just a few years, besides Roosevelt, Colonel Percy Fawcett was the second most favorite amongst the locals and then came Colonel Cândido Rondon – the latter being rather unpopular in fact despite his status as national hero elsewhere. 

Fawcett was the first one to pass through, back in 1906, who was an English treasure hunter searching for a lost city of gold in Brazil and made eight trips to the sertão or backlands of Brazil before being swallowed up by the jungle and last heard from in 1925 near the Juruena River.  Colonel Rondon passed through in 1909 as head of the Strategic Telegraph Lines Commission on his way to Porto Velho to lay line along the Mad Maria railway then under construction. 

It was the railroad construction project that brought Nellie’s family on her father’s side to the Guaporé Territory, the name it went by before it was renamed Rondônia.  Her grandfather and great-grandfather both died on the construction site – the younger from beriberi and the older from an Indian arrow wound.  Her father’s people came from the northeastern part of Brazil, still the poorest region of the country to this day, and migrated westward for work.  The father had died from illness when Nellie was quite young. 

                On Nellie’s Mom’s side, grandniece of Anacleto, they had been in the Guaporé much longer, descended from Portuguese bandeirantes or fortune hunters looking for gold that later married into the local indigenous population of Nambikuára.  Her family’s fazenda, like much of the surrounding land including the land occupied by the town of Campo Dourado, had always been considered sacred and supposedly protected by the federal government from intrusion by white settlers. 

But when bandeirantes found gold in some of the streams feeding the Rio Madeira, the government declared the treaty null and void and allowed prospectors and settlers to enter the region, although still considered hallowed ground by indigenous natives who live on nearby reservations.  Both Anacleto and Nellie, as do many townspeople of Campo Dourado who have Indian ancestry, feel a special bond to the land and still believe in its ancient spirits.

                Despite all this, what pissed off the townspeople and still does even now was that Rondon bypassed Campo Dourado on purpose when he strung telegraph lines southwestward to Porto Velho from Mato Grosso, even though the small village was a center of latex trade and was on a direct survey line of sight with the larger city.  As a result, the town was cut off from the outside world and never did get the telegraph, but did get radiotelegraphy twenty years later when the telegraph was made obsolete. 

Rondon explained his looped detour twenty miles south of Campo Dourado was necessary due to the terrain of isolated mountain islands called morrarias, seven in all in the region, of which the one foothill morro on Nellie’s farm was the smallest. 

The explanation was never accepted by the townspeople because all the sacred hills were north of town, including Nellie’s farm, and not in a direct line with Porto Velho anyway.  This led many to speculate that Rondon had taken bribes or had had some personal reason for bypassing the small town, which in any event led to the still-held animosity.

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                So that left Nellie and me to manage one employee, the ancient Anacleto, who pretty much ran the fifty-hectare homestead all by himself which translates to about 125 acres of scrubland – about a fourth of which was taken up by the morro that rose maybe a 150 feet above the farm, covered in head-high brush and gnarly trees called cerrado.  When I say ran, Anacleto spent most of his time sitting on his shack’s stoop drinking homemade cachaça, watching us with those eagle eyes and occasionally rising to do some work. 

Our farmland and morro is mato scrubland, with thin topsoil and sandy layers and rock shards beneath so was not overly fertile for growing things other than weeds and brush except in a few spots.  I had walked up our foothill several times, there are a few paths winding around where you see a harmless snake on occasion and different kinds of lizards.  The soil is reddish from the iron in the soil, and many of the rocks have quartz crystals attached to them.

We made a little money from the manioc and fruit, like papayas, mangos, oranges, avocados, limes, coconuts, and bananas grown on a small piece of our property and irrigated by our well.  We also tapped a few seringueira or rubber trees for latex to make money.  These were the only sources of income from the farm itself but enough to pay Anacleto’s paltry salary and living expenses with enough left over to pay for Nellie’s part-time maid. 

We actually “raise” wandering chickens too and have a rooster that wakes us up every morning.   On some nights, Anacleto’s flea-bitten dog barks at the big cats that roam the jungle just beyond our boundary fence.  Anacleto also keeps a disgusting capivara as a pet, the world’s largest rodent.  Other than that, things are pretty quiet. 

