The next few postings will attempt to capture the visual flotsam and jetsam left by the most recent few days In Brasil. This is not the naive scribble from a first trip fueled by sun, samba and caipirinhas. Rather this is a pen trying to come to grips with one of the more complicated places to write stories about just now in a world that morphs from month to month. Brasil engenders wild swings in mood, thought and sentiments. It is often difficult to do it justice and all too easy to do it an injustice when I feel so caught between lauding and lambasting. Here goes, and be patient as a few days there pack an almighty  sensory punch;
Google Earth can makes this all appear to be as easy as pie and in all fairness to those gone long before, It is. It just doesn’t quite feel like it at this very moment, sitting passively, inertly, much as Vern & Larry, the crash test dummies might, perched up here at the shiny sharp end of some very long con trails that I helped pay to spray across the world’s skies today. Delta providing some small measure of space from PDX to JFK and then as far as Sao Paulo from where the upstart Webjet took over for the milk run to Brasilia, to Fortaleza and onto Natal. Brasilians flying to the nations capital and beyond can only be viewed as “little people” if the dearth of space between seats on these aircraft is anything to judge by. An absurdly charitable sentence re the clean and punctual Webjet would end in the words ” a bit of a tight squeeze”.
It is while up here on the milk run and in particular the leg ( stretch would carry connotations of comfort) between Brasilia and Fortaleza that I spend some time gazing out of a window that I am wedged tight against… and the view is spectacular. It has the beauty to take a mind and its imaginings outside of the craft and for it to forget what the previous thirty hours have done to move a body ever closer to a DVT. I look from on high on vast, empty swaths of the states of Bahia & Ceara with just a sliver of territory at one point beneath, that I imagine rather than knowledgeably identify as the boundary between Piaui & Pernambuco. From up here it is an empty landmass, empty that is of roads, of visible infrastructure and the scars of progress. It gives off that wild and reckless feeling of having no boundaries at all. It reeks of opportunity and adventure, there is nothing to stop the wind, the heat, a person… and for all I know at this point there is nothing to make a person stop there at all.
Looking outward rather than downwards there are some of the most exquisite cloud formations imaginable and for some reason up comes the ‘cloud creche’ in my mind. The clouds have a hint of that “mackerel” sky to them as they scale off across the whole western horizon. They are beautifully back lit with a sun being gently extinguished in the Mato Grosso. Is it perhaps because of their small sizes, the infinite variety of height and color and in how they whisper in a shadow language to each other and to the land beneath? This arid landscape surely cannot be their birth place as where on earth would all that moisture come from to form and nourish… No, this must surely be the nursery. Where they come to grow and to form and  then reform…  and then take the directives that will see them float and spin throughout a continent, it’s reefy edge and then an ocean itself…  all before dissipating, heaven knows where.