MARK

Contents:

(August)

Biography

Africa

Stories

(October)

Travel

Rwanda

(November)

Reference culture

A truncated biography:

I was born and raised—surprisingly long ago—in the New York suburbs, from which I fled as soon as I was able. I've lived in a lot of places and worked at just about every job you could think of that doesn't require a jacket and tie. I've been comfortably well off and desperately poor. I've traveled a lot, on more than a few continents. I am continually mystified by the fact that I'm no longer as young as I once was.

About a year ago I surrendered to the inevitable and retired from the building trades, partially disabled by an arthritic spine…but I have managed to keep skiing backcountry almost year-round. With a bit of luck I'll graduate from college (in time to brag and crow at my thirtieth high school reunion), get a graduate degree or two and have a new career before I'm fifty. Considering my somewhat checkered academic past I find this quite remarkable. I am significantly balder and girthier than I was even just recently, but I try not to think about this too much. I was once the sort of person parents forbade their children to spend time with, but that was long ago, in a world very different from this one (or not; who can tell?).

Africa:

"There is a very fine line between ‘hobby’ and ‘mental illness.’"

-------Dave Barry

` Personally, I love to travel; I do it whenever I get the chance, like a favorite hobby. In the mid-nineties I spent 6 months or so traveling in Africa. What is striking now about that trip is the way so many of the images of that time stay with me, continuing to haunt or illuminate or merely confuse me. I stumble around from one place to the next trying to create for myself something resembling stability, while at the edges of my mind images drift and intermingle; some real and some altered or remembered selectively in support of agendas I surely possess but which are hidden from me. Sometimes I drift in aimless reverie when I ought, I suppose, to be behaving more productively.

A reverie sampler: in Ethiopia there were incompetent pickpockets in the markets; abandoned armaments and dry, eroded farmlands along the roads; a Falasha potter in her little mud synagogue; there were rats and flies everywhere, and people trying to give us their babies, that we might take them home to America...and espresso drunk sweet, little mud towns with, incongruously, ping pong tables and foosball games, and an entire generation growing up short and stunted by near-starvation. Across the border in Eritrea there was a strong and optimistic spirit and something akin to veneration of afro-ed ex-revolutionaries…in a country since then again consumed by a war aimed in horrifying ways at the most vulnerable classes of civilians. In Rwanda the countryside was all lush, green terraced fields, its little villages of thatched-roof huts almost entirely emptied of people; Tutsi soldiers scowling at roadblocks, and the streets of Kigali bustling with white people in Land Rovers painted with big red crosses. At night in the lowlands down toward the Tanzania border we rolled through town after town, empty but for a few buildings lit by candles and full of people; in the town at the end of the line the few remaining inhabitants took us in and we stayed up drinking beer, smoking and talking as best we could about what it was like for them, about who had died or vanished, and about the refugees in the camps just across the border (it was only later that I realized that these conversations were being repeated in all the other little towns, in all the crowded, candlelit buildings we'd passed that eerie night). In Mozambique our train derailed and we walked and walked through minefields and tiny villages, sleeping crowded with others into mud huts protected from snakes; we hopped a freight train late one night, hitched rides on trucks, cars, boats and (once) an airplane; there were old ruins—and more recent ones too—being taken back by coastal jungle; there were coral reefs, sharks, stories of cobras lurking in the outhouses, and strange local coffees to drink. And Great Zimbabwe, the Skeleton Coast, Soweto; Masai warriors in the Serengeti and San people in the Kalahari; mountain gorillas in Zaire, glue-sniffing street children in Nairobi, a long journey on the Lake Tanganika ferry, elephants by bicycle in Victoria Falls, big scary South African whites reminiscing drunkenly about their times killing kaffirs in Angola....

