The Lunatic Express (5 page)

There was nowhere to go, nothing to do; we drank as much as we liked. We talked, mostly—visited, as my mother would say of the long conversations people had in her native North Dakota. Kleyton was a half-Peruvian doctor from Rio Branco, being posted to a boat out of Manaus to tend to small river towns for six months. He was small, with wire-rimmed glasses and a baseball cap. Yesterday he had been all over Val and Irma, dancing with them, touching their shoulders, trying to make them laugh. Neither one had shown any particular interest, though, and now he was angry.

“Those women,” he said, shaking his head and nodding toward Irma and Val, dancing and swaying in their own world, “they are prostitutes.”

“I don’t think so,” I said.

“No, they are,” he insisted. “They are bad women! You shouldn’t talk to them.”

Kleyton was a man obsessed. Every conversation turned to women, as it often did throughout my journey when I talked to other men. If there was an international language between men in the world, it was about women. The truth was, we were all obsessed. “In Brazil, all the women have curvy backs,” he said. “But in America, their whole bodies are curvy, right?”

We were in a bubble, the world of the boat on the river our own; it was strangely liberating. In the old days, I mused, every trip across the country by train, every trip to another continent by boat, was like this. An escape. A suspension of time, and a time for reflection.

The
Moreira
was clean—a crewman was always mopping—but there was only so much you could do with 200 people on a boat with four bathrooms. They were wet, stiflingly hot wooden rooms the size of closets, and smelled so strong I couldn’t breathe. To bathe, you turned a faucet and eighty-degree river water poured from the ceiling. Communal sinks lined a wall of the hammock deck; I stood in line and shaved and brushed my teeth in front of an audience. Personal space, cleanliness, silence, safety—I was getting used to not having any for long periods of time. But I was also starting to realize they were an unbelievable luxury. In America, the richer you were the more things you had and the bigger they were—but money didn’t just buy things. After so many days on crowded buses and boats, it was becoming clear that more than anything else, money bought insulation and protection. From wind and rain and heat, from other people, from noise, from pollution. The deeper I went, the clearer this became.

W
E ATE, WE DOZED
, we bumped against each other, the river flowed on. Once I stumbled on the captain having nits picked out of his hair. By the afternoon of the third day we passed more and more small cattle farms carved out of the green, surrounding weatherbeaten shacks on stilts near the river’s edge. My hammock mates packed their bags, brushed their teeth, washed their hair, and waited. By nine, as we plowed up the Rio Negro, lights began to appear, and then more and more. They were so bright—a shocking industrial brightness illuminating huge oceangoing freighters, a world of metal and power and muscle, after nothing but wood and water and sky and green. “It’s scary-looking,” said Kayla, a hairdresser returning to Manaus after three months visiting her father in Bolivia. Like Marina on the bus to Lima, she, too, had seen so much and so little—nowhere but Santa Cruz, Bolivia, and Manaus and hundreds of miles of rain forest and river in between. “I’ve never been to Rio, to São Paulo,” she said, as we averted our eyes from the blinding sodium vapor lights.

We slid past piers where hundreds of similar riverboats were berthed and tied up at the end of a floating wooden dock, and in a mad rush dispersed. One moment we were all together, the next everyone was gone, real life grabbing us by the lapels, pulling us in all too fast. For a few days I had been part of a community, and then it was gone, evaporated, and I was alone again.

.    .    .

I
’D BEEN TRAVELING
almost nonstop for a month, and it was time to go to Africa, and the only way to get there was from São Paulo, Brazil. I booked my flight from Manaus through Porto Alegre on TAM, Brazil’s national carrier. While Cubana was statistically the most dangerous national airline in the world, TAM was rated the third most dangerous in Latin America—and that was before two recent crashes. The problem was fairly straightforward: Brazil was booming and it was big and its roads were terrible. Lots of Brazilians were making money; more and more of them were taking to the skies, flying on a system that was being overwhelmed and that required nearly every plane to fly in and out of São Paulo, one of the largest cities on earth, through one of the most crowded and urban airports on earth.

