Pineapple Creek ran along the bottom of the steep ravine behind our house on Blue Mountain Road. We used to see how far we could fly paper airplanes off our veranda into the ravine. Someone had strung up a long rope from a high tree branch overhanging the creek, and we were able to swing out in a huge arc across the creek and back. I think this is the longest swing I have ever been on. (Someone else will have to fill in how the rope got there – I don’t remember, but it would have been a tough climb)
If you didn’t make it back to the takeoff point, you had to swing to a standstill and climb down the rope and drop a few feet into the creek. The rope did not extend all the way down and it was quite hard to retrieve it when it was hanging straight down. While swinging you would be about 12 feet above the creek. Naturally we didn’t wait to come to a complete standstill or make the effort to climb all the way down, but often tried to drop into the creek from quite a height – while still swinging. We each learned the hard way, if you got a little too impatient and careless and dropped while swinging too fast, you would pay a painful price as the creek was only about 4 feet wide and easy to miss. Even if you hit the creek, it was only a foot deep so at high speed it was still a pretty hard landing. Of course, it was also a macho thing to drop at high speed, but we all survived the experience, using natural self-preservation instincts to limit our risks. You can see from this picture how steep the ravine was and how small the creek was, although I think this picture was taken further downstream than our house. I’m sure some of you readers can identify the dude posing by the creek. Hint – it isn’t me.

I don’t have much context for this story even though parts of it are very vivid memories. In honour of some special occasion (I have no idea what) there was to be a parachute demonstration at some square in Mackenzie. The well publicized event drew a large crowd of spectators who watched as Tom (the pilot) climbed the company float plane (single engine 12 seat Otter) to about 10,000 feet and three or four parachutists (probably 216 Parachute Signal Squadron from England) jumped out and started sky diving. They were not individually visible until they started trailing coloured smoke. Each parachutist trailed a different colour and it definitely captured everyone’s full attention. Eventually they opened their chutes and landed quite close to the designated landing zone much to the crowd’s delight. Everyone was clamouring around the parachutists, trying to get a closer look when out of nowhere there was a huge roar as the Otter came screaming down in a full banshee power dive directly at the crowd. There was instant pandemonium as terror set in and everyone started screaming and running to avoid getting smucked in the impending plane crash. I just stood at ground zero while everyone else scattered, outwardly calm, but actually pretty tense, determined to get the perfect photograph you see here, taken just as the Otter pulled out of its dive about 75 feet overhead.

It was of course, just Tom’s idea of a joke to glide silently down with the sun directly at his back while attention was focused on the parachutes, then hit full throttle in a power dive to scare the crap out of the crowd. If I had my current high zoom camera back then, I probably would have been able to catch Tom’s maniacal grin as he came screaming down.

Of course I wasn’t being insanely brave standing at ground zero, I had inside knowledge of Tom’s plan because he had pulled the same stunt at the parachute practice on the golf course a couple of days earlier. I had attended the practice jump and been terrorized just like everyone else present. Needless to say, such antics would be politically incorrect these days, but they provided pretty exciting memories that you might not find today.

Diving Otter

I was always fascinated by all the boats on the river … we could eventually name every boat (that had a name) as it went by on the Demerara. I especially liked speed boats. When everyone else in kindergarten was making animals with Pasticine, I was modeling speed boats. We got to play with Plasticine every day, so I made a lot of speed boats. I also remember my Dad building a speed boat in the late 50’s (the last one described below), and riding in it was a big thrill. I knew boats were a big deal in Guyana and my Dad had been into boats long before I arrived, so I recently asked him about his previous boats. Here is what he recounted: (curtesy of Katy and Evan Wong)

Guyana means land of many waters — and, with no roads, boating was big business. The big “bateaus” started out to be paddled — they were 30 to 50 feet long. As technology moved in, they were powered by outboard motors and old motorcar engines. These bateaus ran the rapids and hauled cargo into the interior, and ferried the prospectors, or “pork knockers” into the interior of the country. As you know, EW&S and Ho-a-shoo both ran big bateau fleets. Evan Wong flew the famous gold flag with a white diamond, standing for his gold and diamond businesses. Bartica, the confluence of the three major rivers, Essequibo, Mazaruni and Cuyuni, was the jumping off point for these bateaus. That was as far up the Essequibo as the ocean going steamers could go, and the bateaus took over from there. Where the 3 rivers came together at Bartica, it looked like a big lake, about 7 miles or so across. Every year there was a big regatta, featuring the bateaus, both paddled and powered, various launches, and, last but not least, speedboats. There was a great deal of rivalry in the area, and a lot of publicity attached to who had the fastest boat on the river.

