The feeling of Brazil...

We left Buzios with our masks in the cup holder, the ocean at our side, and a car full of snacks. My goal was to feel free. I didn’t expect to feel Brazil. But that is what unfolded.

The beauty of a country with jetting mountainous rock formations rolling into jungle forests, with animals only native to this slice of the planet. Other hillsides, saturated in red brick housing, mimicking nature’s rock formations, structures entirely outside of any city code made by the hands of the people who lived there. Large lakes descending into farms set a blaze by field burning that crept up against the highways and slithered along the coastline of a raging ocean. Beaches dotted with abandoned construction projects, and other beaches filled with boats beautifully painted like Easter eggs. Thriving open air markets with organic produce pulled from the ground the same day. Fisherman deboning on docks as men cut open coconuts to bleed their milk into bottles to taste. Life dying and reforming. And on our last day witnessing actual death.

We left Buzios wanting to feel alive and we got that and so much more. We decided that morning we were going to drive to Macaé, a town about 27 miles north. From there we would keep heading north until we crossed the state line of Rio de Janeiro and entered into the State of Espiritu Santo. The only thing I knew about Espiritu Santo was that in my second year in Brazil there was a police strike there. For weeks the state descended into Marshall law and the coverage was on the news each night as I ran on the treadmill in the Vidigal gym. People were scared that this could happen in Rio because the police weren’t getting paid enough across the entire country. It was one step closer to military control. You could begin to see armed forces pop up along the beach during that time, rifles in hand, but this was before the Bolsonaro administration of 2019 that has brought even more power to the military police, and far closer to a military dictatorship than the spring of 2018 when the police strike happened in Espiritu Santo. 

The government of Bolsonaro has not only increased military presence in the streets of Rio these last 2 years but has also given free rein to favela special police forces called BOPE to kill with no questions asked. On more than one occasion we saw bodies put into black bags in our community after being murdered by police, then disappear in the black BOPE vans. If there was a witness or a camera phone, the name of the body might surface in Whatsapp messages that swirled around the community after a police operation. But other times, the body and their name was erased as soon as the plastic wrapped around their corpse’s head, and they were never seen again.

Last summer when the police violence in the community got really bad I shared with some members of my family and close friends the videos of machine guns being fired outside our window and community members being thrown to the ground like dogs and degraded like trash. I shared these to try and cope, to bring some outside sense into the dark situation I found myself in, entirely unable to wrap my head around trying to normalize this like many people here do out of survival. But I was also weary to not share these videos to a lot of people. I didn’t want to further generate stereotypes of black neighborhoods being full of violence. 

But then, this year happened. Last night Fabian approached with yet another horrific video of a black man filmed on a  police body camera back in March, naked on the pavement, with a bag over his head and multiple police officers around him. This was New York. One officer lunges at him and pins him to the ground. He is helpless and struggles to breathe, disoriented,  hands zip tied behind his back. He later died at the hospital. In the favela the laws protect the officers who kill innocent black people. In the States, the police unions protect the officers who kill innocent black people. But the violence is the same.

Last summer when police violence peaked, Fabian experienced it first hand, and it left him with back spasms and nerve damage. In fact as we rode through the mystifying landscape of Brazil on this day,  our dreamy vacation, he was shifting back and forth in the driver's seat trying to align his spine in a way that would relieve the memory of a kick to the spine. 

It was last July, Fabian had gone to the ocean around 10 pm with his friend Lucas. A typical night time activity when the ocean is at your apartment's doorstep. They began to descend the 50 stairs towards Vidigal beach. Rolling waves and a bright moon illuminated  the sand and the reflection from buildings in Leblon and Ipanema sparkled in the ocean. A man approached them in a tank top and board shorts, he gave an awkward smile then pulled out an 8mm pointing at their heads. 

“Get on the fucking ground.” He screamed. Again and again.

Fabian thought he was being robbed so he put his hands up. 

“Take what you want dude”

“You piece of shit lie down on the fucking ground.”

BOOM! The man fired a bullet into the sand inches away from Fabian’s foot. 

Lucas and him dropped to the sand and clutched their knees with their hands, 

The man grabbed Fabian’s backpack, limp and empty beside him. He rifled through it but found nothing.

“Im a fucking cop. You pieces of shit need to lie down.”

 At this point the drug dealers who use this area of the beach to sell  shuffled in the bushes behind them adding to the tension. The officer who was entirely in civilian clothing lifted up his foot and with full force kicked the arc of Fabian’s back, knocking him into the sand gasping for air.

“Do you need to be told again to lie the fuck down.”

