Those lights across the way

The 1970s flickering light display of the Intercontinental Hotel that comes through my kitchen window each night evokes a certain kind of nostalgia, for what exactly, I'm still not sure. My immediate thought, as I sit and write this now, is the radio towers across from Mt. Bonnell, that brought comfort on good days and bad days, cold afternoons and warm nights, that time back in Austin that might as well be another life. I must have spent days up there spread across various points and phases, on dates and with friends and more often than not alone, mulling life over, looking down at the expensive waterfront properties and wondering in the silence of the night what I'd need to get there too.

But the reds and yellows and greens could likewise be more Nigeria-centric, reflecting a time when this whole socio-economic Nigeria project was a hopeful enterprise, which comes when anything is new and fresh and yet to be tainted by things like basic human greed and selfishness. I've seen videos taken from helicopters high above Lagos when Nigeria had just become Nigeria, and in so many ways, my idea of those buildings in faded shades of roughed up colors is what I see across the way right now. The country has changed very little, but has also probably changed a lot.

Nostalgia is in the end, a personal emotion. It draws on your own unique longings and memories of what is and what was. It plays on your desire to feel those things again. Was it freedom you felt? Was it comfort? Was it wonder? Was it needing nothing but the cash in your pocket that would buy your next tank of gas to another small forgotten American town? Was it that sense of excitement flying over the landscape of a new country you didn't know yet but surely would soon? Was it this need, without logical explanation, to have someone in front of you again and be able to put your hand on their cheek? I have felt all those things, and many more, and more than anything now, as I sit here, I feel the need to throw 2014 in a sack and shake it around a little and there is no better place to do this than out on the open road.

New images sprout to life. In one such dream, I am weaving along the Pacific Coast Highway all the way up past Big Sur to Salinas, the true John Steinbeck country, and then continue all the way to San Francisco. And if I have gone that far I might as well keep going because off to the right on the map is Yosemite, where John Muir spent endless summers in his cabin, before dedicating his life to its preservation. It would be a shame to not sit and see what exactly all that was for. Further north still it's wine country, which is a part of any country I have learned graciously to love. And then perhaps a final culmination in Redwood National Park, where some of the oldest living things on Earth tower peacefully above the forest floor as they have for a few thousand years, if anything just to remind you subtly, when you start feeling big, as to how small you still are and how short your life is. "Oh shit, we just killed something older than Jesus," a druggy remarked to his friend after accidentally burning down one such tree recently in South Africa.

What about sleeping in a shady cabin in the woods, or my mom's couch, or my dad's spare bedroom, or the back of the old Nissan Versa shivering in the cold? What books would I pluck off my shelf and toss into the trunk and draw on at various points along the way? What does cold weather feel like to your ears and your nose (I have by now long forgotten) as you tie a scarf around your neck and throw a hood over your head?

These are all new experiences, and old ones. They are fresh starts, quiet spaces, views, smells, and sounds. They flash in and out of my mind in tandem with the lights across the way.

Johannesburg Nights

There is something wholly blissful about cold light beers on a rooftop, watching the middle afternoon sunlight turn to the extravagant colors of Sunday dusk. People constantly alternate between sunglasses and no sunglasses, hiding behind occasional pillars or the shadow of the person on their right. People laughing, standing, sitting, moving, buzzing, interacting, living. You can order your brunch now, or later, or after this beer or that bloody mary. You can have a drink now, or later, and who really cares; just whenever you feel like it but you should certainly have another. The DJ plays a song you don't really hear as anything but background noise and a beat. This peace, this casual conversation without any rush, is intoxicating. It is what in my mind Sundays are made for. It is one last beautiful man-made pause, a footnote, a moment of fleeting contemplation, before the rush of the week begins.

And then the day turns to night, which in my case might be the last sunset I will ever see in South Africa. That makes it all the more urgent, this being present in the various tiny moments of splendor. What follows is a flurry of packing and repacking and sporadic lunches that come when you usher yourself along quickly from one intermediary place to another, and then the trains and the cars and the customs line and its passport check with an officer who for the first time in your life, actually cracks a joke, and then another, and then you fly and watch Invictus on the plane, Namibia and Angola floating by out your right side window, but fixated on Morgan Freeman's depiction of Nelson Mandela, all because it feels right, that one last dose of a country before it is gone again and completely out of reach, accentuated in that final moment when the South African Airways flight attendant on the television screen in front of you says, "we wish you a proudly South African goodbye" in a lovely accent with a smile, all before falling again back into the chaos and the unearthly smog and the Third Mainland Bridge that shoots you out forcefully into the tremendous city of Lagos. But for those last few moments with good people and a beer sweating in your hand, on some deck that you could never find again, you can enjoy.

