The sixth day of our residency was for me most consequential and memorable. It started early. We met the bus at 3:40 am to travel to our first stop: climbing the tower at Reserve FT2 so that we would arrive for the sunrise. It was a huge climb. It felt more arduous than the one I made at the Duque museum with Richard and Rafael. But I made it, and it was worth all the effort. Watching the sunrise over the canopy was breathtaking, as the light continued to change, sculpting one area and then another. I’m looking forward to working with those images when I get back to the studio.

We chilled at the top of the tower, munching on our little packed breakfasts and drinking water while Flavia Santana lectured to us. A biologist from IMPA, she focused her talk on how climate change has affected the ecosystems of the forest. She shared images of a structure her research team built surrounding a particular area of the forest which records data related to the impact of CO2 levels on trees in that demarcated sample area of the reserve.

We climbed down after a while and walked the path again back to our bus at around 9:30. We stopped for coffee at the same place where Richard and I stopped en route to our overnight adventure in Presidente Figuereido.

From there we drove to Asframa waterfall where we changed into bathing suits and enjoyed an incredibly refreshing respite. Most people stood under the rushing falls, but I chose to just sit in the cool waters and hang out.

\We spent almost two hours there, having an incredibly wonderful traditional fish lunch quenched with fresh fruit juices. I took lots of photographs before we left, even some of monkeys in the trees.  Then we returned to the bus to head to our last location of the day: the Balbina dam.

What began with a celebratory exuberant feeling of well-being at the sunrise and waterfall was dampened by this visit. It was a most heartbreaking encounter with the cruel realities of dictatorship and negligence towards its people..

When we arrived at the dock, we saw what appeared to be another pristine reserve of green islands. But we quickly learned that was not the case. As we left shore on two boats, the river opened up to the “Cemetery of Trees”.

In 1980, the leadership was intent upon creating massive public projects such as a hydroelectric dam for the city of Manaus. However, the solution was devastating to the communities that lived here, as well as a fiasco in terms of engineering. It never paid off. But what it did do is flood over 300,000 hectares of pristine forest. What we first thought were islands were actually the tops of the very highest part of the forest that had been flooded by the dam.

Many areas in the Amazon River Basin are heavily impacted by the differences between the dry and wet season. River levels can fluctuate naturally by around 20 meters, flooding forests during the rains and draining them later on in a natural cycle.  But the Balbina dam intensified this pattern by flooding the forest completely, covering all the trees during the wet season and completely drying out in the dry season. The trees and animal life, which were not adapted to be completely submerged in water, died during the flood.  This left a dead dry mass when the water disappeared in the dry season. Then in 2011 a major “El Niño” weather pattern arrived in the dam’s first dry season, followed by a severe drought that left dead fish and animals to rot. This produced gaseous fumes that caught fire and burnt down a vast stretch of what had once been healthy forest.

We traveled across the water towards this burnt forest.  We eventually moored our boats on a spit of island to hear more from the researchers who were with us, as well as members of the communities that had been impacted by the project. Our pilot was a young boy when all this happened, and the memories were seared in his heart. We learned how, for two years, the people who survived were without fresh water or food. The government neglected both the original community and the Balbina village, which had been built to accommodate the workers constructing the dam. The reserve we visited was established as a way of compensating for the destruction. The irony of all this is that, while the flooded waters were raised up to 50 meters in the rainy season they produced 15% of the electricity for the city of Manaus, in the dry season all the water disappeared, producing nothing.  Very little electricity was provided in the end—a graphic example of butchered energy system design.

Another younger woman pilot spoke so emotionally in Portuguese that I just began to cry listening to her words and watching her expressions - the actual language didn’t matter. Everyone was crying.

We began the day with the sun rise, and we ended it at Balbina watching the sun set. It was beautiful, in spite of the intense sadness of the experience.  We rushed back by boat and headed towards the dam itself, before returning to our buses and heading back home to Adolpho Ducke Reserve.

We got back at 10:30, and believe it or not, most people went to eat. I just collapsed and fell asleep.