Paddle-making Part I

As we entered the forest Heni told me to watch for snakes. Rains had driven many creatures into the open that we would prefer to stay underground, and my neighbors had just killed a deadly ­­Anyoka snake near their house the day before. That Wednesday morning we sought a boogu-boogu, one of the trees used for making paddles. As my canoe was in the making, I needed a paddle soon or I would have been up the creek.

I had no idea what boogu-boogu looked like, but we stopped at a truly massive gray tree covered in waves of wrinkles. It looked like the leg of a very old elephant. The boogu-boogu tree had buttress roots similar to the tree shown in the picture. Heni and Barka, my two friends, inspected the buttress roots where the wrinkles extended near the base of the tree, but none of them proved promising for paddle construction, so we explored deeper. Eventually we found another boogu-boogu tree and cut a five-foot long portion. Since boogu-boogu buttress roots are thin, requiring less machete work, the Ndjuka have used this and similar trees to make paddles for centuries. An added advantage of this method is that only a small piece of the tree is harvested, allowing the tree to continue living and producing future paddles. As we walked back through the forest, I killed a small black snake on the path with my machete.

Since we were in the bush, Heni and Barka wanted to check an old plot of ground for second-year cassava. We crossed a few creeks and saw three more boogu-boogu trees with good potential roots for making paddles later on. When we arrived at the plot, we found it had been overgrown with nine foot high Kangayesi grass, which clings to just about everything and tears gashes in skin if removed too quickly. Barka carefully beat a path with a large branch until we confirmed that there was indeed cassava to be harvested. Our objectives complete, we returned home with boogu-boogu in hand.