Tietê: The Once and Future River in São Paulo, Brazil
by Bill Hinchberger
Luiz Carlos Leite (divulgação) Pirapora do Bom Jesus
São Paulo - Running away from the sea and into the country’s economic heartland, São Paulo’s principal waterway – the Tietê River - is haunted by the ghosts of Brazil’s past, present and future.
In Pirapora do Bom Jesus, just 54 kilometers downriver from São Paulo, pilgrims seeking guidance from a Catholic icon dating to the 18th century must endure not arduous tests of faith but the rancid foam that spews from the Tietê. Poised to overtake the little town like The Blob from the 1950s science fiction flick, the froth is indescribable and indestructible - nothing can stop this apocalyptic future of ecological disaster.
Or so it would seem. Yet at every stop along the Tietê, somebody is working hard to take back the river. Many of these initiatives involve opportunities for visitors to experience a unique riverside culture – all within an hour’s drive from São Paulo.
Salesópolis
The Tietê River starts about 125 kilometers from São Paulo in a town of 15,000 called Salesópolis. Blocked by a costal mountain range, the river runs away from the nearby sea for nearly 700 miles. This anomaly once helped early explorers, called bandeirantes, make their incursions into the hinterland. Today it inspires proponents of regional integration in the southern cone of South America who dream of an entirely feasible network of waterways linking four countries, including landlocked Bolivia and Paraguay, to the continent’s economic powerhouse São Paulo.
Given that economic history and potential, it seems almost comical to gaze down into a little pond of water that gurgles up through the sand in the Nascente State Park. To get to the source from the park entrance, you walk for about 15 minutes on a well-maintained trail through a stretch of the Atlantic Rainforest. A plaque commemorates the starting point of the soon-to-be mighty river, which then trickles downhill under a little footbridge.
According to park guides, before the establishment of the reserve about 15 years ago, the woman who lived in an adjacent house would wash her clothes in the pond – thus kicking off the cycle of pollution that becomes uncontrollable in the city of São Paulo. Today water is pumped from the source to drinking fountains in the visitor’s center. There you can actually drink water from the Tietê River.
In the São Paulo metropolitan area, where 18 million people flush over a million tons of sewage into the Tietê each and every day, a petition drive in the early 1990s forced politicians to launch a clean-up program that has boosted sewage treatment from 24% to 70%.
As late as the mid-20th century, the Tietê hosted popular rowing and swimming competitions (thus explaining the oars on the emblem of the soccer club Corinthians), but in recent years the only recorded swimmers have been criminals fleeing the cops. Yet a few privileged citizens can still navigate the Tietê. The Ecoar Institute organizes daily field trips for groups – mostly of school children and senior citizens. The excursions are run on the same double-decker boat used by the experimental theater group Vertigem earlier this year when it transformed the Tietê into a flowing stage for a play.
Traffic whizzes by inconsiderately on either side as the boat traverses the river. The underside of the bridges, indeed of the entire city, reveals itself. The dark muck below seems to percolate with bubbles from some unknown chemical reaction. On the cemented margins, vultures and a brave family of capybara share space with discarded sofas and other debris.
In Pirapora do Bom Jesus, the first thing that everyone notices is the froth that flows under the charming downtown bridge. Passing through a hydroelectric plant a bit upstream, the water is churned up, and detergents and other chemicals form a head that would put Brahma to same.
Undaunted by the reeking stench that flows through their otherwise quaint town, amateur musicians and dancers have resurrected a tradition called “samba rural” that seemed destined for extinction just a decade ago. Sporting a sound reminiscent of that created by the “tambores” played during rites of the Afro-Brazilian religion Candomblé, samba rural features the resounding bumbo, strung around the drummer’s neck. A few other less impressive percussion instruments join the mix. Singers issue calls and responses of traditional and improvised lyrics. During instrumental interludes following a chorus response, the bumbo player jumps into the twirling mix of singers cum dancers.
In his memoir, poet Oswald de Andrade (1890-1954) recalled his family visits to Pirapora as “the best gift of my childhood.” He described city’s feast day, August 6, marking the date in 1725 when – say the faithful – a miracle-working image of Christ washed up on the riverbank. Andrade described the scene as “an uninterrupted series of music and song that dazzled the eyes in a renewed popular spectacle. “
Dozens of samba rural groups would converge on the city along with thousands of pilgrims, the later often arriving in groups on horseback. “Pirapora was the big event of the region until the 1930s and 1940s, when the tradition began to die out,” says historian and anthropologist Marcelo Manzatti.
The few remaining samba rural groups still pull out all the stops each August 6.
