Into the Furnace

"El culo del mundo" is what my Spanish friends elegantly used to call an undesirable place they never want to go. Nigeria certainly falls under this category, and I recently said that phrase back to them when asked how things were where I was. One of the most corrupt countries in the world, and recently ranked the third most unlivable, is not appealing to international flight crews either. An Etihad attendant told me they always post the Lagos route hoping someone will on a whim swap it (they never do), not even wanting to touch down, disembark, and leave 35 hours later, the company not even allowing them to explore outside the hotel. I told her a bit hopelessly that I'll be staying a bit longer, long enough to not really see the endpoint, what drove me here, or where this mess really even began. In short, my few months in Lagos by a number of standards, will effectually constitute the worst and most unwanted place I'll ever live.

I woke up first night to a dense tropical West Africa rain, straight out of Conrad's Heart of Darkness. I asked myself from the confines of my bed why I do this, going off to places where kidnapping stories run rampant, the police are toll booths, the diseases that much more ghastly, and the list goes on. With such a short life, why spend any time in the terrible places that run under every sort of dysfunction and keep trickling by, when New York City and Los Angeles and even the peace and quiet of Austin are very much within my reach? The answer I continue to fall back on is that in this time alone behind high walls, surrounded by misery and repression and anger, and a country imploding on itself from all directions, there continues to be great value - in finding what you're made of and what is left in the dark spaces when you truly are all alone.

When you put cargo on board a ship, you make that venture on trust,
For you know not whether you will be drowned or come safe to land.
If you say, "I will not embark until I am certain of my fate," then you will do no trade: the secret of these two destinies is never disclosed.

The faint-hearted merchant neither gains nor loses; nay he loses: one must take fire in order to get light. 

Moving on

I was beside the bed alongside my mother, holding my grandmother's hand when she took her last short gasp for breath just hours after I arrived. Five years of cancer treatment, mostly centered around the lungs, had finally caught up with her, and I felt the heart stop beating and the skin go cold to my touch. Her eyes, which had been opened and dazed for a number of hours, closed profoundly on their own. Then she lay still and peaceful like she was in a deep sleep, and just like that it all was done. Having now experienced it first hand, I find it was one of the most surreal experiences there is, being that intimate with someone else's death. Before people died in a far off place, disappeared, and what's left sits abstractly at a tombstone in the ground. Now life comes and goes through your fingertips, and that is how fragile and tangible a thing it is.

My grandmother was there when I was born. My mother says it was my grandmother's hands alone that quelled the pain of childbirth, and that when she took them away it became unbearable. There are lovely photos of me, small and tired, wrapped up like a burrito watched over by my grandmother's smiling gaze, and I think there is a lot to that, me being here and her being there, with 25 years of separation. As the peculiar people that run funeral homes rolled her out of the house to be cremated, it felt mostly like this miniature cycle that makes up many larger cycles had reached some sort of fruition, and now a new one will begin.

I went for a hot run the day after she went, up the farm roads surrounding Cleveland, through grassy fields blowing like waves in the breeze, and rusty barns showing no sign of activity. To be honest, I felt coated in death and stagnating bodies, the breakdown of our bodily systems, the physical demise from age and unhealthy lifestyles, and I just felt the need to be alive again. I took deep breaths and felt the burn in my legs and the hot sun pouring down on my skin. I paid special attention to the little sparrows gliding in the wind, and the smells of North Dakota countryside. It was just over a month ago I myself sat stagnant on a hospital bed, my body fighting off a dangerous and invasive infection, and it is not too much a stretch - given an influx of horror stories - to say things could have gone down a bad road quickly.

But the cars roll along the highway outside my grandmother's house like they always have, and I am still here, the pace of things just a touch slower. A robin hops up to the window, and the trains rumble by outside in the night. Baby birds cry out from the houses for their mother to come back with a worm, and I still remember those glorious feeders, attracting all kinds or yellow finches and red sparrows, that used to sit outside the door. Grass from the old bog at the corner of the yard is tall and untamed, reminiscent of my old summer playground and annual project. The gardens that never quite worked. The garage that never grew organized. The artist hobbies that were just never realized. It could all be my childhood or now or sometime in the future, just missing one of the integral parts, the woman who made those memories and visions a reality. Things keep going; they move on quickly.

