Ted Conover Read online

  Where are they taking us?

  *I was four degrees of relationship away from Zhao Xiangjie, the owner of the Chinese auto club I joined in chapter 5; between us were my friend Cathi Hanauer, a writer; her mother in New Jersey, who had taken a trip through China; and Zhao Jing, who had shown the mother around Xi’an in northwest China. And much of my trip to China was organized via instant messages, of which the Chinese are very fond. Ten years earlier the trip would have been put together over the phone, at significantly greater expense, with voice calls or faxes.

  *In an e-mail, he wrote me, “I’m a conservationist and a deep ecologist and roads to me are barriers and intrusions. They create ‘edges’ to ecosystems and are conduits for ‘aliens’ and ‘exotics’ which wreak havoc in ecosystems. They are precursors to development and so-called ‘improvements on the land.’ They promote erosion and pollution. I’m against them, big time.”

  ONE

  FOREST PRIMEVAL TO PARK AVENUE

  MY STORY BEGINS where another one ends, on a corner of Park Avenue on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. It is one of the most expensive neighborhoods in the United States, and home to some of its wealthiest residents. It is an area of liveried doormen, polished brass railings, tiny dogs, and elevators that lead to only one or two grand apartments, frequently encompassing more than one floor. One rough visitor was nevertheless warmly received here at the end of a long journey, due to his celebrated beauty: a big shipment of wood—mahogany—from South America.

  As the limited global supply of it dwindles, mahogany has become extremely valuable. Like other scarce natural resources—diamonds, gold, and oil come to mind—it is pulled, as though by magnetic force, from sparsely populated parts of the world where there are few roads, if any, to densely populated parts that are heavily paved, and where wealth is concentrated.

  The apartment that was this wood’s destination was notable for two reasons. First, the wife of the middle-aged and childless couple who owned it was descended from a famous American dynasty and heir to a significant portion of its wealth. (A condition of my access to the apartment was that I not name her.) The apartment is in a building known as high WASP, the kind that doesn’t take celebrities. Even with their pedigree, I was told, the couple weren’t approved as tenants by the building’s board until a senior member of the family interceded.

  The second interesting thing about the apartment—where the new mahogany would be used in moldings, paneling, doors, cabinets, and bookshelves—was the company it would keep. The two-floor maisonette was conceived by the wife partly as a home for her extensive collection of eighteenth-century English furniture, itself mostly made of mahogany. So the new wood, harvested mainly in Brazil and Peru, would be complementing old wood that probably made its way to England from Central America or Caribbean islands such as Cuba and Jamaica—places where harvesting in the 250-year interim has left mahogany “commercially extinct.” The furniture collection includes Georgian sideboards, secretaries, breakfronts, commodes, side chairs, and armchairs, each exquisitely detailed and worth, in aggregate, many millions of dollars. But the pieces of which the owner is most proud are a set of doors designed by Robert Adam, the Scottish architect whose neoclassical interior designs came to characterize the entire period. The doors, with book-matched panels of thick mahogany veneer on solid walnut, each edged with ornately hand-carved molding, hang at the entrance to studies on either side of the entry hall, and fairly glow.

  I learned about this apartment when my friend Peter was hired to work there. A Yale-educated sculptor, Peter earned a living at the time making high-end custom cabinetry as well as architectural models. He would remark constantly on the number of tradesmen at the job site (up to twenty-eight at once, not including “armies” of men and women who would come in to laboriously French-polish the wood once a room was finished), the high cost of the materials, and the exacting standards of the owner. When slight cracks were detected in a new marble countertop, he told me, yards of it were torn out; when a new oak floor was deemed imperfect, it was replaced entirely—6,500 square feet of it.