                Besides fixing up Anacleto’s shack, I also screened in the front porch and all the windows of our cottage to keep out the swarms of bugs, so now we have a cozy little house even though small by American standards.  But on the other hand, the cost of living here is less than half of what it is up in the States.  That’s because like much of Brazil, ours is a poor region.  We’re happy to be able to afford ceiling fans in all rooms except bathrooms and air conditioning in the three bedrooms. 

Sunday mornings on the farm I always make fresh pancakes, which our little Sarah loved, and think about the poem I used to recite for her, “Wee folk, good folk, trooping all together; green jacket, red cap, and white owl’s feather down along the rocky shore some make their home; they live on crispy pancakes of yellow-tide foam; some in the reeds of the black mountain-lake, with frogs for their watchdogs, all night awake.”   

Nellie brings in fresh flowers every day and we’re very happy to be here.  I even purchased an old Fusca, a very old VW Beetle once produced in Brazil up until 1996, for local transportation and its air-cooled engine still ran like a top thanks to Joe Patch.  It reminds me of the Beetle I owned when I lived in Germany back in ‘66. 

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With my U.S. Government pension and Social Security check, I’m one of the wealthiest men in Campo Dourado despite our poor hardscrabble farm – and when I kick the bucket, Nellie will have my survivor benefits so she’ll never have to worry about money.  Since I get paid in American dollars, when my bank in Camp Dourado receives the wire transfer from the United States, the money is converted into local currency. 

But because Brazilian currency is weak, I also make money on the currency exchange rate.  That’s good because Nellie’s a lot younger than me and women live longer anyway, so she’ll be on her own maybe twenty years or more since people down here seem to live to a very old age for some reason. 

I hope she can find someone to keep her company in her old age, but when we talked about it once she said forget it.  She doesn’t want to remarry or date anyone else ever.  The Nambikuára believe that once you are married on Earth, you stay married even in the afterlife.  Her younger sisters will take care of her she said. 

At night it’s dark as hell out here in the bush, but we have abundant electricity supplied from a huge government hydroelectric project just south of here when the equipment is working.  So that’s why we have a gasoline-powered generator for backup because once and awhile we have power blackouts.  At night Nellie watches Brazilian television, especially the novelas, which are soap operas broadcast during primetime evening hours and are immensely popular in Brazil.  I like to watch futebol games and never cease to be amazed by the skill of Brazilian soccer players.  

                If I wanted to spend the money, I could get an expensive satellite dish and programming package to watch the American cable channels – news, sports, and entertainment – but I’ve lost interest in all that bullshit and prefer not to waste my money.  
             Occasionally Nellie and I will go into town to catch an American movie in English with Portuguese subtitles, but our real fondness of an evening is to just sit out on our screened-in porch as the Sun sets and watch the stars and Moon come out at night.  I’ll smoke a locally rolled cigar or two.

Since there’s no manufacturing industry in this cattle country and virtually no car, bus, or truck pollution, the sky after sunset is so clear you feel you can almost reach up and touch the stars, and the only sounds you hear are the ones made by the jungle creatures. 

Sometimes, however, I will play selected songs from my rather extensive collection of country music recorded in various mixed formats – eight-track, vinyl record, cassette, and compact disk – but regardless of how the sound originates the Waylor, George “Possum” Jones, and Johnny Cash still sound great to the ears of an ol’ country boy far from home. 

In my household goods shipment, which took a couple of months to get here, I brought my old stereo equipment down with me from the States and through my Pioneer amplifier and receiver I can also pick up local FM radio and pipe it through my big and loud Fairfax speakers.  Also in that household goods shipment, dissembled of course, was my old Armalite M-16 and a few magazines of ammo just in case the big cats around here get too close.   

Brazilian country music is called sertanejo and I heard a song the other day called Amanheceu, Peguei a Viola by Renato Teixeira.  It’s about a troubadour who travels around the country and plays his guitar from dusk to dawn, then moves on to another city the next day and so forth.  It’s kind of the Brazilian version of I’ve Been Everywhere by Hank Snow.  Whenever I play sertanejo, Anacleto will stop by and we’ll drink my cachaça.  He offers me his own hooch but I won’t touch the stuff.

