Magdalena River (Colombia) |
Colombia -- History |
Colombia -- Description and travel |
Travel writing. |
Río Magdalena (Colombia) |
Colombia -- Description and travel -- 1951-1980 |
Colombia -- Description and travel -- 1981- |
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Searching... Taunton Public Library | 986.116 D291M | 3RD FLOOR STACKS | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Fairhaven-Millicent | 986 DAV 2020 | NONFICTION | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Seekonk Public Library | 986.1 DAVIS | NONFICTION | Searching... Unknown |
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Summary
Summary
A captivating new book from Wade Davis--award-winning, best-selling author and National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence for more than a decade--that brings vividly to life the story of the great Río Magdalena, illuminating Colombia's complex past, present, and future
Travelers often become enchanted with the first country that captures their hearts and gives them license to be free. For Wade Davis, it was Colombia. Now in a masterly new book, Davis tells of his travels on the mighty Magdalena, the river that made possible the nation. Along the way, he finds a people who have overcome years of conflict precisely because of their character, informed by an enduring spirit of place, and a deep love of a land that is home to the greatest ecological and geographical diversity on the planet. As Gabriel García Márquez once wrote during his own pilgrimage on the river: "The only reason I would like to be young again would be the chance to travel again on a freighter going up the Magdalena." Only in Colombia can a traveler wash ashore in a coastal desert, follow waterways through wetlands as wide as the sky, ascend narrow tracks through dense tropical forests, and reach verdant Andean valleys rising to soaring ice-clad summits. This rugged and impossible geography finds its perfect coefficient in the topography of the Colombian spirit: restive, potent, at times placid and calm, in moments explosive and wild.
Both a corridor of commerce and a fountain of culture, the wellspring of Colombian music, literature, poetry, and prayer, the Magdalena has served in dark times as the graveyard of the nation. And yet, always, it returns as a river of life.
At once an absorbing adventure and an inspiring tale of hope and redemption, Magdalena gives us a rare, kaleidoscopic picture of a nation on the verge of a new period of peace. Braiding together memoir, history, and journalism, Wade Davis tells the story of the country's most magnificent river, and in doing so, tells the epic story of Colombia.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Davis (One River), an anthropology professor at the University of British Columbia, travels the length of Colombia's Rio Magdalena through wildly varied geographies and a past of horrific massacres, in this ardent travelogue. He visits the river's mountainous source, where ancient native communities thrived before conquistadors exterminated them; surveys villages annihilated by a 1984 volcanic eruption that killed 25,000 people; recalls the thousands killed during drug kingpin Pablo Escobar's 1980s reign of terror in Medellín, and the city's rebirth as an urban-planning showcase; recounts the ordeal of farm towns trapped in the recent civil war between murderous left-wing guerrillas and even more murderous right-wing death squads; and basks in placid fishing communities in the river's delta (site of an attack by another right-wing death squad). Along the way he views the country's lush flora and fauna--and heartbreaking environmental damage wrought by humans--through the writings of 19th-century naturalist Alexander von Humboldt, the book's presiding spirit, and delivers a romantic profile of revolutionary hero Simón Bolivar, a liberator turned dictator turned bitter old man. Davis stocks his lively narrative with piquant characters, dramatic historical set pieces, and lyrical nature writing ("The mouth of the Rio Magdalena is the color of the earth"). The result is a rich, fascinating study of how nature and a people shape each other. (Apr.)
