(Photo: Cf.)

Our boat floats up to Abrozinho’s dock, past a drowned tree, fútbol goal posts part-submerged, and a water-logged canoe. This is not uncharacteristic for the rainy season, as many ribeirinhos (river people) of Amazonia tend to settle on or near alluvial floodplains (várzea), living in floating houses, or, like Abrozinho, shanties erected on wood pilings, knowing that part of their land will be underwater between April and June. Here, the fishing and turtle hunting is sweetest, and the prospects are good for harvesting palm fruit and Brazil nut, or tapping nearby clusters of rubber trees.

Ribeirinhos are the most visible of Amazonia’s forest peoples, skilled backwoodsmen and ingenious cultivators who possess the sort of esoteric local knowledge derived from generations of living at the interstitial space between river and forest. Most are detribalized indigenous people or mestizos, working the land in isolation for their own use.

Abrozinho, an impish fellow with absurdly large toes I imagine clinging monkey-like to the brim of his canoe, leaves a half-eaten fish lunch to welcome us. I’m travelling with field workers from Fundaçao Amazonas Sustentável, visiting small river communities on tributaries of the Rio Negro within a two to three hour boat ride of Manaus. FAS administers the Bolsa Floresta program on behalf of the Amazonas state government—a two-year-old initiative that pays forest families directly up to $50 a month not to deforest.

This river man is not shy. I expected him, and the other ribeirinhos I met, to be somewhat retiring and suspect of visitors with their cameras and questions (the field workers were documenting the trip), but they were all instantly gregarious, generous to offer whatever they had to eat, and eager to talk our ears off—the case, I guess, of the lonely, isolated bloke in the sticks, happy to have anyone new around to gossip with, or gab about whatever he’s been up to.

Abrozinho, for example, talks about hunting, and then, switching gears, gives a more detailed than required account of his romantic life outside his otherwise happy marriage—a necessity of the travelling river man’s life I think he explains. He fetches a spiral-bound notebook in which he has recorded the first names of all twenty-three women he’s been with and reads them aloud to us in his soft, slightly slurred, melodious Portuguese. There’s something suggestively poetic to his recitation, each name containing a story, another human episode somewhere in the vastness of Amazonia.

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After that, he retrieves a stick of wood and describes the medicinal merits of its bark and sap. Its sap, radiating in blood-red concentric circles inside the wood, is used topically to mend wounds. The bark, steeped in hot water and drank as a tea, could treat an array of nagging ailments. It is also, he says, the river man’s Viagra. Hearing this, I neglect to ask whether the list of names he read out to us is thus unfinished.