                The best month for sky watching is April.  That’s because we can sit outside in the front yard, off the screened-in porch, and take in a much wider panorama of the big sky since that’s the one month of the year that swarming insects don’t bite you to death, reason being is that Campo Dourado is invaded by returning Canadian migrating birds for a few weeks who devour insects.  There must be a half-million birds in this region after wet season, and downtown the trees around the square are jammed with birds, fouling benches and sidewalks with their droppings. 

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So now it’s time to talk about the really big event and bring my story to a close!  It all began on one of those April nights clear as a bell some time ago, when a waxing Moon with especially visible penumbra appeared bright in the sky, one just like Theodore Roosevelt saw when he traveled through these same parts.

Looking up at the sky, one had to be in awe of God’s glittering celestial embroidery, you felt like you could reach up and catch a bunch of stars in your hat.  It was no wonder they called it the Milky Way.  Then the first meteor shower fell, it seemed, right on top of us.  There were three waves of shooting stars in succession that night, the third lasting the longest. 

There had been shooting stars before in the region, actually quite common out here, but nothing came close to this spectacular display, and a small meteor in the last wave actually smacked right into our morro, the foothill north of us just a few hundred yards away, producing one hell of a flash of light and a boom that shook our cottage, even cracking a couple of windows.  It scared the hell out of us!

Anacleto and I took flashlights and went hunting for the meteorite, but he couldn’t make the climb up the hill.  I did and found some very hot smoking fragments that were little cratered rocks that appeared to be made of iron, but I couldn’t do much more that night because fog rolled in making it harder to see.  I went out again the next morning, found a few more meteorite pieces on the side of the hill, and then forgot about the whole episode – the fragments were gold free ‘cause I checked hoping to find gold for ol’ Duke Mitchum’s sake.

                Then early one morning a couple of weeks later me and Joe Patch were flying around the area in his two-seater looking for a new fishing hole, and he buzzed the farm for fun and got Nellie to wave up at us.  From our altitude, looking at the surrounding seven hills in the twilight, they reminded me of rugged ruins from some ancient city or pyramids perhaps swallowed up by jungle growth. 

It was on one of Joe’s passes that I noticed towards the top of our morro, a lot further up from where I had searched previously, a small blackened crater which I assumed had been made by the meteor the night of the shower.  I didn’t say anything to Joe, who was looking the other way, but when I had some private time the following day I hiked back up to the spot I had seen from the plane and nosed around with pick and shovel in hand to do some digging. 

Sure enough, a chunk of meteorite had knocked down some vegetation and burrowed its way into the hard crust and sediment at the hilltop, and left a scorched piece of earth and busted up pale quartz crystal rocks scattered all around it.  So I started digging out a small fragment of the charred rock and amazingly it was still warm to the touch despite the time that had elapsed since it first impacted.

                As I was nosing around the bigger chunks of quartz rocks busted loose by the meteor impact, the glint of something bright yellow caught my eye.  I picked up a big piece of the quartz, looked at it, and sure as shit, there was a nest of gold flakes stuck to it, or at least what I thought was gold, I swear to God!  Then with my heart thumping so loud it sounded like a freight train, I searched for more pieces of quartz rock and they had gold flakes in ‘em too!

                It was a damn hot day and with all the excitement and manual labor, I’m sweating like hell hoping I don’t have a heart attack and pass out right then and there.  And when I started digging around the bigger lopsided crater, maybe three yards wide and almost a yard deep, where the meteor had first plowed into the hill, under more meteorite fragments I found this huge gold nugget the size of a basketball all smashed up from the force of the impact by the space rock! 

Further up from the crater I found more meteorite debris and smaller nuggets torn out of the bigger one, scattered all over the place.  I just keep talking to myself saying, “Holy shit, holy shit, holy shit!”