Booklist Review
Rivers are the planet's veins and arteries, and the life blood of human civilizations. Intrepid anthropologist and award-winning and entrancing writer Davis, a former Explorer-in-Residence at the National Geographic Society, portrays the Amazon in One River (1996), and travels the Colorado River in River Notes (2012). In this deeply inquisitive, dazzlingly fluent scientific, cultural, and spiritual investigation, Davis illuminates the natural and human history of Río Magdalena, "the Mississippi River of Colombia." This far-reaching, centuries-encompassing river biography is shaped by Davis' love for Colombia, which enabled him "to imagine and dream" as a 14-year-old Canadian on a school trip in 1968. Davis has extensively explored this wondrous "home to the greatest ecological and geographical diversity on the planet," but Colombia is not known for its natural splendor, but rather for catastrophic civil wars, shocking atrocities, brutal drug cartels, and incalculable suffering and loss. Fifty years of terror which echo the genocidal invasion of the Spanish, and which turned the Magdalena into a river of death.Always with a discerning eye to the symbolic and metaphorical, Davis tells the river's saga of fecundity and horror through the lives of remarkable individuals past and present. Among the former are José Celestino Mutis, the "patriarch of American botany," and the "revolutionary hero," Francisco José de Caldas, both of whom worked with naturalist and geographer Alexander von Humboldt, during his Colombian sojourns. Among the people Davis met along the river are resilient Juan Guillermo, who survived guerilla violence to create a nature preserve, and Jenny Castañeda, who courageously carries on work that cost her mother, the "fiery social activist" Damaris Mejía, her life. Throughout Davis emphasizes Colombia's many Indigenous peoples and their abiding belief that protecting the river is a sacred duty. The story of Magdalena, as for every river, is that of an epic struggle between the sacred and the profane, between worship and preservation and reckless exploitation and wanton abuse. More river histories:The Hudson: America's River. By Frances F. Dunwell.Meander: East to West, Indirectly, along a Turkish River. By Jeremy Seal. The Nile: A Journey Downriver through Egypt's Past and Present. By Toby Wilkinson. Nine Ways to Cross a River. By Akiko Busch. Old Man River: The Mississippi River in North American History. By Paul Schneider. On the Ganges: Encounters with Saints and Sinners along India's Mythic River. By George Black. River in Ruin: The Story of the Carmel River. By Ray A. March. River Republic: The Fall and Rise of America's Rivers. By Daniel McCool. Rivers of Power: How a Natural Force Raised Kingdoms, Destroyed Civilizations, and Shapes Our World. By Laurence C. Smith. The Robber of Memories: A River Journey through Colombia. By Michael Jacobs.Running Dry: A Journey from Source to Sea down the Colorado River. By Jonathan Waterman.The Source: How Rivers Made America and America Remade Its Rivers. By Martin Doyle.Where the Water Goes: Life and Death along the Colorado River. By David Owen.
Guardian Review
The Magdalena is the great arterial river of Colombia. Rising in the rugged moorlands of the Andean páramo 12,000ft above sea level, it flows northwards for nearly a thousand miles, carving its way through gorges fringed with cloud forest, skirting the mysterious megaliths of San Agustín, growing fat and turbid in its lower reaches, and finally debouching into the Caribbean at the Bocas de Ceniza (the "ashen mouths"), where its tonnage of silt turns the sea grey. Few know its moods and secrets better than the Canadian author, photographer and anthropologist Wade Davis, whose many distinctions include the impressive post of "explorer in residence" at the National Geographic Society. He first visited Colombia in 1968, on a school trip. He was 14 years old. "Several of the older Canadian students longed for home," he recalls. "I felt as if I had finally found it." In 2018 he was granted honorary Colombian citizenship. Davis is a powerful, penetrating and immensely knowledgeable writer. He first grabbed attention with his high-octane account of voodoo rituals in Haiti, The Serpent and the Rainbow (1985), an atmospheric work of reportage which drew comparisons with Hunter S Thompson and Carlos Castaneda, while also being a meticulous scientific enquiry into the pharmacology of potions associated with the creation of "zombies". Davis was then a graduate student at Harvard, studying under the ethnobotanist Richard Evans Schultes, to whom he later paid homage in One River (1996) - not quite a biography, more an extended psychotropic field-trip, retracing his mentor's amazing forays into uncharted corners of South America in search of hallucinogenic plants and the shamanistic traditions associated with them. Madgalena is a geography book about a river that is also a political history of Colombia, an admonition of ecological disaster, an impassioned defence of indigenous wisdom, and a memoir of the author's various travels and friendships over the years. Like that other fine book about the Magdalena, Michael Jacobs's The Robber of Memories (2012), it is very personal. Its three sections - "Alto", "Medio" and "Bajo" Magdalena - promise a smooth linear ride downriver, but the text is full of mysterious eddies and crosscurrents. In his summary, Magdalena is "less a work of scholarship than a compendium of stories shared by Colombians encountered along the river and beyond". These "living narratives" are the heart of a book whose final purpose is