RadioProfile | swallow

I usually title the story with the name of the subject that configures its central theme. Sometimes they are capricious findings, or simple and curious language distortions. In this case it is the name of a wooden boat, and may the river gods continue to be so, that it was our first and foundational boat, back on Nagüe Island. The one who painted her, for the first and only time, had his pride as a carpenter and lyricist, but he began to stamp the name on the starboard side, from the middle towards the bow, with
large, pretentious letters, and of course, it lacked space.

There was one character left over and the “a” did not enter. So she got “Golondrin”. This element, essential for the islander, came into our hands by absolute chance. certain afternoon of
At the beginning of autumn, with our friend Iturbides, neighbor and caretaker of the house, I wanted to go inside the island, fighting the bug. We were looking for a fork, the fork of two very narrow streams, which were the true drain of the island.

The tide of the Río de la Plata, very close to that area more than 50 years ago, entered through there, and it also came out in the downspout there. As the guide said, “he was a good fisherman.” And so we carried fishing equipment and some provisions, dressed in light clothing and straw hats. Saving, for another opportunity, to recount the superhuman sacrifice of that march. The truth is that we reached one of those streams in the middle of the downspout.

We incarnated with pieces of cow’s heart, red and fat worms, but the bites were not so many or so valuable: we alternated toad catfish, small patíes, and a tararira. We were already heading back when Iturbides froze, looking away from the levee. Clinging to a branch of a single willow, his right forefinger pointed to the bottom of the stream, whose descending waters were always very transparent.

We leaned out too, to see something that shone near the surface. Without hesitating, I entered the water with a bottom of soft mud and some roots; take a deep breath
and I dove in. Almost at the same time, I reappeared excited and shouting:

– “It’s a boat, I touched the finish of the bronze stem. That’s what was shining. It seems that it is quite whole ”, I managed to explain.
-“This one has come loose from some flat sand”, someone foresaw. “It will be necessary to see if it bears the name or registration of the mother ship”

Far from paying attention to legal issues, we were overtaken by the euphoria of having found a boat on the riverbed. Right there we began to remove what seemed like tons of mud, those that had held it down at the bottom, to which it arrived, surely, pushed by some southeastern woman. The truth is that we managed to lighten it until we could hoist it over the reeds and support it, heavily, on an enormous camalote. It showed a respectable course on the starboard quarter, where it would have filled with water and, because it was made of wood, it would have traveled a distance in the middle of the water until it ran into the fork.

Well tied up, we left it until the next day, when we returned in a small boat that they lent us, equipped with a piece of tarpaulin, and ropes of various lengths and
thicknesses. With the canvas we tried a patch that he forged and so, in an almost epic tow to the island, it took us more than half a day but we rescued him. On the other hand, the repair cost more than half a season, because the Swallow was quite lazy and only began to work seriously on weekends, when there was no valid excuse in front of us.

In a few months the entire boat had been neatly covered and the course repaired with some Paraguayan cedar boards that the owner of the Caracoles shipyard had given us; We even had the pleasure of varnishing it completely and making it a slatted floor that was almost perfection. Through the collection, we bought two oars and two oarlocks and, over time, a 2 HP Archimedes motor made its appearance, and from then on all of Bajo del Temor became ours.

Text by Rodolfo Perri

I usually title the story with the name of the subject that configures its central theme. Sometimes they are capricious findings, or simple and curious language distortions. In this case it is the name of a wooden boat, and may the river gods continue to be so, that it was our first and foundational boat, back on Nagüe Island. The one who painted her, for the first and only time, had his pride as a carpenter and lyricist, but he began to stamp the name on the starboard side, from the middle towards the bow, with
large, pretentious letters, and of course, it lacked space.

There was one character left over and the “a” did not enter. So she got “Golondrin”. This element, essential for the islander, came into our hands by absolute chance. certain afternoon of
At the beginning of autumn, with our friend Iturbides, neighbor and caretaker of the house, I wanted to go inside the island, fighting the bug. We were looking for a fork, the fork of two very narrow streams, which were the true drain of the island.

The tide of the Río de la Plata, very close to that area more than 50 years ago, entered through there, and it also came out in the downspout there. As the guide said, “he was a good fisherman.” And so we carried fishing equipment and some provisions, dressed in light clothing and straw hats. Saving, for another opportunity, to recount the superhuman sacrifice of that march. The truth is that we reached one of those streams in the middle of the downspout.

We incarnated with pieces of cow’s heart, red and fat worms, but the bites were not so many or so valuable: we alternated toad catfish, small patíes, and a tararira. We were already heading back when Iturbides froze, looking away from the levee. Clinging to a branch of a single willow, his right forefinger pointed to the bottom of the stream, whose descending waters were always very transparent.

We leaned out too, to see something that shone near the surface. Without hesitating, I entered the water with a bottom of soft mud and some roots; take a deep breath
and I dove in. Almost at the same time, I reappeared excited and shouting:

– “It’s a boat, I touched the finish of the bronze stem. That’s what was shining. It seems that it is quite whole ”, I managed to explain.
-“This one has come loose from some flat sand”, someone foresaw. “It will be necessary to see if it bears the name or registration of the mother ship”

Far from paying attention to legal issues, we were overtaken by the euphoria of having found a boat on the riverbed. Right there we began to remove what seemed like tons of mud, those that had held it down at the bottom, to which it arrived, surely, pushed by some southeastern woman. The truth is that we managed to lighten it until we could hoist it over the reeds and support it, heavily, on an enormous camalote. It showed a respectable course on the starboard quarter, where it would have filled with water and, because it was made of wood, it would have traveled a distance in the middle of the water until it ran into the fork.

Well tied up, we left it until the next day, when we returned in a small boat that they lent us, equipped with a piece of tarpaulin, and ropes of various lengths and
thicknesses. With the canvas we tried a patch that he forged and so, in an almost epic tow to the island, it took us more than half a day but we rescued him. On the other hand, the repair cost more than half a season, because the Swallow was quite lazy and only began to work seriously on weekends, when there was no valid excuse in front of us.

In a few months the entire boat had been neatly covered and the course repaired with some Paraguayan cedar boards that the owner of the Caracoles shipyard had given us; We even had the pleasure of varnishing it completely and making it a slatted floor that was almost perfection. Through the collection, we bought two oars and two oarlocks and, over time, a 2 HP Archimedes motor made its appearance, and from then on all of Bajo del Temor became ours.

Text by Rodolfo Perri.

by Juan Ferrari