Evan Wong & Son were the agents for Archimedes Motors, the workhorse, heavy duty outboard motor — essentially a slow-revving cargo mover. At one point they also represented Outboard Marine (Johnson and Evinrude) and another American-made motor called the Elto. The British outboard motors were called Seagulls and were really too small to be a factor. Your grandfather had dropped Outboard Marine and Elto and was concentrating on Archimedes. When we arrived in Guyana in 1951, the king of the river and the winner the last three regattas was a Class B hydroplane owned by a retired American who had built a huge house at Bartica Point. He was married to Flo Bamford, a local socialite when I was growing up. He had served with the American forces in Guyana during WWII. His boat builder was Oscar Smart, the number one boat builder in Bartica. For several years they had dominated the unlimited class and B Class (10 hp) hydroplanes. They used Johnson motors and their B Class hydroplane also won the unlimited.

I decided that it would be good publicity if Archimedes powered the fastest boat on the river and set out to modify a 10 hp heavy duty Archimedes into a racing machine. My personal boat builder was “Spence” Spencer who built all the racing sculls and one-design yachts like Snipes and Lightnings for the Yacht Club and Rowing Club. He also maintained EW&S wooden barges and Nomad, our 26-foot cabin cruiser. We got the plans for the B Class hydroplane, which was designed to do 45 mph with a 10 hp Johnson, and we built it in secret for the 1952 Bartica regatta. Clement Jardim, my auto mechanic, and personal friend modified the Archimedes as well as possible. He upped the compression ratio, redesigned the exhaust system and ignition and so on. We held secret trial behind the islands in the Essequibo. We named the boat Spiritwood after Christine’s hometown. However, the best we could get out of it was about 42 mph. Heavy duty slow revving Archimedes motors were not built for racing.

However, it was good enough to win both the B Class and the unlimited class.

Of course, there was a lot of betting. All the Buxton boys from the quarries and our other friends bet on us, and there was delirium, and we were the big heroes. Ten hp Archimedes dominated the river run business thereafter.

Christine won a B Class trophy one time in Bartica driving Spiritwood with the 10 hp motor. There should be a cup somewhere, presented to her by Eugene Corriea, the only conservative elected in Guyana’s first election. She was the only woman to ever compete.

In subsequent regattas, faster hydroplanes, using 25 hp outboards (C Class) were the rule. We competed, but Archimedes did not make 25 hp machines, so we entered, not as EW&S but privately, and used Johnson powered boats. With a 25 hp Johnson, Spiritwood was pretty skittish and I had a few accidents, but we still won.

Among the other racing craft we had was Whirlwind, a Class C utility racer, which I took to Mackenzie when we went to live there. We used it as fast transportation to Georgetown, and we started utility speedboat racing at Mackenzie. I crashed Whirlwind in an exhibition sometime in about 1955. No more speed boating after that.

I did design and build a pre-fabbed speed boat for fun though. The wood working shop cut out the pieces and I assembled it in half a day. I designed it to be made from two sheets of marine plywood, and to plane with a 5 hp motor. It was just for fun. I don’t think we have a picture. We sold it when we went to Canada.

Whirlwind and Spiritwood

Spiritwood winning a race

There was a great shortcut path across the hill to our house on Blue Mountain Road, which was used by all people walking or biking. It was quite dark and scary at night, but the great reduction in time and effort still made it popular. One year a swarm of Maribunta decided to build a large nest on a low tree limb directly over the path, near the workshop. Of course Maribunta were known to everyone and amongst the most feared of all the nasty critters in Guyana. The extreme pain from their sting is legendary. I have not yet found a decent picture of these 3 inch giant wasps on the web, probably because it is pretty tough to think about photography when these monsters get agitated. They are quite territorial and will attack anything they perceive as a threat. Anyhow, now every time we wanted to take the shortcut, we had to run-the-gauntlet past this two and a half foot nest. This discouraged most people from using the shortcut at all. One day some of us boys decided the nest had to go, and we declared war on it. We learned that Maribuntas could not see further than about 30 feet, so we would sneak up on the nest staying just out of visual range and armed with big sticks and big stones. We would then rush the nest and launch everything we had, then high-tail it out of there before the Maribuntas could react. The nest was tough though, and even a very successful charge would only knock off a grapefruit-sized chunk. The Maribuntas would instantly get pissed-off and highly agitated, with an amazing number scrambling out of the nest and swarming around looking for the culprits. The swarming Maribuntas effectively prevented us from making a second rush, but we could still sneak up to within throwing distance, where we would launch a fusillade of spears and stones. This volley had even less destructive effect on the nest, but it would rile the Maribuntas up even more and the swarm radius would expand enough to prevent even thrown objects from reaching the nest. So we would pull out our trusty slingshots, firing volleys and retreating until we could no longer hit the nest. By this time the swarm would be pretty spread out, but still maintaining contact with each other. The Maribuntas would eventually start flying organized scouting patterns looking for us. Now, we would be out to air rifle range and shooting from cover while keeping an eye out for Maribunta scouts. It was easy to tell if a shot scored a hit because the Marabuntas would react with a flare-up of agitation. There was no mistaking when a scout spotted us, because they would round up a posse and chase us. One time I had to run all the way home where the last two chasing Maribuntas landed on the screen door moments after I slammed it shut.

