My first sojourn in the city of Manaus, at the confluence of the Rio Negro and the Amazon, the remotest metropolis on Earth, came at the invitation of Brazil’s air force and was instigated, according to one theory, by Margaret Thatcher.

Where the waters meet: The tannin-rich Rio Negro and the sediment-laden Rio Solimões collide to form the Amazon River. Evaristo SA/AFP/Getty Images

I had been camped on Rio Cuieiras, a blackwater tributary of the Rio Negro, in the company of a team of French biologists studying the flooded forest. The French, anxious to begin work, started collecting specimens before our research permits were finalized—a mistake. The next morning, with a thunderous whopping
of rotors, a helicopter circled our clearing. We stared stupidly upward until one Frenchman cried “C’est un hélicoptère de l’armée!” at which we scurried about camp, hiding butterfly nets and sweeping plant-presses and other gear off the table. The helicopter landed. An air force captain exited and shut the camp down. We were sent downriver in disgrace, banished to Manaus.

My French colleagues insisted that there must be more behind the debacle than the tiny technical indiscretion of our premature research. They blamed Margaret Thatcher. The Iron Lady, never famous for her subtlety and tact, had recently declared that the Amazon Basin was too important to planetary health to be managed by Brazil alone. Enraged, the Brazilians had retaliated. Or so the theory went.

My room in the Hotel Anaconda looked past the ornate façade of a once-fine house from the rubber era, then over the tin roof of a derelict waterfront warehouse, abandoned to the black vultures perched along its peak, and finally out across the Rio Negro. The Black River was a pale early-morning blue when I opened the curtains for my first look at Manaus by daylight. Small hyacinth rafts drifted on the current. Above the water the vault of the sky was cloudless and vast. I stepped out onto my narrow wrought-iron balcony. The day smelled of woodsmoke, dust, and wide expanse of water. Pirogues were tracing their delicate wakes on the igarapés, the creeks and channels that insinuate the city from the river. More pirogues moved on the Rio Negro itself, some powered by oars, others by small outboard engines with very long shafts. A riverboat, one of the double-decker motores that are the workhorses of the Amazon Basin, all superstructure and no freeboard, chugged downstream. In the distance its two-stroke marine diesel ponk-ponked faintly but resonantly within the hollow of the hull.

The river traffic all seemed to hug the shore, leaving the middle channel completely empty. What was happening on the far side, I could not say, for the river here is more than five miles across. At its confluence with the Amazon, just below Manaus, the Rio Negro discharges four Mississippis, the biggest tributary of the greatest river on earth.

Raising binoculars, I spotted a floating dock and focused on a bright yellow fuel drum in the mid deck. The Rio Negro fluctuates about 50 feet between the wet and dry seasons. I tried to imagine the low-water river of a few months ago, with the yellow drum and its dock fallen about seven stories beneath where they levitated now. I found I could not.

Early morning market: Fresh fish are unloaded from trawlers at the Municipal Market. Colin McPherson/Corbis

Rise and fall seem endemic to this spot: The fortunes of Manaus are subject to the same sort of wild fluctuation. The place began as an army outpost on the sandbar at the mouth of the Rio Negro, a fortress called São Jose da Barra. The settlement grew into a town called Villa de Barra, and finally into the city of Manaus, capital of the gigantic Brazilian state of Amazonas. It was a city built on the rubber boom, and, soon enough, a city undone when rubber trees were introduced to India, Malaya, and Ceylon. Manaus was moribund for a half-century after the rubber crash, then in 1967 the government declared it a free port, and the population boomed again. The 1980s saw another decline, but since then the city has rebounded once more and now has a population of nearly 2 million. Manaus has become the trade center and central ganglion for Brazil’s development plans for the Amazon Basin. For those worried about the disappearance of rainforest, it amounts to a sort of Sodom.

Manaus is not one of those sequential cities, like Troy, that episodically make themselves over from scratch. The boom times do not pave over the busts; new edifices just spring up alongside the ruins of the old. Manaus presents all its periods simultaneously; the bones of the rubber era stick out everywhere. Here stands a fine rococo façade with nothing behind but 20-foot saplings growing up through charred beams. There stands a palatial turn-of-the-century residence divided, in this poorer age, into residential units where each owner responds to a territorial imperative by daubing his little stretch of housefront a different hue. The caboclos, the local people of Amazonia, like the Indians before them, are slash-and-burn agriculturalists, and the city planners of Manaus seem to have adopted this principle. When a building falls to ruin, the architects move on like caboclos, leaving that clearing on the block to heal itself.

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