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Perini had decided to plow the field over and start again. Which meant that it would be at least another five years before Fordlandia would produce latex. The lumber mill, too, was a mess, its blades and saws ill suited for the very hard or very soft jungle wood. Hired to be a sawyer, Matt Mulrooney felt more like an undertaker: “They averaged about a man a day dying. I used to get orders every so often to cut this lumber for coffins. There was a certain thickness and a certain width they used to make the coffins out of. They’d bring an order up every so often and give it to me. I’d say, ‘What, some more of them gone?’ ‘Yep, better fix up for about ten, Matt.’ ”

    Fordlandia cemetery .

    Like many of the other men Ford sent to Brazil, Mulrooney belonged to the generation of skilled carpenters, miners, and lumberjacks that had presided over the transformation of Michigan’s natural resources into wealth; they had seen the conversion of the state’s forests, minerals, and waterways into the energy and capital that fed the great industrial factories and cities of the Midwest. Sawyers like Mulrooney had witnessed in their lifetimes the seemingly inexhaustible white pine forests of upper Michigan thin out, leaving first inferior stocks of yellow pine, birch, and deciduous aspen and then wastelands of cutovers, trunks, shrubs, and branches of no economic value. Yet they also saw the rise of cities that spoke of prosperity enjoyed not just by the lords and barons in the manor houses of Chicago and Detroit but by increasingly affluent working- and middle-class communities that spread out from these cities. 21
    So Mulrooney could take pride as the gnarl of the Amazon gave way, slowly, to the order of the plantation. “You know, an old sawyer likes the looks of a sawed log,” he said. “There was some nice-looking logs there, some nice-looking timber, awful nice-looking. To go out and look at a bunch of that timber cut up in the woods, it was really a picture to look at, straight and not a limb or a knot in it.”
    But the sawyer also knew that a “very, very big percentage” of the cut wood was “no good.” Watching the absurdity of it all—Oxholm’s bungling, the silliness of trying to impose Henry Ford’s ideas concerning diet and morality, the enormous expense and waste of resources, the impossibility of making the mill work right—Mulrooney had a distinct sense of futility. At the end of the workday, he and his pal Earl Casson, also from Iron Mountain, would “grin and wonder how we’d ever wound up in a madhouse, or if we’d ever win. We tagged it as a game.”
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    * More than a half century earlier, Henry Wickham wrote about the sensation of sitting in the forest and gazing up at the “leafy arches above” and becoming “lost in the wonderful beauty of that upper system—a world of life complete within itself.” The British explorer Charles Luxmoore, traveling up the Tapajós in 1928 trying to locate Percy Fawcett, complained incessantly in his journal about everything he encountered—people, food, insects, heat, and the landscape. Yet upon taking a hike in the forest, “lit up by the sun,” he pronounced it “very beautiful.” “I would not have missed this part of the journey for anything,” Luxmoore conceded. (Joc Jackson, The Thief at the End of the World: Rubber, Power, and the Seeds of Empire , New York: Viking, 2008; 99; Devon Record Office, Exeter, UK, Charles Luxmoore, Journal 2, 1928, 521 M–1/SS/9.)

CHAPTER 14
    LET’S WANDER OUT YONDER
    IT IS ALMOST IMPOSSIBLE TO TELL THE STORY OF FORDLANDIA WITHout invoking Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness , that great, indelible allegory of European colonialism in general and Belgian brutality in particular. Here, the Rouge River stands in for the Thames, the starting point of Conrad’s tale, and the Ormoc for the Nellie , which carries Marlow to his rendezvous with tropical madness. Any number of Ford agents—Blakeley,