In Art one is never entitled to disregard what is true. But this truth may be rendered only if one does not seek out ugliness as a matter of principle so much so that one remains blind to all else-
"Men, sharpen your tools," Linden bellows from under a wide brimmed hat to no one in particular, "We are going to town." He stands in the twilight at the edge of the sleeping hut buttoning a clean longsleeve shirt. A couple of prostitutes working their way up the Siparuni have arrived at a camp in the valley about a mile below ours. Along with the women is an enterprising man who has hauled, all the way from the coast and no doubt with great difficulty, a couple of cases of beer.
Linden is one of the three Cheong brothers who run the camp. Benny is a fourth brother whom my companions Bruce and Tony met in Irdouk along the Brazilian border. Benny and a Patamono Indian named John have been hiking and exploring with my companions Bruce and Tony for over six weeks. Bruce is collecting plants for a botanical garden he is constructing for a university in Florida and Tony is a young botanist on his first jungle expedition.
The moon has yet to rise as Bruce, Benny and myself set off down the valley. The trail to the lower camp winds through the mining wasteland; crossing logs floating over quicksand, skirting brown, orange and green pools of stagnant water, across beaches of alluvial sand and back into the jungle. Benny, walking without a flashlight just ahead of Bruce and me, somehow manages to spot a deadly labaria, or fer-de-lance, coiled at the edge of the trail. He requisitions Bruce's walking stick and wildly beats at the snake. A direct hit causes the snake to shudder. Benny raises the stick for the death blow, but in the nervous bouncing light of Bruce's and my flashlights the mottled snake vanishes into the dense undergrowth.
We emerge from the forest into another sandy wasteland. We duck under white PVC sluice pipe and cross onto a grassy field and arrive at an open thatch hut. Several of the men from our camp are already drinking the warm Venezuelan beer which has been marked up about a thousand percent. Linden has bought a half case which everyone shares. The beer is paid for in gold dust, the preferred medium of exchange in the Siparuni.
Several men sit on buckets at the edge of the darkness circling the hut which is lit only with a week kerosene lantern hanging from a cross timber. A young woman wrapped in a blanket and with frizzy brown hair lays hanging over the edge of a hammock which is slung diagonally across the hut. For want of a seat I stand leaning on a post to which one end of the hammock is tied. Phillip, Linden's younger brother and the camp foreman, sits in front of me on a white plastic bucket. He wears a clean white tank top shirt, a gold watch and smells of cologne.
Linden's face is obscured by his wide brim so his voice seems to come from nowhere in particular. He talks of working in a remote Brazilian mining camp. It was his first real mining job and he was young, inexperienced and illegal. A fat Brazilian foreman for some reason had it in for Linden who was given all the worst and most dangerous jobs, was teased, bullied and fed poor rations. The hardship and harassment persisted for weeks. Linden is powerful and highly respected in the camp so we listen attentively to the resolution of his torment.
"So," Bruce leans toward Linden, "what did you do?"
"Do?"
"Yeah, What did you do?"
"Nothing"
"Nothing?"
"I took my time. It was my first mining job." Linden sips his beer. "That man had things I need to know. I took a lot from that man", Linden taps his forehead. "It was..., it was a..." Linden sucks air through his nostrils looking for the precise word, "it was a ... exercise."
Bruce offers to buy another half case of beer from a skinny Creole sitting behind Linden named Terry Thomas who came up the river with the two women. With a nod from Linden Terry Thomas accepts Bruce's credit. As beers are passed around Bruce pulls his carbide lamp out of his pack, lights it and sets it on the crate on which he's sitting. The light shines directly toward me so it actually obscures my vision. Linden, who sits next to Bruce, and Phillip, who sits just ahead of me, are reduced to dark silhouettes. The carbide flame is almost directly behind the head of the woman in the hammock so her frizzy hair glows like a corona.
Linden asks Bruce what he plans to do with the plants he's been collecting. Bruce rummages in his day pack and pulls out a packet of photographs from a small ziplock bag and hands them to Linden. Phillip leans toward Linden as he flips through the photographs of several of Bruce's projects, large totally constructed tropical gardens and waterfalls in Asia and the United States. Phillip stands and peers over Linden's shoulder. Linden hands the photos to Phillip one at a time as he looks through them.
"You planted these plants in these jungles, Bruce?" Asks Phillip.
"No I made them."
"You made this?" Phillip holds up a picture of a constructed waterfall and lush tropical gardens from some hotel in Singapore.
"Yup."
"You made this?"
