Amazon Life — The River and People

Small boats of impoverished people vanishing into the currents and history. Water the color of the people; the water the color of black tea and cream. Cities once proud, but now, disintegrating into the diminishing jungle and consuming the inhabitants with it.

People fish for flesh-eating piranha while another bathes downriver. A boy with a stick pees in the water with an audience in attendance upon a packed 3 story boat with no concern or shame. They are a happy people, living in concert with the river. Its flow is their blood, their life, their death. What it does and where it goes so do they till the day they ruin it, or at least allow it to be.

Whether by indifference, ignorance, capital needs, or just plain greed, in so they too will be ruined The Clouds are endless, the Amazon giving birth to the givers of its own life. So much water. The rains come and for time you feel you can swim while standing in a warm shower.

The clouds part and the water is gone into the ground and back into the air nearly the moment the suns rays reach its earth. Night falls. The city looks clean. I heard a woman call Manaus the Paris of the jungle. Wait till morning.