Plantation

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Slide Show

 

I woke up. My cell phone read 6:04. Twenty six minutes until my alarm would go off. I went back to sleep. Beep—buz—beep–. I got up took the sheets off my mat for the last time. I had dropped into these strangers house two months before. I had slept on this floor for the last month and a half. I rolled up my foam mat and put it in its corner.

 

            Claudia came down stairs and made her breakfast.

 

I sorted my things. I left in a drawer the pieces I wouldn’t need for the next three weeks. I left David Copperfield, Tom sawyer and a picture of me kissing Shoshi’s head all which I had finished reading.

 

I put six kilo’s of rice, 3 kilos of beans and 6.6 pounds of cassava flour in a bag. I drank my coffee. In the house, they make it in an Italian pot. The grounds are in the bottom in a small net. Below them you put the water. When the water boils it expands and is pushed up into the ground then through a pipe which spills into a chamber on top with sweet gurgling smells. It distances the coffee from the heat, keeping the coffee from being burnt.

I went up stairs to take a shower. I asked Marcia “you called a taxi for me?” She had a service. “Yes, for 8:00 o’clock,” she responded. “I have to be there at 8:00.” I said meekly. Once again language had kept me from getting my point across. She called. I quickly washed.

I took three chickens from the freezer and put them in a footlocker bag. Claudia said, “I’ll see you when you get back” and then quickly left to work. I don’t think I will see her again.

I put on tight green corduroys, a brown chemise, and leather Safari boots, made by Batta. Marcia call out,”David your taxi is here.” I pulled on my orange pack, lifted my Manhattan portage sack, kissed Marcia and Lese on their cheeks goodbye, and put the bags in the back of the taxi. I went back to get my chickens and dried goods. Living with strangers makes goodbyes easier. No real pain in leaving, just purpose.

The taxi pulled up to the agronomy building. A two-story jungle shack. Two pistoled guards lift the yellow and black striped security gates stopping cars. People walk through without harassment. I put my bags next to the building’s light green wall. I waited

It was a quarter past 8:15 and a cigarette was in my hand. Smoke left my ember.

            Professors Charles Clemens is from Oregon. He lives in Brazil and studies black soil generation. Black soil is biomass rich soil that is formed naturally over time as carbon is deposited in the soil through vegetation decay and forests cycle. Black soil land is highly valued in the Amazon for its crop yields. He walked up: “What’s that? The start of your first cancer?” he smiled and continued, “Congiki wont be going today, let me introduce you to the guy who will take you to the fruiticulture station.” I followed professor Clemins to meet the superviser. He was a Billoon of a s with a few teeth missing.. “ We Sai aloe tudo bein,” to eachother. He asked Professor Clemins if I spoke Portuguese. I said “pouco” He said in portugues, “You had beter because I speak very good Portuguese.”

I put my gear and food in the back of a covered bed-pickup truck with six, INPA weed-wackers and a pair of boots.

We got in the truck. I sat in the front with my laptop on it. Four men with missing teeth and deep sun lines sat in back. “You have a Hammock?” the supervisor who was driving asked as we pulled out of Agronomia’s parking lot. “No, a Hammock, No I don’t have one I don’t think,” I responded making sure I understood his Portuguese.

The road we pulled out onto, V8, was completely full. A volkswagon minibus let us out. The supervisor swung the truck into both lanes.

We drove out of Manaus to Agronomia’s experiemental fruit plantation. The Radio played a mix of Brazilian and American classic country, with a smattering of Gwen Stefani and Shania Twain.

On the way, the supervisor talked, a lot, of good Portuguese. The rest of us listened.

We pulled off the asphalt onto a red-dirt road. The truck hopped over the road’s ruts. We stopped in front of the station of the plantation I had visited two weeks before. I got out of the truck, put the chickens and plant parts directly in the Kitchen. I put my backs in he station, asked where my bed was, and was shown a bunk bed with the top bunk serving as a shelf. The foam mattress I was to sleep only a foot below the shelf. I hoped I didn’t have nightmares that made me bolt upright in the three weeks I was staying here.

