The Footloose American: Following the Hunter S. Thompson Trail Across South America (7 page)

Thompson seemed to have understood this, and while he sometimes came off sounding less than culturally sensitive, his account of three days among the Rolex-wearing, Scotch-drinking Wayuu dispels any notion of the romantic, noble savage. Then as now, he suggested, native Guajirans were happy to embrace some aspects of the “civilized” world while emphatically rebuffing those they had no use for. The peninsula functions according to the same principle today, with some light tourism and a lingering paramilitary presence thrown into the mix.

Thompson’s no-bullshit take on Guajira is actually a fitting precursor to the kind of pull-no-punches realism he would call upon in the rest of his South American reporting. For a traveler more naïve, this shattered mythology of native peoples’ primeval innocence might have been jarring—a disenchanting start to a long trip, especially for someone who’d gone off in search of an unspoiled frontier. On the contrary, though, Thompson seemed to find it refreshing. “A week ago I came over from Aruba,” he later wrote to a friend, “… and spent three days with allegedly savage and fearsome indians. As it turned out, they were the best people I’ve met.”

Back in Uribia, we parted ways with the gracious Bernie José, thanking him earnestly for his services and hospitality. On a dusty, quiet street, the three of us leaned against the truck bed and shared one final round of handshakes and Scotch.

It was late when a cab dropped us off at a cheap beachside
hostel back in Riohacha. Sky dialed up Alex from the
puerta-a-puerta
, and the two of them headed out for a night of drinks and girl-watching. I stayed in with my journal and the dregs of the Scotch bottle. I was already too tired for the nightlife, and there was a lot of South America still to go. The room was stuffy, so I lay outside in a hammock, listening to the waves as they lapped against the shore. From time to time I heard the sounds of the revelers downtown, snippets of
cumbia
music and machismo that drifted past like flecks of seawater on the wind.

When I finished the bottle around midnight, I thought of Thompson’s closing lines from “A Footloose American in a Smugglers’ Den.” Arriving in Barranquilla, an exhausted Thompson finds that, as far as the city-dwellers are concerned, Guajira might as well be the moon. “I had the feeling that nobody really believed I had been there,” he wrote. “When I tried to talk about Guajira, people would smile sympathetically and change the subject.

“And then we would have another beer, because Scotch is so expensive in Barranquilla that only the rich can afford it.”

The Magdalena River stretches across Colombia’s populous Andean region like a wide brown scar, arrowhead-jagged and steeped in symbolism. Like a scar, it’s distinguished by its breadth and its permanence, and like a scar, it evokes a messy tangle of concepts: history, pride, damage.

But looking down from an auto bridge back in dumpy old Barranquilla, it just looks kind of muddy and lazy. Sky and I stared at the dung-colored water from a long cable-stayed bridge on the outskirts of town. At its delta, the Magdalena teems with plant life, verdant little bundles torn from the marshlands upstream during high water, and we watched them drifting in great green clumps to where the river meets the sea. Beneath our feet, the Pumarejo Bridge is Colombia’s longest at 5,000 feet—longer than the main span of San Francisco’s Golden Gate. It could have been one of the country’s architectural landmarks, but like the rest of Barranquilla, it is a monolithic and oppressive study in gray, a featureless expanse with even its cables entombed in concrete.

In a sense, the capricious Magdalena is to blame for Barranquilla’s tired industrial character. For much of its history, the port city was actually Colombia’s foremost trade capital, one of the continent’s shining jewels. In the early 1900s, it was a model Latin American metro: modern, cosmopolitan, and enjoying some of the highest standards of living in South America. Then, in the mid-twentieth century, the Colombian government restored and upgraded an old colonial aqueduct called the Canal del Dique. Starting eighty miles upstream, the canal diverted much of the Magdalena’s flow from its natural mouth to the neighboring coastal city of Cartagena. With a newer, straighter route to the sea, the locus of commerce shifted, and Barranquilla’s star faded in
direct proportion to its neighbor’s success. Today, historic Cartagena is known not only as the largest container port in Colombia, but also as the Caribbean’s capital of culture, art, and tourism. Barranquilla is its ugly stepsister—gritty, crowded, and largely forgotten.

