I'm going to put this book in a chapter at a time because I can't see a way to put it all in at once. If anyone who reads this knows how please let me know.

Don Michael - Ten years in the amazon jungle, by Michael Porter

Chapter 1

 

I had a dream, an ambitious, deep, driving force that kept me somewhat sane, and made almost bearable the drudgery of working at normal jobs, and accomplishing normal goals. I had seen once, the Amazon jungle, on the eastern side of the Andes mountains of Ecuador, in South America. My dream was to develop a thousand acre cattle ranch in that jungle. I wanted to move there, live on my ranch, build a beautiful home, dress my wife in white cotton dresses and lacy wide brimmed Panama hats, build an empire, become a millionaire, and hand that legacy down to my children. From then on my family would ever be wealthy. In the cool of the late afternoons I would go riding with my bride on big sleek glossy horses, around the fields and through the pastures, and as we passed the workers they would wave and call out respectfully, “Buenas tardes Señor, buenas tardes Señora.” That was my dream. I believed it possible, with all my heart I knew that I could make it happen, but along with the absolute surety of it, came the hidden fear, if after basing my whole reason for existence on this dream, it doesn’t work out, could I ever overcome a failure of that magnitude? Or would I then simply resign myself to being average, another cog in the wheel of the American economy. I didn’t know. I wanted to believe in my dream, and anything that cast a negative light on it was discounted as unreal, or more commonly, irrelevant.

I grew up on my family's cattle ranch near a town called Sheridan along California highway 65 about a half hour to the south of Yuba City. I didn't think much of the town, but I loved the ranch. I loved to be out in the woods hunting, or working with the cattle, even milking cows and hauling hay weren't all bad because they gave me strong muscles, a very important item to most teenage boys.

At eighteen I went off to college and met Natalie. I was building sets for the theater department, she was a theater major. She was beautiful. Dark long wavy hair, dark brown eyes and fair skin. Natalie was a live wire and I was quiet. We went out and I fell in love on the first date. We were married three years later , after I'd been away two years in South America. Marrying Natalie was the best move of my life.

We lived in California, Hawaii, Utah, California again and then Hialeah, Florida. Sometimes I worked for other people, sometimes I worked for myself, other times I did both at once. I built houses, I built cabinets, had a short lived garage door business, installed insulation, then sold re-insulation for existing houses door to door.

In Hialeah I worked as foreman in my brother Bob’s cabinet shop. I was always searching, never able to convince myself to just accept the grind, and piddle away my life doing normal and accepted things, and at the end have nothing to show for it but an old worn out body. I wanted to do something great. Not be great, but accomplish something great.

We had two children, Natalie and I, when we moved to Florida, William, strawberry blond, and blue eyed, three years old, and Hanna Louisa just turned one, big brown eyes like her mother and just beginning to grow some hair on her round little head. Hanna was named after her maternal grandmother Hanna Louise Williams, but we changed the spelling slightly and the pronunciation completely. It’s pronounced with the “H” silent as the Spanish do and the “a” the sound as in “Father.”

I had still carried within me the dream of an Amazon jungle ranch, but I tried to be patient, feeling that I didn’t yet have enough business experience. I would work for my brother a couple of years, then branch out on my own for five years, then I would be ready. I told Bob about my plans. He thought I was crazy, like everyone else I’d told, (a limited number) but being my brother, was kind about it.

That very night around ten o’clock I got a call from Bob. He and his wife Iraiza wanted to come over, there was something they wanted to talk to us about. “Fine,” I said, “it’s not that late, come on over.” We lived only about three blocks away. They were there in five minutes and seated on our couch receiving Natalie’s and my undivided attention. Seeing our questioning looks, Bob began.

“Iraiza and I have been talking about your plans for a ranch in Ecuador, it sounds like something we’d maybe like to be in on. Can you tell us more about it?”

I don’t think my jaw dropped, I remember having to make sure it didn’t. This was the last thing I’d ever expected! A reaction that was other than “South America?” “You’re crazy!” Trying to suppress my emotions, I began to explain, mostly to Iraiza, as Bob had heard it earlier that day during lunch at the shop.

“In Ecuador, on the eastern side of the Andes mountains, there is a huge area of uncleared land, it’s part of the Amazon jungle basin, which goes all the way across the continent to the Atlantic coast of Brazil. Ecuador has a homesteading law they call “colonization” which means that if you clear a border around a piece of land, the state will deed it to you and it’s yours as long as you begin to clear and work it. This is an area where the climate is the same year round. If you clear it and plant pasture, you never have to cut, bale and haul hay, nor feed it to the cattle. You never have to irrigate the fields, the rain does all that, and the growing conditions are so perfect the grass grows full speed constantly. It should be possible to put at least a cow and calf per acre like we had on our dad’s ranch in California. This is the plan; homestead 1,000 acres of jungle, clear it, plant high quality pasture, place 1/000 Brahman heifers (available there) on the land, and either buy there or import from here, some Angus bulls, to make a sort of Brangus cross. In a year to year and a half, each animal would be worth approximately $500.00 U.S. dollars, which times 1,000 would be half a million dollars a year, and all you have to do is watch them eat grass, get fat, and grow.”

Afterward followed lots of questions and as many answers, then Bob dropped the big one. “Seeing that it’s that good, why wait five years?”

“Because,” I said, “I feel I need more business experience, however if you’re thinking about going in on it with me, that changes things, you already have several years experience running your own shop. What kind of time period did you have in mind, Bob?”

“I was thinking more like making a trip down in three months to check out the situation, and within a year starting the project. What would you think of that?”

I swallowed hard, “If I really believed it could happen that soon, I’m not sure my heart could stand it.”

There was a little more small talk, then they went home. Natalie and I looked in each others' eyes with questioning wonder. Could it really be true? Were we really going to make this fantastic dream come true? As we walked upstairs to our bedroom our emotions were a mixture of disbelief and euphoria. Could this happen? Could I actually get out of the miserable grind? Could I literally build an empire in the Amazon jungle? Yes, emphatically yes! There was no stopping me now. I believed before, I could do it on my own. With my brother’s help it was as good as done.

The next days brought on a frenzy of planning. Not only planning out the project and how we would do it, but figuring the costs. There was a lot of information we didn’t have. The price of land we didn’t worry about because we would homestead it and pay only a nominal fee per hectare (hectare is a land measurement used there, explained most easily as 100 meters x 100 meters, just a shade under 2½ acres). The main cost would be clearing the land and buying the cattle. But it was such a fantastic deal we knew we’d find investors begging to be included. Bob and I set a date and planned the trip to Ecuador, we both spoke Spanish, he learned it in Puerto Rico and I, on the coast of Ecuador, living in Hialeah had allowed us to brush up on it some. The purpose of this trip was to find in which area of the jungle we would have our ranch, see if homesteading was still being done, and check on the price of cattle. In the meantime, through a client of the cabinet shop we met Rubéns Burgos, a native of Ecuador, in Miami on business. We arranged an evening with him and absolutely picked his brains for all the information he was worth. Everything we heard merely confirmed what we already thought. Rubéns had a friend in Quito, the capital city of Ecuador, by the name of Hernán Chiriboga, a lawyer who would be very helpful to us once we got to the country, and Rubéns himself would be in Quito when we got there, would meet us at the airport and help us find our way around. Fantastic! Things couldn’t go any smoother, and they continued to get better.