I told a guard that I was going for a walk. “How do you say,” I said while miming waling. He sait, corre. I told him I was going for one of those.

I set off around the plantation to check on the four colonies of Leaf-Cutters I had found on my prior visit. It was now ten o’clock. The first two weren’t active yet. The plantation is a large rectangle. I had started on the North East side. I walked he perimeter. It skirted the forest edge. Thick underbrush blocked my view inside. Birds screetch and sang constantly. This side was taking the brunt of the sun. Particles of light slammed into the forest and sprayed back as greens and browns. I made my way past the north east corner.

I continued. At 11:00, I turned onto the south side of the parameter. It led along a small pond. On the ground I spotted an ant carrying a bright green leaf twice the size of its body. It didn’t notice the weight. I followed it to its colony, and then followed the trail back out to where it was harvesting. I realized that if this colony was active now, some of the others might be too.

I walked back up the eastern side the station where I had started. I met Patricia, and shared Ciggerettes, I asked how she was. She dismissively demanded the day was good and she was fine.

I took water and went to check the second colony again. I walked along the trail. I jumped over a tree that had fallen in the path and lept off it, bouncing over vines that hung from the felled trunk. I got to the second colony and saw some dead leaves being carried inside. I knelt down to watch.

By the door to the colony two ants wrestled. Their legs pushed against each other. Their mandibles reached for their opponent’s legs. The bigger one had six legs. The smaller one four. The smaller one shoved a foot into the larger’s face, stretching her thorax she locked-onto and lopped-off the larger’s left hind leg. A number of Leaf-Cutter ants walked past and examined the fight, but didn’t intervene. The larger one then pushed the smaller with her gastor. Repositioned, she scissored off the smaller’s front right leg.

A small black ant, a crematogastor, picked up the loose legs and carried them away for food.

The two combatants rolled down the bare ground of the Leaf-Cutter trail. Their mandibles seeking to de-leg each other. They took the legs with until the larger had only one, and the smaller none. Legless, the smaller seized her opponents last leg. Then the larger reach her pencers around the smallers kneck, and cut her head off. The head stayed attached to the leg, but without a body to bring leverage to bear, the headless Amazon warrior couldn’t take the last leg. Its hard to say if the body lost a head or the head a body, because both continued to wriggle after being parted, but the decapitated head simply clung to the victors last leg.

Another Leaf-Cutter approach the death match. This one stopped and engaged. She removed the victors last leg like a twig of a harvest plant. The victor stretched her body, towards the new fighter. She pulled herself around the legged foe.

Two crematogastor drug away the severed gastor, and thorax of the headless ants carcass.

The two new combatants intertangled their bodies and tumbled down the hill the trail was build on. Working her way around the new comers body she scissored off all the legs. The new comer tumbled off her besieged opponent. they accidently rolled away from each other, both ending up on their backs. Their leg stubs, only the joints where the legs meet the bod left, tried to get traction and flip the bodies. The earlier victor tried to use her mandibles to right herself: pushing one into the ground she turned her head to put herself back on her belly. The new combatant rolled herself over. Once righted, both used their mandibles to drag themselves back towards their foe. As the warriors approached each other anew, the fresh was grabbed by swarming crematogastor. She fought them off, slicing the air with her mandibles.

The old combatants recommenced combat. Their seized each other with their pincers. Both sought to scissor the other’s head. Then, staring each other down, eye to eye, they locked in a cross: they both placed one mandible under the others chin, and the other right between the eyes. Their jaws dug into each others’ faces. Intertwined in a cross, a large black ant, echtotomes, fought off the crematogastor, which were waiting for the bodies, and carried way the two moribund contestants. The evidence of the brawl cleared away even before the opponents die.

