Itinga do Maranhão, Brasil

With a Specialized road bike on prominent display at the  large Bodim bike shop in Imperatriz and a hearty greeting from the three shop attendants as if they’d been expecting me, I was fully confident they’d have just the tire I needed to replace my front tire.  

Before I could ask if they had a 700 X 28 or 32 tire, one of the guys whipped out his phone and after a quick scroll showed me a photo of a bike.  Lo and behold, it was mine.  A friend of his had seen it parked outside a supermarket and knew he’d appreciate it.  He never expected it to turn up in his shop.  He was delighted to be able to take a photo of the guy who was riding the bike and send to his friend.  

The shop did have a 700 X 32 tire but it was a lightweight Kenda with less tread on it than the tire I had, so I had to be content with simply stocking up on patches.  I hD my choice of a French Zefal pack or a much cheaper local brand.  Every shop I’ve been in has had high-priced inport items for those who’d like a status symbol or comparable versions from China or Brasil.  

There was another shop in town.  They called over to It, but it didn’t have what I needed either.  I’d just have to survive the 350 miles to Belém.  I’d gone 150 miles without a flat, being more attentive to avoiding the many splintered tires on the shoulder of the road and brushing my tire whenever I was forced to ride through a patch.  There was still a good thickness to the tire. The 3,000 miles I’d put on it and just softened its exterior make it more susceptible to those dastardly wire threads, which my new hard rear tire was resisting.

The traffic was thinning, so I wasn’t forced onto the shoulder and it’s dangerous debris as often as I had been.  It was a shame though that I couldn’t just ride on the relatively smooth shoulder and forget about the traffic, having to be attentive to traffic simultaneously passing me from both directions, ever ready to abandon the road.

I had to slam on my brakes when I spotted avocados for sale for the first time at a roadside stand.  Mostly it’s just been mangoes.  I wouldn’t have recognized the avocados had not Edmilson and Jussara served them, as the Brasil version is much larger and darker-skinned than I’m accustomed to. They were bundled six or seven to a tied-up mesh bag, more than I had space for.  I asked the seller if I could have just two.  He went behind his stand and came back with two and in the Brasilian spirit made a gift of them.  It happens at times too when I just want a couple of bananas, even in a supermarket.  The great generosity of Brasil never ceases to be heartwarming.

Having to be so attentive to avoiding wire fragments, I can no longer lose myself in thought or whatever podcast I might be listening to.  I just added another to my playlist.  Michael Moore launched a podcast two weeks ago and has so much to say and has been so encouraged by the response that he’s put out one nearly every day.  I’m not the only one to be won over. 

Of the over 700,000 podcasts out there he vaulted into the top 25 most listened to within four editions and number one in the news category.  He’s had some phenomenal guests—Daniel Ellsberg, Ralph Nader and Robert DiNero making his first ever appearance on a podcast—but it is his passionate and unrelenting anti-Trump and pro-Bernie rhetoric that has earned him such a huge listenership.  

I’m well familiar with his ability to offer entertaining, insightful commentary on all and sundry after hearing him hold forth many times at his Traverse City Film Festival on panels and interviewing guests and at his special program “Michael’s Surprise.”  Janina too finds him irresistible. After listening to a couple of the episodes she aptly summed up his appeal—“He is so good at breaking through the received ideas, cliches and lazy habits of mind that characterize political discourse. So refreshing.”  

He is an insider of a sort and shares meaningful encounters he’s had with many movers-and-shakers—Elizabeth Warren, Joe Biden,  Bernie Sanders, Charlie Rose, Michael Bloomberg, Nancy Pelosi and others.  He even mentioned Brasil in one podcast.  He is in favor of dropping the voting age to 16, which he said Austria and Brasil and a couple of other countries have done.  

I was delighted that on his third podcast he made an allusion to me, or at least the number I was known as during my years as a bike messenger.  He went to the impeachment hearing and feared he’d have to wait in line for “five, six, seven hours” to get in, but people weren’t lined up and his Congressman from Flint was able to get him a pass anyway allowing him a front row seat in the balcony.  When Pelossi spotted him she put her hand on her heart.  Fifteen minutes later her daughter, a documentary filmmaker Moore knows, sat down beside him.

It is uncanny how often 5-6-7 turns up on podcasts, particularly sports podcasts referring to games played or weeks left in a season or number of players complaining about a coach.  Errol Morris even managed to make a mention when he was promoting his latest movie on Steven Bannon.  In a podcast with Adnan Virk he brought up a documentary he’d made on Doctor Death, a man who smoked 5, 6, 7 packs of cigarettes a day. 

Brasil also received a mention in a book I’ve just read about the American South recommended by Paul Theroux—“Confederates in the Attic” by the recently deceased New Yorker writer Tony Horwitz.  He drives all over the South in pursuit of connections to the Civil War.  Nearly half the book is devoted to joining re-enactors at battlefields, including a one-week binge with a fanatic driving around to as many sites as they can dressed in uniforms from the day and sleeping in the fields without tents as the soldiers did at the time and not showering the entire time to be as authentic as possible.  

At the book’s end Horowitz says he has been as thorough as possible searching out Civil War lore except for making a trip to Brasil where several thousand Southerners fled after the war to continue their cotton-growing with slave labor.  They were known as the “Irreconcilables” or “Conferados” in Portuguese.  A Yale professor, Rollin Osterweis, a specialist on the Civil War, wrote an obscure novel about them called “Santerem,” that I’d love to get my hands on.  I’d pitch it to the Mexican Director Carlos Reygadas, who made a film on the Mennonites in Mexico, “Silent Light,” that was a Cannes award-winner. 

As I close in on the Amazon I’ve come upon some off-beat Christmas decorations of Saint Nick made with recycled materials.

Christmas decorations have otherwise been non-existent or very low-key.