An insider had told us its exact location: When you leave the city center, drive eight kilometers east, go past the police station and the gas station, then look carefully on the left, under the pylons, against the tire retreading center. "You can't miss it!" he had claimed. Yet we didn't see a single monument at first glance. And then suddenly, someone in the car shouted. "That's it! It's over there!" The car turned and swerved. Too bad for the trucks angrily sounding their horns, the first stop was non-negotiable. It was a strange location for a monument, lost on the side of the road amid waterlogged pastures, sinister-looking "sex motels" and warehouses rusted to the core.
All that we could see was the trunk of a gigantic walnut tree, cut with a chainsaw and cast in concrete. Rotten from moisture and overgrown with weeds, it had nothing to boast of. Small purple flowers and embaubas – lobed-leaves plant savored by sloths – were growing from its cracks. A smell of oblivion and nothingness was in the air.
Affixed near the trunk, a black plaque resembling a death notice, struggled to convey the importance of the place: "On these banks of the Xingu, in the middle of the Amazon jungle, the President of the Republic launched the construction of the Trans-Amazonian highway, giving a historical impetus to the conquest and colonization of this gigantic green world." This was followed by the name, "Altamira," and a date, "October 9, 1970." The day a road was born was the day the great forest died.
War against nature
This is where our story begins: in Altamira, in the middle of the fields near the tumultuous waters of the Xingu River. Here, in the heart of the Brazilian state of Para, an unnamed war began five decades ago: the one against nature. Its first victims were the tens of billions of trees, on whom now depends the fate of the climate, of the planet and even humanity. The Amazon forest is its battlefield, and the Trans-Amazonian is its front line.
"So, what do you think of the 'president's trunk'?" Antonio Ubirajara Umbuzeiro asked us while suppressing a smile. In Portuguese, the word "trunk" also means penis. The joke helps break the ice. Our host, an air traffic controller, has a deadpan sense of humor. In his canary yellow house full of trinkets, the 50-year-old man devotes his time to poetry and science fiction. As for his chow-chow dog, he has built a giant kennel shaped like a Swiss chalet, complete with lights and a wooden door. "You have to knock before you enter!" he said without laughing.
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