Hiraeth

The Mango Tree by  Hugh Allan Yearwood,. Bumbury Ameriandian Settlement, Mabaruma, Guyana. Detail

“I am, more importantly however, a permanent resident of the human race and no matter where I go, I’d like to think that I will always belong.” Says Tricia Yearwood in her article, "What It Means To Be A Guyanese Emigrant"

Wise words to end this honest and, at times, soul tearing piece on how leaving the old country is only really accomplished physically.  I know this ache intimately that she writes about “…my eyes began to ache with the same disconnect …”. I became very familiar with this constant feeling of ‘ache’ and ‘disconnect’ during the 31 years that have passed  since I left Guyana.  Then one day this spring, a Facebook friend and ex- British Guianaian introduced her circle of diaspora friends to a Welsh word that finally allowed me to breath in and out more freely. Hiraeth. 

Wikipedia says it has no direct English translation and that the University of Wales, Lampeter attempts to define it as homesickness tinged with grief or sadness over the lost or departed. Describing hiraeth as a mix of longing, yearning, nostalgia, wistfulness, or an earnest desire for the Wales of the past.

I connect better  with The Urban Dictionary that says:  Hiraeth is a longing for one's homeland, but it's not mere homesickness. It's an expression of the bond one feels with one's home country when one is away from it. “As soon as I step over the border into Wales my hiraeth evaporates. I am home.”

Cricket forever (Hugh Yearwood title). Street cricket, Georgetown, Guyana. Photo credit unknown from the internet.

This poem by Tim Davis makes an attempt at defining it.

 Hiraeth (©Tim Davis, 2007)

Hiraeth is a Cymraeg (Welsh) word which doesn't translate well into English. It is a deep longing for home. This poem makes an attempt at defining it. It is pronounced with two syllables. The first is like the English here except that the r is stronger. The second syllable is like how a mathematician would pronounce i-th as in the ith row of a matrix. You could also say eye-th.

 With a last name of Davis, it should be no surprise that my Davis ancestor was born in Wales in the early 1600's. I found this out several years after writing this poem.  The westward theme is in the poem because going home to Cymru (Wales) means traveling west (from, say, England).

Hiraeth beckons with wordless call,

Hear, my soul, with heart enthrall'd.

Hiraeth whispers while earth I roam;

Here I wait the call "come home."

Like seagull cry, like sea borne wind,

That speak with words beyond my ken,

A longing deep with words unsaid,

Calls a wanderer home instead.

I heed your call, Hiraeth, I come

On westward path to hearth and home.

My path leads on to western shore,

My heart tells me there is yet more.

Within my ears the sea air sighs;

The sunset glow, it fills my eyes.

I stand at edge of sea and earth,

My bare feet washed in gentle surf.

Hiraeth's longing to call me on,

Here, on shore, in setting sun.

Hiraeth calls past sunset fire, 

"Look beyond, come far higher!" 

Some of us in the Diaspora were recently having an interesting discussion on social media about the Old Country and our hiraeth for it when Amanda Hector Muehlmann, another of my 'Demerara sugar cane-orphan’ friends, said some powerful words that sank right in to find a permanent place in my core that I can snuggle up to and feel warm when a burst of hiraeth announces itself on a cold, dark and wintery Polish day this coming winter.
“Speaking for myself,” she said. “Guyana is home and will always be home to me. When I say home, I mean home as in homeland. You can move away and adapt, but forgetting where you come from and who you are, is a loss of identity, it makes you a nobody.” She paused then asked us. “ Do you know the song by Neil Diamond? ‘I am I said’? It goes,”:
‘Well, I'm New York City born and raised, 
But nowadays, I'm lost between two shores, 
LA's fine, But it ain't home, 
New York's home but it ain't mine no more’ “To put in my own words and explain what I said above,” Amanda went on. "Germany is home where I live and feel good, but it's not my homeland. Guyana is my homeland, but it ain't my home no more.”
Our own versions of what Amanda said would sound similar in the wide spread Guyanese Diaspora. My version of Amanda’s wise observation is: Poland is home where I live and feel good, but it's not my homeland. Guyana and the county of Demerara is my homeland, but my ‘Demerara’ has moved on and ‘it ain't mine no more’. My hiraeth is for the Old Country and sometimes I'm lost between two shores just like Neil Diamond. One of them is a tropical country of vast Amazon jungle, vast savannahs, mighty rivers, mountains and fertile plains in South America and the other, the more important one of my adulthood is Poland, a temperate country of beautiful rivers, mountains and plains far away in the heart of Europe.