The three leaf-cutter ants were from the same colony. All of medium size. It wasn’t a raid. Most Leaf-Cutters that past the brawl didn’t stop, merely passed. But the three had dismembered each other with vigor. How could it be evolutionarily beneficial for ants from the same colony, 100% the same genes, to desiccate each other? If a whole colony acted this way, there would only be body parts. How could such a maladaptive behaviour evolve?

 

I stood up and walked back to the station for coffee, a cigarette and people.

 

 

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7. Trail Formation

New ant pictures Anthopper.com

As the bus pulled down Highway 10-AM I left Manaus for Rio Preto Da Eva. Pillows of air billowed the bus’ curtains. My thoughts drifted on the air through the window. The morning I had spent finding the bus station the twenty beers I drank last yesturday, the jungle outside the window. Movies made the jungle mysterious, my view from a bus window made it the lining on a road.

I passed Ducke reserve where I had gone with Fabricioi. It marked the farthest point I had traveled. But in what direction? I arrived in Brazil by plane. I have no home, no origin. Marking points of distance seemed so natural, but made no sense without origin.

The couple in the seat in front of me made out. They touched an breathed. That gave their trip meaning. The girl got off the bus at a military post along the way, the guy left the bus a few miles further on.

An hour later, everyone stood up. I guessed we arrived. I didn’t know what Rio Preto looked like, but as the bus stopped I alighted.

A couple walked into the station as I left it. The man was wearing only a blue speedo and a pink intertube over his shoulder. I suppose he rode the bus that way.

It started to drizzle as I walked into town. Rio Preto da Eva is built on the course of the black river. The river is narrow but deep. Because the rain increased, I ducked into a bar by the river.

A long haired hipp drank fermented sugar cane, Cachaça, at the bar. A girl from next door stared at me. Unsure if she liked me or thought I disturbed the fung shwe, I looked around. A grill sat in front with two big fish on it. Several long tables for communal eating filled the room. I sat through the rain storm drinking beer. When it finished I bumbed a cigarrette from the hippy. He was from Rio De Janheiro. He said “my girl and baby are there.” he had hair to his butt, no chin, and a long beard thin beard. The Beard seemed to grow from his cheeks, fall over the lack of a chin and hang straight onto his kneck.

He said he was walking to Mexico. He asked, “Did I walk Manaus?” I said that would be long time. A two hour bus ride is a hell of a walk. He replied, “This government is shit man: they throw shit. The Amazon. Future? If you put. It goes. Vamos.” He kept speaking all in Portugues, I missed the rest.

Two others sat with us at the bar. They were drunk. One said, mostly with his hands, people here put into the ground and it comes. They put into their mouths. Then they put it into the ground’s mouth. The whole time, the other guy tried to get the hippy, who didn’t speak English either, to translate for him.

The Hippy kept saing “Its peace and love, man.” The drunkest man shook my hand and, after glaring at the one who gestured with his hands, said that he was drunk now and he was going to sleep. He left, walking up the road that ran through the center of town.

As we sat and smoked cars passed with huge sound systems. They blared campaign songs for local politicians. The cars themselves were covered in stickers and banners of men in suites, I presume the politicians. I didn’t see any people with sleeves on the street, let alone suites. I wondered what the politicians did locally.

The sound blared so loud it drowned everything. Because the cars are always repeating the songs and driving in circles around town the doppler effect is the only change in the song. I can’t imagine how monotonous it is to drive those thirty second campaign songs around.

Their are several candidates. Some don’t have as much cash it seems, for there are also mo-ped mounted sound pushers. A sound system as large as the driver weighs down the back of the tiny motorcycle. The mo-ped drives slowly up and down hills. Up because the motor can’t pull anymore, down to avoid accelerating too fast.

I finished the hippy’s last cigarro, said tchau to the bar, and asked the hippy his name. He responded: “Jay, like the hemp.”

