Green

Flying over the United States, there is a spotted horse or a porch swing on a small frame house. There are the Plains and the Rockies, flat land and yellow grass, white or brown hills. There are snake-rivers and snaking levees and the serpentine burial mounds of the Mississippians, and highways lying horizontal and grey. There are slow processions of soft-looking logs at twilight, along railways that look like braces running through what some frontier historian called the American desert.

From the sky, Brasil is green and multidimensional. 3D in emerald from about thirty-thousand feet. Alive and appearing to be original. Thick, bushy, motherly. An avalanche of curves and ribbons of green. The cities rise richly in the distance, and the creative homes of the poor are speckled orange and brown and cream, high and low and geometric. Jovial at such a height.

I was thinking of the term 'outro lado' as we were descending into Salvador and I could see the coastline around Baia de Todos os Santos. 'The other side.' I felt not like I was up above, but on the other side. I was on the sky side of the bay.

Years ago, when caravels arrived into the bay, they saw none of this maternal green. They saw blurred plantlife that dangled over the edge of the ground into the ocean. And the bluffs that dropped onto the beaches. And the grassy sand dunes all around the underside of the bay. From the low point of the water, bobbing up and down at the thankful end of several months' sailing (from Lisbon or the Gold Coast), they may have seen the forests rising in the distance like mountains and walls of green. Not matter; just color, color breathing in the wind and echoing the crying sounds of animals. It must have been a dark green -- like the crayon says, 'forest green' -- since the dramatic clearing of the trees hadn't really begun, and so with little light passing through, it must have been frightening, that dense and opaque green space out there.

On the sky side, I look down and see history, but it takes imagination and some effort. One has to see through the highrises and beyond the immutable calculations of hectare and parallel and dollar. I can see it. I can see the harvest of fortresses and cathedrals, and the departure to the interior. I can see the foggy arrivals of immigrants chained and unchained.

Their fear is still tangible. From the water, there is just water and the very edge of land and the absence of voices, silenced by the intimacy of the moment.