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MIPOesias ~ ISSN 1543-6063 Volume 17 ~ Summer 2004 |
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The
following piece is an essay from The White Horse: A Colombian Journey, a book forthcoming with Etruscan
Press in 2004, about several months I spent in the Pacific Coast
rainforest of Colombia. When
my Colombian friend, Ana Maria, had proposed that I join her and
participate in the grassroots environmental work she was doing in the
rainforest region there, I was eager for the opportunity.
At the time, I had been feeling restless and unsettled in Miami,
looking for some meaningful way to make a difference.
Ana Maria and I set on a journey into the rainforest of Darien
and Chocó, an area which is still a very remote part of the world.
We stayed for the most part in small villages, with indigenous
people who are fighting to protect their way of life (and, by extension,
the environment around them), Near the end of
the journey, I found myself traveling back alone through Jurado,
a tiny town where the influence of the “developed” world is most
pervasive. This is where I
met Neftali.
We arrived in Jurado
just as the sun was setting. I
was relieved. I hadn't
known the distance further, and I didn't want to ask. The guards didn't bother with anyone on my boat.
They did take a second glance at me, though, an unlikely visitor.
The dock was empty.
A few emaciated dogs eyed us as we unloaded, but they didn't come
too close. We were too late
for me to catch the connecting boat from Colombia to Panama.
Ana Maria had given me the names of a few people I could stay
with, in the event I arrived too late.
I asked one woman about Don José or Neftali, and she said, “Don José...and Neftali, the man who is building the
boat—yes. Both of their
houses are all the way on the other side of town.”
I thanked her, and started off down the
muddy road, that, fortunately, had hardened in the day's sun.
I could hear loud music playing from the center of town, mixing
with the sound of generators. Jurado
was a very skinny village, squeezed in between the river and the ocean,
at the edge of the rainforest. Most
of the village was built along one long dirt road, which had a short
paved section. I wondered
at the purpose of the paved patch, since there were no cars.
Jurado could be reached only by sea or by a journey through dense
rainforest. There were no
roads out.
I passed a few stuffed figures that looked
like scarecrows, which seemed strange in the center of town.
The huts were built as close to the river as possible, and I
could see that several people had planks extending out to little wood
outhouses over the river. Just
a few yards away, a woman washed dishes in the river, and another bathed
her baby.
Near the end of the road, a church stood
tall in comparison to all the one-room huts.
I stopped short when I saw it—the cross on the steeple was
upside down. No
mistaking it. I felt a
chill run through my body, as I wondered what it could possibly mean.
A woman was passing me on my right.
“The cross,” I said, pointing. “It's upside down.”
She looked up.
“Yes,” she said, as if she were surprised that I would think
this strange or unusual. “It's
been that way for a while. There
was another one, a beautiful one, but some years ago, before I was here,
they say a great wind blew through and blew the cross into the ocean.
Then they put this one up there, and at some point over the
years, it flipped over. The
roof is old and very dangerous, so no one wants to climb up there and
fix it. Anyway, most people
don't really notice it's upside down anymore.”
I had looked up Jurado in my dictionary and
knew the name meant "sworn enemy," but it was also a word for
jury. Ironic, I had
thought, trying to make sense of the double meaning of the word.
Later Ricardo had told me that the name Jurado actually came from
the Cuna: the name for Cuna in their own language was Jura and Do
meant land or water. So the
town's name meant "land or water of the Cuna people."
The Cuna, however, had mostly been pushed North into regions now
belonging to Panama.
Jurado is not marked on many newer maps of
Colombia. Older maps of the
region, from the 1700's, for instance, show the river Urado where
the town exists. It
is an often-forgotten place, transitory—its size changes with the
seasons that flood and drain the land.
It changes with the tides.
Like many of the settlements on the Pacific
coast of Colombia, the village had been formed by runaway slaves, most
fleeing the gold mines of Chocó. Escaped
slaves or cimarrones, as they were called, had lived there for
hundreds of years in a tense co-existence with the native Emberá, whose
culture struggled to remain intact.
