Cooling down south of the border

Most weekends Zeno, my black Lab, and I get to climb up the small mountain range that embraces, with one arm at least, my small town in the interior of Brazil. Zeno takes his weekly bath in one of the ferruginous pools of cascading water, just by diving repeatedly after a tossed tennis ball, and I get to clear my head in such bracingly pure air that bright orange and yellow lichen grows in patches on bare rock faces.

Since moving from the monster city of São Paulo nearly six years ago, I have done without cable or satellite hook-up and my Brazilian t.v. only picks up, its rabbit ears fully splayed, a channel and a half of local fare. Consequently, I have done without television news or newspaper deliveries for longer than I can remember, which is just as well these days, as I get to avoid most of the hothouse humidity of the States during an election year. With my patchy internet connection, I do get to peruse a few web sites, including one from England that reproduces over 700 newspaper front pages, a surfeit of electronic information parading as the real thing which, disturbingly, often dissolves into digital chaos before my eyes. Ditto the primaries.

The range is called Serra do São José and further up has a few ‘slave sidewalks’ or flagstone trails laid down by slaves nearly 300 years ago, in order to help gold-ladden mules get mushed over the passes. No longer. But the stone pathways are still there, complete with cross ridges and other erosion control contrivances, and are in impressive condition considering their age and the violent thunderstorms that sweep over the land – in fact, they appear better engineered than many more contemporary public works. Our hike lifts us up from Tiradentes’s high plain altitude of 900 meters by another 300 or so, and transitions from Atlantic rainforest tucked into the range’s protected foothills through patches of cerrado (the world’s most diverse prairieland and Brazil’s second largest biome) to a sparse, rocky landscape called campo rupestre of stunningly stark beauty. The range is a federally protected environmental area and was recently upgraded to a state Dragonfly reserve (due to over 18 sub-species, encouraged, once again, by the pristine air), but unfortunately this does little to discourage much environmental degradation, caused by the ranchers who shortsightedly burn the high fields, to the weekend joy-riding dirt bikers who cause much trail erosion, including the chipping and breaking of those 300 year old flagstones. The range is composed principally of quarzite bedrock topped by mineral-deficient sandy soils, so continued burning is more likely to create a desert than a sustainable pasture. Such is the price of lack of education, respect of laws or follow-through.

Stretching my legs during the hike up, I stop occasionally to dig out the erosion sluices clogged up by the last storm. The physical labor gives me a chance to reflect on the political donnybrook spreading across North America and I can’t help but believe that many group- and holier-than-thou thinkers are setting themselves up for a fall this autumn as we divide and sub-divide into so many tribes. It’s a pity. Sometimes I feel that the U.S. has turned into another nation than the one I knew.

Zeno is nearly a three-year old Lab, and was given as a gift to me by a kennel up in the mountains outside of Rio after my last Lab, Atlas, died young. I tried various times to pay for Zeno – who in local terms would have cost two monthly minimum salaries – but the unfailing generosity of Brazilians is hard to buck. Today's will be a four hour hike, an hour up to the top, an hour and more along the high ridge, down the far side beyond the Mailman’s Cross (for a colonial letter carrier of ill tidings, who was murdered on the spot – how’s that for blaming the messenger?) to the dipping pools, then an hour and more back over the range’s spinal column, descending finally to my small town of 6,000 souls.

A cool wind dominates that early morning, with screeching caracarás gyrating in the tall escarpment’s updraft. The southern hemisphere’s autumn is pressing up from southern Brazil in rolling gray-bottomed cloud banks. (As usual I am delighted by the always-alive sempre-viva flowers, which looks like a small burst of frozen white fireworks.) Then the sun wins out by mid-morning, such that when I tilt my head upwards the sunlight refracts off the lower edge of my rimless shades, splashing my corneas. Zeno, leashless in a wildlife area, has been taught to pause by my left side for permission before charging ahead on trail or field. He brushes my left hand with his nose and when I look down his brown eyes also fill with the tropical light – just before I say "Go!"

N.B. The doctoral thesis Field Guide to the Orchids of the Serra de São José (1991), by Czech-Brazilian Ruy J. Valká Alves, has always contributed greatly to my geological understanding of the Serra.