The Mango Tree by  Hugh Allan Yearwood, 2011. Bumbury Ameriandian Settlement, Mabaruma, Guyana

SNAKE CUT

A story about overcoming fear of snakes at Kabawer Ranch, Guyana using alchemy.

 

Snake Cut vial

        

 

"Snake! Snake!” - The children scattered. The high octave warning would do that. It caused our eyes to dart left and right, hearts pumping loudly against eardrums as the adrenalin surged. That startling call was able to interrupt us even when we were making much louder noises with our calcium carbide-mixed-with-spittle and shaken-in-an Ovaltine tin bombs. Come to think of it what a nice, long winded name for those ‘harmless’ bombs.

“Snake! Snake!” The alarm call would ring! Stay and get closer for a glimpse as it slithered on its menacing way? Or should I trust the others to keep it in sight, run for the cutlass and be the one to make the heroic kill?

Chop! Chop! The bomb making would have to wait. You see, not a single snake was ever allowed to get away. After all, wasn’t it a well-known fact that all snakes were out to do only one thing? Snakes in Queen Street, Kitty Village were poisonous, every last one of them! Viper or no viper! That’s what they were and they remained so until they were dead, dead and couldn’t bite you. Each and every Kitty snake was within reach of a cutlass chop. “Chop! Chop! Chop iittt!” The unanimous chorus could be heard almost to the end of Queen Street.

“Is it poisonous?”

“Kill it and see! Better safe than sorry!”

“A bite is truly a horrible fate! Remember how poor ‘little Ali’ met his grave?”

That is how it was with snakes as I grew up in Kitty during the 1960s and 1970s. The village was the first one  of many East of the capital of British Guiana , Georgetown. It sat some six feet below the tropical Atlantic on the North coast of South America. Soon the country would become Guyana. Those days there was no TV at home or in the whole country for that matter. There were no National Geographic or Discovery channels and so our curious childhood minds were saturated with other matters from other sources. Matters like the ignorant fear of Adam’s mortal enemy. This fear was cultivated in us as a matter-of-fact live or die issue! Much the way preachers would scare the living daylights out of their flock with stories of fire and brimstone. You could smell sulphur I swear. Truly earnest voices, emphasizing words like ‘eternal’ to press home the case. Dante's Inferno? Let me tell you the fear they put in us children was just as real!

Snakes were evil I learnt in and out of church. They resembled the devil and were any good Christian’s enemy. One look at the pictures in my Sunday school book and it was clear what one of them had done to poor Adam and Eve…and poor me  too what with my Mortal Sin! Yes, it was easy to teach us snakes were evil. This was a fact. It was an outright plain and straight fact. 

My family were staunch members of The Holy Rosary parish church on David Street. "Heaven and Hell exist right next door to each other," my mother explained! "Like the top and bottom floor in a house." So, in the middle of the night, it was little wonder I used to have recurring dreams of hellish snakes crawling up into my bed... from somewhere down below. Some nightmares were so realistic I’d wake, jump out of bed and dash, terrified, into the kitchen for the comfort of the cold cutlass blade. It always stood just there by the back door. Many a minute into the night, did the young me sit feeding lucky mosquitoes. It was always awhile before I managed to forfeit the cutlass for bed and the exclusion of the mosquito net. I had a lot of convincing to do to myself that it had been only a dream.

Snakes are prevalent all over Guyana, not only in Kitty or next door Georgetown. This Land was full of them I learned as me and my fear, now almost a phobia, grew older.

“None of our Snakes are man-eaters either!” I heard.

“Except for the camoodie!”

