I have to declare that in the midst of all the high-tech life we’re enmeshed in these days, right in the very heart of it, like sitting in an airport lounge in North America recently, my mind, seemingly on its own, will take charge of me, like a tap on the shoulder, and send me back to some crystal clear memory (I’ve mentioned some of them before) that ends up slowing me for a few minutes, literally not moving, reliving what once was, photographs of life in some reservoir somewhere, some of them very old, but all of them crystal clear and sometimes suggesting music.
Another vivid memory has to do with the bus ride from Adventure on the Essequibo shore line to Charity on the Pomeroon en route to my father’s farm on that river. We always made that linking ride on one of the buses operated by Kass (I never knew his first name) and what an experience. Usually full of passengers, the bus also carried a bewildering array of various freight and luggage items that often left me wondering where all this stuff was going. Everything from full milk cans and empty ones, to bags of flour, potatoes, potted plants, gardening tools such as forks, spades, cutlasses and water cans, and even bicycles…literally everything for mankind settling into essentially a bush environment. How Kass’ crew didn’t get confused as to what belonged to who I didn’t know, but minus the tags or numbers one would expect they somehow never got it wrong; nobody got off the bus minus anything.
Another bus ride into hinterland involved the East Bank trip from Georgetown to Timehri in the days when I worked at B. G. Airways at Atkinson Field, moving between that place and our family home at Vreed-en-Hoop. On one of those journeys, going back to Atkinson, I, very much a teenager, was in the company of some “big people”, coming back from a Georgetown trip, with Shell boss Rudy deBruin (a lovable Trini) and some other guys, engrossed with finishing a bottle of rum before they reached base. In the hurry to open the booze without stopping the vehicle, they accidentally broke off the neck of the bottle, but instead of tossing it away, one of the guys took off the nylon shirt, popular at that time, he was wearing, strained the rum through it into an empty bottle, and continued the long drive to Atkinson, all without stopping or even slowing the vehicle. Rudy was one very cavalier dude.
The hinterland prods one into improvisation. Over-nighting at Shell Beach, with my wife Annette, we found ourselves, late at night, in our camp with its outdoor toilet, and both needing a bathroom break. Annette braved hers with a running trip to the outhouse, dodging the mosquitoes, while I took the coward’s way out – peeing carefully into a Ziploc bag and emptying it when the sun came up and the mosquitoes had gone home.
I close this column with a note I just saw on Facebook (I cannot remember the author) which has nothing to do with the hinterland, but is so pertinent to Guyana today that I must relay it. It said: “Arthur Chung was elected as our country’s first President on March 17, 1970 under the leadership of Forbes Burnham, the same year that Guyana became a republic. At his swearing in, he said: “Our survival as a nation will depend on how well we work together.” Prophetic.
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Comments
Always a good story from you Dave.
Walk good and stay safe.