 A Road to Somewhere Then and Now I’m often pushing people to seek out smaller publishers whose books are harder to find in bookstores. The reason they are harder to find has nothing to do with quality and everything to do with physical space. Whatever takes up retail space must pay its own way, and oftentimes “names” move faster. What I want to tell you about is a book I picked up a few weeks ago from one of those smaller presses. Journey on the Estrada Real: Encounters in the Mountains of Brazil is a travelogue/memoir of the author’s walk on the road originally built by the Portuguese around 1697. Neither the road nor the area is one I had heard of before, but I am enjoying it immensely. The road runs from the port of Praia dos Mineiros to Diamantina so named for the diamonds that were being naturally exposed by the creeks at the time Portuguese explorers turned up. It was used to remove gold and diamonds from Brazil and to ship in manufactured products for the Brazilians, thus benefiting Portugal in both directions. “The winding dirt road connected some of the world’s poorest people to some of the world’s wealthiest,” writes Glenn Alan Cheney, the man who is the cataloguer of this trip. Before the trip that became this book, Cheney had lived in that area. In 1985 he chose to abandon a public relations career in New York City for the life of a (unsuccessful) banana farmer in Mariana, Mina Gerais, about halfway up the Estrada Real. Fifteen years later he returned, this time to walk the two hundred miles of the trail “under tropical sun and chilly rain, climbing up and down mountains, all alone, with the risk of encountering bandits and snakes, of having a heart attack, of suffering from hunger and thirst and who know what-all, not to mention the financial and marital woes that would ensue from two months without income” because he felt it had to be done by someone before the road’s cultures died. Cheney begins not at the official beginning of the trail because there is no map of the entire trail nor is there any guidebook or even any trail markers. He did find a rough and “often erroneous” guide of the road from Mariana to Diamantina, and so that becomes the part he walks with a knapsack loaded with toilet paper, a change of clothes, a sleeping bag, an umbrella, a bottle of water, and some duct tape. Adding a straw hat and putting aside his fears and the crime warnings, he starts off: Buzzards have a strong presence in my predawn fears, they wait too where the dirt road of the Estrada Real meets the paved road that goes from Mariana toward the Timbopeba and Samarco hematite mines. If I were writing a novel about a trip down this road, I would not want my protagonist to begin his trip under the gaze of a dozen urubus perched on rocks and fence posts , enjoying the stench of something dead. They look like glum funeral directors interrupted in the middle of a meal. They stare at Lazaro and me as we shake hands and slap each other on the back. He takes my picture, then drives away with a toot of his horn and a wave out the window. I swing my pack up onto my shoulders and trudge toward the north under the sullen gaze of the urubus—a gaze that I can say with authority makes one’s skin crawl. His first stop is in Camargos, a village of a few dozen houses, where he meets up with Fernando, a beekeeper who shares his lunch of mexido (a mix of rice, beans, okra, and an unidentified herb), has a beer, and is able to find a bed and a toilet for the night with Manoel with whom he also has dinner and breakfast before again hitting the road. His days between villages or towns are little more than time on the road that is at times agonizingly uphill or down, filled with dirt, holes and rubble, and rarely with any marked sign or other determinant of direction. The latter is frustrating and never more so than when it causes him to go a mile or more out of his way and involves jungle. Yet there is also incredible beauty. Some of the churches—for all the towns have at least one—are hundreds of years old and many in disrepair, yet they remain exquisite. You might think as I did that most of the places along the road are small villages. There are those, but cities exist too among them Barão dos Cocais, a town of 25,000 where Cheney finds refuge from the rainy season. It’s an industrial town centered around a steel mill but it’s only an overnight stop on his way to Cocais, a town founded in 1703 “by two brothers, Antonio and João Furtako Leite, who were deported from Portugal for political activity. They chose the place because of its impressive forest of coconut palms, cocais. They built a chapel here and, unlike most Portuguese, preferred farming to looking for gold.” Cocais is facing hard economic times—even the churches were robbed of their artifacts by priests who came to conduct Mass—but some in the town see tourism as a way to save it. But not all. As Cheney moves along the trail—stopping in places with musical names like Born Jesus do Amparo, Conceição do Mato Dentrao, Itaponhoacanga, São Gonçalo do Rio das Pedras, Tapera—I move with him. When he changes from his $75 athletic shoes to his 75-cent sandals, I feel my toes catch the breeze as he does. When he sits down to a “meal fit for half a dozen kings,” I lick my lips. And when he describes the people, I fall in love with them as he does: Maria Eni has the kind of sincere smile and easy laugh that causes defenseless people like me to fall in love. She’s been a widow since 1993. Shortly after that tragic event, her son, known as Baixinho—Shorty—moved back from an industrial town on the outskirts of Belo Horizonte to help her run the pensão and the little grocery-bar that becomes a dance-hall on weekends. She does all her cooking on a fogão de lenha wood stove and grinds her coffee by hand. Almost all the food she serves comes from local cows, chickens, pigs, trees, bushes and fields. Her cornmeal is ground at a water-powered stone grist wheel just up the street. Wood for the stove comes from the local trees. She doesn’t buy much more than salt and olive oil, and can turn a decent profit on an organic meal that she sells, apolitically, for about a dollar and a half. This small book—it’s just over 200 pages—carries more than it seems it can of a rich history nearly unknown, I’d guess, to Americans. Not just reading it but sinking into it, soaking up the people, the towns and cities, the weather, the animals and waterfalls, flies, beer-cooled days, the generosity of strangers all while the afternoon fades into evening is akin to becoming part of it yourself. In the beginning of this piece, I said that the reason I encourage others to check out the smaller publishers I feature on this page is because of books like this. This book is available to everyone at any time. I think it should be on most bookshelves, but I recognize that simply isn’t possible in many stores. But it is worthy of being on your bookshelves. Upcoming Book Festivals: Also on Friday and Saturday, April 2 and 3, Akron, Ohio, will be hosting the Akron Antiquarian Book Fair. The doors will be open on Friday from 3:00-8:30 pm, and on Saturday from 10:00 to 4:00 at the John S. Knight Center. For more information, it's probably best to call them at . The Pub House: Imaging Books & Reading: Of Interest: This Week . . . Until next week, read well, read often and read on!
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