how creepy is this?

On Saturday evening, we went to a cookout for the American International Society at a farm about an hour from where we live.

Which, by the way, was quite pleasant. It was nice to get to see some of the interior. And where else can you talk with a Baptist missionary, a gay Brazilian civil servant, and a fellowship student from Yale at the same table?

But that wasn't the creepy part.


On the way there, we drove through a blank expanse of countryside between the Litoral North highway and a small town called Camaçari. This is stretch of land is less than two hours outside of the city of Salvador, and suddenly, between the gently rolling hills of palm trees and scarred red earth, a skyline appears.

It's a ghost town, populated only by factories. There's a huge Ford plant, as well as industrial complexes for Dow Chemical, some German companies I'd never heard of, and of course, everyone's favorite, Monsanto.

It was like some grim postapacalyptic landscape.

Then we drove through the city of Camaçari, with its praça and dusty soccer field and people hanging out on street corners playing cards and drinking beer, as though they weren't several kilometers down the road from both the steel undergirding of our modern civilization, as well as, possibly, its undoing.

Several kilometers after that, we made it to the ranch, which was named, inexplicably, Tsedakah Technologia.


The boys went for a ride in a horse-drawn cart. We ate some churrasco.

But all evening that image of the empty industrial city hovered at the edge of my consciousness, unsettling me.

On the way home it was dark, and the lights of the smokestacks blurred past the car window.

I could almost imagine I was back home in New Jersey, except for the dim awareness of being in the middle of a vast, dilapidated continent, where the land is relatively cheap, and the rules are hazy, lights bleeding out of their borders into the night sky.