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Outside Magazine February 2003

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The Hard Way
Up the Creek
Canoeing the jungles of South America, where freedom is a family affair
By Mark Jenkins


	(Illustration by Rob Clayton)

"THEY ESCAPED INTO the jungle," says Marvin, lifting his paddle from the hazel water and pointing the slim blade toward the tangle of verdure. "Just running and running. Not knowing where to go. Not knowing what to eat. Lost and day by day starving and cut all over from the thorns, and the soles of their feet bloody but still running because to be a slave is worse."

Marvin lays his paddle inside the dugout and starts rolling a joint in his lap. He stops paddling whenever he tells a story, as if in deference to the primacy of the tale. Frankie and I keep pulling the boat downstream, plunging our long, fish-shaped paddles into the warm Suriname River. "They slept hiding beneath big leaves and then ran more," continues Marvin in his vaguely Rastafarian lilt. "They ran for weeks. All the way to the top of this river. So deep in the jungle only the jaguar knew where they were."

Marvin learned his stories in the bush camp from his grandmother, at night, after the men and boys had spent the day clearing a plot and the women and girls had planted rice or cassava. Most of Marvin's yarns were humorous allegories involving clever monkeys or parrots or caimans with human weaknesses. But this was the legend of his people, his forefathers, the Saramaka maroons, so he was uncharacteristically grave.

"They knew they were not safe even this far back in the jungle," he says. "They were escaped slaves. Escaped slaves that never come back give other slaves ideas. They maybe start to think they could be free themselves. This is impossible for the white people. So they sent out hunting parties. Men with muskets and swords guided by Indian trackers who knew the trails of the jungle."

Marvin smokes, contemplating the passing wall of impregnable green. There is no hurry. This is a long story. He passes the cigar-size joint back to Frankie and exhales.

"They were hunted like animals. My grandfathers' fathers. Sometimes they were killed in the jungle, but this was bad, because no one saw them die. Mostly they were beaten and whipped and had iron shackles locked around their necks and their ankles and were dragged back to the plantations. Then the tortures began. All the slaves on the plantation were forced to watch. Tortures so cruel it is impossible to imagine. It is not possible to believe what they did to us..."

We are now gliding between islands of flat black rocks. I can hear rapids. Marvin lifts his paddle and in one sweeping, powerful stroke turns our dugout toward a tiny island cove. He will take the unstable boat through the rapids singlehandedly, while Frankie and I hopscotch over the rocks. We step out and Marvin twirls the canoe back into the current, yelling, "This story is not finished!"

Then he disappears. A lone black man in a small burnt-black dugout against white water.

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