“No, the anaconda you mean!”

Anaconda? Camoodie? No one in Guyana seemed able to tell me the difference between the two. Were camoodies the ones that visited town while the more dangerous sounding anacondas ruled the bush? One thing was certain. They looked exactly the same to me. My Dad comforted me with a recipe on how not to be swallowed by one of them. "Simply press your fingers through the eyes straight into its brain!" He declared. 

Everybody knew camoodies and anacondas and other snakes loved places like sugarcane fields where there were mice and other small creatures to satisfy their sweet tooth. The reason, I was told, why all cane fields were burnt before the cane cutters went in. So fierce were many of those fires, that ash, borne on the Northeast Trade Winds, often sailed out of the eastern sky into Kitty. It was a common place thing that happened at least twice a year.

“They killing snakes!”

“The sugar ripe now!”

“Boy oh boy! I sure could drink some cane juice, couldn’t you?”

Off we’d go to Kitty Market to satisfy our sudden thirst.

There was always a season for the many tasty things that grew in abundance in Guyana. The wind-borne, cane-field debris meant we were properly satisfied we knew what was going on. It was now cane season. Time to drink cane juice!

I grew up before I knew it, and without a second thought, I was giving up my budding teaching career at Saint Stanislaus College for my dream job as supervisor of Kabawer Ranch. Ha! Assistant Ranch Manager! Problem was Kabawer was on the Abary River. This was real (Guiana) rattlesnake and ANACONDA country. I soon discovered I hadn’t forgotten those horrid childhood dreams when I stepped through my back door only to come face to face with a ten-footer green anaconda. It was half way up my back step!

No chop, chop with cutlass this time. I made a hasty retreat into the house for my double barrelled shot gun. Boom! Boom! Roared the weapon that Mr John Dickson of Princess street Edinburgh had made! I had emptied both barrels into the serpent before I knew it. As soon as I was convinced it would no longer swallow me, out came my skinning knife. The big anaconda’s skin was to become my first trophy from Kabawer Ranch. The rest of the snake went into the canal for the piranhas and caimans to squabble over.

“I be curious if yuh nah come across Snake Cut?” My foreman Harry, the leader of the cowboys, asked me shortly afterwards.

“Once yuh gat deh Snake Cut, yuh done deh off limits to any snake!” He declared, spitting into the canal for extra emphasis.

All the other cowboys expected me to have it. Snake Cut was a powerful thing. A promise for a long life. They were all convinced it worked wonders. Anyone who walked on Blairmont’s dams, between the canals or lived further south like us on the Abary River had heard about Cutman and his magical, white powder. It was called Snake Cut. Never mind that none of the cowboys had ever actually seen the mysterious Cutman. Harry might not have known his name but he firmly believed in his medicine.

“What exactly do you do with the Snake Cut, Hugh?” My Georgetown friends asked. “Drink it? Eat it? Smoke it? Put it in bites? Do you just carry it around as a talisman? The questions piled up. Was it made deep in the jungle by them bush Africans in Surinam? A friend, John, had even seen their advertisement sign at the Witches Market over there in Paramaribo, Surinam.

“The best and greatest place for Snake Cut cures this side of the Equator.” It proclaimed.

“No snake can never bite yuh now!” Harry proclaimed as I paid him for my Snake Cut. It was with a deep satisfaction on his weathered face that he handed it over. Almost as if he had just saved my life. Or was it his wonder he was selling his Cut to 'Deep English' speaking me? I was handed a greyish white powder sealed in a medical vial. I was stifling an inward snicker at all this superstition but proceeded as instructed to drink a little of the brittle powder that Harry mixed with pure alcohol spirits. ‘Cutman’ Harry also rubbed some of the mixture between the toes of both my feet. The rest was left in the vial which I was instructed to keep with me on my person always. This I did.

It’s funny and strange how psychology works. Even though I’d had my Snake Cut more to 'fit in’ with Harry and the cowboys rather than sharing their firm belief in its supernatural powers my Snake Cut soon began to work its magic. I evolved from being panicky around snakes to just being wary of them. Was it the Snake Cut alchemy working, or was it just a case of familiarity breeding contempt? Snakes, especially rattlesnakes, were everywhere at Kabawer. Caiman and camoodie fighting to the death was also a common sight.