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                At first, I couldn’t believe my eyes because raw gold so close to the surface was highly unusual.  I wasn’t a hundred percent sure it was gold because I had never seen the crude metal in such quantity before, only in tiny grains, but I have to tell you the metal around the crater and the jagged nuggets that broke away and were scattered around sure looked like the gold I have filling my teeth; just as bright, shiny, and bewitching. 

My gut reaction, as I am sure every forty-niner had who stumbled upon a gold find, was to squelch my glee and excitement by covering up the discovery site so I could keep it a secret, which I did, and patted down the earth on top of the crater I filled in.  I also tore up some vegetation and camouflaged the whole area. 

I carried back down the hill with me a large piece of quartz embedded with tiny gold flakes, a few small gold nuggets the size of peas, and a larger gold nugget the size of a walnut.  The large nugget was heavy as hell – but still I wondered if it was fool’s gold, iron pyrite, so I had to devise a way to test it without arousing suspicion.  I avoided any contact with Anacleto whatsoever and tried looking as nonchalant as possible around Nellie. 

But I hardly slept that night ‘cause my adrenaline rush had still not subsided so I just laid in bed – and somewhere between being half awake and half asleep, I dreamt of a way to test the purity of the metal without tipping my hand.  I think Nellie suspected something was afoot, she could always read me like a book, but she said nothing.  I told her I was thinking about writing an essay about the Mad Maria “Devil’s Railway” construction just for fun and was going into Porto Velho to conduct research where I would be spending the night.

                In Porto Velho, I had noticed during prior trips, that around the rodoviária or central bus station a large congregation of street vendors sold crude handmade arts and crafts to travelers and tourists, and the hot sellers were plastic-encased scenes in the shape of a cube, like the more common ones with the alpine village and snowflakes sold in American stores at Christmas time where you shake the water and white little flakes dance around blizzard style. 

Only in Porto Velho, it’s not a snow-globe-alpine-winter motif but one of a garimpeiro or prospector’s stick-figure made of bent wire, and the flakes aren’t snow but are tiny gold-colored flakes.  Vendors swear to buyers that the flakes are real gold, however.

Keep in mind that this city is on the Rio Madeira in a region famous for its discoveries of placer gold deposits and is almost as famous as the Tapajós and Serra Pelada regions of Pará state.  Even today artisanal gold diggers bring gold ore into town for inexpensive testing at any one of a hundred assay offices, found on almost every street corner.  Campo Dourado also had several assay offices including Bruxo’s pharmacy, but for obvious reasons, I didn’t want my “gold” tested so close to home in a gossipy little town.

                So after concocting the bogus story for Nellie, I took an early bus into the big city and playacted like a dumb gringo tourist, riding into Porto Velho from Campo Dourado along route BR-364 which had been built on a jungle path that Rondon had once cleared when he laid the telegraph lines.  I also brought with me a few tools for the counterfeit task at hand.  First thing, I checked into a hotel and made sure the “gold” I carried with me was safely hidden. 

Then I walked back over to the bus station and purchased one of those crudely made prospector cubes and found an assayer nearby to remove the transparent plastic covering from the base to empty out the water and get at the ostensible gold flakes – sure enough, they tested for fool’s gold.  He had tipped over the cube first and I had watched very carefully how he separated base from clear plastic cover.  Only what he had emptied out wasn’t just water, the liquid was clear like water but was much more viscous.  I asked the assayer what it was and he told me it was a mixture of water with cheap glycerin that street vendors could purchase at any drugstore.  

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The chemical and electronic tests for “gold” took about half an hour.  As far as the fake gold was concerned, the assayer assured me that many others had had the same idea as me by thinking they could purchase cheap tourist trinkets and be lucky enough to find real gold inside.  So this became my cover story, my con.  I bought six more cubes from a vendor and back in my hotel room I took them apart, emptied the fluid out and took out the iron pyrite flakes and saved them. 

I purchased a large bottle of glycerin at a drugstore and refilled the plastic cubes with the correct mixture of both liquids.  I replaced the iron pyrite flakes and added ten tiny flakes in each cube of my “gold” that I skimmed off the busted up quartz.  Then I re-positioned the little “prospectors” just right, and re-sealed the bases to the cubes with crazy glue.  It was a messy procedure and took some time to complete. 