On succeeding days we came back to repeat our attack pattern, but the Marbunta were re-building almost as fast as we knocked chunks off, and it took far less provocation to get them really steamed up. One time when we had about half of it down and were all the way out to maximum air rifle range, a lady came by, riding her bike through the shortcut. We tried to warn her, but when we first saw her she was already much closer than we were to the nest. She was instantly far more preoccupied with the Marabuntas than with us. She sped up and made it to the nest before getting stung, but there was no mistaking what happened …. She shrieked, fell off her bike, got up and ran, frantically swatting at Marabuntas as she ran, and shrieking every time she got stung. I think she ended up getting stung four times. It could easily have been more, but the swarm had expanded to maximum size and was fairly spread out. I don’t know how she retrieved her bike, which was right under the nest, but it would have been a highly risky operation. That episode ended our war, as we felt guilty and didn’t want to be responsible for getting more people stung. Shortly afterward, some workmen were tasked with taking the nest down and the shortcut slowly regained its popularity. However, I doubt that lady ever took the shortcut again.

I learned the hard way not to play with Guyanese Cane Toads. I caught one when I was 3 or 4 years old by the dysfunctional kidney-shaped fishpond at our first house down the hill, and it sprayed me with this foul slimey poison. This stuff can kill dogs if ingested, so it is not surprising (in hind sight) that I had a bad reaction to it – big red welts and a fever. These toads can weigh more than 3 pounds and sometimes go on mini-migrations. During migration, many toads get smucked on the roads. It doesn’t take long for vehicle tires to steamroll the dead toads into dinner plate sized pancakes and the sun rapidly bakes them to a crisp. The paved roads certainly got hot enough to cook on – so hot the tar on the roads would get soft. The repaired potholes had a high percentage of tar which would get particularly soft and it would melt onto your feet if you stood on it for a second – very tough to scrape off. The nasty smell of toad pizza was instantly recognizable. Later, when I could ride a bike, I always avoided running over “toad pizzas”, but it meant I was constantly weaving down the road during toad season.

The Watooka Staff Club was the focal point of the community, we had no malls to hang out in, so all the kids hung around the club’s pool. Many pool games were invented or inherited which kept everyone entertained. There were no lifeguards, and some of the games we played would never be allowed in a supervised environment, especially nowadays. For example King of the Castle – where challengers would wrestle the King stationed at the end of the diving board. If the king was thrown into the water without the challenger also going in, the challenger became the new king. This game often resulted in scrapes and bruises from the diving board, and sometimes the edge of the concrete pool, but we always considered it to be enormous fun.

Another game of dubious safety was “Keep the Pot Boiling”, where a line of kids tried to keep water splashes from cannonballs off the diving board continuously in the air. This required the next kid to jump off the diving board before the first kid landed, and everyone tried to land as close as possible to the side of the pool so they could get out of the water and back on the diving board in time to keep the pot boiling. Today, every aspect of this game would be a transgression, running on the side of the pool, too many people on the diving board, jumping while people are still in the water in front, jumping towards the side, jumping close to someone else, yelling too loud, and I’m sure I’m missing some, but these things were what made it so much fun.

Then there was dead man diving, where you pretend to get shot just as you leapt off the diving board.

And there was diving for glasses – drinks came in bottles not cans and were drunk out of glasses because every drink needed ice, no paper cups in sight. Of course glass almost totally disappears in water, so we would throw all the glasses in the deep end and see who could find the most.

Tube diving – seeing how far away you could dive through the hole in n inert tube. The tube might be rolling on the water or even flying through the air at the time.

Knights and horses – traditional water-based piggyback fighting.