I’ve traveled also in Central America, in Australia and New Zealand, in Asia and throughout North America: so why is it Africa that stays with me most vividly? Maybe I fell for the myth, the concept of Africa created by Europeans centuries ago, desperately in need of an "other" to whom they could compare themselves favorably. Maybe it was all those National Geographics I read in my childhood after all, or the stamp collection from which I first learned the names of distant places. (I think, though, that it is the vitality that is there, and the way that the people I met and the things I saw call into question everything that is familiar to me and all that I know. This is frightening, of course, and invigorating; it is the reason that I spend so much time even now reviewing and reworking my understanding of what I did in Africa five years ago. William Faulkner said, "The past isn’t dead. It isn’t even past.")

Of course I’m excited to be returning. Specifically, I’m looking forward to going back as part of an academic program with goals and process somewhat in place, with facilities of whatever sort, with local connections. It’ll be good to be in Africa operating out of a single base for a couple of months on end, rather than constantly moving on in search of the next spectacular site or attraction, face buried so deep in the Lonely Planet Guide that the world slips by unnoticed. As a traveler my learning curve is long and slow, and context is thin on the ground; this is fascinating, yes, but ever so shallow. I’m looking for something different from what I’ve done before, and I imagine myself changed–grown–in unexpected ways by the time we return.

One of the more troublesome aspects of my own travels has been my awareness that my mere presence in the developing world very often has a destructive impact on those who live there. I come from America, the land of Michael Jordan, cruise missiles and, notably, Rambo. My skin is white, my clothes and other belongings are expensive beyond the wildest dreams of the locals, my earning power beyond their comprehension. I may ride on the tops of their buses or sleep curled up on their mud floors but by virtue of my presence in their lives I am hastening the erosion of values and processes which help to sustain them and by which they live. I don’t want to participate in teaching the locals–any locals– that their way of life and point of view is any less valid and nourishing than mine (I am, in fact, quite certain that it is often not, having seen the smiles grow gradually broader and the laughter more genuine the further back into the hills I’ve walked in any number of places). Neither, of course, do I wish to romanticize what is often deep and brutal poverty, and I do not really long to experience the pre-industrial age firsthand for any lengthy period of time.

Do I have anything to offer that is of real value to those who live where we are going? I lack glib answers, and I admit this freely. I’m not as limber as I once was; not as rugged, nor near as resilient: these are qualities I always valued as a traveler. On the other hand, I’ve been into and around the world at various times, under various circumstances. Strange things have happened to me and I’ve survived, even thrived, and remained calm, reasonably confident, patient and fascinated by all that is new and unexpected. I try to notice and question everything, speculating and theorizing and wondering about whatever catches my eye. I’m fairly stable, surprisingly responsible and I’m even–to my surprise–a serious student: sometimes astute, sometimes intellectually adept. I like to think that I’m considerably less obnoxious than your average American tourist, and I’ve learned how to avoid making many of the basic American tourist mistakes. I do want to reassure myself that by being and behaving respectful I can contribute to the strengthening of self-respect in others, be they the cashiers at Hagen's or the people who live in places far from my own home. What else could I really hope to offer?

Getting ready to leave:

I am not doing much to get ready, really. I am making my dentist very, very wealthy. Allowing a woman I do not know to stick a lot of hypodermic needles into my arms. Getting a new passport. Buying a big stack of airline tickets. Taking a French course. Reading a bunch of books. Thinking it over.

Stories:

"There is no story that is not true…"

---Chinua Achebe

A true story:

I turned 40 among strangers on a small Indonesian island––that one known for its population of giant carnivorous lizards, colloquially called dragons. In the morning local guides herded little clots of tourists down a narrow path to the fenced enclosure from within which we studied groups of dragons; giant, lumbering beasts drooling poison, tongues flickering. We were told that the old custom of feeding a few goats to the dragons for the entertainment of tourists had been ended; nonetheless they circled our little enclosure expectantly. Threadbare deer grazed cautiously just out of reach, and our guides told gruesome stories about the deer and feral goats, about the intersecting lives of the local farmers and these languid dragons. In brief spurts of speed, they said, the dragons could run down a grown man. Their saliva contained a nerve toxin. Once or twice a year a farmer was killed and eaten.