In the last thirty years, drug money had moved through the town,
and a bank was created. Guerillas had robbed the bank in the 1980s, as an action
explicitly directed against drug money, they said, and the government
had set up an army base on the edge of the village, on the most
beautiful stretch of beach, virtually penning the people in the town. The people
of Jurado have gradually
lost all sources of income—they live in town and only a very few have
land to grow their own food on. The
newest exploitation of the last ten years has been of the trees, the
wealth of the Chocó region, this strip of forest between the Andes and
the Pacific.
I reached Don José's house, which I knew
immediately because he was the richest man in town—he owned the
lumberyard. Most of the
people of Jurado lived in huts, with no running water, but Don José's
house was a sturdy construction of oak and mahogany, with several rooms
and a porch.
Don José also owned the ice-making plant,
which was located in a building next to his house.
A long line of people who had come for ice stretched into the
street.
A small child, having just collected her
family's ice, stood waiting for her mother to return.
She was holding the block of ice on her head, and it had begun to
melt, trickling down the side of her face.
She looked anxiously in the direction her mother had gone, and
shuffled her bare feet in the dirt.
When her mother suddenly reappeared, her face broke into a smile.
She said, “Lo tengo,” telling her mother she already
had it. The mother nodded, a basket of bananas on her head.
She and the child walked down the road towards home, the child
shivering a little beneath the burden.
The ice glistened as she passed me, and its
sides reflected the world around: her mother on the left with the load
of bananas, to the right, men in the lumberyard with their chainsaws,
the sky above turning colors in the sunset, and in the side turned
towards me, I could see my own reflection.
At the lumberyard, the party for the New
Year had already begun. The
music was playing louder and louder, and people were beginning to dance
in the streets, or rather, on the dirt path.
The waiting customers pushed forward to be assured of their ice.
I went to the gate of Don José's house, where a man met me
almost immediately.
The music blared in the background, and I
had to ask him to repeat himself a few times. "Don José?" he
asked. “He's in Bahia
Solano for the New Year. He
won't be back for several days. But
you must join us anyway.”
I looked inside at the wild party,
consisting mostly of drunk men, and declined the invitation.
I thanked him but asked instead about where I could find Neftali.
“Neftali?” He
gave me a funny look. “El
loco?” He pointed
across the river.
In the low light I could barely make out a
house on stilts, with what looked like a boat under it.
“I don't know if he's there,” the man said.
“You can call across the river—when those chainsaws stop
going.” I nodded nervously, peering down to the river where his
finger pointed. The dusk
gave everything an unearthly hue as I walked slowly down to the edge of
the water.
A huge barge headed for Buenaventura, a
town down the coast, was up on land because the tide was out.
The barge was so wide that it hardly seemed as though it would
fit in the river. I watched
as a man carrying a section of tree at least four times his height,
staggered under its weight. Waist-deep
in the water, he lowered his body to get a better grip.
He hoisted the log onto his shoulder and dragged it out of the
water, through the mud, and up the plank of the ship.
Another group of men were simultaneously
operating chainsaws to shorten some of the already dry logs.
The scream of all the saws at once filled the air and drowned out
the music at the house and the people's voices.
I looked back to the river, where several other men were
emerging, walking very slowly under the great weight.
One after another, they came out of the river, and headed up into
the barge, carrying the logs like crosses on their shoulders.
They returned to the river for another and another, moving like
an assembly line.
I'm not sure how long I stood watching
them, waiting for the sound of the chain saws to die down.
This was the edge of town and had probably been the first part to
be logged. There was only
one tree left on this side of the bank, as far as one could see, and it
shielded me somewhat from the men’s vision.
On the other side, where Neftali's house stood, the roots of the
trees still held the earth together.
But on this side with no trees, the banks were eroding, and the
earth was falling into the river even as I stood there.
I had been unable to hear even my own voice
under the scream of the chain saws, but the sound suddenly
stopped—first one saw, then another, and then silence.
At first the silence seemed louder than the chainsaws, because it
had come on so quickly. In
the dimming light, the assembly of men stopped.