                I could tell right off that the color of my “gold” flakes was different from the iron pyrite, slightly darker than the phony stuff.  And my flakes were the first to settle to the bottom after shaking because gold is heavier than iron, but I didn’t think anyone would notice.  I selected a different assayer’s office a few blocks away this time and repeated the testing process with my dummied-up toy. 

After waiting half an hour, this time the second assayer told me I had been lucky and purchased a “snow globe” with a few grains of gold, not pure gold mind you but about eighty-percent pure.  The other twenty-percent was mostly copper with a little silver, but the gold was worth more than what I paid for the toy. 

I left the second assayer’s office very excited, and made sure I wasn’t followed and after waiting an hour back at the hotel, I found a third assayer on the other side of town.  Once again I asked the assayer to test the metal in a cube I had dummied-up using my own gold.  Maybe it was the poor job I did re-attaching the two pieces back together on this cube, or the assayer had another reason to suspect I had messed with it, or the fact that the gold tested was almost pure, but when I went back to get the test results a half hour later, the boss man and not the clerk I talked to before came out from the back room and started asking me questions on who sold me the toy cube. 

I told him I bought it at the bus station but didn’t remember from whom exactly.  I’m not sure he believed me – there’s something about gold that affects people that way, normal people just get crazy when they see it or touch it.  He told me some of the flakes were almost pure gold and asked me if I wanted to sell them.  I said no thank you and took my cube debris and left the assayer’s office, but I had the distinct impression I was being watched even as I got on the evening bus to go back to Campo Dourado.  I had paid for the hotel room but decided it was probably not a good idea to spend the night there.

                On one hand I was quite excited that I had discovered almost pure gold on my property but on the other, I got really paranoid that my ruse hadn’t been perfect and I had been too careless.  Still using my Mad Maria essay research excuse to travel by bus, over the next several weeks I visited different assayers scattered around Porto Velho to have my toy cubes tested, a dozen in all with similar results; my gold was between eighty to ninety-percent pure!    

I decided to do one last test, and take a calculated risk.  I had an assayer test one of the pea-size nuggets I took from our hill.  He came back with the results and said the purity was in excess of ninety-percent and could he purchase the nugget.  I politely declined.  He didn’t even ask me where I got it.  I was being very careful, but I finally proved conclusively that I had discovered a major gold find down on the farm!  Afterwards, I still had four dummied-up cubes left over.

#

After that I stayed clear of Porto Velho for a long time, and didn’t even go back to the secret gold find literally in our own backyard at the top of the hill, my bambúrrio, for a quite awhile.  I would have to be extra careful now.  But when I finally did walk back up the hill, I made sure no one saw me – especially the sneaky witch doctor Anacleto.

The best day to go back up the hill was Saturday because that’s when Nellie did grocery shopping in town and gave Anacleto a ride so he could see a doctor or just hang out by the town square talking to friends.  Only then was there no one around to hear me thwacking rocks with my pick. 

The old Indian passionately disliked doctors, saying he had all the herbs and natural medicines he needed from recipes handed down to him by his ancestors, so he only talked to one when he absolutely had to, like when he broke a fragile old bone or dislocated a hip, something he had done more than once over the years. 

To make a long story short, I dug all over that hill for weeks of Saturdays – in at least fifty places on every face of the slope, high and low – and every place I excavated beneath dirt and organic growth, two to three feet down I hit quartz veined in gold, and I mean huge gold veins that went deep and wide beneath the crust!  Nellie asked me more than once when she returned home from town why I was sweating so much – she thought I had contracted malaria or had another attack of high blood pressure.  Then she made a joke one Saturday and said she didn’t know writing an essay could be so physically exhausting.  That’s when I confessed the whole story.  All she said was, “Be careful.”

Anacleto never said anything to me but he gave the distinct impression he knew what I was up to, even though I covered all my test diggings with dirt and brush afterward, completely hid the evidence of my work from view, and brushed off any dust on my clothes.  I even kicked the dirt clods off my shoes and wiped them down.  There was no way creaky old Anacleto could make the walk up the hill so that was a good thing.