Later, restless in the heat of the day, I went walking down the beach, studying the way the land rose abruptly harsh and angular from the soft sea and searching the horizon for some sign of the afternoon boat. Coming toward me across the broken coral I saw a dragon; 12 feet long and easily as thick around as I, walking slowly on squat, powerful legs. I got out my camera and started taking photos, the dragon looking immense and foreshortened. It got closer and more detailed, filling my field of view; I kept pressing the shutter and flipping the winding mechanism, thinking of the enlargements I’d hang on my walls at home, the stories I’d tell ("I turned 40 among strangers on a small Indonesian island...").

When the dragon’s head blurred I pulled my eye from the viewfinder and looked directly at his face––scales, fangs, folded flesh, venomous drool––suddenly only ten feet away. No longer framed by the camera he became real, and once real he became abruptly terrifying, carrying the weight of a lifetime of bad dreams half-glimpsed and forgotten. I felt distinctly an abrupt rush of adrenaline and backed away quickly, scratching myself on scrubby vegetation and half-tripping over hidden obstacles. The dragon, never altering his gait, continued down the beach; I retreated to the safety and comfort of the tourist compound of stone paths and decrepit grass huts. Waiting for the arrival of the boat that would carry me to the next island I prepared in my mind my story, and I replayed the feeling of rushing terror in my veins. I did not speak to the other people, and no one knew me there.

Much later I learned of the death of a musician who’d been one of my heroes long before, who’d seemed to take what I felt but could not speak and transform it into rhythm and tone and soaring melody, who had in this way spoken for me in my time of silence; on the day that I turned forty he had died of a lifetime of self-abuse. Now, years later, I wrestle with the unwieldy shape of that day, struggling to make of it a narrative that will do for me what I wish it to do: to tell of the eerie disconnection of that place; the strangeness of the terrain and of the giant lizards there, my momentary confusion between what was real and what was merely a chance to create for others an opportunity to imagine me in a certain light…I have struggled, that is, to render my experience of that day real by making of it a story to be told by myself and by others. I have always carried secretly my regret therefore that the dragon never lunged for me, or hissed at me, or gave any sign that he noticed my fleshy, vulnerable presence there on that beach. I do not know why the death of the musician on that same day affects me so powerfully, but I hope some day to find a way to weave it into the story that I hope some day to tell.

(March-May, 2000

Travel:

All paths lead nowhere, so it is important to choose a path that has heart.

----Carlos Castenada

I think we are all travelers, and all in our own ways looking for the same places. Of course, most travel is internal, even when we wander exotic places far from home. The frontiers are within and the borderlands of our own creation; the most remarkable experiences are within easy reach (this is, you will understand, just one of many possible truths, even to a lover of absolutes like myself). We come to these places—to Africa, to Tibet or Tierra del Fuego, to Papuan jungles or ancient Mayan ruins—because in some way they nudge us closer to what we carry in ourselves; armored, cordoned off, concealed from view. Sometimes bedrock turns liquid and nothing seems real, truths become fluid and other worlds intrude on our own careful constructs. I welcome this, and I run fearfully from it; then I suffer long hours and I spend all my money trying to invite it into my life once again.

Another travel story, about a place not so far from Bellingham:

I first came to these valleys when I was just 16, a runaway, tough and callused, moving restlessly from one place to the next. In a deep canyon just south of here I made for a time a home—my first—among giant trees and polished granite slabs. At dusk I'd watch deer come out to graze in the meadows, and bears would come rumbling through my camp in search of food, endlessly entertaining and amusing. These bears, they were fast and graceful despite their bulk; in their eyes gleamed intelligence and humor.

