(Reflections from my rainforest journals)

By Joan Cambridge
CIRCA 2000
For more than ten years now, I’ve sat here on Yukuriba Heights observing the passing tide; not just the mother water Essequibo River rising and falling in her lyrical seasons, but the purpose of people, events and change.

I recall Sibali Hill (“Sibali The Bitch”, we called that hill) being the greatest challenge to getting here; even more formidable than the unremitting potholes on the Mabura Road (before the vested interest of Omai Gold Mines changed that reality), or the craggy “laterite hill”. It all seems like an eternity ago.

Picture it!
We are balancing on the edge of a severely eroded cliff above a gorge through which flows Sibali Creek, our backs pressed against the side of the overloaded Land Rover easing gently around an S-bend created by massive hillside erosion, fearing that any minute now, the vehicle could lean too far over and topple; or that the uncertain ground on which we’re standing might just decide to give up.
We searched in vain for a tree near Sibali Hill that was sturdy enough to hold a winch to power the ‘pick-up’ out of knee-deep slush bogging us down. We made it here by the sheer guts of our determination, sometimes walking to lighten the load, grunting, heaving, shoving most of the journey; never complaining; loving it all the way.

We encountered streams of pork-knockers forging through, some on foot, others conveyed through the trail in a procession of Land Rovers and ‘pick-ups’ and trucks plying back and forth on their way to the Pott Falls/Frenchman Creek gold-bearing areas.
Those were the days when it was possible, but too tedious, to get to Kurupukari by trail. There was no road to Brazil, and the dredges, in great numbers, had not yet dreamed of Yukuriba and the Siparuni being accessibile by way of the Essequibo.

The dredges have come and gone away again in search of better hunting grounds, and now, perhaps the most pleasurable phase of our journey here today is Sibali Hill, a sweep of gentle gradients rushing forward to greet us in a gush of memory recalling her obstinate past.
We soon leave her to contend still with the more manageable treachery of the laterite hill. And this, we know, will also pass.

We were surging after the idea of the Road To Brazil that we could see in the dim distance. Some people, like Terrence Fletcher and his colleagues in the Trail to Rupununi Association, were also surging forward; they rushed on (perhaps too eagerly sometimes) to give the idea propulsion.

“The man”, in this excerpt from Jottings from My Hinterland Journals entitled: CENTURIES, CEMETERIES, SYMMETRIES, and published every Sunday in The Chronicle when Frank Pilgrim was Editor, was a member of the Trail to Rupununi Association.

MARCH 16, 1987: A red-letter day; not just because it’s Phagwah Day.

The man sat in my cabin, right here at the kitchen counter, and said: “Me going put down one long building from here to down there…”

“Where?”

“Here; right here,” he said.

I didn’t mean to scream, but I had fried the fresh himmorah Brown had caught in a creek three miles away. I’d steamed some in cassareep, and there was fresh cassava bread. Brown and I and Capt. Roy were going to sit down to a meal and some history. The man was down the hill in the ‘logie’ with his crew of Road to Brazil builders; they had come in the afternoon with a tractor, a truck with food, and an idea that they could get to Lethem in ten days.

Capt. Roy Bowen — who grew up in the area; who will talk endlessly when asked; and has talked to me on tape about the Kurupukari Cattle Trail and all the present-day Rupununi businessmen and ranchers who had no other recourse but to walk their load on bull cows for miles on trail (the old Kurupukari Cattle Trail); about Art Williams and his transportation; great balata-boat captains such as Captain Fanfare under whom he grew from small-boy boat-hand to become a certified river captain himself; about the old order that’s changing, changing and will irrevocably be transformed by this Road to Brazil — looked at the man and asked:

“To Lethem in how much time?”

“Ten days!”

“Me brother, they have a thing name swamp; they have 52 miles.”

“Ten days!” the man snaps, stubborn as a mule.

“You alone or what?”

“Me and everybody.”

“Trucks too?”

“Truck; all…”

“You going to widen the bridges that too narrow, from Camoudi Creek, so the truck can pass over?”

“I going to widen them.”

“You going cross over the truck, the tractor, to Kurupukari? You going to float the pontoon?”

“Yes, straight to Surama and through to Lethem. Ten days. The boys at Surama cutting, coming through to meet me; they meet halfway already…”

“You know; you see that, man?”

“I fly over…”

“Yes, you a man dealing with technology; I forget.”

At this point, I butt in to beg the man to listen to the people who lived there all their lives. “Look you have Capt. Bowen, Brown… Listen! Talk to them! You may learn something!”

“I ain’t got to ask nobody nothing. No! Ten days to Lethem! I gotta get there; I going!”

“Not even if they got ten Christ, you ain’t gon mek dat, mih brother. It have a thing they call rainy season; it going to catch up with you. Any time bush cut and grow back in this bush, it have a thing name hold-me-back plimpla; guana tail; hirihiri bali; whatever you want to call it. Thick, thick, thick… You going stall up. Then you gon start again next year to clear again; and you have the swamp to divert and…”

Capt. Roy still trying to convince the man.

“Ten days! I gotta get there; I going!”

But why? Why such unhealthy haste? I wondered; I asked.

“Brazil need port,” the man said. “Me go put down one abattoir at Kurupukari.”

But what about the people who are already at Kurupukari? What about Capt. David Andries and his family; a dynastic family who’s lived at Kurupukari since 1933?

“They going to work for me…

“One sawmill at…

“One paper mill at…

“One peanut factory at…

“One long building from down there to down here!”

As the man reeled off his plans for the area, I wondered: “What’s the difference between the Indian who had known no change and myself? History?

Yes, history. The understanding of history; the recording, interpretation of it for future generations, and the knowledge of it that forestalls any repetition… Yesterday I screamed. Today I sit at the beginning of this Road to Brazil phase of my history, aware and alert. Progress does not have to mean greed, confusion and…

“CAPITALISM GONE MAD!”

There we were, ready for a quiet evening, good food, good talk, cassette recorder all set and ready for an after-meal session of oral history when…

A rumbling sound coming through the forest.

“Vehicle!” Brown said, sitting up.

After a while, there it was! A faint rumbling that grew and grew to a rush; then a roar coming through the forest.

“Big one,” Brown said. “More than one big one,” he added.

I ran to the front of the cabin, alarmed. Whatever it was sounded like the advent of doom; as if it would huff and puff right through the bush, up the hill, and blow my cabin clear into the river. I saw a Land Rover first; then a bulldozer; then a skidder, in that order. I saw the man standing triumphantly, waiting, welcoming the confusion in my life. Then, smiling up at me, he said:

“We going to make a movie, Joan.”
I put on the siren in my throat, opened my lungs and screamed.
MARCH 21, 1987:

I still feel like that “Indian who had known no change”… But what about me? What about that Indian?

I didn’t mean to scream, but listen now. Hear? The birds have come back. The ten-ton truck and tractor with trailer; the bulldozer with huge wheels churning up the earth; grease stains on the grass… Sweet William crushed…have gone away now. I screamed; they couldn’t get away from this ‘mad-woman’ fast enough. Next morning, they were packing and leaving. Now, Listen to the toucan:

Two axe man come!
Two axe man come!
Two axe man come!
Come quick!

What if that Indian had screamed? Would his story then be so irreversibly mine today?

MAY 18, 1987:

Today, some people came by here on the way to Lethem; they’d hired a truck. Cost them ten thousand dollars. They knew they could get to Lethem by road, ‘cause “…it was in the papers.”
And what happened to the man and those ten days on the Road to Brazil? Will they ever get to Lethem?