![[Brazil_Reflections_Part_9.mp3]] The morning after my first night of forró, we drove out to a reservoir called **Represa de Itupararanga**. Breakfast happened first—because it always did in that house—and then the day started moving without anyone needing to narrate it. Laio had planned the trip. Mariana and I just slipped into it. ## The Sandals Conversation Before we left, Mariana’s mom stopped me with a question I didn’t understand at first. She asked, in Portuguese, where my sandals were. We had to use a translation app to get there. The message, once it finally landed, was clear: I was bringing sandals. This is where I need to confess something that still feels faintly ridiculous. I’ve never liked sandals. The sound. The looseness. The strap between the toes. That constant flip-flap that makes your feet feel like they’re wearing percussion instruments. I’d almost always rather be barefoot, and if I can’t be barefoot, I’ll wear barefoot shoes—the thin kind that don’t really protect you from the world so much as admit the world exists. But none of that mattered. There was no negotiating with an insistent mother, especially one doing her best to care for you across a language barrier. So I took the sandals. And then I did exactly what you would expect me to do: I carried them around most of the day and barely wore them. Later, when we got back, I remember her looking at me with that particular kind of confusion that contains both affection and mild exhaustion. Why bring them if you weren’t going to use them? I didn’t have a good answer. I just had a sheepish grin and the quiet awareness that she’d been right to insist anyway. ## Crossing the Dam The drive out was simple, and the moment I remember most clearly is crossing the dam—narrow, one lane, the kind of structure you don’t really notice until you’re on top of it. On the other side was a place with a summer-camp feel: grounds near the water, practical and open, with the sense that people came here to spend time rather than consume an experience. Mariana knew someone there, and the groundskeeper let us in even though it wasn’t the weekend. We unloaded the boards and carried them down toward the shoreline. ## Barefoot and Feedback That’s where my stubbornness arrived. I’d worn barefoot shoes up until that point, but once we got to the reservoir I went fully barefoot. I don’t want to turn this into a manifesto, but it’s part of how I move through the world: I like direct contact with a place when it’s reasonable, and I have a high tolerance for discomfort if it means I get to feel what I’m doing. And yes—there was discomfort. The ground was hot. The path down wasn’t kind. There were sharp rocks near the shore, little rough transitions where the surface changed from grass to plank to dirt to stone. Every few steps my feet had to renegotiate their relationship with the world. It wasn’t pleasant. But it also did what pain sometimes does: it pulled me into my body. It made the moment unavoidable. The sun, the heat, the texture underfoot, the weight of the board—everything got louder in the simplest way. Around that time I’d been reading **Born to Run** by **Christopher McDougall**, and it had me thinking about feedback—how the body learns through sensation, how comfort can sometimes blur that information. Not that comfort is bad. Just that when everything is softened, you can forget what you’re actually doing. Barefoot, you don’t forget. You adapt. So I made the walk down, got one board to the water, and then went back up to grab another—because my brain was trying to be helpful before it was trying to be socially accurate. I went to get a board for Mariana. I hadn’t asked if she wanted one. She didn’t. So I carried it back up again. A small, perfect loop of effort that existed purely because I’d assumed. It was annoying in the moment, and funny immediately after. Mariana stayed on shore, alone in the shade, and what I remember is not what she _wasn’t_ doing, but how complete she seemed doing so little. She sat on the grass under the trees like she belonged there. Music playing softly. Snacks nearby. Her posture relaxed and elegant, like stillness came naturally to her. She didn’t need the day to entertain her to feel content inside it. Before we pushed off, we did sunscreen. I put some on, and then I tried to help Laio, because his skin is lighter and he burns easily. We did that quick, awkward thing where you try to cover someone’s back without missing spots, and I was too fast and not thorough enough. At the time it felt fine. We didn’t realize how bad a job I’d done until later. ## On the Reservoir Then Laio and I got onto the boards and paddled out. That was the moment the whole day became simple. The sky was clear. The sun was bright and steady. The water held us up in that calm way reservoirs do, wide and patient. And then the jungle. I remember looking toward the edge and seeing how dense it was—green packed so tightly it felt like a wall. You couldn’t see into it. Not really. It didn’t invite you in. It just existed, thick and alive right up to the waterline, like the reservoir had been carved out of something that would reclaim it the second it was allowed to. We paddled without talking much. Just moving, just looking, letting the day be what it was. And because we weren’t talking, my mind started pulling up old images from California lakes. **Lake Almanor. Lake Havasu. Lake Tulloch.** Family trips, spread across a few years. Boats and towing ropes and long days in the sun. The memory that hit hardest was jumping off a cliff with my older sister Michaela—standing at the edge, the split-second of choosing, and then the clean drop into cold shock. I remembered tubing too—my dad and his friend Skip trying to throw us off on purpose, whipping the raft around hard turns until you lost your grip, hitting the water so fast it felt solid. Water shooting up your nose and into the back of your throat. A kind of violence that was also pure joy. And what I realized out there on the reservoir wasn’t that those memories were good. It was that the memories that survived were the ones where the day broke through my teenage habit of telling myself I should be somewhere else. Back then, I was constantly trying to relocate mentally. If I was with family, I’d tell myself I’d rather be with friends. If I was with friends, I’d tell myself I’d rather be alone. Wherever I was, my mind kept insisting there was a better “elsewhere.” But the moments I remember—the ones that lasted—were the moments where that voice went quiet. The moments where the experience was strong enough, enjoyable enough, real