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MATO GROSSO
I knew then, as the Kalapalo probably did too, that the road was both a connection to the modern world and a severing of the traditional one, a final dropping of the green curtain that kept the foreign NGO’s and corporate monarchies, here under the guise of environmentalism, at bay. It was only a few years ago that these “enviromentalists” embargoed the region to a breaking point and the hardware store in town was forced to stop selling rope due to all the suicides.
I came under the same misplaced notion, only I called it conservation, but after years of being here and talking to the people I see the truth and I know that we are reliving history, the story of what we did to our own indigenous cultures is playing itself out all over again in the southern Amazon basin of Brazil.
Driving north out of town, we passed a tall stand of forest where a maned wolf skirted the edge and then vanished like an apparition behind a veil of green that was its birthright. We crossed clear streams with tall reedbeds where he said they used to spearfish and he told me of how you could hear the clacking of the anaconda’s teeth under water and how you had to keep an eye out for electric eels, but aside from that the fishing was good.
Later that night, in the Xingu, we dined on smoked peacock bass served on a basket made of reeds and sprinkled salt spiced with small red biquinho peppers and wrapped the fish in pieces of torn manioc while we attended a meeting of the elders in the center of the village where they bury their dead. We listened to conversations about the future of the tribes in the Xingu and how the culture among the young people is changing.
Several nights before our arrival a jaguar had come into the village and had killed a woman, but still we slept outside in our hammocks even though the men told us we were crazy. It would come back they said. Three nights later, in the quiet calm after a large gust front, it did.
Back at the camp on the banks of the Rio das Mortes I watched a fire erupt across the river and saw the forest canopy explode into flames and a few days later as I climbed to the top of a mountain in the Serra do Roncador I watched a flock of Red Macaws take flight and then entered the Cave of Pezinhos where the impressions from both human and animal tracks line the walls, many of them with six fingers. I have tried to understand the meaning of this place ever since, but I doubt that I ever will.
ETHIOPIA AND SOMALILAND
We spoke to him briefly and he said he would join us in a matter of days and then he continued walking in the direction we had found him only moments before. I would learn that he had a habit of doing this. In the coming weeks he would often disappear on a track, only to resurface two or three days later saying nothing of where he had been. That road connected him to his youth, leading to the country he had fought against in the civil war during the early 1990’s. He was shot in the face and bared the scar of that time, a harsh reminder of his earlier life and the absurdity of politics. Later, I would watch him climb into dense riverine forest after a wounded buffalo, in bush so thick that it required crawling on all fours. At one point he came face to face with the wounded animal and they locked eyes, each unable to move and in that moment he and the animal were one being and I knew that he looked at them not as some other creature but as a part of himself and that he saw things that were not of this world. That’s not to say that they weren’t real, but they were hidden to those not open to the idea of their existence.
As time passed, the rains slowly started and eventually the whole country was soaked and the tsetses were so bad that the Mursi began to move to drier pastures further south. It’s a conundrum that plagues them their entire lives. They depend on the rains for the grasses their cattle graze, but with it comes the relentless onslaught of the flies that carry the fatal disease known as Nagana, a form of sleeping sickness. It was something I had learned many times over the years in different parts of Africa; that life and death are forever joined and that within the essence of the very thing we depend on, lies also our ultimate fate from which we cannot ever escape.
The day came when it was time for us to leave as well, but he would not be coming. His place was here. We traveled east to the desert country beyond Dire Dawa. The maps show it as still being in the control of Ethiopia but the culture and the language there is distinctly Somali and the people think of themselves as belonging to that country, a reminder that borders exist only in the minds of men. As we pressed further into the desert the sun rose over the low hills and camels were out walking along the roadway. The minarets of countless mosques silhouetted on the horizon. Still I continued to think of him and with the war there now I wonder if it makes him think of his youth and the pointlessness of conflict and I hope that he has disappeared on yet another track to that place that only he knows.
1/12
2/12
CAMEROON
I have been back a few times since this inaugural journey, but it is my first impression of the country there that has stayed with me - a collection of flashback-like memories and strangely cinematic moments that are beyond my ability to organize into any sort of linear narrative. Certain light recalls to mind the exhaustion and boredom of two-day drives on forest roads, the smell of alcohol on the breath of a drunken army officer with malaria yellowed eyes at some unknown checkpoint somewhere.