"Everything. Every single plant, every single rock I put there. I made the pools, I made the falls, I made the whole thing"
Phillip passes the photo to Terry Thomas. "He made that." Phillip taps his index finger on the photo, "The man made that." Linden hands Phillip another photo.
"You made this too?"
"Its what I do."
"Bruce you must be a millionaire. Any man who can do that must be a millionaire."
"No, I work cheap"
"A quarter millionaire?"
"Not even a quarter millionaire."
"In Guyana a man who could do that would be a rich man,"
Bruce sighs.
"Bruce, you can make this", Linden gestures toward the dark, toward the desolate valley, "into Paradise?" The woman in the hammock titters.
"It was Paradise... it is Paradise."
A young Portuguese man with a leonine mane of jet black hair appears in the light of the hut. He is shirtless and has his right arm around a young woman and a can of beer in his left hand. The woman is perhaps eighteen with straight black hair, she stands in flip-flops with her arms folded in front of her. The man nods and they stand in a corner.
Phillip returns to his bucket. He cocks his head and looks up at me, "Guyana, you know," he clenches his right fist, "is a very, very rich country." Phillip smiles, the carbide light streaks across his face and his gold ringed incisors flicker.
I walk out from under the hut to stretch my legs. Red Howlers roar from a hill to the west about a half mile away; bats flutter around the hut and across the open valley. I swat a sting on my knuckle; I feel blood smear across my palm. Frogs twitter somewhere near one of the ponds and a single toad drones in the moonlight, "work...work...work..."
The Essequibo flows to the sea. The Siparuni flows to the Essequibo. Countless creeks, streams and rivulets--named and unnamed--trickle, seep and cascade down the eastern face of the Pakaraima Mountains to the Siparuni.
The ancient Pakaraima are crumbling into hills and the hills are dissolving into the alluvial valleys. Quartz intrusions, thrust upward from deep within the earth, are exposed, worn and shattered by the elements. Auriferous veins are ground over millennia to nuggets and to fine dust and scattered throughout the land; or as they say in the jungles of western Guyana: Gold can be anywhere. Gold is everywhere.
A man in a yellow vinyl hood and a purple shortsleeve shirt stands knee deep in a muddy sump at the edge of a large shallow pit. He monitors a six inch yellow hose which sucks the gray slurry out of the pit. His job is to keep the hose free of stones, roots or anything which might clog it, a task he mostly performs with his feet.
I sit on a ragged pile of branches and logs which ring the pit like a nest; my sketch book is open in my lap. Just below me the man in the pit bends over and sticks his whole arm into the slurry. His head is cocked skyward as his arm runs through the slurry. He grabs something from the muddy bottom, straightens, and examines his find in the palm of his hand. He sloshes through the slurry and clambers out of the pit toward me picking his way over branches and logs. As he reaches me he unfurls his fingers. Upright and wriggling in his palm is an eight inch armored catfish, black and glistening as a rainy night.
Our valley is desolation. Skeletal trees ring malarial pools. The natural course of the mountain stream has been diverted and obscured by the mining operation as sand and mud pave the valley floor for several miles between the lush jungle slopes. Only grass and scattered clumps of bushes grow along the edges of the multicolored water filled craters.
I follow a path looping around the valley and winding along the edge of a virgin jungle. I pass one of three mining camps, each consisting of several large tarps stretched over crude pole structures erected on the lower slope of the hills along the valley. In each camp live ten to fifteen miners, or pork-knockers as they are called in Guyana. Most are Creoles from the coast, though some are Amerindians, mostly Patamono, whose nearest village is several days hike into the Pakaraima.
I walk past a single
small thatch hut at the base of a hill. A man lays coiled on
the dirt floor wrapped in a blanket. A single shot shotgun lays
on a piece of clear plastic a few feet away pointing to his head.
Next to the gun, and set erect in a row are four D cell batteries.
They are, I believe, Korean, green and silver.
Lizards scatter; the man rolls toward me and lifts his head. He is a young Amerindian, perhaps eighteen; his black hair is damp and matted to his forehead. I stop. Malaria? He smiles and nods once.