I explored the town, I was looking for agricultural land. After walking up the road to the edge of town, I lopped back through side streets. Motorcycles made up most of the traffic. The taxi’s were even motorcycles.

Rio Preto is a small town. Taverns and flip-flops take up most the the shop space, along with hand built plaster buildings and peeling pastel paint. Women hang out of first floor windows, people walk in the streets, and dogs sit in the shade speaking of the olden days.

The town is built on hills which slop to the river. On top of the the highest hill, which the federal government blasted a path for highway 10-am to pass through onward to Venezuala, a 50 foot statue of Jesus overlooks the town.

I wove among the streets of the Rio Preto. The people didn’t look at me, but I looked at them. I passed a footbal field. The boys were doing sprints. The girls sat outside the field’s fence talking on the curb. They all wore yellow political shirts, one waved a flag with a bearded man’s face on it. While I passed the girls, a man almost ran into me because he was staring at the girls so hard.

I walked into a gulch. The earth was red, blobby clay with ruts in it from the rain. I crossed the stream at the bottom. I passed a family, the mother in yellow, they didn’t look either.

As my road led out of town the asphalt covering changed to natural red clay. As The recent rain wetted it, it caked my flip-flops with a second sole made of clay.

The road passed a house and two hotels. The house doubled as a political headquarters. and sound truck was outside and a red political banner hung out front. The family ate lunch to the sweet sound of blaring campaign music. Further on, the two hotels had manicued lawns, brightly painted walls, and phone numbers brightly painted on them.

I walked over a hill and came to a river. At the river their was a empty resaurante. I went inside and asked, “Hello?” A man, two chickens and a dog greeted me. the dog ran at my ankles snarling. The man said “hey!” to the dog. I said “Calma, amigo,” then I asked to the man “Can I sit?” gesturing to the chairs.

I sat and ordered water. While the breeze aspired, the fish jumped from the stream, chickens chirped the water brgalled, and the rooster greeted the non-existant dawn “I said its not morning Frango…” The man laughed.

The Man sat at on the table next to me the whole time I drank my water. Afterwards, I walked back a long the wet red clay road to town.

I got a room for the night rested for two hours, until 8:00 PM. Then went out and got dinner alone. I had rice and beans and Frango and Manioc powder, cassava flour and a beer. After, I went to a bar alone: smoked, watched the street, talked with the owner in portuguese about the town and watched life on the street pass by. At night the fifty foot statue of Jesus is lit with purple flood lights.

I went to sleep in my room wondering where I was suppose to go.

In the morning, I walked out of town along 10-AM. The red clay walls where the government had blasted over shadowed my path out of town.

I took a logging trail into the forest. I came across a trail of Eciton, army ants, who were carrying a vanguished copinotus colony larava and all, back to their bivouac. I found them at 9:00 AM. I followed it into the forest 20 metres. 10 metres in there was a bridge made from Eciton bodies. When I broke it it reformed itself in 20 minutes. Even while the ants hadn’t joined others walked over, standing on the partially formed bridge reaching the other side. No majors took part in the bridge. Only the smallest Eciton. When I disrupted the trail on the litre I noticed caching of booty while the trail reformed itself. However, when I disrupted the trail in another place, no catching was observed.

Additionally, bridge building is used for efficiency in trail speed. When the the ants passed through an especially deep and narrow crack they formed a bridge half way down where the sides were no more than two ant widths apart.

After watching the ants, I walked back to town for lunch. I ate the same thing I had for dinner the previous night. I saw the hippy again. He said “Hey man” I waved, I didn’t have anything to say in Portuguese.

When i finished lunch, I walked back out of town the same way I had that morning. Jesus didn’t seem to notice. The air was cool: the clouds grew darker. I stopped at an unfinished bank building. There were people squatting in the ruins that had been left behind by receding capital.