to "celebrate the true wonder of a country that has long been overlooked and misunderstood". Passages of description catch the evanescent flavour of towns along the way. Here are the indolent tropical charms of the old colonial port of Santa Cruz de Mompox: "Mompox has a way of slowing down the world, reducing the day to its most casual core, gestures and interludes choreographed only by the heat of the sun ... Along the waterfront splintered shutters creak open to reveal courtyards and private fountains, hidden gardens of fruit trees and orchids ... Elderly couples sip their coffee, already at ease in the wicker rockers where they will spend most of the morning and, quite possibly, much of the day." But the idyll is always counterpointed by the harsh truths of Colombian history - the Magdalena as one of the portals for the genocide of the Conquista; the graveyard of countless thousands slaughtered in the civil wars of the 1950s, in the cocaine wars of the 80s, and in the guerrilla insurgencies of the Farc. Davis compares the Magdalena to the Mississippi. Like that other great river - "its shadow to the north" - it is "both a corridor of commerce and a fountain of culture, the wellspring of Colombian music, literature, poetry and prayer". Also like the Mississippi, the icon of its glory days was the paddle-steamer - "magnificent three-storey vapores with soaring black chimneys, passing in the night like brightly lit carnival tents". But these picturesque vessels were also destroyers of the forests fringing the river. In their heyday there were 70 large steamships plying the Magdalena, which is navigable for 500 miles between Barranquilla on the Caribbean coast and the rapids of Honda. The furnaces which powered them were fed with wood, taken aboard at riverside depots. The basic unit was the burro de leña, a donkey-load: roughly 70 3ft-logs. The largest of the steamships consumed 100 burros a day. By the early years of the 20th century, Davis reckons, the vapores had burned some 40m cubic yards of invaluable hardwoods. There was also a carnage of wildlife. "Vessels became platforms for the hunting of manatees , blue turtles, ocelots and jaguars ... Children cut open the bellies of iguanas, replaced their eggs with manure, and tossed them back into the river." As late as 1949 a Colombian scientist reported seeing his fellow passengers entertaining themselves by killing caymans with machine guns. Manatees - hypothesised by early travellers as mermaids - are the classic fauna of the Magdalena, though now seriously endangered. In his memoir, Living to Tell the Tale, Gabriel García Márquez gives a beautiful account of seeing a manatee from the deck of a vapor on a moonlit night: "We were awakened by a heartrending lament from the riverbank. The captain ... gave an order to use searchlights to find the origin of the weeping: it was a manatee female who had become entangled in the branches of a fallen tree ... She was a fantastic, touching creature, half woman and half cow, almost four metres long. Her skin was livid and tender, and her large-breasted torso was that of a biblical matriarch." Márquez was one of the great literary celebrants of the Magdalena. Davis notes that in his late novels, Love in the Time of Cholera and The General in His Labyrinth, the river is "not just the setting but an actual character". Born in the small northern town of Aracataca - the model for his fictional village of Macondo - Márquez made his first river trip in 1943, when he was 16, headed for further education in Bogotá. He was homesick in that chilly, cloudy city; the Magdalena was his "antidote", the lifeline back to the north, where all was "awash with colour and passion" and "daily life was but a pretence for poetry". Two splendid chapters in Davis's book cover the music of the Bajo Magdalena: cumbia - "the heartbeat of Colombia"; vallenato, with its swirling accordions; tambora, the music of the palenques, villages founded by runaway slaves. In Barranquilla Davis visits Carlos Vives, whose fusions of traditional Colombian music with rock and jazz have attracted an international audience. "If cumbia is the mother of our rhythm,"Vives says, "the mother of cumbia is the Magdalena. The river is our storyteller. It's what defines us as people." In Barranco de Loba Davis is taken to meet a local legend, Maestro Ángel María Villafañe, 85 years old, "thin and fit ... with a straw hat tilted at a rakish angle". To watch this charismatic master of tambora on stage, he is told, is like "having Jagger right in front of you". The traditional lyrics of the tambora are "raw and elemental", Davis writes. They are "the poetic words of the unschooled, composed mostly by illiterate men and women singing about the simple moments of life: a bird in flight, a girl in love, the beauty of the river". People are passionate partisans of one music or another. Cumbia is more widely known, but a fan of tambora tells him: "To dance cumbia is to dance tambora, only slower and with candles." "In Colombia," Davis writes, "there is no limit to what can be squeezed out of a day." His love of the country is "something visceral ... To be away too long is to be on life support." Magdalena is steeped in a physical sense of Colombia: the landscapes, the disreputable backstreets, the irrepressibly resilient people. This eclectic log-book of life on the river puts one in mind of Ryszard Kapu?ci?ski's idea of travel writing as "authenticated by its being lived" - "you have experienced this event on your own skin, and it is this experience, this feeling along the surface of your skin, which gives your story its coherence."
