All the little Africas

Out past the dilapidated roads of Lagos further and further into the countryside, things get strange, but this is not a Nigeria-only phenomenon. Stay the night at an inn in West Texas, or eat breakfast at a Waffle House outside Little Rock, and you are sure to see a fair amount of strangeness too. People there and in all such places I find more hardened to the elements, more enclosed, more absorbed in the little worlds that don't change as much or as fast as they tend to in cities. For me it will always be something worth seeing, something worth sharing a coffee with in the morning or a meal with at night, a chat that reminds you just how many little niches there are out there, but after a week I am crawling back to civilization, where the buzzing energy of people and their broad fluid ideas surround you.

I reached that week-long threshold in an ancillary Nigerian state of 3 million, but out there it really is a whole new level. I learned, for instance, that the entire pipe system of this no name province is decades old and made of asbestos, which I then thought about later in the shower before turning the water off. Meals each night were passed alone in a dining hall next to a blaring evangelist preacher on a television that no one was watching but no one bothered to change. I will forever look back on those meals, alone in a room, overshadowed by an animated shouting Prophet Akanda, wondering if this was a low point in my life or one of the most interesting periods there will ever be.

One day I rode on a scooter and found it infinitely less pleasant than my moto-taxi in Kampala, and likewise in Bangkok, and pretty much any motorcycle I have ever been on in my life. I elected not to do that again. I was dropped at an open air informal market to buy apples and crackers, cloaked in a suit after too long a day, and never in my life have I felt more out of place, middle of nowhere, somewhere in Nigeria, dimming light on the horizon, people yelling "oyibo" in every direction, an impossible distance away in both time and space from what I and many would consider a normal existence where girl and guy meet in coffee shop and two months later curl up on a couch watching the cinematic version of On the Road. You just have to laugh about it sometimes, or else you might cry. You have to decide if the conventional life is for you, and then just how unconventional you are willing to go. Blazing back down broken roads after a week in the boonies, Lagos, Nigeria never looked so good and so forgiving when its buildings popped up across the sky in front of me. When Lagos starts to play that role, I realize your reality has gotten obstructively warped.

It's challenging to explain, the cynicism you start to develop. The Africa of my littered memories is a thousand things, East, West, and South, and not all of them are happy, leaving me in a constant state of cross-checking reality with whatever it is I used to know. But I feel like if you've done this place right, if you've done it long enough, if you've ventured a bit into the heart of what makes all the little bits add up to a whole, you just cant look back on everything with a big smile on your face, and that's okay, right even, because I do not believe everything in life is meant to be happy, uplifting, or inspirational, wrapped in colorful flowers from the world's paradisaical escapes. We do no one any service when we apply masks and pretend things aren't what they are. It brings us no closer to the happiness within ourselves, which, you know, can exist anywhere, no matter how far out we land.

In town again

One could even argue its good to be back here, but that is hard to explain to the average person. The turmoil of Nigerian elections is just around the corner, capped with more Boko Haram violence in the North of the country. Oil prices have plummeted, dampening virtually every aspect of the economy. Companies trim budgets, people wait, and the dysfunctional that has always been here pushes the place forward into another year. That is the state of Nigeria in January 2015.

But there is no question in my mind now that the Lagos supercity of 20 million has an allure in ways I have yet to fully understand myself: something that draws you back, something you miss when you're away, something that you love to hate. It could just be a feeling in the air. Some say it is optimism, or a culture of aspiration. "Africa's first city," the recent National Geographic feature story said. That feeling in the air, that bustling energy, you absorb and it becomes a part of you. You start to enjoy the fight, the chaos, and the toughness that grows up from within. It's the same thing the drew that businessman in a South African bar to say Nigeria is something he must do before he dies. It's that thing that keeps most people away. It's what happens when you tell people not to come because they won't get it, and there just isn't any need for them to. It's all of these things lumped into one.

In the background, you join in on the yelling matches when no one is actually mad and all the incessant car horns begin to sound like birds chirping, everyone just talking to each other. You hate all the stupid and unnecessary problems that arise, but then love the little inconsequential victories you achieve over them. This surprises you, creeps up on you, until the point that you arrive back in the horrendously dysfunctional Murtala Mohammed International Airport after a few months away and seemingly exit your body, separate yourself from former ideas of what's pleasurable and what's deplorable, and it just doesn't feel that bad anymore. We are probably all a little crazy here in the end.

