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Outside Magazine February 2003

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The Hard Way
Up the Creek (Cont.)

BELOW THE RAPIDS, the canoe is swamped. Marvin shovels to shore and bails it out. Then Frankie and I climb back in and the three of us continue down the languid, serpentine river.

From Paramaribo, the port capital of Suriname, I'd taken a one-hour bush flight to Bendekonde, a village of tentlike thatched huts along the upper reaches of the Suriname River. There I'd spent days searching for a boat and boatmates.

There are no roads in Saramaka territory. The one highway is the river, hence the Saramaka are expert canoeists and master canoe-builders. Up until the present generation, it was incumbent upon every husband to carve a dugout for his wife so she could paddle to and from the fields. Every family still owns a dugout—it's the vehicle of choice and is used daily. But since the introduction of gas engines in the 1960s, no one paddles great distances anymore. Now there are bigger dugouts fitted with outboard motors that, like shuttle buses, transport people and goods up and down the river. I met one 89-year-old man who had canoed all the way to Paramaribo—"a difficult eight-day journey"—but he'd done it half a century ago.

I wanted to canoe from Bendekonde—a pleasant village deep in Saramakaland with cashew and palm trees planted along the footpaths but no electricity, no telephone, and no running water—to Atjoni, a village on the edge of the territory, where the first dirt track wriggles out of the rainforest. It was a distance of 50 river miles, past about 40 villages and down dozens of small rapids.

"It's very crazy, my friend," Marvin Pansa shouted gaily the first time we met. He was tall and tattooed, and his long limbs glistened with sweat. He was in the midst of a ferocious soccer game in a pasture along the bank in Bendekonde. Word had gotten around that there was a white man looking to canoe the river.

"Who knows how long it could take," he said. "Three, four, five days." Frankie Pansa, Marvin's short, non-English-speaking sidekick, appeared behind him. "Me and Frankie will have to paddle the canoe back upriver." Marvin grinned, revealing a gold front tooth. "You pay for both directions?"

I met them on the riverfront at half past six the next morning. They were in shorts and flip-flops, Marvin sporting a Nike visor, Frankie wearing a Giorgio Armani T-shirt. Each had a sealed five-gallon plastic tub with his belongings inside—hammock, pants, extra shirt, toothbrush—and a hand-carved paddle. Their supplies for the journey consisted of one bottle of 90-proof Mari'nburg white rum, a bag of homegrown ganja, a machete, and a shotgun.

Marvin, 20, lives in Bendekonde. He has a wife and young child and a girlfriend who is pregnant. (Traditionally, the Saramaka are a polygamous, matri-lineal society; most people in a village have the same last name—as Marvin and Frankie do—even if they are only distantly related.) Marvin knew he needed money, which is why he volunteered for this trip. Besides, he had experience with bakaa (Saramaka for whites). His father owns a tourist camp in the bush, and Marvin had guided Dutch bakaa on rainforest eco-tours.

Frankie, 22, had borrowed his grandmother's dugout. The intricately carved upturned bow and stern that Saramaka boats are known for (often reinforced and decorated with hammer-patterned metal fittings) had both broken off, and the normally smooth, elegant clapboard gunwales nailed to the hull were battered. But it floated. Almost.

We pushed off into cobwebs of mist, and within an hour the dugout, christened Oma—"Grandma" in Dutch—was sinking. Marvin and Frankie were unperturbed. Marvin started bailing with an oil can while Frankie stood up, machete in hand. Hiking up his shorts and pulling down his boxers, he sliced off a strip of fabric and plugged it into a bubbling crack in the hull. Then he cut off a second strip and sealed another leak.

Over the course of the journey, Frankie would use up his underwear chinking old cracked Oma.

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