Kirkus Review
The explorer, photographer, and prolific author returns to a country beloved since his boyhood to chronicle a river whose rehabilitation mirrors Colombia's own. Traveling to Colombia in the early 1970s from Canada, Davis--a professor of anthropology and former explorer-in-residence at the National Geographic Society whose book Into the Silence won the 2012 Samuel Johnson Prize--regards the country as the place that first allowed him to "imagine and dream" and to give him "license to be free." Davis' popular book One River, published in a Spanish edition in 2002, was "a love letter to a nation by then scorned by the world," still in the throes of the violence and corruption of drug cartels, which sadly marred the country's reputation as a place of natural splendor. In his latest delightful journey, the author takes on the Magdalena, the so-called Mississippi of Colombia, which is celebrated for its legendary status as the life artery bringing food to the regions, exploration, trade, and commerce but also excoriated as a highway for the death and corruption that plagued the country for 50 years. Davis is a natural, engaging storyteller, and while he makes his way through Colombia's history--from the early Tairona natives' sophisticated civilization on the shores of the river, first contacted by the Spanish explorers in the early 16th century (and subsequently decimated), through the dark days of the drug wars of the 1980s and '90s--the book is also an affecting account of on-the-ground exploration. The author skillfully weaves in accounts by academics, who have studied the vicissitudes of the river, and by the people who have lived and toiled along its shores. Many of these people have endured decades of political turmoil, beginning in 1946, when the Liberals and Conservatives "faced off in fratricidal conflict" known as La Violencia. This remarkable river has endured eras of massive extermination, erosion, damming, and pollution, but it has emerged renewed thanks to a people's spirit and resilience. An elegant narrative masterfully combining fine reporting and a moving personal journey. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
For most Americans, the image of Colombia is one of drug cartels and violence. For Davis (anthropology, Univ. of British Columbia; Into the Silence), while he fully acknowledges that part of Colombia's history, the lifeblood of the country is the Rio Magdalena. At the darkest times, the river served as a mass graveyard for those victimized by violence. Yet, it also gave birth to music, literature, and religion in the country. From the time he was a teenager, Davis has had a love affair with Colombia and Colombians, culminating in this project to explore all aspects of the Magdalena, the commercial and cultural center of the country. By exploring the river, Davis uncovers stories of this unique place and the people shaped by it. He also offers a glimpse of the hope that the river provides to a country seeking to define itself in peace after decades of conflict. VERDICT Shifting seamlessly from travelog to history to nature writing, Davis weaves together a fascinating story of the geographical and cultural diversity of the Rio Magdalena, a diversity that characterizes the spirit of Colombia. Recommended for those who enjoy good writing, and all interested in a new perspective on personal narratives.--Michael C. Miller, Austin P.L. & Austin History Ctr., TX
Excerpts
Excerpts
Bocas de Ceniza The mouth of the Río Magdalena is the color of the earth. To the north, beyond a sea of golden clouds, the Caribbean sky fades to lapis blue in the falling light. To the west, the sun sets upon the Atrato and the rain forests of Darién, the Gulf of Urabá, and all the lost islands of Panama. To the east, the beaches and rocky shores run away to Santa Marta and beyond, past the Ciénaga Grande, the vast wetland that shimmers as a great mirror to the heavens, to the soaring flanks of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, the highest coastal mountain range on earth, reaching finally to the sands of the Guajira, the desert peninsula where Colombians reinvented grit, commerce, resilience, and passion. To the south, upriver, the lights of Barranquilla glow as a distant halo over a city that from its inception has inexplicably turned its back on the river that gave it life. Founded between 1627 and 1637, it remained a small fishing village until the arrival of commercial steam vessels in 1824, but even then, it could never decide whether to be a port on the river or a city on the sea. The building of a railroad from Barranquilla 400 miles upriver to Salgar