It’s not nature’s topography; the complex pattern of waterways draining our coastland wasn’t always there. Guyanese built it. The Dutch and the British laid it out, but our ancestors did the back-breaking work that created this astonishing network of canals and trenches and four-foots and drains and dams and conservancies that makes it possible for us to live and work and play in an area generally 6 feet below sea level.
Ours is probably one of the most elaborate networks of drainage waterways in the world, and you can be born and raised in the midst of it, as I was, and be largely unaware of it, as I was. In the 1950s, as a young man in Guyana working with British Guiana Airways, I was familiar with the interior, as far south as Aishalton, but it was only in recent years, flying over our coastal span in planes based at Ogle, that I began to understand, for the first time, the scale of this astonishing network we had created in Guyana to channel water on the land and to move the excess from the coastland into the sea. Of course, I knew we had trenches and four-foot drains on the West Coast, but that was a close-up village view; I had no long-range awareness of the network that was actually around me and behind me and beyond me. It is a phenomenal and often not recognized aspect of Guyana.
Until we get in a plane and look down on it from 5,000 feet flying parallel to the coast, we have no idea of the complexity and precision of this