                I then did some ciphering to figure out how much gold I theoretically had in my backyard and borrowed on my old friend Duke Mitchum’s vast knowledge on the subject of surveying.  During his geology and geodesy course field trip to Stone Mountain, Georgia when he was attending Texas A&M my fictional character had determined the volume of the mountain to be 7.5 billion cubic feet which at 168 pounds per cubic foot of granite came to about 640 million metric tons in weight.   

Duke would have determined that my farm’s small hill was of a metamorphic rock composition, as is Stone Mountain, but unlike mostly exfoliating granite, my morro had a sediment and organic material crust underneath which had silica, pyrite, feldspar, granite, and other minerals, plus wide and coarse shards of milky quartz – so give or take, the weight to volume ratio between both hills would be close.  But Duke would not have allowed for the additional weight of vast amounts of gold, much heavier per cubic foot than granite, because Stone Mountain had no gold. 

Stone Mountain is essentially an ellipsoid which mildly slopes at the extremities into a cone-shaped mound almost nine miles long, two miles wide, and 700 feet tall whereas my hill is only 150 feet tall, give or take, about 300 feet long, and a couple of hundred feet wide with gentle slopes taking up about a fourth of our homestead’s land.  Its shape is more conoid, more mound-like with less of a slope than Stone Mountain so taking everything into account I figure my hill weighs slightly less than 500,000 metric tons, or thirteen-hundred times less than the mountain in Georgia.  It’s sort of like comparing Earth’s volume to Jupiter’s.

#

                Here’s where it starts getting interesting.  Just suppose my hill was made of only ten-percent pure gold content, I mean, everywhere I dug, just a few feet down, I saw color.  And I’m talking about total weight of my morro measured at ground level, but what if the gold veins’ roots ran below ground, shit, they could go down hundreds of feet, who knows? 

As it was, just a ten-percent gold content of our hill meant we had 50,000 metric tons of it in our back yard, and applying a price per troy ounce of $1,000 meant Nellie and I were worth $1.6 trillion!  Even if the gold content of the mountain was only one-percent, we were still worth $160 billion and if the gold was only fifty-percent pure we were still worth $80 billion! 

Now that’s what I’m talking about, really big money for this here good old boy!  Move over Warren Buffet and Bill Gates!  Remember, I’m the legal owner of this here farm now.  I couldn’t stop thinking about gold, day and night; every waking moment that’s all I thought about. 

And what about the other six morros all within twenty-miles north of my front porch – those hills were huge, much bigger than my hill and one in particular could easily be the size of Stone Mountain?  That means there could be a hundred times, or even a thousand times my piddling billions of dollars in gold in them thar morros!

Then it dawned on me why Cândido Rondon had bypassed Campo Dourado when he was laying telegraph lines through the Guaporé Territory in 1909.  He knew there was gold here, he knew about the seven sacred hills of gold as did Anacleto. 

Like in the United States when the Transcontinental Railroad was built, cities and towns followed the rail line bringing with them thousands of settlers, and the same thing happened in Brazil where telegraph lines were constructed.  Rondon wasn’t trying to punish Campo Dourado, he was trying to save it and save the sacred lands of the Nambikuára from utter annihilation by fortune hunters!  He was a tribal chieftain, a cacique, and had to protect his people.

                And so I pondered the situation, as I will to my dying day, which by the way is only a few years off best-case scenario unless I can find Anacleto’s secret elixir for long life which I hope isn’t his foul hooch.  I’m not even sure how I’d convert a gold nugget into money – take a box of nuggets into town I suppose and let some assayer assign a value and buy them from me.

But then word would spread like wildfire about a gold strike on my property, meaning that every crooked politician for miles around would be poking into my personal affairs and sooner or later Brasília would figure out how to steal my gold, like corrupt government officials always do in the end.  Then what would our life be like?

And that’s only the start once the fuse is lit.  There would be an explosion of fortune hunters wanting to cash in.  This gold strike would make Serra Pelada look like small potatoes in comparison.  In three months time there would be two million gold diggers in the region, men with high-pressure hoses, tethered rafts, and heavy equipment.  Precious rainforest land would be cleared by fire-setters.  The local police force would be overwhelmed.  Even if the federal government in Brasília sent in the army, it would not and could not stop men driven crazy by the lust for gold. 