I've returned here again and again through the years. Each time I come these valleys are changed and I am grown a bit older, and each time therefore we negotiate our relationship anew; we find a fresh balance or we do not. Each time too is a homecoming of sorts, and I try to allow it to touch me, that I may take something of the feeling with me when I go. The seasons pass, giant trees frame soft meadows beneath sculpted cliffs; the bears come to the orchards and they wreak havoc among the camps and the old houses....but I like the bears, as I did years ago; I forgive them their trespasses and I am thankful for their presence here.

The table is solidly built of handsplit timbers, oiled and left to weather in mountain sun and snows. The man, too, is fissured and scarred by long weathering: tall, thin and bent; sinewed; squinting by habit, speaking little. We discuss his tai chi practice, local politics, the passing of time in the mountains. Jeff has lived all his long life right here in this tiny valley. He mines gold at his claim in the high country, hunts a bit and grows fruits and vegetables for the table—enough to get by from season to season. My friends borrow his property for a weekend, and by the dozens we come: camping out, swimming naked in the river, gathering for meals and to sing by applewood fire each night. Jeff sits with us by the fire, and he listens but does not sing. One morning I wake up early and I see him in murky first light, dancing tai chi softly like a ghost outside the line of our tents.

Sitting, we talk about home, about history, about big trees and granite soil…then about the bears. He does not share my love for these animals; they strip his fruit trees and claw deep furrows in the doorway to his cabin up at the mine. He says that he tried something new this year—something to keep the bears away—and that soon he’ll know if it worked. He used to shoot them out the kitchen window, he says, and he'd used a .22, a small gun more suited to squirrels. "That way they'd go up in the hills bleeding and die later, not here in my yard where I'd have to haul away the carcasses and hide them from the game warden. But this year in the spring when the bears were thin and hungry I put out big chunks of butter along the trails, and in the butter I put razor blades."

I hear lilting music in the woods, the trees turning brown and the snow blowing soft in the high country. The roads close for winter and the tourists go home; Jeff dances his delicate old man dance in morning mist, he sits by the fire pondering late at night, and he wonders if the bears will return to plunder his orchards and scratch at his door. And I, I am soon gone from these mountains, carrying now the crisp leaping pain of blue steel slicing soft flesh, of blood freshly spilled, thickening on bare frozen ground.

There are no rules here, and underfoot the earth shifts and roils. I am alone in this place and it is difficult to recognize even myself.

(October, 2000)

Rwanda:

I came today from the country just to the north of here, where I stayed in a small hotel in a town along the highway. By day convoys of trucks rumbled past carrying food to the refugee camps to the south; by night I sat with other travelers and discussed what we had seen and done, how it was that we had come to that place and where we might go next. By night, too, there was sporadic gunfire in the streets outside our hotel, and rumors of armed men infiltrating through the jungles and mountains.

Then I crossed the border and came somehow here, to this small country where now I sit in my room with the door shut tight despite the heat. I have paid these missionaries for a bed for the night, and for food and water, and for a door that I might close against the world. This country only some months ago belched violence and death, its rivers running thick with corpses and a great stench in the air. The soldiers at the roadblocks do not smile, and their eyes are hard and old. I think about the stories I have heard, the things I have read about this place. I am a long way from home.

I get a late start on the following day, intending to travel only the short distance to the eastern border, deceived by the appearance of normality in the capital city (only the bullet scars on buildings and bridge abutments hint at what has just passed). By late afternoon I am standing at a crossroads just half way to the frontier with a crowd of locals, hoping for a ride. The trucks and minivans that used to race up and down these roads carrying passengers and cargo are gone, and no one here travels at night. I am wondering how safe I will be, curled up in the bushes until morning; I will wait until all the locals give up and then decide what to do.

But at twilight a van pulls up, and twenty or more of us race to get inside. I do not know where it is going; only that when I speak my destination they tell me no, not there. I do not speak the language; I am adrift; I try to stay alert and to trust my luck. It gets dark outside, and we pick up speed.

