“So – this – is – a – river?” asks Mole, one of the characters in Kenneth Grahame’s classic novel The Wind in the Willows. Rat corrects him: “The River.” Rat has spent his entire life “by it and with it and on it and in it.” As he explains to his friend, “It’s brother and sister to me, and aunts, and company, and food and drink, and (naturally) washing. It’s my world.”
For the novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Colombia’s Rio Magdalena was “the river” that carried his country’s life in its current. Both the river’s realities and its metaphors fill his writing. “The Magdalena, father of waters, [is] one of the great rivers of the world,” he writes in Love in the Time of Cholera, but he acknowledges that it is now “only an illusion of memory.” The novel’s aging main character, maneuvering along the river with the woman he loves, mourns all that has changed, including the loss of trees along banks of the Magdalena — deforestation which began in order to feed the boilers of riverboats just like the one on which they traveled.
In Every Day the River Changes: Four Weeks Down the Magdalena, debut author Jordan Salama recounts his month-long journey from the Magdalena’s headwaters in the Andean highlands north to the river’s delta where its waters flow into the Caribbean. Life on the Magdalena (and in greater Colombia) has continued to change since the publication of Love in the Time of Cholera in 1985. Environmental degradation has increased. Deforestation has led to extreme soil erosion, filling parts of the river with sediment so thick that it is all but impossible for riverboats to pass. Both the flora and fauna in this astoundingly diverse bioregion have been decimated as the river has been reshaped. “The Magdalena of the storybooks was the Magdalena of the past,” writes Salama.
Colombia has suffered in other ways as well. Conflicts between leftist guerillas and right-wing paramilitaries have wracked the country. Drug cartels are funding the processing and exportation of drugs, creating an illegal trade which has fueled violence along the Magdalena and throughout the country — leading to tens or even hundreds of thousands of murders and disappearances. Although negotiations in 2016 promised an end to decades-long violence, peace in the country still feels tenuous.
Unlike Garcia Marquez’s characters’ riverboat journey, much of Salama’s travel along the almost-thousand-mile path occurs by land — often by pickup truck, bus, or motobalinera (a wooden platform pushed by motorcycle along a railroad track). “The Magdalena, like most major rivers, has a long history of being described mainly by those travelers afforded the perspective of floating on it and looking out,” writes Salama. “This to me did not seem too different from peering out the window of a train, always soothing but unable to offer a fuller picture of a place in time before it recedes into the oblivion of the past.” Traveling by land from village to village allowed Salama a see the daily workings of communities and to hear residents’ own stories.
Salama focuses not on the large social and political problems so much as on the impact of these struggles on individuals. What most intrigues him is not the past but “the river that’s left now, plundered and pillaged” and “the fishermen in shacks and the villagers in towns and hamlets that have long lined this artery of a nation, this express highway that once connected the country’s beating heart to its shimmering sea.” Salama’s goal is to get to know some of those individuals who live beside it and who try to make their livelihoods from what little the Magdalena can still provide.
Every Day the River Changes is a book hinging on hope — hope that the violence will not claim more lives and also that the river can be restored in ways that will allow those living along its banks to attain more secure employment. Achieving some of those dreams may require international political and financial assistance, and Salama’s powerful book may itself inspire some US readers to work for justice and peace in Colombia.
Still, Salama never suggests that Colombia is on a path to imminent renewal. But his narrative shows that some Colombians — even the most powerless people he meets on his journey — are committed to contributing to the endurance of the river and the life that depends upon it. His book is “filled with stories of the very real struggles of humans and nature,” but it also full of “stories of strength, marked by passionate people who have long remained devoted to living meaningful, deliberate lives in the midst of hardship and solitude and don’t plan on stopping now.”
Salama introduces us to a teacher who straps books to the backs of his donkeys Alfa and Beto in order to distribute them to children living in rural areas. We meet an environmentalist who keeps tabs on a feral but growing hippopotamus population (descended from animals imported by Pablo Escobar), as well as a woman who has created a sanctuary for critically-endangered Magdalena turtles threatened by both habitat loss and the overharvesting of their eggs. We get to know an artisan who teaches his descendants the skills to create the exquisite filigree jewelry which his family has made for generations, and a master builder of traditional wooden canoes who hopes education will provide an easier life for his beloved granddaughter. And we watch fishermen on rocky outcrops use improvised gear made of discarded plastic bottles and homemade kites to collect enough fish to feed their struggling communities even as the number and size of fish decline precipitously while the river degrades.
One of the most moving descriptions is of the town of Puerto Berrío where “people go to the cemetery to visit the tombs of people they have never met.” The dead arrived by river: people who had been murdered somewhere upstream and were “discarded in death, dumped into the Magdalena, and carried away by the current” past Colombia’s riverside towns and villages. More than 30 years ago, fisherman from Puerto Berrio began to bring the unidentified corpses into town to give them a final resting place. Local families visited the cemetery and looked after the tombs, sometimes adopting particular “Ningún Nombre” and often even naming them after their own missing relatives. “The town had plenty of its own ‘disappeared’ from the war,” explains Salama. “Giving a final resting place to others’ missing loved ones was a sort of consolation for those who’d lost their own.”
Salama’s main goal is to explore how both a difficult history and a changing landscape shape the people he meets in the communities along the Magdalena. His conversations and relationships also lead him to consider the meaning of his own complex identity. Salama’s relatives in his paternal line were Syrian Jews who lived in exile in Argentina, and his mother’s lineage were Iraqi Jews who traveled the Silk Road. (Interestingly, the Colombian river derives its name from Magdala, an ancient city on the shores of the Sea of Galilee — an area not far from where his ancestors lived.) What Salama comes to understand about his roots is that his family and cultural heritage instilled in him a deep curiosity about the world. Learning about his ancestors’ extensive travels and explorations taught him the value of reaching out to strangers wherever he found himself and listening to their stories about their histories and their homelands.
When Salama traveled the length of the Magdalena, he was about to start his senior year as an undergraduate at Princeton. Every Day the River Changes began as his senior thesis, designed to meet the requirements for Latin American studies, environmental studies, and journalism. What Salama has produced is not only a moving book about social and cultural survival in the shadow of environmental and political chaos but also a deeply lyrical and astonishingly mature piece of writing that will move its readers. This stunning volume heralds an exciting new voice in narrative nonfiction.
[Published by Catapult on November 16, 2021, 224 pages, $26.00]