in 1872 opened the way for a great maritime outlet to the world, and oceangoing vessels entered the river mouth for the first time, struggling against a current that carried the weight and promise of an entire nation. Indeed, one might say that the Magdalena carried the land itself. By 1883, its burden of sediments and silt had once again buried the estuary, rendering the river mouth impassable. In 1893, the construction of the world's longest and most elaborate pier at Puerto Colombia, on the coast twelve miles west of Barranquilla, redirected commerce for a decade, but by 1906, attention returned to the potential of Bocas de Ceniza, the actual mouth of the river. With grand plans, both to dredge the river channel and to construct a modern port at Barranquilla, the government hired an American engineering firm in 1907, only to turn to the Germans in 1912, then a national consortium in 1919, until finally, in 1924, with little accomplished, the flow of money was directed once again to the Americans. Puerto Colombia was abandoned, its magnificent pier left to crumble into fragments of concrete and iron. In 1943, in a move tainted by the scent of politics, the use of any of the port facilities at Puerto Colombia was prohibited by law. Ultimately, all that remained was destroyed by the sea. The river mouth, meanwhile, was reinforced with a long line of breakers, parallel to the flow, intended to direct the Magdalena into a narrow channel, concentrating its force that it might sweep all sediments to the sea. Unfortunately, the barriers, built at considerable expense over nearly a decade, achieved quite the opposite effect, trapping the sediments and clogging the estuary as never before. The global economic crisis of 1929 suspended work for several years, and it was not until 1936 that President Alfonso López Pumarejo, crossing into the mouth of the Magdalena aboard a destroyer of the Colombian navy, accompanied by an entourage of ministers, admirals, governors, and mayors, was able to officially inaugurate the new canal and the proposed Maritime and Fluvial Terminal, facilities that would not in fact be completed until 1939. "Barranquilla," he declared, "is, from now on, a port of the sea." Regrettably, this proved to be wishful thinking. For a time, beginning in 1936, seagoing freighters, vessels of serious draft, were able to make their way into the river and reach the city. But they were fighting the power of a river born a thousand miles to the south in the Macizo Colombiano, a rugged knot of mountains that soars over the continent, giving rise not just to the Magdalena but to the Ríos Putumayo, Cauca, Caquetá, and Patía, not to mention the three great branches of the Andes, which fan out in Colombia as immense cordilleras, running northward toward the broad Caribbean coastal plain. In the body of Colombia, the Río Magdalena is the main artery. A new river, as measured in geological time, with a drainage encompassing fully a quarter of the nation, it flows from one end of the country to the other, through an astonishingly diverse landscape of glaciers and snow-covered volcanoes, cloud forests and páramos saturated by rain. Fed by lakes and countless mountain streams, it falls into a great lowland depression once covered by rich tropical forests, mangroves darkened by caimans, and waterways manicured by manatees. Scattered across the entire basin of the lower river are literally thousands of shimmering wetlands, some the size of the sky. Indeed, the entire Bajo Magdalena is a world of water, which ebbs and flows with the seasons, causing the river itself to overflow its banks, reaching a width in places of as much as fifty miles, even as its estuary expands to embrace and define both the geography and hydrology, not to mention the economy and culture, of all coastal Colombia. Attempts over the years to transform Bocas de Ceniza, focused narrowly on reconfiguring just the mouth of the river, invariably proved to be quixotic gestures that defied nature and brought to mind King Canute's famous failure to hold back the ocean waves. Every year the Río Magdalena, despite its meanderings, carries 250 million tons of silt to the sea, the equivalent of eighteen hundred large industrial truckloads of sediments being dumped at the river delta every day. The engineers, despite their best efforts, never really had a chance. The names of the enterprises charged with taming the river, building the breakwaters, and dredging the channel changed by the decade, but none managed to achieve the impossible. The river silted up in 1942 and 1945, and again in 1958 and 1963. Millions of dollars had been invested, and