Delays of hours and sometimes even days were frequent at Congonhas, the oldest and busiest of São Paulo’s three airports, with notoriously short runways that were surrounded by dense blocks of high-rise apartments and frequently pummeled by heavy rain. The runways at JFK in New York stretched for more than 14,000 feet; Bogotá’s were over 12,000 feet. Congonhas’s longest runway, however, stretched a mere 6,362 feet. In 1996 a TAM jet plowed through an apartment building on takeoff, killing all ninety-six people on board. In 2006 two Boeing 737s nearly skidded off the end of the runway (and a Gol Airlines 737 collided in midair over the Amazon with a private jet and fell to earth, killing all 154 passengers). In February 2007 a Brazilian court banned all Boeing 737 and Fokker 100 jets from taking off at Congonhas—the airport had been closed an average of three times a month because of heavy rains—citing short runways, decaying tarmac, and slippery conditions. People protested, however—the ban forced passengers to the much farther away Guarulhos International Airport—and an appeals court reversed the ruling. Soon after, the International Airline Pilots Association issued a pointed warning to all pilots flying in Brazil, citing “a lack of proper government oversight and control” of aircraft. Then, just five months after that, on July 16, 2007, a turboprop ATR 42 had skidded off the runway, though no one was injured. And the next day, TAM flight 3054 landed in heavy rain and it, too, failed to stop as the runway ended.

I booked a ticket on the very same flight. And found myself in shock when I hit the airport in Manaus, not twelve hours after stepping off the
Moreira
. The floor was nubbed rubber, clean enough to eat from. Diamonds and gold and pearls sparkled behind glass counters. Men in suits and women in skinny jeans and silver flats padded past. After a month on bad buses and in the near constant mud and dirt of mountain and jungle roads and winding rivers and wooden boats, it all looked hard, shiny, slick. I was overwhelmed by the orderliness of it all. A disembodied voice called out my flight; I handed my preprinted boarding pass to a woman in lipstick and big hair and heels, and strolled down the Jetway to the shiny new air-conditioned Airbus 330 filled with seats upholstered in orange plastic. A stewardess passed out hard candy in individual wrappers from a wicker basket. Everything about flying, about operating airplanes, was the polar opposite of the buses and boats and cars I’d been traveling. Schedules, technology, pilot and safety training, baggage handling and tracking, maintenance, air traffic control, radio communications, and fuel management—the whole enterprise required a quantum leap in skills and organization and government intervention above the bus drivers with their gold teeth and tattoos and the river captain with nits in his hair. The wooden riverboat, the buses, they all had schedules, more or less, but not really; they left when the boat or bus was full; they arrived when they arrived. People expected no more. The schedules took a back seat to reality. Ditto with maintenance and safety: tires were bald, buses were overloaded, the system was upended with corruption. Usually the only consequence was a flat tire and a delay, and when tragedy did strike, its victims were poor, people whom no one but their immediate family and friends cared about.

Brazil’s airline system was expanding by leaps and bounds—in fact, more people were starting to fly all over the world in places they hadn’t ever before; planes were becoming much more democratic. New low-cost airlines were popping up everywhere, not just in Brazil but in every country that had a burgeoning middle class, from Indonesia to Nigeria to India. But the underlying systems that made flying safe hadn’t caught up. In America the days of planes filled with sexy, eye-candy stewardesses were long gone, and planes themselves often felt like unkempt cattle cars. Stewardesses were more often than not stewards, who stomped down the aisles brusquely jerking your seatbacks forward on final descent. But behind the cranky utilitarianism of flying on, say, United lay a powerful statistic: at that point in my journey no regularly scheduled commercial jet operated by a U.S. airline had crashed in two years. Behind all those aged flight attendants American businessmen complained about lay decades of seniority, women and men whose real job wasn’t passing out pretzels or looking good, but simple passenger safety should anything go awry.