enough, that it overpowered my resistance. Paddling beside Laio, in Brazil, with the sun on my shoulders and jungle at the edge of the water, I felt that same break—except this time I noticed it happening. There was nowhere else I wanted to be. Not as a gratitude exercise. Not as a line. Just as a fact. ## Back on Shore When we returned to shore, we met up again with Amanda and João, who I’d met the night before. João was buzzing with excitement and wanted to get on a board immediately. We all insisted on a life vest first, and he did what kids do: he checked the person who really mattered. He looked at Amanda. I don’t remember her needing to say much. A nod was enough. And he accepted it. At that point she wasn’t his mother in the formal sense. She and Rafael were still dating. But right there, in that small moment, you could see the role she was already stepping into. João trusted her the way kids trust the person who makes the world feel safe and legible. She held the boundary gently. He followed it. Motherhood, in practice, is a relationship before it’s a title. Laio took João out on the board, and João’s excitement was bright and unembarrassed. It struck me because at his age I had that excitement too—but I often hid it. I treated joy like something that needed to be managed, like being visibly thrilled was somehow naive. João didn’t do that. He just lived it. While they were out, the rest of us sat in the shade with snacks and drinks, and eventually we all ended up in the water near shore—calm, shallow, thigh-high, the five of us in our own little pocket of the afternoon. Conversation drifting between Portuguese and English without anyone worrying too much about completeness. ## Mariana’s Mom’s Shop After the reservoir we ran a few errands, and one stop was Mariana’s mom’s clothing shop. I don’t care about clothes the way some people do. For most of my life I’ve treated them as utility: cover skin, look decent, don’t think about it too much. Mariana is the opposite. She has an eye for outfits, an instinct for expression through color and fit. She wore things throughout the trip that felt intentional without feeling performative. She could change the energy of a room just by walking into it dressed like herself. But even with that, I didn’t walk into the shop thinking, _I’m going to buy something._ I walked in thinking, _We’re stopping here._ And then I felt the context catch up with me. Mariana’s mom had fed me. Hosted me. Looked out for me. Insisted I bring sandals like I was already someone she could take responsibility for, even without the shared language to fully explain herself. I wanted to thank her in a way that didn’t depend on translation. So I asked Mariana to help me pick out a shirt. She narrowed it to two and couldn’t decide. One was dark blue with bright orange pineapples—bold and contrasty and completely outside my normal range. The other was blue with palm tree silhouettes. Both felt like the kind of thing I wouldn’t buy in my regular life, which made them feel like exactly the kind of thing I should buy there. So I bought both. I didn’t ask the price first. It didn’t matter. I wasn’t really buying shirts. I was buying a way to say thank you that felt proportional to what I’d been given. I wore those shirts a lot after that. They made me feel like I fit in more, like I’d borrowed a little bit of Brazil’s confidence in color. And I liked that. A new place really does give you permission to try on a new version of yourself. ## Elton’s Barbecue Later that evening we went to Elton’s for a barbecue. The thing I remembered most about Elton from the night before was the way he talked about cold beer like it was a craft. **Canela de pedreiro**—the “shin of the mason.” Beer chilled so perfectly that when you pull it out, frost blooms on the glass, dusty and white like concrete powder. At his house, the first order of business was beer. Then the grill. Then slowly, people. Brazilian barbecues aren’t just meals. They’re social architecture. A reason to gather that doesn’t require a special occasion. A night that gives everyone permission to show up and be together without needing to justify it. Elton was an artist at that. Not because he was loud. Not because he tried to be impressive. Because he paid attention—meat, timing, atmosphere, making people feel comfortable. Creating a space where people could relax into themselves. Someone told a story about a past party where people had been setting beers on his car, spilling, leaving sticky film, and the next morning he drove to work with beer cans still stuck to the roof. It was the kind of story that sounds like a punchline, but it also sounded like evidence: nights at Elton’s got comfortable enough that people stopped managing themselves. As the night moved on, I talked more with Amanda. She told me parts of her story—hard years, confusion, stepping back to get perspective. She spoke English fluently, and I kept noticing how many people could. They didn’t announce it; they just met you where you were, quietly, generously. Without that, I would have missed so much of them. ## A Circle of Songs And the night ended the way the best nights sometimes do: not with a plan, but with a circle. Everyone gathered and sang. Somebody handed me control of the music choices, and I did what I’ve always done in those situations: I picked songs that I knew could pull people into the same emotional space at the same time. I remember playing **“Under the Bridge”** by Red Hot Chili Peppers. I remember Sublime. And eventually **“Bohemian Rhapsody,”** which feels like cheating because it turns strangers into a choir almost instantly. There’s a particular kind of joy in watching a room change because the right song starts. Conversations stop. Bodies stand. People sing louder than they meant to. And then, at the end of it all, we walked home. Later that night, Laio’s sunburn made itself known. When we saw it, we laughed—because it truly did look like modern art, one big continent of missed sunscreen spreading across his back. I apologized in the way you apologize when you know the apology won’t undo anything, but you still mean it. ## Quiet Gratitude And when I finally got into bed, I didn’t feel like I’d lived some dramatic travel story. I felt like I’d been carried through a day made of care: the sandals, the shade, the life vest, the shop, the barbecue, the singing. A whole sequence of ordinary moments that added up to something quietly important. I fell asleep tired and grateful—still a little surprised at how easily Brazil had started to feel like a place I could belong. Continue to the next post: