Back to the Rail Yards (and beyond)

 There is some intense construction activity at this large building behind those which accommodate the Sunday farmers' market.  I believe it to be the one destined to house the new film-making school.

 My purpose on a Tuesday morning was to visit the Wheels Museum which occupies a long, low building at the south end of the Rail Yards.  The narrow, high-ceiling rooms are not particularly well suited to housing the bulky transportation machinery on display.

 The collection contains plenty of documents and images to satisfy those with an interest in the fine details of the region's transportation history.  For most visitors though I think the personal memories triggered by the vehicles on display are the main attraction.

 The Dodge Power Wagon was my trigger. It seemed very like one of a long string of vehicles in which I travelled in 1959 from near Seattle to Leticia in southern Colombia.  That adventure, which has often come to mind lately, started with a single-engine plane taking off from the Bellevue airfield, and progressed to other large and small aircraft, some river launches and a series of ever-smaller dugout canoes which eventually got me to the headwaters of a minor tributary of the Amazon River in southern Colombia.

After landing at Leticia's airfield in a two-engine Curtiss C-46 my three companions and I hitched a ride into the little Amazon port town, seated in the Power Wagon's bed with all our gear.  I vividly recall our entry into the town right after a tropical downpour which left the dirt road under two feet of water.  A number of the town's residents stood in front of their modest homes watching us pass by, up to their knees in water.

Michael Tsalickis Obituary (2018) - St. Petersburg, FL - Tampa Bay Times

 The Power Wagon belonged to Leticia's most prominent resident, Mike Tsalickis, an American expatriate who had founded a business there exporting wild animals and tropical fish. Mike generously gave us space in his warehouse to hang our hammocks, as well as free run of his house. He also was a great help in introducing us to the region and assisting with arrangements to get to our final destination on the Rio Miriti-Parana where we filmed an indigenous harvest celebration.

The Tsalickis business seemed at the time to be a very successful enterprise.  Mike often staged publicity pictures of himself wrestling in the river with large Anacondas, but the  wild animal trapping and fish catching was actually accomplished by villagers throughout the region, including many indigenous people. Cages and tanks at the Leticia facility held the captives until they could be transported to Miami, usually in WWII-era surplus bombers. That all went well for about two decades and resulted in a great many municipal improvements to the town promoted by Mike, including the building of a hospital and expansion of the airport.

The Tsalickis empire was eventually brought to an end, partly by the decision of the Colombian government to forbid the export of native animals. Also, the real economic engine of the region by then was the illicit drug trade which paid much higher wages than did wild animal trapping.  Mike and his family moved back to Florida where he started a shipping business.  Unfortunately for Mike, one of his warehoused shipments of lumber was found also to contain 9,000 pounds of cocaine.  A jury found Mike culpable of involvement in the drug smuggling and he got twenty years in a federal prison.