After walking a mile, I turned left onto a new dirt road. It was lined on both sided with barbed wire fenced private particulars. They had small palms and big goats. Though the sound trucks didn’t come this far out of town, red and yellow posters hung on many fences. The clay stuck to my flops, turning them into plip-plops.

The sky cleared and the sun beamed. I walked down a hill in the oppressive heat. A creek lazed at the bottom. A bridged spanned the water, made of two thick rough boards. On the far bank, a sand beach slept. I walked to it and did too. Sitting on two planks of wood, I soothed my white skin in the shade of a tree.

I drew the creek in my sketch book. The lines were all tilted. I wanted my camera to prove how picturesque it was. I read the quote of Suntag in the front of my journal:

As photographs give people an imaginary possession of a past this is unreal, they also help people take possion of space in which they are insecure. Thus, photography develops in tandem with one of the most characteristic of modern activities: tourism.

It seems positively unatural to travl for pleasure without taking a camera along. Photography will offer indisputable evidence that the trip was made, that the program was carried out, that fun was had. Susan, On Phtogography, 9)

The lines tilted because my mind was not at rest. I connot make the pin be calm when who it expresses aches.

I ate cashew (Caju) nuts and a protein bar. It was made with organic natural banana, so tasted like the over ripe black part.

I gave cashews to the crimatogastor who were foraging around my feet. The nuts were a hundreds of times the size of the ants’ tiny legs. Pulling hundreds of penced mandibles, their legs lifted, pulled and pushed the nuts up the hill to their nest. Their bodies poking like light off a childs rendition of the sun. They took the nuts back home. They knew how to get home, it smelled right.

One nut got stuck in a concave patch of green. Two plants grew on both sides of a miniscule cliff. When the ants took the cashew into the the natural caldisack they couldn’t double back, they only knew the way home if they walked straight for it.

For more than half an hour they tried to hoist the caju up the cliff. More ants rallying to the taste. Though they pulled and pushed, they were standing on the leaves of two plants, every time, the immense weight of the cashew tipped the leaves, and the crimatogastors lost their footing. Finally, linking bodies they anchored over the leaves to the earth behind. By this time hundreds had rallied. The nut slid over the cliff. The ants neved doubled back. They technically couldn’t: their way of constructing world’s and order with pheromone trails wouldn’t allow it.

I stood up, brushed off the sand beach and kept walking along the path. The rain clouds had gathered again. The sky turned from blue to gray. The ants disappeared from the road. I turned into a small trail that led into the trees. Not knowing where it went I alternatively hoped trees would protect me from the rain, or that it would take me to someone’s house.

I passed under some forest trees and came out onto the cleared top of a hill. Charred stumps of forest canopy, cleared to cultivate the forest floor, made a panoramic view of five hills with a farming illage in the river valley bellow.

As the rain began to fall I breathed the clean air reviling in the the experience of hiking in Amazonian hills, the lighting and temultous clouds spelling ADVENTURE. As the rain began to fall harder, I realized I didn’t want to be that wet for the sake of adventure.

I took shelter with a pig. Running over the top of the hill I saw a small tin roof. I came to it and was greeted by a black and white pig. Behind a wood fence under a tin roof, he said : Grrrugf.” I had never met a pig this close before. I didn’t know how to respond. His noise wasn’t exactly friendly. Stuck in the rain by a seemingly inhospitable boar I waited.

I decided I would rather be mauled by a pig than get any wetter. I ducked under the eve’s of his cage outside his fence. He competed with the pouring rain to make more noise. I told him “Shh, amigo, calma, Legal?” He got the point and hoofed himself in relative silence. I guess he had flees.

The rain droppletted over the sides of the shack dribbling onto my face and splashing my toes with mud. To get a better smell, the pig hopped his two front feet with their four big pig toes onto the fence behind me.

I repeated “Calma, Amigo.” not actually preferring being mulled over by a pig.

The rain subsided. The charred hill top, cleared to grow pigs and palms, glimmered with granules of water.

