Crossing the River Read Online Free PDF Page A

Brazilian life. Maybe they knew what they were talking about. After all, they were no strangers to travel.
    Getting out of Salvador is a project, no matter how you work it, whether inland by looping four-lane highways, or through the beach crowds along the water, the way Peter and I did. After only four days in Brazil, we missed our kids but were also enjoying our freedom.We dodged our little Fiat—zippier than our used Subaru back home—through barefoot crowds of bronzed bodies. Then we passed a wrecked taxi: up on the curb, bifurcated by a fallen steel telephone pole. The car looked like a crushed soda pop can.
    I flashed back to careening through the streets of Cairo when I was twelve, my fingers clutching the squishy backseat of a cab as my father tersely told the driver the one phrase he had learned in Arabic: “I’m not in a hurry.”
    Soberer now, we made our way more slowly out of town onto the Linha Verde—the Green Line—the two-lane coastal highway that veers to the northeast and heads out toward the tip of Brazil’s bulge. As landlocked Montanans, we had decided, somewhat arbitrarily, that it would be nice to find a town on the ocean.
    The road wasn’t crowded. There were none of the top-heavy trucks, axles askew, moving diagonally down the highway that we’d seen in other developing countries. Rather, the occasional shiny SUV; maybe an air-conditioned, double-decker luxury bus; a pickup or two. The road, although narrow, looked newly paved. The foliage shifted from palms to bamboo to drier pine. We spent the night in tiny Praia do Forte, home to a sea turtle conservation center and weekend condos overlooking a small harbor. Could this be our town? No. Charming, but too small and too touristy.
    We crossed the border into the state of Sergipe, cattle country. The walls of thick foliage thinned and gave way to dry rolling hills, humpbacked white Brahma cows, and stunted inland palms. We swung back out to the coast and pulled into Sergipe’s sprawling capital, Aracaju. Though the downtown’s five- to six-story buildings were more modern, they looked worn out, tired.
    â€œArajacu? Aracaja? Why is this name so hard to remember?” we said laughing, wondering if we would ever get a grip on Portuguese.
    After driving miles out of town along a sand-swept beach highway, in search of a nonexistent hotel listed in our guidebook, we backtracked, checked into another, and crossed the busy ocean drive, lit by nighttime stadium lights. Trekking across a deserted beach, narrowing our eyes against gritty, blowing sand, we tumbled down a steep bankand fell into the ocean for a swim in the dark. The verdict: too big, too windy, too soulless. We crossed Aracaju off the list. At breakfast the next day, we pulled out the map.
    â€œHey, Peter, this looks good. Penedo, in the state of Alagoas. It’s a small town. It’s not on the ocean, but it’s on a big river, and it’s only . . . maybe . . . thirty kilometers up from the coast.”
    We looked it up in the guide.
    â€œâ€˜Colonial masterpiece of the state,’” I read, “and you get to it by car ferry. I love that!” When I was growing up, one could only get to my family’s cabin on the island in Puget Sound by car ferry.
    Leaving Aracaju, we headed inland and poked along the main two-lane highway. It was clogged with earth-moving equipment. The operators seemed to have torn up the road and then left for a permanent coffee break. Finally, we pulled off onto the route that cut down to the Rio São Francisco. The view suddenly improved, as though we’d flipped to a prettier calendar page. The fields were greener. Ample, spreading trees stood alone, blooming white. A hill town rose to the left, its entrance drive lined with geometrically clipped bushes. Fluttering stands of eucalyptus flanked another rise. The road dropped. There was the river.
    â€œWhoa, it’s wide,” said Peter,