The first gate I pass each day separates my neighborhood from those who live outside it, some of whom are indeed desperate. It’s one of those solid metal sliding jobs, corrugated and painted brown, and it rides creakily along a track and comes to rest like the unhinged jaw of some futuristic genetically modified urban beast.

I’m both grateful for the gate and wish it weren’t necessary, and most days I don’t think about it at all and that’s probably the case for anyone who’s been in Brazil for very long.

After a few minutes of local, neighborhood-type driving, I make a left hand turn in front of oncoming traffic going both ways across four lanes. To my left, vehicles slow for a speed bump, offering me a chance to dart into the divider, where I wait for a space to complete my turn, or to wait finger-bitingly until I have an opening.

After making the left, I move to the far right lane to avoid a constellation of bone-jarring and coffee-spilling sinkholes, then I slow down and drive over the first of around twelve speed humps that lie in wait on the daily drive, like maybe the splayed-out fingers of the beast.

Of course, too, there are lights. But lights, and lane lines, and cones, seem to function more as suggestions than anything else. About halfway through the twenty-minute drive, for example, I encounter a traffic light pointed clearly at me, but when it’s green, my lane of cars alternates with a lane of traffic coming from a street to my right.

In Brazil, what’s needed to control the flow of cars, apparently, are walls or gates or guards or bumps. A colleague tells me that the “Brazilian roll”–an ever so slight reduction in speed at a stop sign or red light–actually has to do with the historical fact that lots of people used to get robbed at intersections. In addition to safety, there seems to be on Brazilian streets a casual relationship with the rules, something I’ve written a bit about elsewhere.

Some roads of my commute have two lanes, and others have one, but it’s not completely clear what the difference is. I’ve been passed on the right and the left, and on both sides at once, although the vehicle on my right was a motorcycle and motorcyclists here in Sao Paulo do whatever they want to do, so that doesn’t necessarily count.

So far, I’ve arrived at my destinations in one piece, and I’m choosing to experience my time on the roads with fellow paulistanos as a rousing affirmation of the human soul’s desire to be unconstrained by arbitrary and artificial rules.

But when I arrive at work, an earpiece-wearing security guard waves me through the driveway gate, and then at the mouth of the parking garage I scan my ID badge to open yet another gate. I work behind a phalynx of security designed to keep the world out, and the suits, earpieces, steel, and firearms make me feel less liberated that I do out on the roads, but maybe that’s just the way things are.

To obtain my Brazilian driver’s license, I underwent a mandatory psycho-metric examination in a small group: three Brazilians (or, at least, able Portuguese speakers) and myself. Seated in middle-school sized desk-chair combos, each of us was issued a sheet of paper and asked to draw vertical lines approximately one-cm tall across the paper until told to stop, at which point we should draw one horizontal one-cm line. This we all did, happily. We repeated this procedure three times, at which point our proctor collected the papers and our pencils. What information could they have been seeking from such a test? 

At the time, I found the test as curious and baffling as anything I’ve ever done. And yet, indeed, some of the gates I encounter each day are corrugated and look somewhat like a set of vertical lines, and others are those arm-type gates which look very much like single horizontal ones.

Reading and Listening

I finished reading To Shake the Sleeping Self, in which US-native Jedediah Smith relates his bicycle ride from Oregon to Patagonia. He also noticed urban Latin security as he descended from the rural Andes mountains to the more “civilized” part of Argentina:

As I rode in, I saw something new: big, well-constructed suburban houses. Stucco. Clean handsome construction, and a few that were even fancy, with Spanish tile roofs and swirling iron over the windows and on the gates, and clean cars in the driveways. The houses were still walled off. I realized that almost every sizable home I’d seen in Latin America was behind a wall. I wondered if I’d ever see a house with no walls or fences in Latin America. Like the ones I grew up with in Nashville, where the yard just blended invisibly with the neighbors’.

Smith’s book isn’t bad, but it’s extremely millennially. C.f.:

I crawled in my tent feeling fresh and clean. I snuggled up and put my winter jacket behind my head on top of my backpack for a pillow. I opened my laptop and checked what movies I had downloaded. It would be nice to have some wine and watch a movie. All alone out here. Outside, the river’s white noise filled the air.

Animal Spirits recent Re-Kindled episode featured Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death, which I’ve read several times, and I was happy to hear the hosts discussing Postman’s truer than ever claim that “The news of the day is a figment of our technological imagination.”

Barry Lopez doesn’t read travel books about the places he visits. He buys and studies bird guides; ornithology is his Baedeker. I preferred Arctic Dreams to his latest, Horizon, but it does contain gold:

One morning there I spotted a pale chanting goshawk in the top of a dead tree. This particular accipeter hunts other birds, as well as reptiles and small mammals. Like all avian predators of its type, the goshawk’s hunting success depends on depth perception. The bird had its back to me as I approached. I imagined it gazing intensely at an expanse of savannah grass before it, searching for a creature upon which to swoop. As I drew closer, the bird rotated its head and stared down at me. Its right eye had been torn out of its socket. The hole was rimmed with blood-matted feathers.

It turned back to its survey of the savannah, ignoring me.

Often, when I want to give up, I think of that bird. How many other such severely wounded birds are there in the world, still hunting?

RIP DFW 9/12/08