On the other side of an opaque pond a single Creole sits on a log facing the sluice and the pit. A British diesel engine floating on a crude raft in the pond roars behind him. The man is barefoot, mud spattered and he stares toward the treetops with his round face puffing on a cigarette. His name is Cookup and he is the foreman of one of the camps. Yelling through the roar of the diesel engine Cookup explains to me how the gold mining operation works: the land is cleared - trees are chainsawed, chopped, burned or, if too large, simply left to die. Water is pumped from one of the makeshift ponds through a four inch PVC pipe to a powerful fire hose which blasts the earth into a milky slurry. Pork-knockers hack and chainsaw the tangle of exposed roots and toss them up onto the rim to be burned. Before long a large pit, perhaps half an acre in area and about ten to fifteen feet deep or more is gouged out of the earth. The slurry is channeled into the low end of the pit, where a hose powered by another diesel engine sucks and pumps the slurry up to a wooden sluice. The slurry cascades down a series of open ended sluice boxes and over the bottoms of which are nailed several rows of riffles or wooden slats which catch the heavier materials - mostly gold, small stones and an occasional diamond. Over time the near sterile mix of the spent slurry repaves the valley. Powered by diesel fuel and visions of riches, the pit moves like a necrotic sore along the jungle floor, devouring, digesting, excreting.
I bombard Cookup with questions about what it takes to get a mine going- claims, financing, equipment- Cookup waves his hand in front of his face as if batting flies. He drags his last puff from his cigarette and flicks it toward the pit as two scarlet macaws streak and squawk into the valley flying directly over our heads. Only two things, Cookup assures me, are truly necessary for the mining of gold in the jungles of Guyana: Ignorance and Brute Force.
The diesel engines drone to a halt. Blue diesel smoke rising and curling skyward from the pit precipitates shafts of late afternoon light streaking through the tree tops. The two macaw, flying high over the pit, flash in the sunlight; they disappear above the canopy then reappear, as if on a tack, beating directly to their nest in a tree about eighty feet above the camp.
About a dozen men crawl out of the pit, scramble over tangled piles of branches and logs and file along the edge of the jungle avoiding the mud and quicksand around the sluice. They drop onto the dry sand and file one by one past Cookup and me. They are sinewy Amerindians and Creoles, barefoot, mud splattered and more than half the men carry, like little purses, homemade birdcages. In each cage sits or flits a little brown finch called a tawa tawa bird and the song of each is prettier than the next.
A
pork-knocker and Patamono Indian named
Ramsatt informs us that his village will be coming down to the
head waters of the Siparuni River in about a week for its yearly
fish kill. A poisonous vine is mashed and soaked in a dugout
canoe then dumped into the river. The poison numbs or kills almost
every fish within a several hundred square foot section of river
from the bizarre, bewhiskered, and plated catfishes of the dark
river bottom to the swift, bejeweled Characids- the tetras, piranhas,
pirai of the mid depths and the light dappled surface. As the
stunned fish float near death they are scooped up, or shot with
arrows, or otherwise collected and dried for later consumption
back in the village.
About a day's hike south from the mine is a place on the Siparuni River called Lloyd's farm. Ramsatt introduces us to a couple of young men from his village who are fishing in a nearby creek about a mile from the mine and who live seasonally at Lloyd's Farm. Claude and Ignatius agree to help pack our supplies to Lloyd's Farm and from there we may be able to hire them and their boats and paddle the three days to the headwaters.
The trail winds along a sparse forest floor perpetually shaded by a vast lacy dome of vegetation. Every few hours or so we cross another trail, one of perhaps thousands of interconnecting trails, which grid the forest floor throughout the great South American wilderness. The trails are the living remains of an awareness immersed in the world and moved by the elegance of necessity. Neither designed nor arbitrary they vanish, reappear and vanish again, yet they invariably follow the most sensible route over hills, around bogs and across creeks.
Bruce and Tony walk well ahead of the rest of us. Bruce, with only a heavy day pack and his long walking stick, follows an almost invisible trail. He is an experienced jungle hiker and intuitively gravitates toward the correct path whenever the trail is obscured by treefalls or simply disappears in the undergrowth.
Tony's wild matted hair hangs on his shoulders and his beard grows to his chest. He walks barefoot wandering on and off the faint trail. He wears only a light shortsleeve shirt and a pair of gymshorts. His pack is almost empty; he carries no map or compass or machete; he asks no directions nor is he especially experienced in jungle exploration. He wanders up hills and disappears into valleys willing himself to be lost. Tony is guided by a faith in the beneficence of the jungle and proceeds as if ignorance itself could be perfected.
Ignatius slides his knife into the tigerfish, pulls out the entrails and tosses them into the river. Small characins churn as the current sweeps the guts down stream. Ignatius' young wife stands alongside barefoot in a frilly dress holding a baby in her right arm; the baby's head is cocked over his mother's thin arm watching his father. Ignatius' wife smiles at me and she smiles at the striped three foot catfish. Ignatius walks to the edge of the rock, opens the fish and rinses its gut; the blood stretches, billows and vanishes in the curling waters of the Siparuni. With a fresh fish Ignatius and his family climb past me and up the bank of Lloyd's Farm.