On TAM, the old, romantic patina of flying as luxury was all there; the Brazilians had it down pat. The stewardesses wore tight-fitting blue skirts and clingy white tops with plunging necklines and four-inch stilettos, the Airbus was spotless, and they handed that candy out to us before we even took off. But as we roared down the runway and rotated up, no one checked to see if any seatbelts were fastened or the seatbacks were up. Behind the façade lay an air traffic control system run by the Brazilian military that was in complete disarray.

All of which was on my mind when I boarded TAM flight 3058, from Porto Alegre to São Paulo the next morning, nine months after the very same flight—then called 3054—had killed every passenger on board. That morning, like this one, had been completely routine. Nothing special. No prescient foreshadowing drumbeats. Just a full load of businessmen and businesswomen in dark suits and creased designer blue jeans clutching cell phones and BlackBerries and slim attaché cases. I looked around. None of us expected to die. People had meetings to get to. Families to see. The captain in his starched white shirt, four gold bars on his epaulettes, stood at the door to the flight deck and greeted everyone. Disasters happened quickly, I realized. One minute you were watching
Rambo
on the TV screen, the next the bus was diving off a cliff. I fastened my seatbelt. The woman next to me chatted on her phone; I thought of how many people on that TAM flight had talked to friends, family, and colleagues from their seats—their last conversations.

We took off. Sun streamed through the windows. Had the same flight ever crashed twice? I wondered. I looked around. On that flight, as on this one, nothing but the usual banal movements. People leafed through their in-flight magazines. Adjusted the airflow overhead. Sipped Coca-Cola in plastic cups. Movements that meant nothing, except that on 3054 they meant everything because those passengers were doing them for the last time in their lives. I knew I wasn’t going to die, that this time this flight wasn’t going to crash. But, no doubt, that’s exactly how they’d felt nine months ago, on this same trajectory, dropping an hour later out of the clouds over the endless acres of São Paulo’s rooftops, coming closer and closer, so close you could almost see through the windows of people’s apartments. On 3054 there had been one piece of information that the passengers didn’t know, though the pilots did: only one of the airplane’s two thrust reversers was working.

I tightened my seatbelt, looked out the window. Sun and puffy cumulus clouds; on 3054 that morning the ceiling was low, rain pouring down—that was the only difference. As far as I knew, that is. Were both of this plane’s thrust reversers working? Had all its maintenance been done? I had no idea; none of us did. And that was the rub with airplanes like this one: everything looked so good. On a bus in the Andes I braced myself for disaster, but on a shiny, new-looking airplane with pilots in white shirts and stewardesses in tight skirts, what could go wrong? I knew what was happening up in the cockpit because I had a transcript of 3054’s cockpit voice recorder, and because it was a closely followed script that never varied from one flight to the next.

P
ILOT:
Flaps one.

C
OPILOT:
Speed checked.

P
ILOT:
Clear status.

C
OPILOT:
Clear status. Clear.

C
ONGANHAS TOWER:
TAM three zero five four, reduce speed for the approach, and call the tower on frequency one two seven one five, good afternoon.

A grinding sound—flaps extending and landing gear coming down.

P
ILOT:
Good afternoon. Landing gear down.

C
OPILOT:
Landing gear down.

P
ILOT:
Flaps three.

C
OPILOT:
Speed checked. Flaps three.

Sitting over the wings, I looked out the window and watched the flaps extend.

P
ILOT:
Flaps full, standby final checklist.

C
OPILOT:
Standing by.

The rooftops were even closer now. The woman next to me closed her magazine. I noticed a man in front of me, through the crack in the seats, checking his watch. We’d be there in a few minutes, another flight over.

“Cabin crew,” said the pilot over the PA system. “Clear to land.”

Back in the cockpit, the pilot said, “Auto thrust. Speed. Landing.”