Many kinds of races and dares, sometimes involving running around performing tasks on the grounds and down at the river as well as pool antics.

Zillions of kinds of tag, one of which was Dark Tag. We would sometimes gather down at the pool at night, turn off all the pool lights and play tag. The whole pool was so dark, it was impossible to see someone at arms length. The game was all about stealth at close quarters, you had to control your breathing and be able to swim totally silently – quite a bit harder than it sounds. The attraction of the game was more to do with the eeriness of the unknown than actually having a great set of rules. Most of the time you could swear you were the only person in the pool. You have no idea who is actually “it” and if you bump into another quarry, you could actually end up thinking you got tagged. We still played it whenever it was dark enough. One time we arrived to an already darkened pool and were playing for 20 minutes before we discovered there were a couple of older teenagers (who shall remain nameless) “making out” in the deep end. I’ll leave the rest to your imagination, but you will need a pretty good imagination to guess the details of what they were doing.

As Scott mentioned, there was a tiny little blue water lake just off the back road by Nooitgedacht where we used to gather for the clay wars. This lake had a small orange island about 14 feet long by 5 feet wide sticking about a foot out of the water. The island was about 15 yards off shore. About 30 feet from the island was a submerged atoll, smaller than the island and ranging from 1 to 3 feet under water, made largely of white clay. The water surrounding the island and atoll was no more than 8 feet deep and the bottom was littered with large white clay nodules. The clay was very pure and smooth with no rocks in it and the perfect consistency to be immediately formed by hand. This lake had all the natural geometry and resources just begging for someone to invent the clay war game. We didn’t need digital watches or text messaging to know when and where to show up, nothing other than swim trunks (buckta) was needed or useful. (As everybody knows, all timing in the town was run by “hooters” but that is a whole subject on its own) You can read about the Nooitgedacht races for a prequel to the clay wars. Sides were chosen (another intricate subject) and we would race out to our respective “forts” to start stock-piling clay ammunition. Initially the water would be crystal clear and you could see the valuable clay deposits on the bottom that would later be rapidly transformed into ammunition of various calibers, each with its own strategic purpose. The basic objective of the war was for the atoll-based attackers to overthrow the defenders of the island. There were a few rules that allowed this to happen: 1) If you got hit by a clay ball you had to die (fall into the water) and 2) If there were no defenders standing on the island, the attackers took possession. Dead defender warriors would almost immediately be reincarnated by the water and could scramble back into position. Dead attackers had to go back to the atoll to be reincarnated. Dying of course was performed with the most theatrical of acrobatics, as one staggered, twisted, flipped and flopped into the water, complete with anguished screams. This war game was not just a simple snowball fight, it actually involved fairly sophisticated strategies as the defenders had to deal with the logistics of simultaneously mining enough ammunition and adequately manning the fort, while the attackers had to figure out how to get close enough to knock the defenders off. As the war raged on, the water immediately surrounding the combat theatre would turn completely white, making it impossible to see through. This helped attackers, and sometime defenders, but also forced everyone to mine clay by feel alone. It was not really possible to hit all the defenders from the atoll, but you could set up a barrage that kept them dodging while your attack party made a fast assault. Another strategy was to send the entire attack army under water where they could not be seen or hit, carrying as much ammo as possible. One attacker would surface somewhere, possibly even on the far side of the island, to draw fire as the main body erupted for a broadside. Or they might simply send a flanking party to the far side and nail the defenders with crossfire – its pretty tough to see and dodge projectiles from multiple directions. It may sound like taking the island was easy but there were ingenious strategies developed by defenders too, such as recalling all miners at strategic times, or sending out snipers, and it was always a pretty even match. One defender strategy against total immersion of the attackers was to abandon the island while the attackers were underwater and set up to pick off the first attacker to try to claim the island, thus immediately re-taking it. As Scott previously mentioned, this game was highly addictive, with almost constant laughter as we taxed out bodies and our minds. Who needs the Corbomite maneuver when you can devise your own reverse underwater ambush?

Dis stary start wid far a fi buys till ova de farm doin de (classic) fishin ting. De wata high dan de beach, so all us fishin out de traf. Bri-yan (Quin) ga de bes place a de en. Wan buy kech a kyatfish an we all looking wa appen, wen dung de traf come big load a feddas. To-tal suprise maan. Dey nak Bri-yan clean in de wata. Shite maan, dis big big trouble…dem wata full a perai an ting an ting maan, juss waitin fu food come dung de traf. We all terrify maan, an Bri-yan, he know he gyn die maan. All dem buys is hallerin an reachin a help, but Bri-yan don wait fa notin maan, him wakin an wata maan. He get out witout a sin-gle bite maan….dem fish juss as suprise as we. Eh-eh maan!

