Free Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes by Daniel L. Everett Page A

vem, seu Daniel”
(The recreation boat—a name that still causes me to scratch my head—is coming).
    I started to get the family up and pack, but Godofredo said, “Relax. It won’t be here for a while. We can have some coffee first.”
    We had coffee, I growing more anxious at the thought that the boat was going to pass by and we’d be stranded here for at least another week. As we finished our coffee, though, I heard voices outside his house. Men were coming, unbidden, to help me carry my family to the boat. After conversing for about fifteen minutes, the men slung ham mocks on poles and I gathered our belongings together. Keren and Shannon were put back in the hammocks. Cesária picked up Caleb, I got Kris in my arms, someone else took our bags, and we began walking in a procession illuminated by kerosene lamp and flashlight through clouds of mosquitoes in the humid blackness toward the port. There were no lights anywhere. But as we neared the bank, off in the distance like a spaceship, the boat’s searchlight intermittently roamed the bank and river, looking for floating logs that could damage its wooden hull, checking the distance of the boat from the banks, searching for rock shoals that could sink it. We began the precarious descent in the dark, down the steep bank, straining our eyes to see by the light of a flashlight. Suddenly I heard someone fall and tumble down a few steps. It was the man who had been holding the back end of Keren’s hammock pole. But even before he hit the ground, another man had taken his place and Keren didn’t seem to have noticed.
    We blinked our flashlights at the boat to signal it that we wanted a ride. As it approached out of the blackness of the starless, moonless night, more than twenty feet high and seventy feet long, its enormous searchlight came to rest on us down at the river’s edge. It looked us over, puny little earthlings on this Martian shore.
    The men unloaded Shannon and Keren onto the lowest deck of the three-deck boat. I put everything else on board, including Kristene and Caleb, and the boat pulled out. Suddenly the friends from the Auxiliadora were gone, swallowed up in the Amazonian night. Would I ever see them again? What would happen now? I hung all five hammocks that we had been loaned by folks at the Auxiliadora in a near frenzy, worried that Kristene and Caleb might fall into the river, that Keren or Shannon would be stepped on as they lay unprotected on the deck, and that someone might try to steal our few belongings. After hanging our hammocks, I moved everyone and our baggage to the second deck. Then I gathered all our bags underneath my own hammock, settled my family in, and tried to get some sleep. I put everyone close to me so that I could hear and feel if anyone awoke or needed me.
    The top deck of our boat was a bar area. Underneath the bottom deck there was storage. The boat was dirty, with thick brown paint covering the floors, whitewashed rails about one yard high around the sides, and blue paint on the hull. It was painted white everywhere else. I had known about these boats from reading, but this was the first time I had seen one up close. There were perhaps one hundred passengers on the vessel.
    Throughout the Amazon River system, whether in Brazil, Peru, Colombia, or any other Amazonian country, a passenger boat is built pretty much the same. One begins with a massive frame for the hull, built from three- or four-inch-thick planks of a water-resistant, sturdy wood, such as
itauba.
The frame for a smallish boat will be about ten yards long and three yards wide. The rest of the heavy wooden structure of the hull is fashioned from two- to three-inch-thick boards, with spaces between them filled tightly with rope or other fiber and caulk, then covered with putty and paint. The rope and fibers are driven in with a caulking mallet and a caulking iron (like a chisel). The hull (
batelão
in Portuguese) has to be able to withstand blows from floating