Although it has rained intermittently almost every day we are entering the "dry" season and presumably the river has subsided enough for our journey to the fish poisoning at the headwaters. The river is obviously well below its high water marks as the banks rise about eight or ten feet above the river and the large flat rock. The rock would be totally submerged in high water but now serves as rare natural dock along the muddy banks of the Siparuni.
I swim in the gentle current and wash several days of dirt and grime. Wary of the notorious pirai I rinse myself and crawl out of the water onto the warm rock. Small characins, several species of tetras- some silver, some gold, some pink, some spotted- flicker along the shore. A single six inch river goby sits in a crevice on the rock and herds of two inch corydorus catfish graze to the waters edge.
I try fishing with a hand line and a few worms I dug out of the bank. On my first toss I feel a strike; I pull in an eight inch long catfish. The catfish is a muddy green with speckles; it has goofy but alert eyes, oversized pectoral and dorsal fins and a small strictly bottom feeding mouth.
"Hasa." A middle aged Amerindian in green shorts and a baseball cap leans on a paddle next to me. "Hasa," the man points to the catfish, "they never take line." He introduces himself as Jerry Lewis and points to the jungle across the river where he has a small farm. I ask him if the hasa is good to eat. He shrugs. "Today, perhaps. The fish don't bite as they once did, before the mining, once ago." As if hooking fish after fish he snaps his hand, "zing, zing, zing." He holds both arms in the air as if lifting a large catch of fish and Jerry Lewis giggles.
"How many miles to the beach?" Ignatius paddling glances over his shoulder but doesn't answer me. "Is it far?"
Ignatius plunges his paddle into the water and as he sweeps it along the hull two symmetrical vortices spin past me amidships. "Far far."
An anhinga, a hundred feet or so ahead, struggles to get airborne; his sodden body skims along the surface, wings beating. The bird lifts from the water. Ignatius lets fly an arrow which streaks to intercept the bird. The rising arc of the bird bends toward the falling arc of the arrow as if destined to meet. The arrow passes through the feathers of the birds right wing and plunges into the Siparuni. The anhinga disappears unharmed around a bend. Ignatius retrieves his arrow which bobs feathers up in the river, he turns and grins with dimpled cheeks.
The Siparuni flows between steep banks; there are very few places along the river to land or even rest. Our plan is to camp on one of the rare sandy beaches one of which, Ignatius tells us, is almost halfway to the headwaters at the base of the Pakaraima Mountains. With luck we should be able to reach the beach by nightfall. The chances are, however, that we won't reach the headwaters until the day after tomorrow, hopefully a day or two ahead of the Patamono fishermen who's village is a couple days hike farther west.
The river is littered
with dozens of fallen submerged and half submerged trees and
a magnificent primeval forest grabs the banks. A red howler troop
feeding a hundred feet over our heads watch in silence from scattered
light as we pass. Gigantic oropendola nests hang along side smaller
scarlet rumped orioles; the male oropendolas gurgle, hang upside
down and flash their golden tails. We startle several giant river
otters feeding on a log jutting into the river. They abandon
their fresh catch of pirai and dive into the water behind the
log and rubberneck us as we pass.
Bruce notices a large black carcass on an unusually shallow grassy bank on the right side of the river. He back paddles the stern of the canoe toward the bank. We approach with caution what appears to be a pile of inner tubes crawling and swarming with flies. "Camudi!" Bruce quickly surmises the body can be nothing other than an anaconda of enormous dimensions. The stern of the boat bumps into the bank a few feet below the awkward black coil, hundreds of flies take off and swirl into a grey cloud. A black head rises from the grass. The snake comes right for Bruce who furiously paddles. The beady-eyed head dips as it reaches the water and the snake uncoils, pours into the river and disappears in our wake.
"Is it far to the beach?"
"Far?"
"Yes, far."
"Yes, far."
We paddle in a generally southwesterly direction. The sun ducks in and out of clouds and slowly drops below the top of the canopy. Golden rays glitter through the leaves of the high canopy. An occasional light rain drifts down the winding river valley more refreshing than anything else. I watch my lengthening shadow paddling along side the boat; drops of water skim and sparkle over the shadow as I lift my paddle for each return stroke. Eddies swirl and streak in the dapple light as the river slips beneath us and I revel in the illusion of swift progress.
We tie up to a huge half submerged trunk to fish for our supper. We catch pirai, cichlids and some kind of iridescent catfish. We club the dangerous pirai and throw them in the bottom of the boat with the other fish and before long a pile of fish accumulates under my seat.