Views from above

Flying still remains something relatively new and exciting to me. The shapes of the clouds and the rapidly changing landscapes are always beautiful and beckoning from above, particularly since I may never see them from below. I found flying over Greenland especially majestic, watching the glaciers flow and break apart right into the sea, before expanding out into smaller and smaller icebergs. The perfectly manicured fields of Azerbaijan a few hours before, just after the mountains around Tehran, were also a lovely sight through the clouds, fed by the winding rivers out of the nearby Caucuses. The integration of small things can all be clearly seen from 30,000 feet, all the parts adding together. I remember back in the Kilimanjaro Region, even the snowy peak that bred countless stories of the past can only be seen from a plane during rainy season.

The last and latest flight leads to my grandmother, who is going through a period of her life we will all have to eventually face, indeed, one of the only things we all have in common. I cannot imagine how difficult it is, the daily, perhaps hourly challenge of being brave and accepting the physical demise of age, knowing absolutely how one's story must end. I have put myself in her position a number of times, from the perceived safety of youth and distance, and I have come to think that in this peculiar final isolation is the comfort of knowing everyone there is has gone through this before, every generation for a hundred thousand generations of human history, so it is the natural order to embrace it with open arms. Dying is as much a part of the interconnectedness of things as a new child being born. Snowy mountains turn to rivers that flow into the sea, then condense and fall as snow atop mountains. Trees fall over and rot and turn into the soil that feeds other trees. Thematic catchphrases aside, I really see life and death as one inevitable circle bigger than ourselves, which makes me feel very wholesome, and it needs no talk of heaven or hell or the straight rigid lines that carry us there to make me feel that transitory life itself is a spectacular thing.

Beautiful words come out of the tribal nature of Africa, away from the world of nations and borders and all the Western infused "emancipation" of the last 150 years. Who is to say that if the world had maintained the ideology of small communities bound by families, tied to and integrated with the land in which children still grow up outside free amidst the animals, it would not have been a better and more simple place? A bushman replies, "I am as young as the most beautiful wish in my heart, and as old as all the unfulfilled longings in my life."

Low Points, and Room 242

It's really the longing that hurts most after two weeks in the hospital.You see the bright sunlight out your window and the trees rustling in the breeze and you want to be there walking freely. You want a home cooked meal that doesn't taste like hospital sheets, and a few new episodes of a show you'd never watch, just because you cannot bear another rerun. You want to sleep in, and the beeping sound to go away, and to rip all your bandages off for a good hot shower. You want the aching in your veins to stop, and people to quit pricking you with needles of various shapes and sizes, and that drip drip drip, watching antibiotics enter your body, to never drip again. You just want to go back to how things always were during the normal times when you felt good, which of course weren't appreciated because normal never is. It is a sad truth of life we don't value things like good health until it is taken, the same way we tend to neglect good people until they die, leave us, or travel far away. Life in the hospital is wrapped up, suffocated, and constrained by IV chords, and you stay strapped down to a bed in ways beyond the physical.

Things can always be worse. The nurse told me one night I was easy and that patients are often admitted for three months and can't roll over or go to the bathroom by themselves. A few weeks earlier I was shown the general ward of Kenyatta National Hospital, where a number of victims of a recent Al-Shabaab bomb blast in Nairobi were being treated - in a room that resembled an airplane hanger. Illness comes in many forms, and I was lucky that a short series of invasive procedures and a steady flow of drugs, standard from today's perspective, ultimately saved my life. 150 years ago the case may very well have been different, and that is always a powerful thought to let settle. As life slowly and gradually gets normal again, it becomes very clear how unimportant some things are I made very important for far too long. We drive ourselves to the grave, I think, always chasing after something. It is such a trick in life to realize you are free and that you need nothing.