  At the same time, the situation was an artisan’s dream, approaching something out of medieval or Renaissance times, where the patron’s resources seemed endless and nothing mattered so much as doing it right. Peter loved working with mahogany, as had generations of his predecessors going back as far as the carpenter on Sir Walter Raleigh’s 1595 voyage to the West Indies, who used the wood to repair the ship. (It would be another century before craftsmen in England began to use it alongside walnut in furniture and fine cabinetry.) Mahogany was beautiful to look at and nice to hold, strong but easy to work, not as hard as maple and “ doesn’t beat the shit out of tools like teak does,” according to Peter’s boss, David Morton, sixty-one, of Big Tree Woodworks, Inc. Its figure, or grain, came in an array of patterns that vary according to the tree and how it was milled (plain-sawn, quarter-sawn, or rift-sawn)—David showed me a bubbly pattern he called quilted, another known as plum pudding (“like quilted that didn’t quite get there”), bird’s eye, tiger stripe, and curly. And there wasn’t the time pressure of a typical job and the stress that comes with it—the couple had gotten off to a bad start with a different contractor, according to David, and “came around to the view that decisions were best made based on quality.” Waiting was made easier by another apartment they had in Manhattan, the house in Westchester County, the property or two in California.

  And so the work went on and on—three years for Peter and six years for David Morton. During this time, David bought some 30,000 board feet of mahogany, the rough equivalent of between seven and ten of the giant trees. He designed, fabricated, and hung fifty-six solid mahogany doors. He designed and built a massive yet delicate mahogany media center (the owner’s key instruction, in so many words: Don’t embarrass my antiques collection). He installed fifteen and a half miles of trim moldings—baseboard, chair rail, picture rail, and crown. From the beginning of the job to the end, he watched the price of mahogany nearly quadruple, as Brazil ceased exporting the wood, at least temporarily, due to concerns about the environment and the corruption of officials who were supposed to protect it. And he watched the mahogany available to him drop from boards twenty feet long, four inches thick, and thirty inches wide, to smaller pieces that reflected a diminished supply.

  When all the work was done, the furniture in place, and the couple moved in, David drove down from his workshop in the faded Hudson River town of Kingston, New York, to meet with me and Peter and tour the place. It was April 2007. He left his aging Toyota Matrix hatchback in a garage off Park that was filled with much fancier cars. His former patroness showed us around, but David already knew every inch of the apartment. He showed me closets with paneling inside, drew a sketch to show the method he’d devised to embed electrical wire in the picture molding, demonstrated how many of the door and window frames were held together by nothing more than a perfect fit. He moved with respect around the antiques, which mostly had arrived after he left but which he had studied, in books and dealers’ shops and museums, to improve his design work for the client.

  Afterward we walked to another apartment nearby, where David had recently delivered a graceful $80,000 mahogany credenza his craftsmen had labored on for months; I had seen the piece on its side in the workshop in Kingston. The apartment also contained a sculpture by Giacometti and an oil by Diego Rivera. David felt that his piece fit right in.

  Back on the street, he pointed out some of his personal landmarks: the building on Park designed by the father of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, the co-op with the apartment full of antique firearms, the place across from the church where the doorman wouldn’t let him in but the guy who controlled the service elevator would, any day. Though he lived and worked outside the city, approximately 70 percent of his customers were here in Manhattan’s Gold Coast, 20 percent lived on the Upper West Side (“much time in the Dakota”), and maybe 10 percent were in Brooklyn Heights. His work in the neighborh
ood was finished for the moment, but he’d be back.

  “You know,” he said, as we walked down Park, “my first ten or twelve years in the city, I never got off of 72nd Street. Because so much money lives here.”

  Trees, however, live mainly elsewhere. The world’s remaining stands of Swietenia macrophylla, big-leaf mahogany—genuine mahogany, not the cheaper substitutes known as African mahogany or Philippine mahogany—are mostly in the rain forests of South America. Brazil has the lion’s share, but since its 2001 ban on exports, Peru is the leading exporter. The United States is the world’s largest importer of mahogany, and most of the wood, as of this writing, comes from the portion of the vast Amazon rain forest that lies in Peru.

  The trip can be traced backwards. To get to Manhattan, the wood used in the apartment came in trucks from a “concentration yard” (a place where wood is gathered before being distributed) in Hanover, Pennsylvania, run by one of the two largest firms that import the wood from Peru, TBM Hardwoods. (The other is Bozovich Timber Products, of Evergreen, Alabama, and Lima, Peru.) The boards, rough-cut by makeshift mills in the rain forest, arrive in a wide assortment of shapes and sizes. First they are placed in the company’s kilns to dry out. (Time spent in the kiln depends on the thickness of the wood—boards one inch thick take a week, and those four inches thick take three months.) Next they are sawn—not to make them all the same, but to make them square. (Mahogany boards, unlike the pine you’ll find at a Home Depot, are not often sold with standard dimensions: cutting them to standard size would waste too much wood.) Then they are graded according to quality. David Morton was buying so much mahogany for the apartment, and of such a high grade, that TBM Hardwoods agreed to do a special “sort” for him so that he could find just the boards he wanted.