At this point Fabian almost passed out. He pressed his face into the sand trying to stay conscious as more police officers showed up.

The officer who kicked him claimed that Fabian had tried to punch him.

“Look at his ears he is a fighter” He pinched Fabian’s cauliflower ears lifting his head out of the sand. 

“He is a maestre!” Lucas shouted

The mood shifted. The officers apologized and helped him up. Practicing the art of Jiu Jitsu is well revered amongst police officers in Brazil and being a maestre, or black belt more so. They police officer in charge of the raid apologized and checked his ribs to see if they were broken.

Fabian looked back at the officer who dealt the devastating kick,

“You practice Muay Thai?” he asked

“Yeah yeah I do, but I also practice jiu jitsu too” trying to sop up some apologetic connection.

“Are you training Jiu Jitsu now” Fabian asked.

“No, it's been a while.” the police officer lowered his head a little.

“Ah ok I now I understand, because someone who is practicing Jiu Jitsu would never kick a maestre” Fabian looked him dead in the eyes and turned away. 

The incident left Fabian with internal organ damage. After making it home he collapsed in a pile of gray skin. His friends Lucas and Rodrigo propped him up on their shoulders and ushered him to a moto-taxi then to the hospital. Since that day he has had chronic lower back problems.This kind of police violence I  thought was a problem of favela communities, not of places like my city, or state. Today the whole world watches  Portland, yes a city in my state, as officers, and military men and women spay tear gas and rubber bullets into the faces of unarmed protestors. 

Sometimes when I dream of our bike trip the fantasy gets punctuated by fears of racism against him. Fears of police violence against him, in my hometown. The favela is not the problem. This is happening in your city too. Police violence is the problem, White supremacy is the problem. And “othering” is the problem. 2020 has helped me learn this. Brazil helped me learn this. 

Today as we marveled at our newly found car freedom, Fabian pushed his pain aside. The road was fast-moving, two lanes, the major artery of traffic flow, but also in minutes it served as the main street of small towns. There was almost too  much to take in. Giant trucks hauling spectacularly stacked loads of 5-gallon water bottles, other trucks carrying giant blow up balls, yes like kids balls, rainbow colored with a speaker blaring that the ball truck was arriving!  The pace was enough to give anyone a panic attack, in seconds we would descend to a crawl to observe speed bumps, then race back up to 60mph. So many speed bumps. I learned that it was a tactic for Brazilian municipalities to fill their streets with speed bumps because it's an easy money laundering scheme.  The city budget could have a line item far exceeding the price of a speed bump for “traffic control”, put in a speed bump, then pocket the difference. So many speed bumps.

The first small city that we crept through on this main road was Unimar. The wide highway lanes didn’t deter pedestrians from crossing, moms pushing their strollers, men going to work on their bicycles, mechanics with their garages open, and mega discount supermarkets pulsating with people. The 27 miles to Macaé would take us two hours because of the pace of the highway, its speed bumps and occasional traffic lights. I was grateful that Fabian was driving because I struggled to understand when it was ok to go fast and when you needed to go 25mph. The intensity was heightened by the occasional semi truck that would pass us in the parking lane on our right, simultaneously as motorcycles used the center lane as a speedway zooming past us. 

The epitome of “things you never think you’ll see while driving on a highway” we saw, on the bridge leading out of Rio das Ostras. Almost this entire drive is done with the Atlantic on our right. Its waters shifted as we went north from cerulean blue  to a rocky road brown and it was nicely lined with a ciclovia that occasionally disappeared into the parking lots of mega marts, lanchonetes, gas stations, and dirt roads. But the traffic at Rio Das Ostras siphoned into a bridge crossing a canal leading into the Atlantic, and so did the ciclovia tightly hugging our fast moving lane. As I pulled out my camera to take a video of a collapsed bridge running parallel to our bridge, crumbled chunks just sitting out in the middle of the ocean, Fabian yelled. Look on the other side! The other side. I looked but just saw a massive line of cars heading where we had just come from until...

There it was, a giant golden stallion. Yes, like the archetype of what you might imagine in an old western movie, tall and wiley, regal and terrifying, running in the space of a sidewalk over the bridge and heading down the other side. WHAT THE? This wasn’t like the occasional work horse you may see on smaller streets pulling a cart or being transported between homes, this was a horse ready to race. As the stallion charged its way down the ciclovia a rope bounced from its neck. The rope was connected to the arm of your average teenage dude, blue jeans, a white t-shirt and baseball cap.  Your average teenage dude trying to control a giant beast in rush hour traffic on a tiny bridge, his eyes wide open as if enjoying his dance with death. To make the scene even more strange was his bike. A bright pink bicycle with wide handlebars, pink sparkly tassels on their ends, and a big purple basket. 