I felt sick the entire drive home on a cool Friday night, with seemingly more questions than answers. One of the worst feelings in the world is looking at your body, or life, and not knowing exactly what troubles it. Without that spout of knowledge, you don't know how to fix it, and we all just want to be fixed when we sit alone and ill, our minds left to run wild. There were a few scary nights in there, up late in the dark sweating and aching, wondering what would happen next. I have little doubt I will sit at a bar in a city where sickness is less extreme and treatment more organised, someday far off in the future, and talk about that time I got meningitis in Africa, realizing that probably made me better, my story more interesting, and my spirit more resilient in the end.

The Snows of Kilimanjaro

Four Masai children no more than ten years old carried small whips alone on the side of the road. I didn’t see them for long, as my car rushed by, but their job was presumably to care for what must have been a hundred goats, and at this instance usher them across the highway in unison. Knowing as little as I do about the pastoral Masai culture, I know that these animals are life as much as water, and you do not have to look far to  connect and compare white children of the West who cannot even pour cereal at that age without making a mess. It is a fact of life that children grow up quicker in the third world, as a matter of necessity as much as it is culture. The more these sort of images accumulate the more you redefine what it means when someone says someone else has grown up sheltered.

Up the road, past domesticated goats and wild baboons, sits the Serena Hotel at Lake Manyara – part of one of the most successful hotel groups in East Africa, having perfected the art of getaways in complete isolation. For days I stayed there around Easter, watching the rains come out of the nearby mountains and spread across the lake in varying waves and shades and layers. This is the green expanse of the Kilimanjaro Region, where rolling hills and flat grassland exist as one, and water is everywhere during the rainy season and carves its little niches in streams and puddles and misty downpours. It all created a delightful sort of stillness, one absent over the past few months of my life, where you sit and close your eyes and there is no urgency and you just listen to the birds and the bugs make their noises. I believe that in this space you find everything – the words that fit on a page and the rights and lefts your life requires next – and I do trust it’s there waiting even when it feels far away.

“…and then they were out and Compie turned his head and grinned and pointed and there, ahead, all he could see, as wide as all the world, great, high, and unbelievably white in the sun, was the top of Kilimanjaro. And then he knew that there was where he was going.”

Easter is always a peculiar time, whether in the solemn streets of Seville during Semana Santa, the old cobblestone pathways of colonial Guatemala, or an isolated lodge of a heavily Christianized African nation. I hold every age of human history to the same explicable standards. As I have trouble believing a man could rise from the dead in today's world of zombie pop culture, I do not find this plausible 2,000 years ago at a time the most respected cure for common ailments was bleeding a patient to balance their four humors. But people continue bellowing "He is risen," believing its importance, its tangible benefit, and how much private attention is given to our lives while billions continue to suffer based on chance and geography. I've always found organised religion to the most convenient thing in the world, because you don't have to do a damn thing, yet you believe you've done everything. 

Down the cliff, falling away from the Serena at the base of the Lake, sits a Masai Village. There the goats sleep alongside the people and the people live in grass huts you only find nowadays in museums that say “this is how they used to live.” Hippos live in the Lake and elephants in the surrounding plains and the herders have to think about protecting their livestock from lions, and this is one of their challenges. Thanks to Christian Colleges and missionary expeditions, these villages celebrate Easter too, and whether that makes their lives better or worse or the same, I'm not the one to say. In Africa, as is true anywhere in the world, the elegance and the harshness sit side by side, but perhaps Africa just can't mask its paradoxes as good as the others just yet.

I didn't see Kilimanjaro until the last day; the low lying clouds and the periodic rains kept the tallest mountain in Africa hidden from view. The snow-capped peak was only visible for a time out my right-side window, ascending and descending quickly back into Nairobi - back to suits and ties, impossible schedules and deadlines, phone calls and emails and meetings, and all the various tenets that make life so busy again. The paradoxes, for better or for worse, function in a way that sometimes make a small cabin with a wood stove in the middle of the Canadian Rockies with a pen and a beer alone the only thing in the world that makes sense. 

