We all like to revisit comfortable, familiar scenes and places in our minds. Jungle rivers will always be such places for me. In the early days all the missionaries and their families lived in jungle houses perched on a river bank sandwiched between the green jungle and the river itself whose color depended on the drainage basin of said river. The color could be from very dark, almost black, to a very muddy, light chocolate shade. The missionaries lived on riverbanks because that’s where the tribal folks lived. It’s almost impossible to overstate the importance of the river to those who lived on it’s banks. While the jungle out your back door did provide most of the building materials for your house and some food, the waters of the river made travel so much faster and easier. In those days the alternative would have meant hiking and slogging through the rain forrest for days, weeks or months. The river was the only practical way of traveling any distance in those days and travel wouldn’t improve much till the arrival of small planes to the jungle years later.
Every river has a distinct personality. And a river’s mood depends on a multitude of factors, but all facets of river travel hinge on full or how empty it is. In rainy season the river would be full, very full. The water was swift and full of floating debris. In rainy season navigating downstream was simple because for the most part you steered your craft straight down the pike. The current was your friend and even though you had to keep a close watch for dead trees turning round and round as they were pushed along and you had to stop your engine and clear the leaves off the water intake, travel wasn’t so bad. Going upstream in the rainy season is an entirely different story. Your engine labors against the current. The underlying power of the river seems more in your face than if you are going with the current. The water boiling (it literally seems to boil) up out of the deep tosses your boat around with ever so much ease. Going upstream you steer your rig along the inside of each bend because you encounter less current there. Eventually your inside bend runs out and you have to cross the river to the inside of the next bend. To get to the other side however you have to navigate out into the raging current sweeping full force off the outside curve of that next bend. The danger lies in that as you approach the terminus of your inside bend there is a strong backwash pushing your rig forward. The backwash interfaces with the swirling current sweeping off the outside bend. In order to safely get into that current you have to nose out into it at just the right angle. The problem is that if heavily loaded and you get broadside to the whole mess you can easily sink. The backwash will be pushing you full tilt upriver and the downstream current will be smashing you full tilt downriver. If you get broadside you’ll find yourself in a violent swirling mass of water as your prow gets whipped downstream as your stern is still being pushed upstream by the backwash. Approaching this dangerous situation at just the right angle is the only way to safely navigate crossing the river at these points.
Stopping for the night when the rivers are running full and there is no dry land to be found on either bank can be challenging. Unless you find a lagoon to nose into or the mouth of a secondary slow moving stream you’ll be hearing and feeling the hard driving current all night long A relatively quite backwash or the downriver end of an island are about the best you can do otherwise. Even in a moderate backwash the current will swing your rig back and forth all night long. And you’ll hear the current splashing up against the side of the boat and swirling through the branches of the treetops whose trunks are under water. Although hard wind driven storms are less likely to come out of nowhere and pummel your rig in the rainy season as opposed to some in between season months, the likely hood of an all night rain is an ever present reality. If one of your boats happens to be a large dugout with no roof, count on bailing all night long.
The dry season river is palpably different than the rainy season river. It’s face is less angry, more friendly. It seems more docile, more contained. It’s the same river, same recirculated water, same rocks, same sand bars, same bends but oh how opposite in many ways. And though the river has lost a lot of volume and it doesn’t appear to be as overwhelming as it was in rainy season the experienced navigator knows it contains a lot of potentially dangerous surprises. Most of the rocks covered in rainy season are exposed or lurking just under the surface waiting to reach out and give a lot of grief to an unwary boat pilot. The sand bars that were covered to a safe depth are now huge islands of dry hot sand or parked just under the water’s surface. No longer can the river boats cruise the straightest or most time saving path up or down the rivers. No, now the boats must take the path of the deepest channel however many tortured twists and turns that might mean. And in some stretches of river there really is no well defined channel. In dry season the main thing isn’t how to make the best time, the main thing is how to get where you are going without ruining you propellor on some hidden rock or getting stranded on a submerged sandbar for a couple of days.
Shallow water, usually meaning rocks or sand bars, is what tends to drive the boat pilot’s nightmares in dry season. From one rainy season, dry season cycle the rocks obviously don’t move. For the most part even though the billions of grains of sand are being moved along all through the year the sand bars for the most part stay in the same place. The sand is pushed along down stream but others take their place. That’s not to say that there are not subtle changes from year to year. Say for instance there is a haphazard pile of jagged rocks right in the middle of a quit narrow channel between sand bars. Last year the only way through was to the left of the rock pile as you come up river and this year the sand might have shifted just enough so that the only way through was to the right of the rocks. Usually places where these shifts happen are well known to the river pilots and they steer the correct course. Sometimes, howeverrrrrrr…… Another danger common to big rivers and sand bars is when your rig is crossing from one deeper area to another and you pass through shallow water. As you move along through the shallows a wave begins building behind you. At first it’s a ways back but then it gets close and closer. Now, if you aren’t too heavily loaded, that is if you have lots of free board, you are good but if you are heavily loaded and especially if your backboard is low in the water, that wave, when it chases you down can swamp you from behind.
Stopping for the night is way different in dry season than in rainy season. Now you have no trouble finding some place you can tie your boat when you stop at night that’s actually dry land. It may be a nice big flat rock along the bank or it may be a sand bar butted up against the shore line or one somewhere out in the middle of the river. The more you travel the river the more you tend to stop at the same rock or sand bar as you navigate up or down river trip after trip and year after year. Certain places are just the right distance apart for a full day’s travel. Other spots may be good alternates if for any number of reasons the day’s going was especially slow. The culprits making extra slow going usually were uncommonly low water or engine trouble. At any rate these rocks or sand bars not only were good, safe places to spend the night, but the jungle and waters around them many times held the menu items for the next day’s meals. There were fish of various species to catch or spear and paca to hunt at night. If you could bag a turkey or two early the next morning life was good. The reality however of keeping everything working smoothly as you headed upstream took up most of the crew’s time, including servicing the engines etc. till way after dark. Sometimes after the last outboard foot had been greased and last spark plug had been cleaned and the last fuel tanks had been filled for the next day’s running and the last adjustment on the ropes holding the boats together was made and well, you get the idea, everybody was too tired to hunt or fish. When that was the case the menu was what it had been for a good deal of the trip, sardines and rice. Hopefully the next night’s work wouldn’t be so late and we’d have fish or paca or turkey with that rice for noon and evening. Breakfast was oatmeal, coffee and hopefully there were still some town bought sweetbread buns for the coffee to wash down.
I could go on forever but I must quit and like the very tired boat crew I will go to bed tonight knowing that tomorrow neither jungle fish, nor jungle paca nor jungle turkey will be on the menu and that makes me sad.
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