Dark blue melded with fiery orange as the sun set against a backdrop of trees. The river below glowed. It was a kaleidoscope of colour just as Rodrigo had promised. We watched the sun inch towards the river’s horizon.
Strangers really, but a quick conversation on the street as I had been lining up my camera to accommodate the town’s famous three water towers had led to an impromptu tour around his gallery. Enjoying his company and his quick wit, I had spent the day being guided by his photographic skill and local knowledge.
The view we looked at now had been captured by Rodrigo and published in a magazine. This sunset over the Madeira River had been seen by thousands. It had given him the courage to open the gallery and take many more photographs of his home town; the river flowing alongside the Brazilian rainforest was inspiration for many.
Silent now, the river flowed serenely to meet the great force of the Amazon some way ahead. Downstream was the hydroelectric dam in its first stage of building. Here, the river was broken and confused.
Forced off its natural course and meander, the river was being re-directed. Flooding had destroyed the bridge linking the two sides of the river. The damage led to long delays for the morning commuter traffic edging along an improvised bridge hastily erected by the army days before. With a Brazilian indifference to time, the family I stayed with had not appeared to be perturbed by the delay. However, there was a flurry of exasperated sighs when they talked of the dam taking away their long serving maid. She had left to take a better paid job working there.
I clutched the beaded necklace given as a gift from the indigenous family Rodrigo had stopped to photograph earlier. He told me they had lost their home as the land they once owned had been consumed by the river’s greedy flow. Mercury levels were their concern as the disrupted river was disturbing toxins. Fears over the fish, their livelihood, were discussed. Language wasn’t needed to see the anger in the jerky hand movements as the elder pointed at the river – once a benevolent friend but now a grasping foe.
Back in town, a power outage left us in darkness on the road where Rodrigo’s gallery stood. The government had given the go–ahead to the dam after a huge electricity failure in Sao Paulo. The Amazon dam would provide Sao Paulo, the powerhouse of Brazil, with a reliable source at a cheap price. Not so for the people here, their electricity and lives would remain as chaotic and disrupted as the flow of the Madeira River.