Problem: the boat left Belém at exactly the time Brazil was scheduled to play Colombia in the World Cup quarter finals. Solution: the boat—which lacked many of the trivial luxuries like wi-fi and, uh, ice—was equipped with a satellite dish rigged on a periscope-type setup. One of the deckhands was charged with the sole responsibility of compensating for the boat's turns by maintaining the dish's orientation to the satellite signal. And when he slipped up, things got tense. But it didn't happen often, and by the time the game was over, we were well on our way deep into the river basin.
After an evening of chatting on the rooftop, we all turned in a bit early to find where we had rigged our hammocks among the chaotic web on the lower deck. And for the first time in months, there on the open water with wind at cruising speed, I felt legitimately cold. It was hard even to be upset at lost sleep, so sweet was the chill of the madrugada.*
But arrived we did, shortly after sunrise. Jean's Aunt Anna greeted us at the port and took us back to the house. From that moment onward, we were met with nothing but familial hospitality, including hours of swimming at the little river house, hours more of joke-filled conversations that often didn't include a single moment of sincerity, and incredible home-cooked food (this is where I learned to like maniçoba, a stew based on manioc leaves cooked over seven days).
We also made our way around the river a little bit, including a visit to Corcovado, a village with a past more prosperous than the present. We stumbled upon a giant concrete shell of a building crawling with vines and trees. The forest was thicker inside it than outside, and trees grew in every corner, some rooted twenty feet up a wall, anchored in growing cracks. According to some residents, it was a small rubber plant during the borracha, or rubber boom. For them, the story of Corcovado is one of political promises going unfulfilled. But the church is still swept and kites still flown. Hope didn't seem necessarily to drip from the tongues of those telling the story of the village, but life still nodded along there.
Life in Breves was slow and sweet, but the time went so fast. After the week-intensive English immersion program of nonstop activities, all I needed was to row along the river, peek around in the forest, swim in the sunshine, and rest afterward. Breves was just that.