You came for the sun
and the sun got you
now what would be
october autumn november
transformed to more than summer
the fierce fire-breather monster
that summer is the northern ghost of
This sun makes demands on you
taxes you with knowledge
that there is nothing beyond summer
that lives in that easy light
shares warmth and frees you
but this storm monster that must be caged with knowledge
and kept from your soft, white skin.
2300 (because the bloody clock went back again): At 1300 we had a tour of the engine room conducted at lightning speed by the Chief Engineer. The engine is enormous - 3 or 4 storeys high (I lost track) and long in proportion. It revs at a constant speed and direction and speed changes are down to the 20-foot variable pitch prop.
Later we left Baia de Turbo. We closed the hatches (mine was more of a passive role) at 1530 and then were boarded by a pilot in an orange shirt, who conducted us a couple of hundred yards where we moored again. We hoisted the 'D' flag and two divers began to check the underwater hull, presumably for contraband cocaine. This seems bizarre - there are so many other places it could better be hidden. The gesture reeks of the State Department. It was not until after 1730 that we were finally under weigh. Then the whole sky aft was filled for an hour by sheet and fork lightning illuminating the bay, the swamps, the rainforest and the little town, as though we were emerging from hell. And that is exactly what it felt like. Turbo - goodnight and goodbye.
Clock back 1 hr.
This is war country
Casual guns
Sounds must be re examined
Misunderstandings shrugged off
Less uniforms, not more
Authority a product of alliance or who you work for
A man in a stripey shirt complains about me filming
His friends have rifles.
Fast launches traverse from nowhere to nowhere
Unexamined business
Fifty seven killed on this spit of land
Watchtowers in the rainforest
Divers examine boats
At the suggestion of the State Department
In exchange they train the death squads
What's the story of this picture?
The same one again and again
Death, sadness, end of ways
Unredeemable dreams
And the storm winds come with evening
Let us leave this bay
Out into the night and storm waters
The smell here is sweet and smiles glassy.
the wind tugs at my shirt
as if to make me think twice.
mobile phones don't work
still everyone talks to their hands.
careful of that book
it's due back at the mobile library dreckly.
and the light filled
the clouds
to get out of here
was to quit hell
Shining sparks and sheets
almost continuous
go away
stay
away.
who is it who looks over these waters
stills the storm and calms all troubled seas
not god but america
on that cape
fifty seven
in one day's battle dropped
and the loading of bananas
never stopped
Not all are helpless in this world of pain
Some have much to lose
and some to gain.
What is coming home but
a tugging at the hem of simple feelings
each emotion to be expressed
yet fitted into the web of people's lives
only you have travelled
everything has gone on and moved on
family, friends and lovers
catch up quick, is their message to you
travel may broaden the mind
but you'll get over it.entering the world of language
we communicate english to russian to german
taken towards each other
we communicate with signs
the more we develop
the less we are able to say.
(0530) 1345: Well the joke is on us. We can't go ashore because there is no way of getting there. The ship is fast to a mooring buoy in the middle of the bay, to port the province of Turbo, to starboard Darien. It took me a while to work out the geography of it, but the tide must have been going out.
Many big rivers feed into this bay and the bananas come down them on boats and rafts (the Captain told me this). The cutting is carefully timed to fit in with shipping movements, because the bananas can spend no more than 24 hours on the barges transhipping them to the freighters, towed and shepherded by tugs.
We have armed guards aboard - I am not sure whether they are police, army or militia/ death squad. They are dressed in the blue boiler suits such people adopt when their specific identities are withheld. The two I met were amiable enough, and very interested in my camera, whether from a security or consumer point of view I don't know, so I didn't ask them to pose for me, which of course I now greatly regret.
Apparently in the good old days before the cartels and the death squads and the incredibly tight security here, the indigenous Indians and others made a living selling exotic birds and caymans to the ships' crews, either alive or stuffed. All this has now been stopped. But the Captain's First Mate bought a cayman for his wife. Restrictions on entry to the USSR were tight, so he drugged the cayman with vodka and put it in a dirty sock amongst his washing. The officials didn't want to check this too closely so his wife received her gift.
Once he had returned to sea, the wife tried to feed the cayman, which only woke after several days. But the cayman would not eat. So she phoned the vets and told them she had a crocodile which wouldn't eat. Did they have any advice?
This was a surprising enquiry in Riga . Vets and animal officials went to visit the cayman. They gave the wife some money and took the cayman to the zoo. She asked how they would make it eat and they told her they would put a piece of meat on the end of a stick and wave it in front of the cayman who would eventually attack it and eat it.
The Captain said that members of his crews have spent 2 or 3 days in gaol in Russia while the caymans they had bought were investigated to confirm they were not protected alligators.
And he told me that a couple of years ago 57 people died in one day in a shootout on the cape to the east of the bay, but the loading of bananas never even paused. Someone protects this port, such as it is, and makes sure nothing interferes with the passage of goods.
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