The back road off the “hill” to Nooitgedacht was a typical un-paved bauxite road, dusty in the dry season, mucky in the rainy season. Just past the bottom of the hill was a sharp left hand turn that got particularly mucky – about 8 inches deep and virtually impossible to ride a bike through. But that didn’t stop us. We used to race our bicycles down to the little lake where we fought the clay wars (see separate post on clay wars) in order to stake out the best territory. And of course the guys from “up-the-hill” were trying to get there before the guys from “down-the-hill” who came from the other direction. The up-the-hill guys (I was living with den Hartogs at the time) would come screaming down the hill as fast as we could go, trying to use momentum to carry us through the mucky zones. Of course we tried to stay in the ruts left by the last Land Rover to pass by, but that was a tall order as the clay-bauxite mud was slippery and the Rover would be sliding and weaving around leaving a tough trail to follow, and the ruts were so deep, the bike pedals could get caught in the muck anyway. It was pretty rare to make it through the two big mucky zones without wiping out. Usually the bike would just run into deep mud and get bogged down, but there were many spectacular wipeouts at fairly high speed, especially at the sharp turn. Making a sharp turn at high speed on a slippery surface on a bicycle is just asking for trouble, but it was the only chance we had of not having to laboriously push our bikes through all the deep mud. Wiping out into 8 or 10 inches of soft clay was not too bad unless there happened to be a rock somewhere in there – ouch. Fortunately, no serious mishaps occurred. Our bikes took a beating though, we were always straightening handlebars and of course had to wash them down when we got home. Naturally as young boys, we found wipeouts by others to be totally hilarious, but there was also an element of showmanship. If you were going to wipe out, you might as well ham it up and put on a show. Some wipeouts gained legendary status, such as the flip over the handlebars or the face-first power dive. I still smile when recalling some of the antics.

In 1967 we discovered a flat little clay area, about 50 yards across, off the road to Nooitgedacht. When it was dry, there were little cracks in the surface, when there was enough rain, it would turn into a shallow pond only an inch or two deep. The way I remember it, somebody (probably Reggie) decided to wade out to see if the water got deep enough to swim. The edge was deep wet clay silt and he was over his knees in silt after only wading out a few feet. As he tried to take bigger steps, he kept sinking lower and lower and eventually got pretty stuck. We had to form a human chain to drag him out. The next day the gang returned to try and figure out how deep the quicksand was. I seem to recall we even brought rope once, in case someone had to be hauled out. Of course the parental units would have had a fit if they had an inkling of what we were up to. We couldn’t find the bottom, so curiosity about quicksand rapidly turned into a challenge to see how far we could go out into the quicksand before getting stuck and having to get rescued. Knowing what I know now, the reason we could not touch the bottom was the quicksand was so dense we were buoyant enough to “float” with our shoulders out of the water. However, if you went in vertically up to your chest, it was almost impossible to move. We learned a lot about quicksand – the hard way – trial and error. After a couple of days, we had learned how to spread our bodies out at the surface and move slowly forward with a special sequence of body motions, so no more rescues were needed. However, travel in this stuff consisted of moving a few inches and in the process getting mired down for a few minutes before being able to get in position to move a few more inches. Eventually somebody had the “bright” idea to have a race across the lake and back. It may have been the ultimate slow motion race, but it took lot of effort and a lot of concentration and a lot longer than expected to complete the race. After that, it became a sport – quicksand racing. There was a lot of technique in successful quicksand racing. The start was all important, if you just jumped in, you would be hopelessly bogged down – basically the technique was to run as fast as possible at the lake, until your feet started to get mired down, then to lunge forward in a low sliding belly-flop. Execution of the sliding flop was crucial, because coming down too hard would get you bogged down immediately, but the biggest trick was knowing how many steps to take before lunging. Every extra step gave a huge distance advantage, but was a direct trade-off in initial miring, reduced speed and reduced slide. We didn’t often race all the way across the lake, because of the time required, but even a short racecourse was highly entertaining with lots comedy and lots of time for the usual taunting by young boys of each other’s struggles. We never stopped laughing the whole time we played in the quicksand. Needless to say, after playing in this muck, we were coated head to foot in clay, and it would dry as we biked home. Fortunately it wasn’t smelly, but we still had to hose ourselves off thoroughly before being seen by a grown-up.