River of life

AN EXCLUSIVE EXCERPT FROM RENOWNED CANADIAN ANTHROPOLOGIST WADE DAVIS’S FORTHCOMING BOOK MAGDALENA: RIVER OF DREAMS, ABOUT THE ICONIC WATERWAY THAT HAS SHAPED THE GEOGRAPHY, CULTURE AND PEOPLE OF COLOMBIA

- WADE DAVIS

The Caribbean sky is the color of dreams, and the clouds appear as shadows on the still surface of Colombia’s Ciénaga Grande de Santa Marta. Our skiff scudded over the water as we left the narrow neck of shoreline behind at Tasajeras. The wetland expanded in every direction. At full throttle, our small party was soon skating over a mirror of glass, with only a distant fringe of mangroves to suggest the presence of horizons and the mundane separation of Earth from sky. The faint silhouette of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta hovered about 50 kilometres to the east. As the sun cuts the ice loose from the frozen summits, glacial streams from those heights grow into seasonal rivers — the Fundación, Tucurinca, Aracataca, and Riofrío — that replenish the wetland with freshwater and more essentially, according to the mamos, infuse it with aluna, the generative essence of the Madre Creadora, the Great Mother. Running away from the ciénaga to the south and west are natural canals that ultimately fuse with the floodwaters of the Río Magdalena. Like the arteries and veins in the human body, a network of waterways reaches across the ancient delta to connect the snowfields of the Sierra Nevada, the most sacred destination of the pilgrims, with the river that made possible the life of the Colombian nation.

The mamos still speak of a time when the Ciénaga Grande was wet with the innocence of birth, an aquatic Eden that was home to manatees, jaguars, caimans, and no fewer than 244 species of birds. Open to the Caribbean, recharged by the annual surge of the Magdalena, the wetland was a perfect balance of river and sea. Often described as the most beautiful body of water in Colombia, it was certainly the most productive. Bocachico,