A true heir to Macondo, Edrulfo lives in a floating town—Nueva Venecia—and so, his story flows from water. For those of us from the mountains, it takes some imagination to picture life in a stilt village. But Edrulfo helps us see it: he describes how they play football on a floating field, four by four meters. He recounts, with a sparkle in his eye, how when the ball flies out, everyone dives after it, swimming strokes through the lagoon. It’s only when he speaks to outsiders that he realizes his everyday world isn’t like ours—those of us who walk on solid ground. That’s when he pauses to marvel at his landscape, one filled with bird songs and fish that swim close to shore while others prefer the deep.

Edrulfo doesn’t know he speaks like a chronicler. His words and images come naturally. Every time he mentions one thing, it brings up another memory. Give him a little time, and he’ll flood you with tales of fishermen and carvers. We can’t help but smile when he tells us how the ball-shaped wood from a mangrove thrown into the river as bait, sings differently to the water depending on its weight—and how the quiet echo draws the sábalos to shore. Then suddenly he startles us with a booming “booommm”—the sound made by the hit of those wood balls on water, a kind of call used by fishermen to summon lisas before casting their nets.

He remembers that as a child, he used to cry when he had to go fishing with his father. They’d start at one in the morning, and it wasn’t until six, far out in the river or sea, that they’d begin hauling in the nets. It was grueling work. Now, with a sigh, he recognizes the toughness of the fishermen—and though life led him to become a craftsman, he’s grateful for what those strong men taught him: patience. He also tells us how the waters have changed. Before, thanks to the tides and winds, they fished saltwater species for six months, and freshwater ones for the other six. But in recent years, that rhythm has been broken. Now it’s all freshwater. And while part of the change is climate-related, it’s also the result of the highway to the sea, which cut through the Ciénaga and split the natural territory in two. The consequences are plain to see.

Edrulfo remembers the exact moment wood called to him. He was about seven when a piece of timber floated his way from some nearby construction. He picked it up, saw the shape of a canoe, carved it just a bit, added a plastic sail and a string to pull it—and made himself a toy. Later, he watched his father make a real canoe by hollowing out a trunk, slowly burned by the stove’s embers. That’s how he learned—like so many others—through ingenuity born of scarcity. Years went by before he had the right tools, getting by with only a machete and a hand plane.

He began with furniture, not crafts. Then he realized he could make a living out of crafts when a man from Spain challenged him to make a canoe so graceful someone would want to pay for it. It took three tries, but on the third—the charm—he finally saw the value of craftsmanship, the same dedication he had seen in the fishermen’s work.

No Macondian tale would be complete without a brush of violence, and his story has one, too. On the year 2000, November 22, armed men arrived at 3 a.m. and in three hours, killed 37 people in Nueva Venecia. The survivors fled. His mother, who sold bread to the fishermen, had to hush her children so they wouldn’t look out the window and witness the horror. Like the rest, they fled in search of food and peace far from their waters. Edrulfo says that even so, they emerged stronger. They overcame silence and mistrust in order to imagine life again. And that, he says, is what he does every single day.