They were calling it a day—a year, actually, as it was New
Year's Eve. The last logs
had been pulled from the river and were stacked in piles on the barge
and beside it.
In the silence, I stood at the edge of the
bank a few more minutes, staring into the river and at the outline of
the house and wondered how I should call for Neftali.
Would my voice carry across the river?
Just then I felt a hand touch my shoulder.
A thin, wiry, middle-aged man with a moustache and very dark,
intense eyes asked, “You are looking for me?”
I was startled, but for some reason, his
presence had a calming effect on my senses.
“Yes,” I said. “Thank
God. Ana Maria sent me.”
At the mention of Ana Maria's name, his face became clear with
understanding, and he nodded.
“I missed the boat to Jaqué,” I told
him. “I was returning
from the Emberá village, and the motor broke down.
But I have to be back in Jaqué to catch the plane.”
“Don't worry about that,” he said, “I
know for sure there is a motorboat leaving for Panama tomorrow at dawn.
But first, you must be hungry.”
“Actually, I'm exhausted.
I feel like I could lie down right here and go to sleep.”
“Then you must sleep,” he said, putting
my bag into a small canoe to take me across the river to his house.
“But I will wake you at midnight.
It's not a good idea to sleep through the New Year.
What you are doing when the year changes marks what the year will
hold for you.”
He poled the canoe across the river into
the belly of the night. The
canoe felt like a hollowed-out husk floating in the dark water toward
the little house. I was too tired to ask about the ship underneath his house,
whose bow arched from between the stilts.
He brought me up the wood stairs, pointing out where some planks
had been removed, “for a part of the boat,” he said, and told me to
be careful not to fall through.
A hammock was strung across the house,
which had no walls, and I noticed that spiders had spun huge webs to
catch any insects flying or swept into the house by the wind.
The hammock swayed, and the stilts creaked slightly.
I was so tired from wading all day through the river that I fell
almost immediately into a deep slumber.
I woke in the hour before midnight,
wondering where I was. Neftali was carving something.
He held it out to me.
“Is it a bull?” I asked.
“Buffalo,” he answered.
“I've carved a bull, but this is a buffalo.
You know about buffalo?”
A single book lay on a wooden chest, open
to the page with the buffalo. It
was the B volume of the encyclopedia.
He said he had found it in a box of old magazines down at the
village general store.
“Billy the Kid,” he said.
“You know about Billy the Kid?
I was like Billy the Kid. But
I didn't kill anyone. And I
didn't die at twenty-one. But
I left everything behind and went West.
But this is as far as I could go.
Without a boat, that is.”
“And Lord Byron, the poet?
You know him? Have
you read his "Fugitive Pieces?”
I couldn't say that I had.
He hadn't either, but he went on through Byron, Bronte, Beowulf,
Brazil, Beelzebub, and John the Baptist, showing me pictures on several
of the pages, and some unfinished carvings.
He turned the pages of the encyclopedia to barco
and showed me the different ships depicted.
“I carved small ones first,” he said, “but the one
underneath the house I have been working on by daylight these last few
years. She's taking her
time.”
“What kind of boat is it?” I asked.
“A Viking boat,” he answered, and
paused a moment, as he blew some wood shavings off his hand.
“There was a Reader’s Digest that ended up in town
some time ago, with complete blueprints for a Viking boat.
I studied the design for hours.”
He paused again, as if wondering whether to
continue. “That night, I dreamt about the boat,” he went on.
“I dreamt that El Señor spoke to me and said this would
be my task here—to build this boat.
But the next day, the digest had disappeared, so I was left to
build the boat from memory. I
guess El Señor wanted me to have an even greater task.”
Back home, I probably would have thought,
as the others in town seemed to, that the man was indeed loco.
But I had seen and heard such strange things for many weeks now
during this trip that his talk hardly surprised me.
I thought of a statement Gabriel Garcia Marquez once made—that
he makes nothing up in his stories, that he just writes down what
happens and what the people tell him.