Once soldiers first caught sight of a gold nugget, they’d throw down their weapons and join in the madness.  It would be a chaotic and lawless place, with constant fistfights, shootings, and stabbings as men jockeyed for position in the pits to stake out gold claims.  The land and rivers would be inundated with filth and deadly chemicals.  Mercury and potassium cyanide would kill fish and wildlife and take human life for generations to come. 

Our family farm and quite possibly the family itself would disappear from the face of the Earth, as would Campo Dourado and the surrounding six hills.  The only thing left once gold mining activities finally ceased would be a smoking crater twenty miles across and hundreds, if not thousands of feet deep.  So one morning I got up bright and early and made many trips all day long up our hill and down again.

#

I carried up several sacks of concrete and buckets of water, mixed them together, and filled in the big hole where the meteor struck, then covered everything with dirt and vegetation.  The weeds grew quickly and would cover my repair job with vegetation again very soon.  I wanted everyone to see and hear me, so Nellie and Anacleto just watched and listened.  I kept a few nuggets for souvenirs, as well as one of the gold prospector snow globes I had dummied up.  Of the other three, I gave once each to Nellie’s two brothers and one to Anacleto, which was when for the first time I saw him smile.

All the gold in the universe would not bring back my darling little Sarah – had I been wealthy when she disappeared in ’76 maybe I could have hired private detectives to try and find her, but now it was too late; maybe she’s still alive but I’ve come to grips with the fact that we’ll only meet again in the great beyond, when I’ll be able to hold her, and hug and kiss her again, and tell her how much daddy missed her and loves his little girl, and is so sorry he let her be taken away that awful day, and beg her forgiveness. 

And Sarah and I will make a nest, a cozy little home for Mommy when she joins us, as inevitably she will, and then we’ll finally all be together and a happy family once again, just like in the old days.  I decided that as long as I’m alive the gold find will remain a secret.  And I’ll do whatever it takes to keep it a secret in the years ahead, as will Nellie.  I now believe that Anacleto always knew there was gold in the sacred seven hills, as did Rondon. 

Assuming Anacleto departs this earth before me, Nellie and I will be the latest in a long line of caretakers of the secret, and afterwards, new caretakers will step forward as has been the case for centuries.  Who knows, a thousand years from now Indian family elders may still speak of me around the fires and toast with drink the legend of the old gringo who helped save the sacred lands, and wouldn’t that be at least a small sliver of immortality? 

No, I could never allow the garimpeiros and the big mining companies to come in here and tear the land apart, and poison the streams and rivers where Joe Patch and I fish, and where I find such peace.  I have finally found everything I need to make me happy, right here and right now, and gold’s source of wealth would most certainly become a Midas curse, not worth the heartache and sacrifice.  I don’t need society’s modern-day trappings of success like a big mansion, a fancy car, an expensive yacht, or any of the other material things money can buy.

                Wealth on this Earth surrounds me every day.  My riches exist in Mother Nature’s beautiful tapestry, the evidence of which I can observe right from my front yard in her pristine waters, the lush green jungle, the marvelous critters, and in her Moon and stars.  It’s in her hills, her sky, and her clouds, whose puffy formations remind me from time to time of Sarah’s angelic face, smiling down and forgiving. 

And I possessed another kind of gold all along and didn’t even know it until now; it followed me from the places I’ve visited and from the close personal friendships I made along the way during a lifetime of travel, all those amazing sights and experiences in so many countries and all those good, luvaful souls I once knew, and the wonderful family I was and still am blessed with – sometimes I wonder, has it all been a dream, did everything really happen as I remember?  I wouldn’t trade my fading memories for all the gold on Mars.

                I can feel my brain getting older, not quite as sharp, a little more forgetful – and my body has a few more aches and pains each year.  So I’ll just enjoy my final years, living them out one simple day at a time, with my golden girl, my wise and beloved Nellie. 

O Fim

(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)