He had one hand on the bike guiding it down with some kind of fearless bike wizardry as the other one secured the leather strap connected to the horse. Mathematically I couldn’t quite figure out how a giant horse and a bike could fit in the space of the sidewalk over the bridge. It was a freaking sidewalk but this kid was making it work and picking up speed. Right behind him appeared to be his two friends. One of them had a stick, maybe it was a golf club? It was tucked under his armpit as he also was trying to navigate how to go down a narrow ciclovia with heavy traffic and a giant horse.It looked like he had been enlisted to help guide this maneuver with the stick, but speed and a downhill  kind of got in the way of him directing anything. 

Later in our trip when we would return home on this same bridge and I would  marvel at how if you happen to be coming from the opposite direction that day, the surprise you would have seeing that giant beast ripping towards you along with its troop of teenage herders. Sheesh. The intricate and fine line that people walk in Brazil that borders death and life is otherworldly. All while smiling and seemingly not really giving a shit. Just as the Hertz guy showing us his  9 year old son driving stick impeccably BY HIMSELF, this scene kinda dug into my fear of biking in heavy traffic like a nudge of confidence and chill the f out 'em. If they can nonchalantly bike through traffic with a wild horse, you can bike through traffic with your reflector vest, helmet and neon bike jersey Em. Fear only gets in the way of doing things we are made to do. We can do the exact same things every day with fear, or without fear. The choice is up to us.

We reached Macaé and it was the perfect place to make a stop at the beach. We parked one block away from the tranquil ocean and I looked around feeling like I was in Fort Lauderdale or North Beach Miami, resorts, chicy burger bars, hip boutique athletic wear shops, some closed respecting quarantine, others open and serving people only at the door.

We walked along the pristine ciclovia and took in the almost empty beach. A few people were out walking their dogs but the sun was hot mid-day, and it was lunchtime so the aroma of garlic hitting the scalding oil of a frying pan filled the air. I still don't quite understand how Brazilians can eat feijao, rice, spaghetti noodles with no sauce, and meat for lunch, everywhere, every day. Brazil exudes creativity, it explodes with music that makes you melt, like sensual sambas, and pounding drum rhythms, it has parade floats the size of skyscrapers, and headdresses that put Vegas to shame, but it's as if that all sucked the breath out of any culinary creative thought. So anywhere you go you will be offered a plate of rice, black beans and spaghetti noodles for lunch. 

Today we had packed homemade PB&Js and I could not be happier with that. 

We ate our sandwiches while getting roasted by the sun and loaded back in the car for the final three-hour leg of our trip, only stopping at a gas station in the middle of nowhere for fuel and homemade doughnuts. Delicious. 

Our final descent into Guarapari was a complete unknown. Neither of us knew anything about this beachside community other than recommendations by friends. Google tells me that the name Guarapari comes from the native Gurani people. They used to hunt a bird with brilliant red feathers on this land. The bird’s precious feathers were called “guara” and the weapon they used to hunt them with was “pari”. After the Jesuits settled here in 1535 and built their white church on the highest hill,  speckled in seashells extracted from the many beaches, the natives and the birds died off. All that remains is the church, and the name. 

When we crossed over the bridge leading into the tiny town we were welcomed by a gigantic tiger. A tiger! The mascot of our bike trip. A total omen, this tiger statue was to bring your awareness to the giant gas station but we took it as a sign we were in the right place. We googled a hotel and to our joy it was open and stunning. Tonight was our anniversary. One year ago today we stayed up all night talking and laughing and drawing, and mixing three languages and curiosities and desires. And one year later we were still doing the same. Thank you God. We ate a plate full of pizza freshly baked from the pizzeria next door and bought a churro pudding dessert from the daughter of our waitress. The most crumbly, crunchy, velvety moist dessert I have ever tasted. Touché the Brazilian culinary Gods mocked back at me. 

Best dessert of your life! Mock our cooking again! 

This was indeed the perfect Brazilian day and the perfect Brazilian night. Feeling like we were the only people in our seemingly vacant hotel, we tip-toed giddily through the empty hallways and into our room that overlooked the ocean. The beach below us was “the beach of namoradas” or lovers. We were so in love; with each other and with Brazil. All of its extremes and lessons and hardships and radiant beauty. It was here that we were brought together and here that has shaped us into the mold that  2020 is breaking us down to recreate. Who are you becoming out of the ashes of this year? How has 2020 re-formed you? We owe so much of this process to our time here. And the adventure isn’t over yet.