no doubt many additional millions will be spent in the future on new and perhaps improved plans to industrialize the river mouth, but in the end, the Río Magdalena will always roll on, carrying all things to the sea, merging, as Shakira so gracefully sings, the body of Colombia like a lover to the waters of all the world. From the river settlement of Las Flores, an old fishing village today engulfed by the outskirts of Barranquilla, a narrow-gauge railway runs north along the Magdalena, past modest shipyards and repair shops, restaurants and docks, rusted barges tethered to the shore. Reaching the coast where the wide crescent beaches are covered with plastic refuse and kelp, it continues onto the original breakwater built in the 1920s, a narrow jetty of tumbled riprap that stretches for several miles into the sea. The rock foundations remain solid, but the track, twisted and dilapidated, with short sections patched with wooden poles in place of iron, has clearly seen better days. The open-air cars, with their coughing and sputtering engines, frequently derail, prompting a frenzy of excitement as passengers unload and small crews of young men furiously lift the carriages back onto the rails. When two cars going in opposite directions meet on the single track, the passengers move from one to the other with quiet and polite efficiency--unless, of course, music is heard, coming from a radio, perhaps an old cassette player; then everything is forgotten as people mingle and invariably someone begins to dance. Vallenatos, stories of the soul sung with an accordion's plaintive cry, generally imply but a short delay. But if the rhythm is cumbia, sensuous and seductive, and the long skirts of the women begin to twirl with each tight turn of their feet, one best come up with new plans for the day. Bocas de Ceniza is a popular tourist destination, mostly for Colombian families and students. The tracks reach half the length of the spit to a narrow roundabout where, beneath the protective gaze of a white Madonna perched on a cement pole, everyone gets off to wander. Small children, impeccably dressed, dart about like butterflies. Teenage girls, in tight jeans and tank tops sparkling with rhinestones, defy gravity as they delicately make their way on high heels further down the jetty, tiptoeing among the stones and twisted remnants of the rail tracks. Older women search in vain for shade, settling for a cold drink, perhaps a raspado, a cone of shaved ice drenched in syrup. The jetty is lined on both sides by small wooden shacks, home to the men and women who live on the rocks, fishing by night, sleeping by day. In the bright sun, their absence is felt; the place feels lifeless and deserted. The spit of stones is in no place more than thirty feet across. On one side is the sea, dark and brooding, with waves pounding the rocks and surging onto the jetty itself. On the other side flows the Magdalena, brown with silt, too toxic to drink, contaminated by human and industrial waste, which flows into it from every town and city in a drainage that is home to forty million Colombians. The fishermen use the river to wash their clothes and to bathe, but not even the hardiest among them would dare drink the water. Some with their recollection of darker days, when bodies regularly floated by and the river served as the graveyard of the nation, hesitate even to eat the fish. Theirs seems a precarious existence, perched on the edge of a narrow jetty, living in shacks tacked together from old boards bleached grey by the sun. Exposed as they are, a single wave could sweep away their lives. And yet, as if in conscious defiance of despair, rejecting any overtures of pity, all of them have painted their homes with poetry, simple declarations of faith and contentment, all signed by the authors. "I am happy to live at Bocas de Ceniza," declares Wilfrido de Ávila Barrios. "Thanks to the fish, I raised my sons and sustained my family and for that reason I never want to leave this place, that's my wish and that of my family." The shingle hanging over the door of Gilberto Hernández's home reads, "What I like about this place is the peace that I breathe only here, the fish and the sounds I hear in the crashing of the waves." Written across the entire façade of one dwelling, owned by a handsome young man of twenty, single and with no interest in marriage, are the simple lines "Here lives Beethoven. Here one breathes peace, love, and tranquillity." Only as the light fades, and the happy if overheated tourists trudge back to the carriages that carry them home to the city, does the small community of fishermen come alive. Men and women