Magdalena River of Dreams

The story of the riverThames is equally dramatic. For years. Londoners treated the river as one great public latrine, flushing into its shallows raw sewage and industrial waste in equal measure. By the 1950s, the river that had carried the weight of all of British history, the symbol of the nation, the lifeblood of its people, was little more than an open-air sewer, utterly devoid of fish, incapable of supporting any form of life, lacking even a trace of oxygen in all the waters that reached for miles above and below the London Bridge. In 1957, London's Natural History Museum formally declared the river biologically dead. Today, by contrast, the Thames supports no fewer than 125 species of fish. Herons and cormorants line the riverbanks. Sightings of seals and dolphins occur every day, and even whales are sometimes seen in the river, skimming beneath the bridges of the city.

Known by this time throughout the country as "El Fabricante de Sueños," the Dream Maker, this visionary entrepreneur had one more gift for the country. In 1919, he had imported Colombia's first movie projector, screening in Puerto Berrío a silent film that dazzled the audience. In 1924, he cast himself and his wife, along with friends from Medellín's high society, as actors in what would become the first feature film ever made in Colombia, Bajo el cielo antioqueño. Proper films, of course, required a proper setting, so the next step was to build the Teatro Junín, at the time the fourth-biggest movie theater in the world. If Medellín was to have such a temple to the new art of filmmaking, surely Colombia would have to develop the capacity to produce movies, and thus his final act was the creation of Cine Colombia, to this day the nation's most important theater company. Gonzalo Mejía would die the rarest of business leaders, a civic entrepreneur who accumulated not wealth but goodwill, with projects coinceived in dreams, and realized for the well-being of all Colombians.

The message for the culture is clear: The jaguar spirit must be mastered if the moral and social order is to be pre- served. The wildest of instincts, like the impulses of the natural world, must be curbed if any society is to survive. This may be what these stones are all about. In guarding the dead, the stones of San Agustín reveal what it means to be alive, even as they warn of the consequences of failure. Those who lived here did not have a lot of time or patience for compromise. They knew what they believed and they knew it was true because yagé, the sacred plant, revealed it to them.

Indians worshipped but the land itself: the rivers and waterfalls, the rocky outcrops and mountain peaks, the rainbows and stars. Every time a Catholic priest planted a cross on the ruins of a temple or lay claim to a shrine by spinning a new story in an attempt to co-opt its power and resonance, as clearly had been the case here at La Piedra del Letrero, he merely confirmed in the eyes of the native people the inherent sacredness of the place.

Indeed, it is not unreasonable to ask why any of Colombia's biodiversity, perhaps its greatest national asset, not to mention the health and well -being of its children, should be put at risk to satisfy the misguided policies of a foreign country whose people seek salva- tion and contentment in the false promises of a drug best used as a topical anesthetic to numb the senses. Having endured the con- sequences of the illicit trade for so many years, perhaps now is the time for Colombia to reclaim a stolen legacy by celebrating coca for what it really is, what the Inca saw it to be: "the divine leaf of immortality." Marketed as a tea or nutraceutical, coca could become Colombia's greatest gift to the world, dwarfing the commercial suc- cess of coffee. Nothing wrong with coffee, of course, but its origins do lie in distant Abyssinia. Coca was born in Colombia.

The amount of moisture on the planet does not change through time. The water that slaked the thirst of dinosaurs is the same as that which tumbles to the sea today, the same fluid that has nurtured all sentient life since the dawn of creation. The sweat from your brow, the urine from your bladder, the very blood in your body will ultimately seep into the ground to become part of the hydrological cycle, the endless and infinite process of evaporation, condensation, and precipitation that makes possible all of biological existence. Water has no beginning and no end.

Arrieros, to this day, don't just dislike horses; they disdain them, Who would want to work with horses, so often petulant, preening, and precious, when. an uncomplaining mule is tougher, lives longer, is cheaper to feed, less vulnerable to disease, capable of carrying tar greater loads, and, like the men themselves, as solid as the stones that mark the trails that define their lives?

If something was too big to carry a piano, perhaps, or an industrial engine it was simply disassembled and loaded in pieces. One story tells of an arriero who reached a small mountain town with a complete electric plant, along with everything necesary for its installation. He was greeted as a hero and toasted upon his arrival with aguardiente and cascades of blossoms as the entire community celebrated the arrival of light.

By 1850, for example, Bogotá was an established capital, a cultured city of museums and universi- ties soon to be known as the Athens of South America. Yet virtually everything to be found at that time in the homes of the rich, in the shops, in the laboratories and factories- from French champagne and cologne to German tools and scientific equipment, Dutch linens and English umbrellas, not to mention basic building supplies such as iron, copper, and cement all of it had reached Bogotá from the head of river navigation at Honda, on the backs of mules along a track that predated the arrival of the Spaniards.