  But having a contractor buy for an individual job is unusual, said Hugh Reitz, the president for imports at the company; most of the buyers are distributors. More than half of the mahogany Reitz buys goes to architectural millwork shops, he says—ten-to twenty-employee outfits doing “extremely high-end work” fabricating things like doors, chair rails, and moldings for wealthy individuals or university or corporate settings. Makers of electric and acoustic guitars are another important clientele. Surprisingly, furniture production is now less than 10 percent of the market for Swietenia macrophylla; in recent years, furniture and casket makers have shifted to the cheaper, African mahogany (Khaya spp.).

  Wood moves easily on American highways—Reitz can receive his from Baltimore hours after it clears Customs, and delivery in the eastern United States rarely takes more than a day or two. The wood also moves fairly quickly across the sea, taking two weeks, in a container ship, from the Peruvian port of Callao, an industrial suburb of Lima, to most American ports, even less if it’s headed up the West Coast and doesn’t need to pass through the Panama Canal.

  The going gets far tougher inside Peru. The problem is roads, in the mountains and in the jungle. It’s easy to drive north-south along the Pacific coast of South America—the Pan-American Highway has been in place for years. East-west, however, is another matter. Like Colombia, Ecuador, Bolivia, Chile, and Argentina, Peru has the Andes Mountains running through it, north to south. Significantly higher, in many places, than the Rocky Mountains, the Andes pose a daunting obstacle for transportation. The mahogany, and the jungle, are on the east side of the mountains, making them remote by definition. While Brazil is developing its Amazon at a rapid pace, turning rain forest into fields for soybeans and pasture for cattle, Peru has done fairly little on its side. In fact, in much of its corner of the basin, it has turned swaths of rain forest into nominally protected areas, trying to safeguard indigenous peoples as well as stunning biodiversity. Unfortunately for that admirable goal, these forests also contain the last significant supplies of big-leaf mahogany.

  There are plans afoot to change the east-west transportation situation—and there have been for years. Peruvians understand the economic benefits of regional integration, and the idea of a road link to Brazil, the regional economic powerhouse, is a longtime dream. So long has a prospective “interoceanic” highway, linking the Pacific to the Atlantic, been on the drawing board that the project has acquired a not-likely-in-my-lifetime, Holy Grail status.

  Just as there is more than one route designated the Pan-American Highway, several east-west “interoceanic” highway routes are being developed simultaneously, and not just in Peru. Peru has at least three or four, Bolivia about three, Ecuador at least two. What they have in common is the idea of connection to a Brazilian highway (and thus a path to the Atlantic) that already exists. Brazil is well along on road infrastructure, and in fact is eager for a route across the Andes: it would save Brazilian exporters from having to ship Asia-bound soybeans, beef, and other products around the Cape of Good Hope or through the Panama Canal, and it would open up markets for Brazilian goods along the west coast of South America. The most likely route connects Lima/Callao up to Cuzco in the Andes and then down to Puerto Maldonado in the rain forest, and from there to the Brazilian border town of Assis in Acre state. Puerto Maldonado also happens to be the capital of Peru’s mahogany-producing zone, where loggers drive the drumbeat for road construction. To retrace the wood home to its source would be to see a road’s promise in the economy of a poor country, and its threat to pristine wilderness. It would also be a good way to see Peru.

  Sometimes it’s easy to find a truck, and sometimes it’s not. I learned that most Peruvian trucking is based in Lima, and faxed several companies cold from New York to see about a ride. Only one responded—the executive, Antonio Ponce, didn’t send trucks over the mountains, he mainly stuck to the coast, but he liked my idea and said his friend’s company would take me.