But Barranquilla is still the origin point for one of the world’s great river trips, from the Magadalena’s mouth to the historic terminus of Girardot, near Bogotá, a route once traveled by grand passenger steamboats and immortalized in the writings of Colombian favorite son Gabriel García Márquez. If you’ve heard of the Magdalena at all, it may well be through Márquez’s novels and stories, in which travel on the river is a recurring theme. It’s a fitting setting for the country’s beloved Nobel laureate, since the story of the thousand-mile Magdalena is intimately intertwined with the story of Colombia itself.

For four hundred years following Spanish conquest, the Magdalena was the Giving Tree of hydrological features. With its tributaries, it irrigated one of the New World’s richest agricultural basins. Cattlemen cleared its forested banks. Bricks made from river sand paved the country’s colonial streets, and its currents carried barges of Colombian gold to finance the Spanish empire. For goods and passengers, the Magdalena was a watery superhighway, the primary travel corridor between the coast and the inland capital of Bogotá, Colombia’s living artery.

By the time Thompson set out upon the Magdalena, however, the steamboats were only a memory. The last remnant of the fleet had burned to the waterline the year before, and passenger travel on the river had all but vanished. The reasons for this are eloquently explained in Márquez’s 1985 opus
Love in the Time of Cholera
, a fifty-year love story in which the deteriorating Magdalena serves as a metaphor for
the unrequited love of the book’s aging protagonist. When Florentino Ariza, the moony owner of a riverboat company, notices changes along his beloved waterway, one of his captains explains to him the river’s ironic undoing: For a half century, Colombians logged the Magdalena’s banks in order to fuel their wood-burning ships. Over time, this led to catastrophic deforestation, which, in turn, caused such erosion and sedimentation that the river was no longer navigable for the large steamboats.

So the best Thompson could do in May of 1962 was to barter with a shipping company for passage aboard a small tugboat: in exchange for ten promotional photos of the ship, he rode on a tug pushing seven barges of beer upstream, into the Colombian interior. Bogotá was his goal, and although a bus ride or short flight would have saved him a full week on the river, Thompson’s itinerary was dictated by simple thrift.

“I am down to 10 US dollars,” he wrote from the boat, “but have developed a theory which will go down as Thompson’s Law of Travel Economics. To wit: full speed ahead and damn the cost; it will all come out in the wash.”

Thompson didn’t write for the
Observer
about his Magdalena journey. In fact, his trip into the geographical and cultural heart of Colombia seemed to hold little romance for him. “There is a definite sense of the Congo here,” he wrote in a testy letter on day one. “The fucking bugs are on me in force. I can barely stand it. My balls for a sleeping pill.”

Márquez, not surprisingly, evokes the river with more affection. In his memoirs, he writes that “the only reason I would want to be a boy again is to enjoy the voyage once more.” At the end of
Cholera
, he ties his characters’ destinies to it, closing the book with a moment of magical realism that finds Ariza and his love unwilling to abandon their country’s cherished river, resolved to float in an abandoned
steamboat forever. For centuries, the relationship between the Colombian people and the Magdalena was one of near-complete dependence. As Sky and I set out to follow Thompson’s course upriver—decades after Márquez’s eloquent eulogy—I wondered: What was the relationship between the river and its people today?

There are easier ways to see the Magdalena River valley than by boat. Much of the region spent the second half of the twentieth century basically frozen in time, cut off by the end of the steamship era and then rendered off-limits by the drug-trafficking and paramilitary activity that followed. In the last decade, however, many Magdalena River towns have become accessible for the first time by modern paved roads. Buses now reach villages that, a generation ago, were effectively off the map. But wherever possible, I wanted to travel on the river itself, and in the absence of commercial passenger boats, this amounted to fluvial hitchhiking, a gamble that Sky and I could meet and negotiate passage with private boatmen along the way.

At the outset, this proved difficult. From the Pumarejo Bridge, we could see the looming cranes of a shipping terminal, but the only river traffic was a pair of wooden canoes just below us, shuttling straw bales from one bank to the other, presumably to avoid the bridge toll. Barranquilla sits at the crossroads of northern Colombia’s highway system, its streets jam-packed with colorful and exhaust-spewing “chicken buses” offering cheap fares to villages upstream. Boat travel in the region is essentially an anachronism. So our hope was either to hire a sympathetic local fisherman or, like Thompson, to talk our way aboard a commercial barge. And we’d been told that the area around the bridge was our best bet for doing either.