I place my paddle across the gunnels above my lap and lay a pretty golden sunfish on the blade. I open my small watercolor box and my sketchbook and begin my work ignoring the staccato flapping of dying fish under my seat. The sunfish is a long elegant cichlid; a bold eyespot dominates its tail, the tips of its dorsal and caudal fins are dipped in gold and crimson, a black streak flashes through each eye...
The razor chomp
of a pirai penetrates my heel. I yell and swirl in my seat upsetting
my paints. I grab my paddle and club the fish with the butt end.
The pirai shivers and is still. Blood trickles from my heel.
"Ignatius, is it far?"
"Not far."
The river narrows and the current accelerates as we continue up the river. Shafts of light, as if on a great fulcrum, rise toward the canopy as the sun sinks behind the deep forest.
"Close?"
Ignatius scans the river ahead, peering around a bend.
"Are we close?"
Ignatius stands in the bow and points his paddle ahead and toward the left side of the river, "no, not close." A sandy white beach, the first one we've seen in almost eight hours of paddling, appears on the left side of the river, "close close."
I sleep little. My tent is pitched on the beach against the steep bank away from the rising waters while everyone else is camped up on the bank. The rain and wind crush against my rainfly and water dribbles in around the zipper as I peer into the slick blackness to check our two boats which rock in the ragged river. When the rain lets up I go out and pull the boats further up the beach and retie their bowlines to exposed roots on the bank. The river rises all night and by daybreak it's within a foot of my tent. I rise prepared to strike my tent but the rains die and the river stabilizes.
I join my companions who rest in hammocks under a huge tarp at the top of the bank. We sit drinking porridge waiting for the weather to resolve itself. Our will to proceed bends as we contemplate the silent rush of the river below the bank. Benny digs chegoe eggs from between Tony's toes with his knife and we marvel at a fungal growth which covers much of Tony's back in a magnificent reddish purple spiral. Bruce sits on a five gallon bucket tapping, just below his left eye, a sore he suspects is a growing beefworm larvae. Ignatius clambers up the bank from bailing the boats. When he informs us there is no way his village will proceed with the fish poisoning in such high and murky waters our collective will snaps and we abort our mission.
Tony and Bruce wander off into the surrounding jungle with Benny to collect plants so it is mid afternoon by the time we head back downriver. The trip is swift in open stretches of river but slowed by sunken logs and intermittent violent rainbursts. As the precipitous tropical night falls we are miles from Lloyd's farm.
The early moon flashes between broken clouds dimly lighting our way between dozens of sunken and half sunken trees. Ignatius in the bow picks our way. He moves his head slightly from side to side scanning for debris and logs ahead- in darkness one sees more clearly by indirect vision. Not once do we strike a log or a rock.
The moon is almost overhead when we land at the flat rock. Barefoot, I step out of the boat and skid on the rock. Someone turns on a flashlight. The rock is spattered with barely coagulated blood. Each crevice and crack is a little crimson pool. Claude has apparently killed a peccary earlier in the day and slaughtered it on the rock.
Up in one of the open huts Ignatius brings us a bowl of fermented casiri along with a warm meal of boiled cassava and fish which his wife cooked earlier in the day. We learn Ignatius' baby boy has developed a bad fever and all the symptoms of malaria. This is a very dangerous situation for a young child. We debate whether to give the baby some of our anti-malarial pills but we have no idea what constitutes a safe dosage. Benny insists Ignatius bring the baby to the mining camp and from there try to catch the weekly supply boat down the Siparuni to the Essequibo. With luck the baby can be in Georgetown in two or three days. Bruce gives Ignatius a wad of money for the trip and Ignatius disappears into his hut.
We lean at the table sipping our casiri. In a nearby open hut Claude tends to his peccary over a smoldering fire. Bruce curses his beefworm which continues to grow in his face. I'm beginning to feel a little listless myself and I suspect some parasite is flourishing in my gut. Tony leans over the table resting on his elbows. He stares into his casiri and brushes his long matted hair from his eyes. His head aches and his body is feverish.
I squat on the bloody rocks and rinse my plate in the black Siparuni. A web of moonlight describes heavy rain clouds. I flick on my light. A herd of corydorus catfish scatter. Schools of small characins sweep through the bits of food swirling in an eddy along the rock; the fish flash, twist and dart near the waters edge. Showers must continue upstream as the Siparuni seems to be swelling. The rising waters kiss a small pool of blood which billows into the river and as the characins dash in and out of the growing plumes they are enveloped and obscured. I bend closer with my light. I can see no fish: only golden tail spots flicker and dance through the blood.