An Excerpt From Jordan Salama ’19's "Every Day The River Changes: Four Weeks Down the Magdalena"

Princeton University President Christopher L. Eisgruber selected the travelogue “Every Day the River Changes: Four Weeks Down the Magdalena,” by Jordan Salama ’19 as the Pre-read for the Class of 2026. Every year, Eisgruber chooses a different book as a way of introducing first-year students to the intellectual life of the University.

Every Day the River Changes was originally written as Salama’s senior thesis and later expanded into a book, named a Kirkus Best Nonfiction Title of 2021. The travelogue was inspired by Salama’s international experiences while at Princeton, and connects his studies in Spanish, creative writing, environmental studies, journalism and Latin American studies.

An American writer of Argentine, Syrian and Iraqi Jewish descent, Salama tells the story of people and places along the Río Magdalena, nearly 1,000 miles long, in the heart of Colombia. “This is a story about a young person’s journey down a river, how the people he met changed him and changed his view of the world,” Salama said in a video message to first years. “I hope that when you read it, you think about all of the ways that you can chase your own passions at Princeton. That you can pursue projects that may seem ambitious, challenging but are exciting to you at their core.

An excerpt of the book: 

The Magdalena River. It wasn’t in the tourist guidebook like the other places she mentioned, but I recognized its name immediately, for so many people in Colombia spoke of it to me with an almost-religious fervor. “A place you must not miss,” they said. It seemed to be every Colombian’s dream to someday travel the 950 miles of its course, though not many people had actually done it. The Wildlife Conservation Society had a project in a community somewhere along its banks, but it was in the Magdalena Medio, the Mid-Magdalena, where at the time they had told me it was still too dangerous to go.

I landed back in the States a few weeks later, at that point more curious than fulfilled from my trip, and without having laid eyes on the great Magdalena River. But I did not forget about my time in Colombia. In college, friends studied things like economics and history and biology, while I devoured everything to do with Latin America, reading books like “One Hundred Years of Solitude” and “The Old Patagonian Express” and dreaming of a second chance to travel there. The next summer I spent on a grant in Argentina and Bolivia, tracing the route of my great-grandfather — the long-ago traveling salesman in the Andes — and seeing for myself that ours was indeed a family forever on the move, linking one place with the next, exchanging goods and stories and cultures as they wandered. I realized the value of a journey with a singular thread, one that could connect seemingly disparate places and people. And I was beginning to figure out that telling these stories was what I wanted to do with my life.

The Magdalena was waiting for me when it came time to decide on a topic for my senior thesis. I’d decided I wanted to spend time with people along a river, and I was surprised that it took me so long to find my way back to my old journals from Colombia, written in the sweaty heat under Sandra’s grandmother’s careful curfew in Cali. Immediately I was reminded of the glimmer in people’s eyes when they told me of their country’s greatest river; indeed, in Colombia there is no river that is more important and revered than the Rio Grande de la Magdalena, which flows through just about every kind of landscape — mountains, jungles, plains, and swamplands — before emptying into the Caribbean Sea. The river is central to the history of Colombia and much of South America, serving as the setting for several of the continent’s most famous novels (by Gabriel Garcia Marquez), the birthplace of some of its most popular music (from regional genres like cumbia and vallenato, which arose from the valleys, to global superstar Shakira, who was born in Barranquilla at the river’s mouth), and the source of myths and legends that have since touched lands far beyond the river’s banks. In Colombia’s heartland, the Magdalena is a major source of life. The old woman in Ladrilleros had said to me, “To understand the river is to understand the country.”

Maybe I wanted to understand Colombia because it is always changing, always coming up with something new. By late 2016, just a few months after my first trip, a landmark peace deal had been signed, and the worst of the guerrilla armies were supposedly demobilizing. Areas of the country that were previously off-limits were now ostensibly back on the map, and there was renewed hope after more than fifty years of conflict. But every few months there were regressions, too: in the absence of the guerrillas there came political upheaval, threats of a return to arms, killings of environmentalists and local activists and ex-combatants, and the strengthening of dissident criminal groups, all stoking fears of a relapse into violence. And all the while, through the ups and downs of hope and despair, there were stories of ordinary people doing what they could to help, often in the most extraordinary of ways.

One thing was for certain: the Colombia I met in 2016 was a far cry from the Colombia I came to love just two years later, when I did indeed return, though at the old woman’s advice I did not go back to Vismar and Colo in Ladrilleros or to anywhere else I’d been before. I returned to Colombia with the goal of traveling the entire length of its most important river, from source to sea, south to north, over the course of four weeks. With school in the way, this was all the time that I had; an ambitious goal, but by no means an unattainable one.

Figuring out how I would do it was another question entirely. The Magdalena River of the storybooks was a river of life, revered for its romantic journeys through landscapes with astounding biodiversity. I soon came to dream of long voyages by steamboat through the dense, misty wilderness, of siestas spent cruising by in a hammock, without worry, lulled by the hum of the ship and the buzzing of the jungle. A life lived by river seemed impeccable in its simplicity — you never had to worry about where you were going