Our taxi driver took us down a dirt road in the shadow of the bridge’s concrete piers, where a village of tightly clustered lean-tos had sprouted. Their corrugated steel roofs trembled with traffic noise from above, and in the road, a small child used a switch to beat a bewildered-looking mule.

“This isn’t poor, you know,” Sky admonished me, reading my expression as we drove by. “Around here, this is probably just another working-class neighborhood.”

The taxi drove us to a clearing at the river’s edge, where a dozen men were busy unloading the canoes we’d seen from above. Most were in their twenties and thirties, milling around and shouting at one another as they tossed straw bales into the beds of two large pickups. Their canoes had flaking blue paint and visibly splintered hulls. Across the side, in fading white letters, one of them read:
ASI ES LA VIDA
. Such is life.

One of the older men wore a jumpsuit with the logo of the nearby shipping terminal, and when we stepped out of the taxi, he walked over and introduced himself as Julio, extending a hand to each of us. Julio stared impassively while Sky explained our search for a boat, then nodded slowly and turned to consult with some of the other men. I noticed that one of the trucks had a Thundercats decal on the windshield, and I wondered which of these serious-looking workers appreciated the cartoon show from my childhood.

After a moment, Julio turned back to us. Why didn’t we just take a bus? he wanted to know. River travel took longer, he said, and besides, it wasn’t cheap. He was right on this score, of course. Gas would be a big expense. While Colombia is an oil-rich nation, the majority of its petroleum reserves are tapped for export, and domestic oil sales are heavily taxed. The cost of fueling a motorboat to take us upriver would easily buy us a dozen bus tickets. So we tried
to explain our interest in the river’s history, our desire to see the Magdalena’s farms and villages as someone might have seen them a century ago. But Julio just furrowed his brow and shook his head, clearly dismissing the river as an object of romance. He stared at us contemplatively while a few of his coworkers snickered.

It was understandable, I thought, that the Magdalena wouldn’t strike these men as a place of fascination, that the concept might even seem a bit ridiculous. To Julio and his companions, the river was primarily a means of making a living. Sometimes it was an obstacle, something to be crossed with a canoe full of feed. The idea that two gringos would willingly spend a week’s wages just to see the countryside as they couldn’t see it from the road—I wouldn’t blame them if this struck them as absurd. I thought of one of Márquez’s characters, the no-nonsense Fermina Daza, willful heroine of
Love in the Time of Cholera
, who scoffs at the notion of a pleasure trip along the Magdalena. “If I go,” she insists to her suitor, “it will be because I have decided to and not because the landscape is interesting.”

After further cajoling, Julio conceded that it might be possible to find a fisherman willing to take us upriver, but he sure didn’t know any. He offered instead to take us to the shipping terminal where he worked. Perhaps there, he said, we could arrange some sort of passage on a commercial freighter. So he joined us in the taxi, guiding our driver through an adjacent shipyard where skinny cattle wandered among the skeletons of old boats, and ten or so minutes later, the four of us piled out at a gated office building still within sight of the bridge. An armed guard at the entrance radioed inside to find out what to do with us.

The man who came out a few minutes later wore a dark blue suit and spoke the brisk English of an international
businessman. Benjamin González introduced himself as the commercial director of the Palermo Port Society, a logistics hub for container ships taking cargo into and out of Colombia, and as he gestured us inside the gates, he offered politely to answer any questions we had about trade along the Magdalena. It was true, he said, that commercial river traffic had suffered over the last several decades, in Barranquilla and elsewhere. River erosion and sedimentation were factors, yes, but so were the backroom politics of federal infrastructure projects. By the 1960s, González explained, Colombian leaders had all but abandoned the Magdalena River as a lost cause. Instead, the government funneled money into railroads, road construction, and commercial trucking, shifting resources away from river restoration. Pressure from the American railroad and auto industries probably helped influence this policy, González said, and only recently had some Colombian politicians started advocating for river rehab, citing low emissions and the comparatively low cost of freight shipping.