Madeira Playlists

 As described in more detail in Down the Creek, I had the good fortune this month of taking a long-awaited voyage on a cargo ship from Porto Velho, Rondônia to Manaus, Amazonas. My photos from the entire trip (including time in each city and on the rivers in between) is in my Rio Madeira 2023 folder on Flickr. I promise, this is an edited set of photos, with all (or most) of the duds removed). I am gradually adding annotations to many of those photos.

Photo credit: JHB (see note below)

Meanwhile, I realized that I had recorded more than the usual number of videos along with the many still photos I took. I probably made more videos (from a few seconds to three minutes in length) than I usually do in a typical year.  They are visible within the Flickr folder above, but that is a bit awkward. I have therefore gathered them into small playlists on YouTube, so that a person visiting my channel can find them all, or can click to each playlist from this metaplaylist below. In each case, viewers will see a brief description of the list as a whole, and the clips (5-10 in each group) will play in succession. 

• Madeira 2023 - Intro (for some reason I did this single clip in Portuguese)
• Madeira 2023 - Animals
• Madeira 2023 - Watermelons
• Madeira 2023 - River
• Madeira 2023 - Boats
• Madeira 2023 - People
• Madeira 2023 - Amazon
• Madeira 2023 - Wedding of the Waters
• Madeira 2023 - Botos
• Madeira 2023 - Manaus

I hope you enjoy these. Please alert me to any glitches!

A note about the photo above: 

For those who DO know the city, its three water towers -- As Três Caixas D'Água -- are a favorite symbol. So when I was waiting for Miguel to do some work downtown on my first day, I walked a few blocks to get a selfie. I must say I'm proud of myself, because it is really tricky to get them all in the frame! They were built at the same time as the city itself, from 1910-1912, and they are made of material similar to the locomotive engines that were brought here from Philadelphia, London, and Bremen as part of the rubber trade. 

The railroad failed, but the town persisted. That is a century of history in six words; it's more complicated. A mural on the plaza adjacent to the towers depicts much of that history -- the "Introduction" video above is my attempt to describe that mural in Portuguese. 

Down the Creek

The Madeira River is arguably* the longest of the Amazon River's 1,000-plus tributaries. It is also the route I was privileged to travel this summer (July 19-22) with my good friend Dr. Miguel Nenevé. It is highlighted in pink on this map of the Amazon Basin -- a path that coincides with most of the route we took from Porto Velho (near its formation) to Manaus (just upstream of its confluence with the Amazon River. 

I spent almost a week in Porto Velho before our voyage and two days in Manaus afterward. Photos and videos from the entire experience can be found on Flickr and YouTube through my Madeira Playlists article. 

Image: Wikipedia

It is worth finding Porto Velho on Google Maps or in an atlas. Even though it is a city of a half-million people in an area with no other big cities, many Brazilians are barely aware of it. At an airport, for example, I will find an employee who has never checked in a passenger with "PVH" on their documents, and does not know what to make of it. 

*Lengths of rivers is always arguable, as the Wikipedia article List of river systems by length makes clear. Just as no river has a single source, it is often difficult to determine exactly how to measure the length. Notice in this article that many of the familiar names (such as Nile, Amazon, and Mississippi) are joined by hyphens to names that most readers will not recognize. Hydrologists can often find a longer river by following channels that do not bear the name of the "main" river.

The Amazon River has a thousand named tributaries, about a dozen that measure a thousand miles or in their own right, and and unknown number of nameless tributaries. The most important of these is the Solimões, which most maps label "Amazon" and which Wikipedia does not even mention in its river-length article.

The word "arguably" above refers to the fact that the Tocantins-Araguaia system is mapped as part of the Amazon Basin, but joins it in the delta, not along the main channel. Does that make it a tributary? Perhaps.

dd

Detroit Recovery

It has been a decade since the City of Detroit declared bankruptcy, leaving its "citizenry" vulnerable to the whims of fiscal overseers. The scare quotes in the previous sentence are made necessary because citizens whose municipal affairs have been placed in the hands of unelected outsiders are not fully enfranchised. 

The Detroit Public Library is one of the city's treasures;
so to are its librarians, who were among the public
employees whose pensions were raided by the
bankruptcy managers.

I began following the progress of Detroit around that time for several reasons. First, its fiscal demise had a very specific kind of spatial dimension, as population loss sharply reduced population density, which then made the provision of services increasingly expensive on a per-capita basis. This dismal feedback loop ultimately led to the bankruptcy. 

I was further interested because of the important insight my son shared in an undergraduate research paper about three years into the bankruptcy. The suits (that is as polite a term as I can muster) decided that a city with fiscal difficulties did not deserve great art. That is, the city's financial overseers threatened to sell off the treasures of the Detroit Institute of Art and other city assets, placing the short-term interest of creditors ahead of the long-term interests of the citizens.

This is all prelude to Quinn Klinefelter's report on today's NPR Morning Edition, entitled How is Detroit doing 10 years after it filed for bankruptcy? Please listen to his comments, which I would describe as Detroit coming back slowly and unevenly from its low ebb a decade ago. In my view, the unevenness of this recovery is a microcosm of inequity in the country as a whole. From my very brief visit last summer, I can confirm that the entertainment district described in this story is doing much better than the rest of the city. 

To the degree that the finances of the city itself have recovered, it has been on the backs of public workers. Teachers, librarians, and other municipal workers had their retirement benefits stolen. Even uniformed public employees (police and fire) were ripped off, though not as deeply. 

For those who are interested, a search for Detroit on this blog points to some resources about this most important of American cities.