A month or two later, the Abary River was in flood. We canoed up to a small bit of higher and dry ground. Sure enough, we heard the unmistakably sinister sounds of tails rattling. Within sight there were at least six of them! I felt none of the 'old' familiar panic as they menaced us with their flicking tails and cocked heads. I didn't even kill a single one of them! An unheard of act of mercy from the likes of me and my double barrelled shotgun. But, that was me pre-Snake Cut days. Whatever had happened to my old philosophy about the only good snakes being dead snakes? Did I spare them because they weren't actually on Kabawer Ranch land and thus not a direct danger to our animals? Was my mercy tied to a lack of profit? We got paid good money for snakes killed on the ranch because we were always losing cattle to snake bites. Kabawer rattles were a nice bonus to wages. A note in my expense register from Monday 4th May 1981 said. ‘Ganash Puran - 1 rattle snake, $2.00. Snake box full! Six-hundred rattle snake tails.'

Snake Cut or no Snake Cut, I never stopped being more scared of anacondas than rattlers. In those life-or- death struggles against caimans the results were almost always in the camoodie’s favour. As for the three-meter one I’d blasted away at the bottom of my back stairs? Well, I skinned it, salted it and put it up raw on my living room wall where it stank to high heavens for weeks until it dried. I’m sure I can still smell it even today! I kept this trophy proudly displayed at every ranch I was posted to thereafter. I left it on the wall of Ebini the ranch I left Guyana from. My Snake Cut vial, however got smuggled into the UK then Poland. It  left Guyana with me. So, who’s afraid of snakes? Me? No, certainly not me! I got me Snake Cut,man.

 

Author on Shadow, Ebini Ranch, Guyana 1983.

Hugh Yearwood

Stan Brock, Amazon bush pilot – My candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize.

Stan Brock. Photo credit R.A.M.

This story is based on an entry I made in a journal in 1978. 

Stan Brock, was my number one hero when I was a teenager and I’m sorry I never met him. When I first heard of him British Guiana was now Guyana and he was the long gone ex-manager of one of the most remote and largest cattle ranches in the world; Dadanawa Ranch. During his time as a cowboy there some 4,000 of British Guiana’s 83,000 sq. miles were Dadanawa range. Lethem, the capital of the Rupununi today, was just one of its Out Stations. The ranch is  bordered to the South and East by the mostly unexplored Amazon jungle and to the West by the Guyana-Brazil border.

Dadanawa began as a remote trading post set up in 1865 and it was sold with 300 head of cattle to H.P.C. Melville in the late 1880s. He was a Scottish gold and diamond prospector who had struck it rich and was to become the founding patriarch of the famous Melville clan of the North and South Rupununi savannahs. This future legend was lost and nearly dead of malaria when he luckily wandered out of the dense Amazon jungle into the North Rupununi where some Macusi Amerindians found him. Sadly, this is not a story about Mr. Melville so, just let me say that when he sold his now world famous ranch in 1919 to investors, they established  themselves as the Rupununi Development Company to run Dadanawa  Ranch that Stan Brock was to manage.

This story is not all about Stan Brock either. It’s about how he influenced me, and predestined my future, becoming my role model hero when I was fifteen. He was THE Amazon cowboy. He rode bare foot like the Wapishana vaqueros that he led driving beef herds along the Rupununi Cattle Trail. From the savannahs into the dense amazon jungle towards the coast they rode. For days on end. Many heads of cattle were lost to jaguars or dissappeared in the treacherous, fast flowing, black water rivers they had to cross on the way to the Intermediate Savannahs and markets further North on the coast.