I left the farm and went back to my clay road. Up the hill, the ants were the only thing on the road. After the down pour the clay stuck even thicker to my shoes. I clopped on. On one side of the road the forest grew thick. On the other their was illegal logging. The trees fetch as much as $600 a piece.

I came to a steep down slope. I slipped half way down it in my plops.

I met a man coming up the hill bearfoot. I realized how rediculous I was to still be wearing my shoes in clay this wet. I talked to the settlement at the bottom of the hill barefoot. The people looked at my feet like I was uncivilized. I just thought I was clever, reveling in the squishy between my toes.

I passed a church and a pinapple orchard and came to the end of the road. A young boy and a woman stradling up from the settlement I had just passed came toward me. Their was no more path to walk outward on, omly a number of houses. I pretended to examine some flowers – hoping either to see where they went so I could keep walking outward treking, or at the very least not to be seen walking around aimlessly.

After they passed I followed them for several feet. They went into a house. I realized I had no where further to go forward, and walked back the way I had come.

The Church had a man in nice leather shoes, sleek slacks, and a black tucked in chemise. He hammered something into the wall. Without my shoes on, I felt like a savage.

I prowled all the way back the way I had come, daring anyone to question my shoes.

As I stepped onto the asphalt road once again the thick sole of clay on my bare foot fell away. I put back on my flip flops. A fat couple meandered by. The clouds turned from gray to black.

I pased a house where the fat couple sat. I looked in, they offered me shelter from the oncoming storm. Lightning cut the sky. Not wanting to not speak Portuguese, I said no thanks, and gestured as if to say these increasingly dark menacing clouds were no problem, lightning was my friend and continued down the asphalt back toward Rio Preto da Eva.

The rain started. I saw a gate to a ranch. It had a tile roof over it with one plaster wall between a pedestrian door and a vehicle gate.

I sat under the tile with with my back against the white plaster. The rain slashed out. I sat wet and tired watching cars go by. The plaster wall and the asphalt road had conducted heat from the sweltering sun between the storms. So while the sky was sombre and cold, the bulwarks of man kept me warm.

The clouds relieved of their burdens, I walked back to town. Intending to get up in a few hours for dinner, I went to bed at six.

I dreamt of Shoshi: walking around a spiral I couldn’t get out of I couldn’t reach her. I awoke forteen hours later and left Rio Perta

The Begining

As this ant points her left feeler over the hole, the right one still securely touching the ground, her nature tells her to keep moving it down. Only once her feeler strikes solid ground will she know what exactly is ahead, and how exactly deep that hole thing is. The bottom of this abyss isn’t exactly just when she feels the tunnel floor. That chasm in the earth leads to the hive, and for me thats even less known than every next step for the unintelligent biomachine (this little ant). As I stand at the edge, reaching out to feel my first step into a world of ants I’m feeling rather scared. I just do not know when my feet are going to take me to the bottom of the colony, and when this little ant hole is going to end.

On the practical side, I have my tickets for Brazil, it turns out Copa air panama’s regional air provider has great deals from JFK to Manaus, only just over a $1,000. I now have a contact in biology, though he is a mammalogist, in Brazil. I will beleaving NYC on the 17th of July. While talking about flights I have decided the best way to get my Brazilan visa is at the consulate in the Big Apple. As an amusing aside, On the consular’s site for Brazil it says “there will be a $130 charge for a US Citizen to get a visa to Brazil, the exact same price the US has been charging Brazilian citizens for years.” This is a kind of ‘fuck you’ to the US, and I like it. Additionally, I have finally found the last component to my macro photo kit the B150 B macro guiding rail, which essentially allows me to slide my camera backwards and forwards thereby making up for the fact that macro photography has an incredibly narrow depth of field (i.e. the camera only focuses at a very specific depth).

Furthermore, if you like the picture above you can see my first roll (at much higher resolution) at Anthopper.smugmug.com