Marc Herman: Searching for El Dorado

If ever you doubted the preciousness of that ring around your finger, you may want to pick up Marc Herman's Searching for Eldorado, which chronicles the astonishing human cost of extracting gold from the rainforests of the northern Amazon. Neither a professional traveler nor an environmental advocate, Herman stumbled upon his project in the remote tropics. One winter nine years ago, he'd wanted to get away to someplace warm. There, on a day trip from Caracas, he met his first Guyanese miner outside a roadside shack in a town called Km 88. Intrigued, Herman did some poking around and found that the northern Amazon had been host to a veritable gold rush since the 1980s, attracting everyone from heavily backed multinationals to independent prospectors who spent their days inhaling fumes from the mercury they used to leach the gold from dirt.

What follows is a terrific dual narrative about how the whiff of gold can linger in a region for centuries, even when it's clear that extracting the stuff is no longer profitable. With casual, yet authoritative flair, Herman explains how El Dorado was once a mythic city of gold. In light of this grand past, what Herman finds today seems all the more sorrowful. He journeys into the interior of the region on rickety cargo trucks and visits mines where he meets men working in nothing but their underwear in a few feet of water.

The living conditions outside the mines are not much better. In Georgetown, Guyana, the people mulch their past day by day. Colonial mansions slouch toward ruin. Where the colonial influence fades, Americanisms take its place. One village Herman passes through features a shack that plays movies, like the narcodrama Traffic, so long as the temperamental power generator keeps running. Underlying this fascination with the U.S. is a longing of great seriousness. Many of the men Herman interviews beg for help with the INS--"only for write a letter," one repeats over and over, pining for a visa.

It's not hard to understand why. Even a lucrative day at the mines brings but two or three dollars, more often much less. And yet, in spite of this bleak setting, Herman makes the heartening discovery that the children of these dollar-a-day miners are exceptionally well cared for. Here is the best explanation for why miners keep scouring the soil. "They said faith was the nation's wealth and the gold was just a talisman," Herman reports. It sounds naive, but after reading Searching for El Dorado, you may come around to seeing the appeal of such a philosophy. Faith may not be as good as gold, but in their country, in their situation, it's all they've got.