I had begun to believe him.
“Of course, everyone here thinks I’m
crazy—building this boat,” Neftali continued.
“But I’m sure they thought I was crazy when I first arrived.
One day I just walked west from Medellin.
I had to go through Chocó for many months, living off berries
and leaves and what I could find. When
I got here, I must have looked like an animal—half-naked, dirty,
hairy-faced. I had to stop
in Jurado because it’s the edge.
Actually, that’s the way most of the people ended up in this
town.”
He was referring to the fact that most of
the town’s inhabitants were descended from escaped slaves who had fled
through the forest until they reached the ocean and could go no further.
“Why did you build your house on this
side of the river?” I asked.
“Did you see the other side?” he asked.
“I like to have at least this much water between here and
there. Actually, I’d like
a lot more water, but this will have to do for now.
I’ve been building the boat piece by piece.
I’ll trade sometimes for a certain piece of wood.
But mostly, I’ve been using the house.”
He pointed to the missing planks.
“Where are you planning to go when you
finish it?” I asked.
There was a long silence, with only the
faint sound of the carving knife over the wood, before he answered that
time. “Cualquier viaje”
(whichever voyage), he said.
But before I could ask him more, we heard
the voices from across the river rise to a new level, and he sprang up
and ran to the edge of the house.
“It is the countdown,” he said.
“The old year is about to be lit on fire.”
I looked across the river to the party on
shore, where one of the straw men stood tied to a pole, and all the
people gathered around and began to chant: “Diez, nueve,
ocho, siete, seis, cinco, cuatro, tres,
dos, uno!”
At the turn of the year, the straw man was
set on fire, and he burst suddenly into flames.
All around town, fires began simultaneously as each party's
effigy was burned. The people cheered and chanted and began to dance around the
fires.
“Would you like to see her?”
Neftali asked suddenly, pointing down to the boat.
Of course I did, and carrying two lanterns
against the darkness, he led me down the planks and temporary stairs to
the huge ship under the house. We
went in through a small opening like an entrance to a cave, and the
lanterns swung back and forth, casting our shadows on the skeleton of
the ship.
“How long have you been building it?” I
asked.
“Un tiempo,” he answered, as if
an exact time had no meaning.
We stood in silence in the boat as I
wondered what other questions to ask him, and whether I should ask at
all.
Though on land, the boat creaked, and I
almost thought I felt it move as if on water. Perhaps it was the wind
whistling through the wood and blowing against the planks like waves.
I could almost feel the boat straining to leave on some journey.
Walking inside the body of this boat, built
with such careful attention, I understood.
It was a response to a calling—the shape of which we often
cannot understand until we have reached the heart of it.
Neftali had two books that directed his life, and while they were
rather odd texts (the Reader’s Digest and the B volume of the
Encyclopedia), he took their messages on faith.
Even from my Western, “rational” perspective, I believe that
certain books and experiences and people come our way when we need them.
Fate hands us such tickets, and it is up to us whether or not we
use them, even if we often don’t know exactly where we are heading.
When Neftali told me his story that night,
he left much out. But his
actions felt prophetic. His
faith felt prophetic. Perhaps,
as various philosophers have described it, the major activity of the
prophet is interference, to interfere with the way things are going:
militarism, racism, materialism, environmental destruction.
Jeremiah talks of the “tearing up and knocking down” which
must precede the building up and planting.
In much the same way a flood, though destructive, clears the way
for new growth. As Neftali
was taking his house apart, so had I been taking apart some of the
structures and preconceptions of my life as a result of this journey.
His house, like mine, was slowly being disassembled and put back
together in a different form, one with a helm and a compass.
The hull of Neftali’s unfinished boat
curved around me that New Year, oval like an egg, or a seed, holding me
for that moment in time. Of course, I couldn’t help but think of the ark in the
Bible, which I have long understood as such a seed, containing and
preserving the messages of life until the new ground is prepared. The boat contained me as I became part of that seed, part of
that story, which would help me begin to understand the pace and shape
of my own.
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Poetry |
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