I think of river crossings on old barges or dugout canoes, salmonella poisoning, forest fires and massive storms. I hear the violent scream of a silverback gorilla deep in the forest - shaking the trees, beating his chest, then vanishing. I think of rain, dust and bees; the reenactment of a hunt and a bongo skull dancing in the half light of the fire. I see a French bible and pygmies with sharpened teeth, dead elephants, 7.62mm shell casings and the barefoot track of a lone poacher. I recall stories of Loa Loa - the eye worm parasite and how the old timers used to pour paraffin on their feet after crossing rivers. I think of massive columns of ants and chimpanzees in the early morning mist and see logging trucks overturned on forest roads. The snakes - Green Vipers, Gaboon Vipers and a Mamba in the canopy. I see it all and I think I finally understand what Joseph Conrad meant when he said, “It was written I should be loyal to the nightmare of my choice.”
BOTSWANA
The camp was built on a shallow rise above a dry river bed on the southern edge of the delta and looked out across the donga to the opposite bank where a lone palm tree stood silhouetted against the sky above a long line of mopane trees. It was this lone palm that gave the camp its Tswana name, Molkowane, and beyond the palm and the mopane forest was the delta with it’s clear waters and scattering of palm islands and where the river that was born in the highlands of Angola emptied into the otherwise waterless Kalahari in the dry season. In August the leaves of the mopane trees would start to change to a brilliant yellow and orange and at sunset when you looked out across the scrub brush the sky would blend with the leaves and the whole world looked as if it were on fire.
It was here that my life began. The camp and the people who made it what it was are long gone, but I can still smell the sage on the late afternoon wind and feel the cool air during a long, lazy lunch in the shade of a sausage tree on the water’s edge. I remember dinners under the mess tent with the kerosene lamps casting shadows on the canvas and the pale dusty look of the land at midday so that when you saw the lions they blended into the grass and disappeared before your eyes. I will always long for that place and that time that can never happen again, but that story and that history is ours now and I go there often inside of myself.
TANZANIA
So I set out searching for my own place in the world, a place where I could create a new legacy, one not yet written in stone, but one that was mine to write. This search set me on a course of migrations, nomadic movements that continue to haunt my thoughts.
Even now, when I make a cup of tea - a habit that has stayed with me - and I pour the milk and the clouds form, I am instantly taken back there, back to Africa, to the farmhouse in the foothills with the fog rolling down from the great mountain. I think of chai tangawizi next to the warmth of a fire and see the candelabra tree in the garden where the two lions laid roaring one morning.
Moments in time are burned into my memory as if they happened yesterday. I remember falling asleep as the sun rose after being up all night with the lions roaring just beneath our beds in the machan. And the time the whole country had turned green with the coming of the early rains and the grass had started to grow high all around us and we nearly stepped on the two female lesser kudu as we walked out away from the road.
I close my eyes and hear the guttural chanting of Maasai Morani at an ngoma in a village south of Arusha. I see the diplomats and foreign aid workers on the veranda at the new Sheraton and the purple flowers of the jacaranda tress that overhang the roadways. I think of long drives on unpaved roads or flights to some remote bush airstrip somewhere. I see myself waking up in a canvas tent next to the river with the hippos grunting in the early hours of morning.
It all feels like a dream and that any minute I might open my eyes and find myself sitting at the edge of small fire in a camp somewhere in the gray dawn of early morning and stirring the ashes from the night before the ironwood fire would come back to life and I’d pull the kettle from the coals, making a cup of tea and watching the sun rise over the river in the distance, waiting to see what the day holds. Maybe it’s not a dream, but a feeling, some foretelling of days that lie ahead.
LAGUNA MADRE, TEXAS
And, if you are away for too long, you miss the damp heavy air, thick with salt that sticks to your skin and the smell of the hyper-saline bays and estuaries between the barrier islands and the mainland. You miss the shrimp boats tied to the pilings and the pale green color of their nets and tackle in the summer sun. You miss the sight of spoonbills and the flocks of green-winged teal, the whooping cranes and the sound of geese overhead as they return north to Canada in the fall. You miss the thin distant horizons that seem to rise out of the sea when returning from an offshore fishing trip on the Gulf Stream. You miss it all and I know this because I spent the early part of my life here and then I left. I left for a long time and while I would find myself in some distant country, maybe on a long endless track after buffalo in the dense sand of the Okavango, or up in the north-country on an equally endless pack trip to some distant mountain, my mind would wander and I would feel the warmth of the south Texas sun on my skin and dream of the day that I would be back amongst the shrimp boats and the coastal dunes of my beloved shoreline.
But everything here reminds me of Africa and I find myself torn between two worlds. The herons in the shallow flats out in front of the islands, with their long legs and thin necks, make me think of Marabous and how they are drawn to the grass fires in the dry season waiting out in front of the flames for any animals to break cover. The thin, low lying mesquite islands along the coast remind me of the palm islands and waterways of the delta and crossing the clear, knee-deep water as trees break and crash ahead of us from the elephants pushing them over and then retreating in the heat of the day to have lunch in the shade of a sausage tree on the water’s edge. I long to go back there and yet I long to stay right here.
KENYA