  He turned out to be a generous man, Señor Ponce, who not only took me to dinner near my hotel in Lima, but supplied me with a road guide for tourists. He apologized, from his dingy office in an ugly neighborhood, for the uglier neighborhood the truck would leave from, and declined to send me in a taxi, because it wasn’t safe.

  But it’s always easier to leave an ugly place, and I was not upset. The La Victoria district of Callao, where he took me, had no green plants. Dirt streets. A large pile of trash not far from a garbage truck that had apparently disgorged it on the street, and many people digging through, skinny dogs getting as close as they could. A naked toddler; some older kids walking by in school uniforms, looking out of place. Some prostitutes in the shade provided by low concrete buildings. Fences and sheet metal, too much light. And plenty of trucks.

  Ponce brought me to a tandem rig parked outside the office of his friend’s small company. The firm mainly worked the route up to Cuzco, carrying industrial supplies over—and wood back. Outside the truck was Sebastián Cisneros, forty-four, the driver of a tandem semi rig, and inside Edgardo Rojas, twenty-five, his assistant. Edgardo had been asleep on a narrow bunk behind the front seats, but sat up when his boss shouted, then nudged him. “He is fat and lazy,” bearded Sebastián said with a smile. In fact, Edgardo was neither—though he was a bit round. He sat up, found his rubber sandals, and walked around the open-topped, wooden-sided trailers to make sure the tires were full and the tarps securely tied down.

  Our cargo was some large commercial scales, barrels of paint, and chemicals for making asphalt. Our estimated travel time was two days. We would not drive at night, Sebastián said; it was too dangerous due to banditry. My goal was Puerto Maldonado, but they could take me only halfway—up the Andes to Cuzco. There I’d have to switch to a smaller truck for the ride down into the rain forest. Big rigs like Sebastián’s couldn’t make it down the other side; the turns were too tight. Our route would take us along the coastal highway south of Lima to Pisco; inland across the desert to Ica, Palpa, and Nazca; and then, leaving the route of the Pan-American Highway, up into the mountains through Puquio, Chalhuanca, and Abancay to Cuzco.

  It took a couple of hours to get free of Lima. No sooner were its low buildings behind us than we
came to the peripheral slums, seeming miles of pueblos jóvenes where the walls of people’s homes consisted of cardboard, sheet metal scraps, and woven cane mats. We saw a small Indian family—mom, dad, kids—sitting by the side of the road with no clear purpose, as if waiting for fortune to swoop them up. We passed billboards for junk food and one advertising a new subdivision: it said, cruelly, Live like an American, and showed a light-skinned family on bicycles on the grass in front of their new house.

  One other billboard was notable: it had a picture of a truck on a mountain road, and the words “324 puentes a lo larga de la vía” (“324 bridges over the length of the road”). The advertisement was part of a series of government-sponsored signs for the carretera interoceánica, or Interoceanic Highway, a big project of nationalistic importance. At the bottom, this billboard, like others, had the slogan “ Perú—Sí Podemos” (“Peru—Yes We Can”). Tellingly, the sign didn’t specify which route would boast those 324 bridges—not surprising, since this question was the subject of intense regional rivalry, and planning announcements over the years that seemed to favor one area over another had prompted riots and work stoppages. But Sebastián and Edgardo thought it would probably be the route we were on: Lima to Cuzco, Cuzco to Puerto Maldonado in the rain forest, and Puerto Maldonado to Brazil.

  For an hour or two, the divided highway was swift and modern. To the right, occasionally, you could see the Pacific, and some sea lions on dark, wave-splashed rocks. To the left were dunes—and an evidently disturbed man making his way across one expanse of them, jerking through the hot sand barefoot and half-clothed.

  The sere coastal desert yielded to greener climes and a narrower road. We braked and stopped to buy a burlap bag of cayotes, a root vegetable popular along the coast but sometimes hard to find in the mountains. (“We will give them away as presents in Cuzco,” Sebastián explained.) And then near Cañete, as it got dark, we pulled over again, abruptly, after passing two women standing near piles of boxes. The boxes contained green grapes, it turned out, and after a brief discussion, Edgardo began loading them into one of the rig’s two trailers. Then one of the women came into the cab with us, and we were back on the road.