These were the Johannesburg afternoons and nights: that humble dose of civilization, where things - the little details people only appreciate if they have spent time to the truly dysfunctional and compromised countries of the world - function naturally and as they should until the end, and your entire being, the parts of you always on guard because everything is something - a risk, a con, a challenge, an obstacle - finally sits back and takes a breath and that is all there is. 

Abuja to Lagos

A chance set of circumstances put me next to a young American guy on the flight from Abuja back home to Lagos. He wore sandals and baggy pants, and sported an impressive beard, which by any standard satisfies the typical NGO look spread across Sub-Saharan Africa. In Nigeria however, nothing is as it seems, and I soon discovered he was into commercial farming, owning about 200 acres in the North of the country. When asked how a white American happens to end up in the middle of nowhere growing a variety of grains with four tractors, he said it was a random and unpredictable series of events.

Knowing the challenges operating out of Lagos, Northern Nigeria is hard to imagine. He enlightened me on a few of the things he deals with, including crime, lack of basic infrastructure, and spiders, scorpions, and snakes ("always watch where you step!"). A prominent Indian businessman was recently killed when a cobra came up through his toilet and bit him while on the pot. "The worst are the people though," he said. "I am always armed. Since all my staff are pious Muslims and I am Jewish, I was watching the Gaza crisis closely. Didn't know if one day they would all revolt and cut off my head as retaliation. Luckily nothing happened." The conversation had an oddly casual tone of voice when referencing such things the average population would hardly take so lightly.

We talked about his wife, too. He married a local Nigerian he met one day at the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development while getting his land titles sorted, and fast forward to present day and his current flight will lead to another flight to watch her give birth to his first child. As a footnote, he advised me as a rule not to mess around with the average locals here, because there are a lot of diseases. I assured him I had no intention, though he was particularly concerned, in that case, about what I did for girls. We also talked taxes, which he hasn't paid in ten years. He doesn't expect anyone to come after them now in the remote corners of the Sahel. "But you're a suit and tie guy," he said as he motioned to my outfit. "You definitely have to worry about that stuff."

I wish I could have recorded the conversation. Too many jewels are now missing, lost forever, just hours and days later. All in all, he was the most ridiculous human being I have met in a long time and probably a little bit crazy, but he seemed happy, genuinely happy - that aura of confidence someone has when they need nothing from you or anyone else and are just along for the ride - and that is more than most can say in most parts of the world, and I appreciate that in somebody. The whole 55 minute flight got me thinking, or more helped me remember something I knew already, which is that there really are a million possible ways to live your life, more than one could ever dream up or think suitable for themselves, combining the big decisions and the little ones, and it really is never too late to wipe your slate clean, pick up the pieces, buy a ticket (yes, that part of it actually is that easy), and start the whole thing over again. Whatever it takes to find your own niche; whatever it takes to live your own life. No matter how far flung some people end up, and how off their rocker some people seem, I will always respect the hell out of a person who at the very least has the courage and the balls to try and figure things out - in practice by doing, and with much less talking, which is really the only way.

This Ebola Story

The Ebola outbreak in Nigeria came and went, in what many countries are adequately calling a success story in West Africa that could be a containment model for others. Given Nigeria's mostly collapsed healthcare infrastructure, underfunded and incapable of caring for its 170 million people, this news came as a surprise to many, not least of which me. The lingering effects remain - temperature checks at airports and mandatory hand sanitizer in restaurants - but people now return to the more pressing and dangerous aspects of business as usual in Nigeria.

This makes the conversation of panic circulating around America most ironic at a distance. From an airport lounge in Abuja, my attention was briefly occupied by CNN's fearful account of "Ebola in America," where Wolf Blitzer talked about hospital missteps in Dallas that could get another few infected. This follows an influx of social media accounts full of baseless arguments - doomsday scenarios that Ebola will go airborne and kill us all, despite the fact heart disease is much more likely to bring about our early death given the bad food my country continues to put in their mouths knowingly. I think there is a romantic association with Ebola, one of certain death and gruesome last moments - the epitome of a mysterious disease out of African jungles - and the 24 hour a day news culture of the United States always requires content. The fact is, Malaria does and will do more damage 1000 times over to this continent each year, but no one stays awake at night fretting about mosquitoes. Liberia and Sierra Leone are African tragedies that pose more a threat to American conscious than they do to American lives.

Being the only American passport in the room, I looked around curiously at Nigerians also watching the news. I am not sure what they were thinking. It's been a long few months, and this country has a lot on its plate, but I imagine to some extent there was a sense of amusement at what exactly Americans - with their nice hospitals and emergency response systems and qualified doctors - consider scary in a world full of unpredictable and improbable events. The things that should command our attention rarely do.