emerge from their homes and gather around open fires, drinking tintos, small shots of coffee, and getting ready for the night. They work only in the dark, making their way to the very end of the jetty, where a strong north wind always blows. They fish with kites, crafted of plastic and small bits of wood, that rise in the wind and carry their long lines, rigged with perhaps a dozen hooks, along with plastic bottles as floats, far out into the darkness. Illuminated by the glow of their headlamps, they clamber over the rocks, working their lines, even as the waves crash upon the rocks, sending great cascades of spindrift and salt water across the jetty. Silhouetted against the night sky, they appear truly heroic--defiant, independent, and free. This is the entire spirit of the place, its reason to be. Among the most respected and venerable of all the fishermen is Andrés de la Ossa. He is a slight man with a soft face and the rough hands of one who has worked with fish and the sea all of his life. Born in Cartagena, Andrés arrived at Bocas de Ceniza in 1962. The jetty has been his home for more than fifty years, a span that corresponds to the duration of the conflict that has long tormented Colombia. In a wild and ragged country, the jetty has always been safe. "Nothing happens here," he explains as he pulls in his line to rebait the hooks. "Everything is normal--people come and deal with one and they see everything as it has always been. Simple and true. There are times when the fishing is good and times when it is bad. But the water is always there, and there will always be fish in the sea." Asked about the Río Magdalena, the other side of the jetty, he speaks as if the river is a completely different world, one of darkness and strife. Nets get caught in the rocks on the river side. The water can't be drunk. Those living on the jetty have to haul potable water from the city. Just the previous Sunday, on the day of the Lord, Andrés had fished two bodies out of the river, a man and a woman wrapped together in a carpet. During the worst of the violence, he added, the flow of corpses was constant. Most were headless, but you could sometimes identify the FARC guerrillas from their rubber boots, the same as those that he had used as a child, working a small patch of land owned by his uncle. In the early hours of a new day, invited to stay, I rested on a wooden bunk in the room of a man I had just met, grateful and impressed as ever by the generosity and kindness of ordinary Colombians who have little to give. With the sound of ocean waves pounding against the rocks on one side of the shack and the slow surge of a river too tainted to drink flowing by on the other, I thought of how people everywhere take water for granted, fouling our rivers and lakes, forgetting that fresh water is among the rarest and most precious of commodities. If all the water on earth could be stored in a gallon container, what is actually available for us to drink would scarcely fill a teaspoon. We spend billions sending probes into space to seek evidence of water on Mars or ice on the moons of Jupiter even as we squander the wealth of nations on industrial schemes that compromise the limited supply of fresh water on our own blue planet. In Christian faith, we equate water with spiritual purity, baptizing infants with holy water dripped in the form of a cross upon their brows or by immersing them completely in sacred basins, from which they emerge graced with the promise of salvation. And yet even as we bless our children with this precious essence drawn from living bodies of water, we think nothing of defiling those very rivers with raw human waste on a scale, and in a manner, that can only be described as shameful. Excerpted from Magdalena: River of Dreams: a Story of Colombia by Wade Davis All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.Table of Contents
Map of Colombia | p. xi |
Preface | p. xiii |
Bocas de Ceniza | p. 3 |
Alto Magdalena | |
Map | p. 16 |
Fountain of the World | p. 17 |
San Agustín | p. 48 |
Valley of Sorrows | p. 60 |
Girardot and Honda | p. 86 |
The Miracle of Murillo | p. 100 |
Medio Magdalena | |
Map | p. 118 |
The Forgotten Land | p. 119 |
City of Eternal Spring | p. 138 |
Cauldron of War | p. 162 |
Sisters of Mercy | p. 185 |
The Nameless Dead | p. 204 |
Morita of the Manatees | p. 222 |
Bajo Magdalena | |
Map | p. 236 |
The River of Cumbia | p. 237 |
Land of a Thousand Rhythms | p. 256 |
A Great Republic of Nature | p. 280 |
The General in His Labyrinth | p. 304 |
A Geography of Hope | p. 329 |
Epilogue | p. 344 |
Acknowledgments | p. 349 |
Bibliographical Essay | p. 357 |
Index | p. 375 |