The Smoke That Thunders

The torrential downpour at Victoria Falls, on the border of Zambia and Zimbabwe, is not the average way to turn twenty five. 500 million cubic meters of water plummet 100 meters into the gorge each minute, and there just aren't many places - if any - like it in the world. From a helicopter you see the real prowess of it all, spreading out 2 kilometers, the mist shooting up into the air and visible from miles away. I stood at the adjacent island for quite some time, soaked from head to toe, water coming and going from every direction, entranced by the way nature does things, and how simple and complex that can be.

The Kololo Tribe, living around the Falls in the 1800s, called it "Mosi-oa-Tunya," or, "the smoke that thunders," and as I find true with many tribes and pre-colonial, pre-industrial nations around the world, living before the era of telescopes and microscopes and science, they have the simplest and sometimes best way of explaining things. We can know very clearly how something works - that a basalt plateau has many large cracks filled with weaker sandstone, and that over the course of 100,000 years the falls recede upstream, eroding the sandstone to form these very gorges - but no one really cares when they look out at it. We know we are seeing something miraculous, the culmination of a million tiny and improbable factors over a period of time much longer than we will ever witness first hand, and that is quite enough.

One of these very witnesses was David Livingstone, who explored the Zambezi River in 1855. He was the first European to see the Falls, and in the most British of ways wasted no time honoring his home country by naming the site after the Queen. "No one can imagine the beauty of the view from anything witnessed in England. It has never been seen before by European eyes; but scenes so lovely must have been gazed upon by angels in their flight," he said shortly after discovery. People have come and gone and thought similar thoughts since the very beginning, no matter their level of intellect, and these are things I always find comforting. In today's world, we are hardly ever alone. Consider the best things and the worst things, and someone out there has no doubt been through it before, survived, and died an old man better for having done it. 

I'm well into my 25th year now, but I still think back on that weekend trip down south: the roaring sounds, the fresh smells, and the invisibility that turned to visibility as the spray of water came and went with the wind. 25 years is a drop in the ocean. There are some things - from a family to a river to the stars - far bigger than ourselves. Seeing it that way is both humbling and empowering. As we sit and tell ourselves our lives are volatile, hopeless, and out of anyone's control entirely, trying to keep our heads above water on a day-to-day basis, things just keep on moving, so we are best suited to find some level of peace in the short time we have - and guard that inner peace with everything, because without it there is nothing. 

In Kisii

A long drive in Kisii County at night reminds you things can always be worse. As the car rumbles along winding dirt roads ripped to shreds by the rain, up and down the hills and mountains, past coffee farms and villages made of dust, people walk who knows how many miles in the dark. They clutch kerosene lamps if anything at all, guided by the little path they have etched many times before. Like too many parts of Africa, people live not so differently than they did 500 or 1000 years ago, their houses thatched together with grass and the night real night without any electricity grid. You think everyone - the little Carnegies and the Rockefellers of each generation - can forge their own way in life, until you see those condemned to the bleakest of circumstances with no hope of going anywhere at all. They don't teach you that in American schools, because it's not the American way. 

I have sat a bit defeated on the floor of my shower, letting hot water rush over my head, too many times over the last few months trying to flush out noise and volatility. It's hard to write or talk or do much at all under such circumstances, the basic foundations of self whipped around and turned to mush. But the beauty and the tragedy of the third world is that you don't look far for perspective; human life is always harder and a bit more real around every corner and back alley, and in places you once thought safe. The paradoxes don't make things easier, but provide a framework to compare and assess and work through your personal trivialities. 

A volcano just went off in Guatemala - one I sat and looked up at on many peaceful nights alone - and seeing the photos for whatever reason took me back to many places and many times, and they felt very near to me. On the cusp of my quarter century, Picaya is a reminder that things just keep moving and evolving and time doesn't give a damn how slow or fast.