Stan Brock, Barefoot Vaquero Photo Credit "Jungle Cowboy"

Brock was also a fearless wild animal wrangler. He even tackled huge anacondas in the water as he collected specimens  for world famous zoos. His pet puma, Leemo  must have watched his antics in disbelief, not even pumas played around with those snakes. Vampyressa brocki or Brock's Yellow-eared Bat was discovered for science by him. Stan  is also a mostly self-taught Amazon bush pilot who could land his plane almost anywhere, it seemed. He was exactly the kind of real man the fifteen year-old me, himself with more than a speck of adventure inside, could hero worship.  He was nothing short of being my Guyanese John Wayne. Today, many people the world over know him as the founder of Remote Area Medical missions. Before that, he had been a hugely popular TV nature and wildlife presenter as co-host of the very popular ‘Wild Kingdom’ television series in the late 1960s and 70s.

It was 1977 and my summer holiday to Barbados that year was going to be a memorable one and not only for the culinary experience of being introduced to Kentucky Fried Chicken and Coleslaw salad! I was  so excited to be watching TV for the first time in my life! There was none of that back  in Guyana. No Stan Brock anchoring Mutual of Omaha's ‘Wild Kingdom’ to watch. I learnt two old words I knew now had a new meaning; 'commercial break'. I even found those attractive.

Barbados, 1977 was the time I discovered what it was like to fall madly in love. I became totally enraptured by the  powerful emotion they call puppy love! Her name was Sandy and she was a pretty Polish girl from Windsor  in Canada just over the border from Buffalo, NY.  My heart was truly owned for the first time by a female. One I didn’t call Gran or Mum; and in what a different way! We danced to ‘Red, Red Wine’ by Neil Diamond and held hands on the beach as we watched the spectacular Barbadian sunsets. The poolside band liked playing Harry Belafonte’s "Jump in the Line”, but it was his “Jamaica Farewell” and how we changed the lyrics to Barbados and Bridgetown that remains unforgettable. We exchanged weekly letters for almost a year afterwards and even today a tiny part of me reacts differently to Neil Diamond or Harry Belafonte. As if I were hearing a faint echo of Summer, 1977.

The clear blue Barbados sea! Ours was the Atlantic Ocean, an unattractive, East to West, turbid flow; an ugly sight mostly. It was always thick with silt from the Amazon and some of the other mighty rivers further East along the South American coast. The Guiana Current was a constant wash that seemed always in a big hurry. It taught us about the importance of using landmarks to 'anchor' ourselves to a point on the beach when we went swimming. The steady warm, current constantly pushed us to the West towards the Demerara River mouth every time we bobbed up and down in the waves.

Westwards went the roily flow; pressing against the wild and muddy Guyana coast on its way  towards the Orinoco river delta and Trinidad and Tobago, where the current meets the Caribbean Sea. Before reaching this blue sea of paradise, however, the Guiana Current would dump its grey and muddy silt onto our coast! Causing me and other Guyanese to curse our 'bad luck'. Ach! They called us “Mudheads” in Barbados because of it.  Our blue waters of paradise are only three to five kilometres off the coast! I know because a fisherman once took me out there in his sail boat to see it.

Author's uncle, cousin and aunt in a Guyana fishing boat early 1950s

Barbados was where I read Stan Brock’s book “Jungle Cowboy”. This book predestined my future! It describes his time and adventures as a teenage cowboy who became a man and manager of Dadanawa Ranch in the South Rupununi savannahs. I learnt he’d been a teenager like myself, when his father brought him to British Guiana from England to seek his fortune in the colony. His book so ignited my imagination that the following year I walked over from St. Stanislaus' College in Georgetown to the offices of the Rupununi Development Company. I had high hopes of getting a summer job at his Dadanawa.  It was the last day of school. Saints had broken up for the summer holidays and I wanted to get a job there just like Stan Brock had. I wanted to experience the same adventures he had had and had so fired up my own imagination.

Unannounced and up a dark and rickety flight of stairs, I entered the office and was lucky. Chairman of the Board, Diana McTurk, was in Georgetown and she would see me! I knew the buck stopped at her desk. She was THE COMPANY, the very ‘owner’ of Dadanawa Ranch. I introduced myself and bravely stated my mission. Diana listened to all I had to say about Stan Brock and shook her head negative. She was deadly serious.

