Saturday, I, Compton, and Marlon, took the boat out to do some river territory. I had been checking the tides, and it seemed like it would be a good day to go. You don’t want to be on the river when the tide is low, because all the canals that lead to the houses are then too shallow to get the boat close to the house, so you have to either wade up the canal, or try to walk along the soft, muddy bank. I was a little nervous, since it would be the first time I was on my own with the boat. I was looking forward to it though, because the territory we were going to hadn’t been done in two and a half years, and I knew there was a fair sized village in it.
The night before, I had taken the longitude and latitude coordinates of the fork in the river where the territory started, as well as where it ended, off the map we have and entered them into my GPS, just to make sure I was working in the right place. I kind of had a picture of the river map in my mind, but I intended to check it just before I left the house in the morning. But with everything on my mind, I forgot to do that. We got everything together, and got under way about 9:30 am. The boat planed off very easily, so we made good time going upriver. We were going with the tide, so that helped. After we had been underway a while I turned on my GPS. It reassured me that I was going in the right direction, and when we got to where I thought we should be, the reading I had calculated from the map at the house agreed within 500 feet. I was impressed with that.
We started working our way from hut to hut up the river. At one place, there was this huge pile of boulders in the yard next to the hut. Some of the boulders were bigger than a minivan. I have no idea how they would have gotten there as there was no high ground for more than a mile in any direction. Very strange.
We reached the landing for the village a little after noon, the tide was still coming up. The landing was at about the center of the village, so for one side, Marlon and I worked together and then the other side, he worked with Compton. The village was spread out along the side a fairly steep hill, and of course it’s fairly grown up, so you walk along the main ‘track’, watching for small tracks leading off. Early on when I was working by myself, I talked with a family at a house, and explained that we were trying to reach every house in the village. When I got ready to leave, they sent their small son with me to lead me to all the houses. So from then on, I just followed along after my guide, as he took me up and down the side hill on all these interweaving tracks. It was very beneficial, as otherwise I would have gotten lost, or missed a number of houses. The territory reminded me of the way it was in Mabaruma when we had been here three years ago, as everyone was happy to invite me to come sit and they would listen attentively to what I said, and then sincerely thank me for coming.
I had told myself, that I wanted to be heading back by four pm, as I had no desire to be caught on the river after dark. As it was, we finished the village at 4:15. When we got back to the landing, I checked the coordinates of where the territory ended, and saw we had about 3.5 miles left, so I knew we wouldn’t be able to finish it if we tried, so we figured that was a good place to end for the day. The tide had changed some time before we got back to the boat, and we found it sitting about a foot out of the water on a log that was along side the dock. So we pushed the boat off into the water and headed home. We were again going with the current, so we made great time on the return trip, and had the boat secured and everything put away well before dark. All in all it was a great first time out on my own.
