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is big/that is bigger.
I couldn’t find color words—no simple words for red, green, blue, and so on, only descriptive phrases, like
that is like blood
for red or
that is not ripe yet
for green. And I couldn’t find stories about the past. When you can’t find something, but you expect it to be there, you can waste months looking for something that doesn’t exist. Many of the things I had been taught to look for in field linguistics I could not find at all. This not only made things hard, but it also was at times downright discouraging. Still, I was optimistic that with enough time and effort, I would figure out this language.
    But the future is not ours and our plans are only our wishes. It was folly to believe that I could just ignore where I was and focus strictly on linguistics. We were in the Amazon.

2                  The Amazon
    O nce you have made your peace with the Amazon, a Pirahã village is a relaxing place. The first step toward this peace is for you to learn to ignore, even enjoy, the heat. That is not as hard as it might sound. The human body, when clothed properly, can handle the 90 to 110F temperatures well, especially since the jungle provides plenty of shade and, in the case of the Pirahãs, the Maici River, which is always cool, wet, and relaxing. The humidity is harder to accept, though. Perspiration—that otherwise effective tool for lowering body temperature via evaporation in temperate climates—produces little more than athlete’s foot and crotch rot in the Amazon, unless your skin, like the Pirahãs’, is weather-beaten and usually dry because you rarely perspire.
    Apart from such minor bodily discomforts, the Amazon region is not merely a place; it is an awe-inspiring force. The Amazonian rain forest covers nearly three million square miles: 2 percent of the total surface of the earth and 40 percent of the South American landmass. This forest is nearly the size of the continental United States. Fly from Porto Velho near the Bolivian border to the city of Belém at the mouth of the Amazon, a four-hour jet flight, and on a clear day you will see the jungle stretch out to the horizon in every direction: a green carpet, as far as the eye can see, with blue streaks of water from north to south, flowing toward the “moving sea,” as the Tupi Indians called the Amazon.
    The Amazon flows over four thousand miles from Peru to the Atlantic. The river is over two hundred miles wide at its mouth, with a delta, the island of Marajó, which is larger than Switzerland. There is enough dark and unknown land in Amazonia to consume a million imaginations. In fact it almost has—there is a nearly endless list of books about it, on its ecology, its histories, its peoples, and its politics. It has aroused the wanderlust and the imagination of Europeans and their descendants since the Spaniards and Portuguese first beheld it at the beginning of the sixteenth century. Two of my favorite American writers, Mark Twain and William James, felt its pull.
    Mark Twain left Ohio in 1857 hoping to depart from New Orleans for the Amazon River, apparently to try to get rich in the coca trade. One wonders what books or stories we have missed because he changed his plans and decided to train as a riverboat pilot on the Mississippi. Might we have had a
Life on the Amazon,
as opposed to
Life on the Mississippi
?
    William James actually made it to the Amazon and was able to explore a significant portion of the main river and its tributaries. While on a trip with the Harvard biologist Louis Agassiz in 1865 to collect zoological specimens, James traveled for some eight months through Brazil and along the Amazon and its tributaries. After his Amazonian experience, James abandoned his goal of becoming a naturalist—one might say that there is no place to go but down for a naturalist after the Amazon. (More than one-third of all species known on earth live in the Amazon.) He decided instead to focus on