“You’re much too young to be out there in the South Rupununi all by yourself, Hugh.” The tall, handsome woman enounced in her clipped Queen's English. “Besides it’s the middle of the rainy season and we don’t want you drowning in some horrible puddle now, do we?”

“But…, but…, I can swim like a fish”, I stammered. “My friends even call me White Shark!” My protests seemed to fall on deaf ears. Nothing. Silence. I was so disappointed. It seemed there was nothing else I could say to promote my dreams as I stood in front of this stern woman. Suddenly, her face lit up and a wonderful twinkle sparkled in her eye. “How about a summer job at Karanambo instead, Hugh?” She was beaming now. The delight on my face was clear to see. Karanambo Ranch! Another legendary place in the Rupununi. It belonged to the McTurks and had been founded by her father Tiny McTurk, the most famous angler in Guyana. The world’s largest fresh water fish, the arapaima was his speciality. I knew because I’d seen photographs of him and his exploits in the Guyana Museum!

“I can take better care of you there,” she said. “We leave on the morrow, so go get ready.”

That’s how I got to spend the next two and a half months living and working as a vaquero with the Macusi Amerindians on Karanambo’s 500 sq. kilometres of open savannah spotted with numerous islands of bush. Karanambo is in the North Rupununi savannahs  wedged between the Kanuku mountains in the South and the Pakaraima mountains to the North. It  is so huge it stretches from the banks of the Rupununi River all the way North to Toka, a Macusi village in the foothills of the Pakaraimas.

 It was at Toka village, where we had tracked some cattle rustlers to, that I heard mother nature's voice singing a tune that could have been the alluring sound of the Sirens in Homer's Odyssey. A bloodcurdling, yet hauntingly, beautiful, wailing sound that seemed to come from the very bowels of the mountain. A huge silhouette  that loomed in the moonlight behind Toka Village. The sound would come and go. On and off it wailed, scaring yet enchanting me until it stopped as abruptly as it had started. Was it water flowing inside the mountain? Was it the wind swirling through secret caves? I never found out what made the mountain sing. "Spirits", said one of the Macusi vaqueros.    "Kanaima", another muttered and they all nodded their heads, obviously scared.

Summer of ’78 at Karanambo was a time of adventure. Adventures that led to many of my later experiences in the mostly uninhabited and wild interior of Guyana.

Decades have passed since then but Stan Brock remains a remarkable man. In many ways he continues to inspire others. He sold everything he owned to create Remote Area Medical that would organise medical missions for people in remote areas of the world including the Rupununi and the surrounding jungle of the Amazon basin. Today, most of RAM’s missions actually help the large number of the underprivileged in the USA.

"We were 25-35 day's march to the nearest town with no health care." Is how he describes why he founded RAM. His devotion to helping other people is absolute. He has no family, earns no salary and lives in a disused school that the city of Knoxville, Tennessee lets his RAM use for a one dollar rent fee. Stan Brock is like a modern day Diogenes of Sinope who, himself living in a barrel, famously observed a child drinking water out of its hands and gave it his own cup saying "A child has beaten me in plainness of living."

Stan Brock, according to the CBS TV program“60 Minutes” at seventy-two was taking showers in the courtyard of the school with a hose. He is as homeless and penniless as the Greek it seems to me. Meanwhile, and according to a report in The Independent (UK),he:

"...has no money, no income, and no bank account. He spends 365 days a year at the charity events, sleeping on a small rolled-up mat on the floor and living on a diet made up entirely of porridge and fresh fruit." Nevertheless, there are huge differences between him and the philosopher. Stan might sleep like him but in his seventies this intrepid  bush pilot is still flying a C-47 or Dakota, R.A.M. plane that flew on D-Day in World War  II. He continues to fly over the Amazon jungle bringing medical relief to the people of the Rupununi making him my firm candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize. As for me, it is  the McTurks' Karanambo Ranch and not Dadanawa that I have fond memories of.

Stan Brock lassoing cattle at Dadanawa Ranch. Photo credit "Jungle Cowboy"