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Adventures in Farming, WhiteWater  Rafting  &  Trying Life as a Teenage Hobo!

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But Pretty Good Progress has been made!  - so please do check out the lower portions

     During his somewhat troubled teenage years and early twenties RFK Jr. had a number of opportunities to visit Latin America and fell in love with the landscapes, people, culture and wildlife of the land

 

     His first visit was an important and quite challenging initiation into what it means to work really hard.

Working on the Farm in Colombia - For Pennies a Day

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​     Family friend and RFK Jr’s father-like guide Lem Billings set it up for Bobby to spend the summer of 1969 working on a ranch in the Rio Meta region of Colombia. For a child from a relatively wealthy and rather privileged and beloved family this was a great introduction to how so much of the rest of the world has to work and struggle just to survive and pay bills.

​

    For a mere two dollars a week he had to work from dawn until night fell every day – doing a wide variety of hard labor. It nourished qualities of perseverance, endurance and appreciation and honor for a hard days work. Along with the impoverished peasant farm workers of Colombia Bobby worked ...

Checking fence wires for breaks to repair – and looking out for possible squatters.

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  Driving cattle, breaking horses and castrating hogs; and treating the farm animals for ever-present tropical worms and parasites and various diseases.

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Clearing fields with fire and machetes

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   He also learned several useful improvisational skills along the way – including, how to patch change a tire without the help of a jack – by boosting it up with stones and a log crossbar.

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   After working all day teen Bobby and his coworkers would try and sleep through the night beneath a thick web of mosquito netting inside of a sweltering tin-roof bunkhouse.

  They lived on fried plantains, potatoes, arepas, yucca and yams. And occasionally they’d also have a bit of beef or the giant aquatic rodent – capybara – and sometimes even the snack that became one of his lifelong favorites, canned sardines!

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  “I learned in civics class that the United States is great because our people are resourceful and hardworking, ambitious and productive.  Yet it was difficult for me to imagine anyone working harder or more resourcefully, or enduring greater difficulties than these Colombian men and women.  Every Colombian, it seemed was an ingenious mechanic, able to keep rusting heaps of machinery running long after their ghosts had fled.”

 

  (These people) “lived day to day, bullied and robbed by ranch managers and absentee owners, paid meager salaries insufficient to clothe or properly fee their children.  Illness or injuries, which were daily occurrences, could cost them their jobs, their homes, or their lives.  Parents watched their children die, often in agonizing pain, without access to a doctor or medicine.  Rendered voiceless by the political system.”

​

         - Some of RFK Jr’s observations after spending months working

      alongside Colombian peasant farmers, as quoted in The Real RFK Jr., p 39-40

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White-Water Adventures!

   Throughout his life Bobby has kept up with his family’s tendency for adventure and risk taking. This was even true in terms of his employment in his early 20’s - working throughout Latin America as a guide for his brother Michael’s whitewater adventures company.

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   Along with leading the usual whitewater tours Bobby with friends and associates made daring first descents by kayak and raft down rivers in Colombia, Venezuala and Peru.

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In 1974 together with his brother David, their cousin Chris Lawford, family friend Lem Billings as well as three other friends and two Ashaninka Indians, RFK Jr. built a raft out of giant balsawood logs and then used it to float on the Apurimac River in Peru to the Amazon’s headwaters.

    And then in 1979 RFK Jr teamed up with his sister Kerry and several of his Alabaman friends to make the first descent down the Atrato River headwaters and through some of Earth’s most rainy jungles in Choco province, western-Colombia.

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   These epic and pioneering river adventures took some major preparations beforehand – gathering the right tents, lights, clothing, food, etc. But even more-so they required great teamwork and perseverance during the expeditions themselves. One night a sudden torrential rainfall swept many of the group’s tents as well as all of their canned goods – forever claimed by the river.

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   Beyond the stormy forces of nature itself, whether in river or on land Bobby and fellow crew members had to be on constant look out for poisonous snakes, packs of cat-sized river rats and caimans (the region’s version of alligators) – and then of course there’s the piranhas.

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​   In several instances Bobby surprised his friends by the calm and poise he’d cultivated during his day of laboring on the farm in Colombia. - He stayed calm and focused while addressing emergencies that came up along their dangerous journeys – such as immediately taking action to splinter the leg of an boy injured in a car collision in Peru and then swiftly locating and getting him to the nearest hospital. And when the hospital was out of pain numbing drugs he managed to find and purchase some at a nearby pharmacy.

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Similarly when his friend Lem Billings hurt his leg falling into a ravine out in the middle of the jungle, Bobby knew how to sew the wound up with stitches; and then he and the rest of the crew managed to lay him onto the raft’s luggage rack to continue safely on down the river.

RFK Jr's Canadian Encounter with His Future Toxic Nemesis

    It was during this period of Bobby’s early-twenties raft adventuring that he first encountered a clear example of mass poisoning by mercury – the toxic metal that would feature so largely through several aspects of his future career. RFK Jr’s early witnessing of the toxic effects of the silvery liquid metal took place during a river exploration – up North on Canada’s Wabigoon River – together with his friend Blake Fleetwood.

   On their way to an Objiway Indian village they encountered a whole tribe who had been poisoned by mercury dumped into the river by an upstream paper factory. The tribe members were being poisoned to death by this callous criminal pollution. 

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The industrial mercury-poisoned tribe

     One particularly striking image that stuck in Fleetwood’s mind was the scene of “cats dancing in circles driven mad by the mercury.”

 

     This incident was definitely instrumental in Bobby’s determination to fight back against corporate polluters.

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Cats driven insane by mercury-poisoning

Hobo Days Across The Great Plains - And More

  After a series of escalating conflicts with his mother (c. 1970-?) she threw Bobby out of the family house - so he set out with a fried to drive to California in a used car – a car that soon broke down. This was the beginning of summer of adventurously riding freight trains across the Great Plains and American West.

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   “It was more harrowing than anything he’d ever experienced: stuck and starving on a siding for days never knowing when the train was going to move, sometimes in heat that made him think he would die of thirst; being chased around the yards by the railroad “bulls” and awakened by their sticks and billy clubs; becoming covered ion coal dust that wouldn’t come off even with the most intense scrubbing. “

- Dick Russel in p. 40-41 of The Real RFK Jr.

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   (And yet) "I recall the feeling of exhilaration riding through the Colorado canyons under the clear blue sky, wearing my patched and faded blue jeans and my feet dangling out the boxcar door, sharing a gallon jug of Gallo wine with a carload full of hoboes. We built fires and heated cans of stew, baked beans, and spam. I was in paradise.”

    - RFK Jr. as quoted on p. 41 of The Real RFK Jr.

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  In the midst of this 'adventure' young Bobby got another good and direct remedial lesson in the struggles of the American laboring workforce:

    To replenish his traveling and survival funds he worked for two weeks at a lumber camp - but soon his hands were covered with so many blisters that he was unable to keep working there any longer.

    But seeing a shootout between a group of white men against a black man – Bobby and his friend decided they’d experienced enough of the hobo lifestyle (for the time being-?) - but Bobby decided to continue his overall adventure of living on the edge – by hitchhiking all the way back home from Kansas City.

RFK Jr's Fight for Healthy Water! Riverkeeper & the Waterkeepers Alliance

© 2021 The ART of RFK Jr. / RFK Jr. Illustrated. All rights reserved.

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