Arizona Daily Star from Tucson, Arizona • Page 33

gftg Attorns Batlg Star Tucson, Thursday, June 17, 1993 Comics 4C -r II i I 9V I I AM bara Linaeman Beyond ptdwaj 'in ft mm "lit A I flff TT I Amazon 7 Ex-Tucsonan finds a wife, a cause The Arizona Daily Star ill 'it I About nine years ago, Tuc-sonan David Richardson went to the Amazon and found a place where he could settle 4 SN III A A 1 Wo ft wwie. Ed Severson "It was the i safe is 4 Bruce McClelland, The Arizona Daily Star David Richardson and his wife, Maria Antonla Kaxlnawa, at his mother's home In Tucson Geographic because my mother gave me a lot of National Geographies," he said. "Anyway, it was raining, and I looked out the window, and I said, 'I know up to Speedway, and I know up to he said. Suddenly, the smallness of his world seemed to close in around him. He started traveling and just kept on moving.

Besides doing a stint in the Peace Corps in Swaziland and Malaysia, he traveled anyplace that caught his fancy, such as Australia, Nepal and India "In those days, you stuck $150 or $200 in your pocket, jumped on a plane, took off and made the best of things," he said. "You could always find an odd job, or figure out a place to sleep." To keep himself afloat, he shined shoes, sketched pictures in plazas for tourists, helped install tile roofs and worked as a tour guide and as a commercial fisherman out of San Diego. In 1972, he canoed 4,500 miles down the Amazon with a friend. "Nobody had any currency on the Amazon," he said. "We traded tobacco and Frisbees." In Borneo, he was tattooed by the Iban Indians.

"They are a gift when you go from one community to another, and I'm probably one of two or three white men who have them," said Richardson, who won't permit his tattoos to be photographed. "I admired them for their knowledge of the forest, and they were completely aware of the spirit world." After a while, Richardson found work with oil companies. "Whenever I had a little bit of money ahead, I'd stretch it for three or four years and travel," he said. "With travel there was sensory overload Rio de Janeiro wasnt like Los Angeles, and Los Angeles wasnt like Athens, and Athens wasnt like London." Along the way he picked up half a dozen languages and several dialects, including Malay, Indonesian, Spanish and Portuguese. Finally, ending up in the Amazon, he lived there sculpting and painting for about five years and was about to leave when he met Antonia.

"She was very embarrassed at first that she was an Indian," he said. "In that part of Brazil, they're the lowest thing on the social ladder. If you throw a dog in there, there'll be a dispute about which one is lower." After they were married, Richardson See RICHARDSON, Page 6C last frontier, a place with adventure where all the rules weren't established yet," he said. "I knew that I could fall in among the tribes and disappear." Although he did fall in among the tribes, he didn't disappear. Five years ago, he married Maria Antonla Kaxinawa, 21, of the Kaxinawa tribe, and they live on a boat on the Amazon with their son, Miguel An-gelos Amazonas Kaxinawa, 34, and daughter, Ana Maria Kaxinawa, 2.

(Antonia's last name and that of her children is the same as that of their tribe, although they are listed as Richardson on their passports. In addition, they all have native names.) Richardson and Antonia have established the 10-month-old Center for the Preservation of Indigenous Art 1492 1992 in Alter do Chao, Brazil. The building houses the largest collection of Amazonian native art on exposition in Brazil. The items in the collection all bought from Amazonian tribes include ceramics, blowguns, headdresses, arm bracelets, weavlngs and tools. A gift shop supports the center, which has become a major stop for the cruise boats that ply the Amazon.

"We were just what the tourist industry was waiting for, but that was never our intention," Richardson said. "We feel it's a permanent memorial for the tribes that have slipped into extinction since 1492 (the year Columbus landed in the Americas)." For Richardson, 43, who is in town with his family visiting his mother, Kay, it's been a long and winding road from Tucson to the Amazon. A 1967 graduate of Rincon High School, he spent a couple of semesters studying fine arts at the University of Arizona. He recalls sitting in a friend's house one day when everybody went out for pizza. "I'd say I'm a byproduct of National wv Vi--if 'i -tJ'w-----wl t.

The Center for the Preservation of Indigenous Art 1492-1992 In Alter do Chao, Brazil News of old friend's death unleashes flood of fond memories -acx" Li By John Bret-Harte The Arizona Dally Star My friend Hans Vitzthum died two weeks ago. His wife, Quita, whom I'd also known since childhood, called to give me the news. Hans had pancreatic cancer, one of the meanest, most painful varieties of that terrible disease. He and I were the same age, give or take a month or two, and we went to school together from sixth grade through 12th. For two or three of those years, he and his One wretched summer, when we had reached the age of working, we got jobs pitching hay into stacks where it would be cured.

This had always looked, from a distance, like fun, but in the stifling heat and humidity of July and August it soon became brutal and exhausting. I quit after a few days. Hans worked on. The January afternoon in 1946 when I broke my leg skiing, Hans was with me in fact the hill where I took the fall was behind his house. It was he who went to get his mother, and she who went to get mine.

By the time my mother got there, it was dark and she lighted her way with a kerosene lantern. A lucky thing too, since it was so cold by the time the school nurse got there with morphine and a toboggan to pull me out that the morphine froze in the needle, and the only Are to thaw it out was in Mother's lantern. Later on, in high school, family lived in the next house to ours, though out in the Vermont country where we were, people spread out There was about a quarter-mile between our houses. In those years, Hans was my closest friend and perhaps my only one, since I was a skinny, misanthropic kid who worked hard to be popular and generally Li- Hans and I weren't so close. Hans Vitzthum Although our class was small, we gravitated toward different groups and got absorbed in different activities.

But we remained friends, with an easy familiarity between us that rested on years of being together. After we graduated I came West almost all the rest of our class, including Hans, stayed in the East With the sole exception of one cousin who had graduated with me, I saw none of my classmates for 40 did my things teaching, editing, finally newspa-pering; they all did theirs. Hans went into international banking. I would read from time to time about my old friends in the school's newsletter, but seldom bothered to write or try to keep up with them. Then came the magical reunion, our 40th.

Having never before attended any reunion, either at my school or at any of the three universities that gave me degrees. See FRIEND, Page 6C ended up friendless. Hans, uart. onH on the other hand, was open, Jonn Bret-Harte, left, and generous and friendly. I don't remember what he looked like then, but the persistent image I have of him is of tousled, dark hair and a broad smile that seemed to light up his whole being.

We did all kinds of things together. The brook that ran through the woods at the bottom of our property was dammed farther down, and on sunny summer afternoons when the air was still and muggy, we would go down to the pond and skinny-dip. Other days we played in the old barn behind his house, climbing on the beams and jumping down into the loose hay below. Hans had a pony named Nicky and we rode him. Later on there was a larger horse that we undertook to break.

In retrospect, it seems providential that the animal was docile to the point of lethargy, or we might have been the ones who were broken. As it was, we got a fine sense of accomplishment without much effort his Most of the surviving members of the Putney School Class of 1950, with some spouses, in 1990.