Word: riverbanks
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...shallows like huge sea lions, there are signs of activity on "the Indian side." Small children scamper from house to house--16 identical government prefabs staring blankly across the blue through 16 identical broken picture windows. The wind sends whirlwinds of dust spinning frantically over the grassless strip of riverbank and single row of Monopoly board houses. Eventually, three or four boats, loaded to the brim, start off down the river to the estuary where the freight boat will dock. As they go behind the hump of sandbars, both water and boat disappear while heads and torsos are still visible...
With only 97 people on that dusty strip of riverbank out in the middle of nowhere--50 roadless miles from the nearest Indians--a definite tribal cohesion, not traditionally characteristic of the Montagnais tribe, has developed by necessity. The problem of existence is a communal problem dealt with in a communal way. Everyone is expected to contribute in such tasks as chopping wood, carrying water, cleaning the houses, cooking, raising children, keeping warm. To the children, there is very little difference between one house and the next, one parent and the next; not because no one cares but rather because...
...houses, singing, wailing and tapping on window panes in search of companionship. They are simply ignored. One evening, from our broken picture window, we watched the sun disappear behind the hills up the river. Suddenly, a drunk man broke the stillness, driving his Skidoo wildly along the muddy riverbank, shouting to himself and to his wife who stood surrounded by children in the doorway of their house. The Skidoo lurched over the bank and down to where a boat was tied to a log. There he threw it and himself into the boat, announced that...
...Choloma, a market town of 9,000, the people were awakened at 3 a.m. on Sept. 20 to find their houses rocking under the battering of water that had surged over a nearby riverbank. "It was like a wild thing," Pablo Venture told TIME Correspondent Bernard Diederich, who visited the stricken town last week. "Our house turned over and then vanished. Three of our children completely disappeared." Wiping his eyes with a dirty handkerchief, Juan Ramirez sobbed, "Dios mio! What has happened to us? My wife died, and now the water has taken seven of my beloved grandchildren...
...chopper spiraled down from its 4,500-ft. cruising altitude, darted over the flood-swollen Mekong toward a riverbank landing spot. Cambodian soldiers sucking Buddha amulets for luck leaped from the helicopter, lugging cases of food and ammo as they sprinted for shelter. As I jumped out of my seat and sloshed through knee-deep water toward the shore, insurgents began firing at us: the pilot had ill-advisedly put us down in a no-man's land between the two forces. We were lucky...