So I'm back now, for who knows how long, and despite all the many layers of that decision that should probably keep me up at night, I've been sleeping well lately, as well as I can remember, and that says something about each passing day. I understand none of that invites you here. It just perhaps explains the nature of things, and why on Earth I'd come here again.

Cruising around Bangkok

By motorcycle taxi was the best way, I found. The many roads of Bangkok tend to grow congested at any hour of the day owing to an array of tightly woven bottlenecks on top of poor planning. One traditional taxi ride was all it took, and then in moving from one place to another I joined the hoard of beeping scooters dodging in and out of cars, forming their own tiny side lanes in a way you don’t think is possible, and yet, it all works again and again.

So that is one way to do it. You would also do well to walk and walk and take in a hefty portion of real Asia until you are tired and don’t want to take it in anymore. At the MPK Centre, for example, you are inundated by fake Calvin Klein underwear next to “I love Bangkok” shirts which is one floor above a million electronic stores built atop one another selling carbon copy Beats Headphones under 10 USDs and shady phone unlocks. Down roads like Silom, tailors call out for you to take a peak in their shop, next to massage parlors where ladies (and ladyboys) request you do the same. Then later at night, a visit to Patpong road, one of the more well known red light districts in the world, brings you face to face with Thailand’s unfortunate sex tourism industry. The oldest business in the world is on display in full bright colors, still going strong. “Every girl on stage is available for your ultimate pleasure,” one sign declared, and there were no doubt more than a few takers behind those seedy blackout curtains.

It was never too much, at least I can’t say Thailand was for me. On the contrary it seemed perfectly balanced, every terrible intersection next to a quiet alley, a go-go bar equaling a quiet cafe on the river. Buddhist thought describes the quest for a state of Nirvana, only achieved through the “middle way,” that moderate place between pain and ecstasy. It is hard not to see how this translates into the overall mindset of a people embedded in the day to day happenings of their lives. It was all peaceful in the chaos, something kind and soft spoken in the air. 15 million tourists will no doubt note similar attributes on their 2015 journeys, go back and tell their friends, ushering in next year's wave. I was lucky to be one of them nestled in for a few perfectly lit days in January under that lovely equatorial sun. 

Yosemite, in retrospect

The renown Ken Burns documentary called it “America’s best idea,” and it would be hard to argue if you’ve ever meandered along the paths of Yosemite or Yellowstone, Glacier or Grand Canyon. The idea was this: private interests and profit motive tend to corrupt and decay our great natural treasures, and so those treasures deserve to be protected for future generations to enjoy. Here was born our system of National Parks now over a hundred years old. If you had any real American childhood at all, indeed to call yourself American, you must have visited one of these with your family some summer long ago.

And so with great pride in my country’s preserved diversity, I found Yosemite one winter afternoon, and will always be grateful I did. How to describe the overwhelming sense of peace in that valley, fed by endless waterfalls, overlooked by the icons of el Capitan, Half Dome, and Glacier Peak? Do you know what complete silence sounds like against the cold on your ears after being inundated by the choir of cities day after day? You will just have to go and see.

Patriotism itself goes many ways, but someone boasting about the real beauty of this country showcases pride at its best. Tell me how big it is, and how different the rainy days of Seattle are from the sunshine of Miami, New York City's bustling from the laid back vibes of Venice Beach. Talk about the little crevices you have seen, those you want to see, and how you could spend your entire life traversing all of our states and not see it all. I devour that conversation.

The world grows smaller and smaller. What once took more than two days from San Francisco by train, horse, and carriage, now takes under three hours by car. Civilization approaches, and yet, the Yosemites few and far between live on.

The word, the line, the way

I plucked Charles Bukowski off the shelf at a rare book store in Monterey, after telling the owner how much I liked shops like his. “The best way to support us is to buy a book,” he told me, and so I happily did this and carried on. Arguably one of the more abrasive writers of the 20^th century, particularly when discussing the opposite sex, I cannot exactly pinpoint why this troubled tired old man who authored more than 45 books of poetry before his death struck a chord with me as California rumbled by outside. But passages both obscene and beautiful, as these things go, will forever be associated with a string of memories out along the Pacific Coast Highway in December. It’s that rhythmic flip flip flipping of pages and an assortment of words that function just like songs and like smells.

“We were made to accomplish the easy things and made to live through the things that are hard.” That was something I came across one night just outside Kernville I believe, nestled in the back of my car surrounded by high reaching Sequoias. It had started to rain there on my abandoned campground, the world pitch black outside, and as I look back on that trip and other trips all the way back to the cold sand of last year's Zanzibar, it's hard not to find a few places it fits. For other purposes, The Great Escape I'd also recommend ["I got off my stool and climbed right up the supervisor and then I reached up and pulled myself right out of there. It was so easy it was unbelievable but none of the others followed me"]. And then there's, So you want to be a writer? [If you have to wait for it to roar out of you, then wait patiently. If it never does roar out of you, then do something else.] There's nothing in the world like stumbling across that perfect set of words at just the right time.

I ran with Charles for two weeks, really, sufficiently marking him up and reading out the final page in closure. This was the road trip I dreamed of so many months back in the chaos and the quiet. It was the one I engineered slowly based off the little hunches difficult to explain. Each mile put all that 2014 was and wasn't further and further in the rear view mirror. Yes, Charles and I went together up the curvy roads of Big Sur that fall down into the sea. We went together into the delightful craft breweries of Monterey and San Francisco and Mariposa. We sat atop the lookout over the Golden Gate Bridge at sunset as all the world's couples came and went, and as the bitter wind settled in for the night. I got drunk with him on Polk Street one Saturday when the entire world was dressed as Santa and Elves and Grinches. And we walked together into Yosemite Valley, up and down the trails, leaning out over the Falls, breathing in the cold fresh air.

We are adventurers and explorers at heart, and so adventuring is merely connecting with our long-standing roots and our instincts. This is how we advance and this is how we heal. The next hill will be something new, a chance for us to spring out from ourselves into the million hills that follow, eclipsing where we were before. The next fork in the road will be the biggest decision of the day, one that trumps all the decisions you ever made before because it's happening now. The next tank of gas will be infinite freedom, because of how far it can take you [and for the record, it's quite far]. I cannot describe what that does to a person, or how that opens you up. I cannot explain all that means to me.

But for what it's worth, beyond all that, I am myself again, with an extra kick in my step bursting forth into a new January, and that is the me I've always known. You may have known him too. “In the totality of all things, of course, our petty agony is stupid and vain,” another poem declares. “But I feel that our dreams were not.” 

Far from you

I think I'll always be too far from you
Just past that sunset
Under some other moon
And I know that doesn't work
The maybes, the somedays, the hazy tomorrows
That may never come.

But I wanted to let you know
That I took a walk today
Alone on a hilltop
That looked off on a big mountain covered in snow
In a place so far removed
Even the satellites cant reach it.

It was one of the most beautiful things I'd ever seen
And I thought of you.

The man at the bar in Monterey

Bill told me a lot of things, that man at the bar, but he had that rare demeanor of someone who more often than not is asking for details as opposed to speaking of his own conquests and aspirations and vacuous desires. We went back and forth on a lot: the strange path my life has taken, balancing risk and adventure; the ins and outs of San Francisco, which soon I will understand; his challenging personal situation, one that made him look tired, which at one time I could certainly relate to. It was refreshing all around, over a couple cold pale ales, and in my long history of sitting down at random bars in sidelined cities, clamoring away from most conversations that just don’t seem to end and people who do not know when to shut up, I recognize you don’t run into Bill-like characters every day.

I should explain more about Bill. He is seemingly straight-laced, probably early 50s, no children, recently divorced, and a financial planner. Naturally, in one of my more introspective moments, expecting a bland and by-the-book response, I asked him for advice. I asked what he would recommend to a young budding 25 year old who wants to balance experiences these days with security in future days, and as a response, he gave me without hesitation two short stories.

In the first, a client with an especially well-designed retirement package found out one day, out of nowhere, that he had terminal cancer with a year to live. That money, as these things go, would then go to his only son, who has proven himself to be especially irresponsible and impulsive in his late adolescent years. There was understandably a tone of tragedy and hopelessness to this one.

Then I was told of a man who, though everything is done, continues to come back to Bill seeking advice. Bill tells him the same thing again and again: you are fine, you have done everything right, now go do what you want to do and enjoy. “But I just don’t know what to do with all this spare time,” he continuously replies. Arguably some retirement stories solicit more empathy than others.

In a world where we are all navigating future outlooks and obsessing over risk, and perhaps even some utopian time yet to come, this all meant a lot to me from the horses mouth. There may come a time that I wish vaguely I had set more aside, planned this or that, had a 401K going at 23, and many other fiscally responsible ventures. That time may come indeed. But I’ll never regret those days cruising slowly up the Pacific Coast Highway, and the night I landed in Monterey, before that great storm blew in out along the Pineapple Express.