Outside: small towns dark and empty, grasses and shrubs crowding the road. Every now and then a single building is lit from within by candlelight; I can make out human shapes gathered in the half-light, but we pass quickly, and I hardly see. There is no one of whom I can ask questions, and at any rate nothing to ask. My fellow passengers are quiet, and some look out the windows nervously. My backpack is crushing my legs; there is no room to shift its weight.

I have been here forever, right here in this back seat smelling exhaust and the sweat of strangers, leaning into the turns in the road, watching blackness pass outside my window, glimpsing through glass those more rooted than I; they sit inside in the light. Always I have felt this sweetness; the outsider constantly moving; the short-timer never still. I am hoping this ride goes on forever, careening along through black night, through eerie empty towns, our passage swirling the air––swirling ghosts of those now gone. In this back seat I am safe from the strangeness all around me, and as long as I am moving I am grounded and real.

(Always, too, I have felt this terror. I am alone here, soft and exposed, and I am afraid of the end of this ride when I will step into the night, again and forever. There is death in the night breeze, and unbearable sadness in the swaying of the tall grasses in the edge of the headlights.)

Now: stand here in the dark, just outside the circle of lights. Look in through the window; what do you see? Listen hard to the night; what language does it speak?

(March, 2000)

Reference Culture:

Like you, I am the product of my history and my culture. Like you, I learned early and deeply certain ways of interpreting my experience, of naming it, of remembering. Like you, all I have ever really wanted is to return to a place that never was…save in dreams forgotten long ago, in a time I never really knew.

(At any rate, that’s one way of looking at it; I’m pretty sure there are others.)

Home (under construction; please pardon our mess):

As children we see clearly the chaos that is the world, and because we desire order and predictability first and foremost we look for structures around which we can organize that chaos and from which we can derive meaning. When I was small I had just this craving, and I looked for certainty everywhere around me, and I asked the questions that children ask at such times. Why is the sky blue? What happens to the sun at night? Where do mosquitoes go during the day, and why do cows eat grass? And then: where do old people go when they die? Where was I before I was born?

No one answered me, precisely. We did not gather around small fires in gathering darkness, the colors fading slowly until only vague shapes remained in hints of concentrated mass, the grand arch of the stars overhead. We did not gather there, arranged by families or by age or gender, squatting close to soft orange flame, telling the stories of the creation of the world, of the coming to life of our tribe, special among all the others. We did not explain to each other the way the future might be known by arrangements of soggy leaves in the bottoms of porcelain cups, by the presence of owls and ravens or the appearance at opportune moments of wolf packs hunting long-legged on endless steppes, speaking sadness to the skies at night.

Instead (in those tacky postwar suburbs, all cement and fiberboard and corroding aluminum), we watched television and went to the movies, we saw billboards telling us what cars to drive and which cigarettes to smoke and what these things would mean to us, how they would help us define ourselves to ourselves as well as to others. The television told us stories about the surreal world of the Cleavers, and we read superhero comic books and listened to fairy tales full of princes and princesses, talking animals and evil old women. Because I needed to know these things––because I was ravenous for answers––I read and listened and watched carefully and I drew many conclusions on scant evidence and then went out into the world young and rigid, determined to make my experience confirm that which I already knew so clearly, so deep and unquestioning. (We were all quite crazed, of course. It was early 1963; a Kennedy was still president and Vietnam unknown, the civil rights movement just a distant rumor and the nuclear family very much the norm.)

In the end it matters almost not at all what actually happened to me long ago; what matters is what I did with it. I took the raw material of my senses and in a constant dance of perception, interpretation and memory transformed my experience repeatedly and comprehensively, creating of it this vastly complex thing that I called reality. Do you see? I absorbed my experience (or not) according to the myths I learned early—these myths much larger, more vivid and convincing than reality ever could be—and now I carry within me those layered myths all intertwined, half-hidden, half-rotten, and within them I live. Long years later, the myths of my childhood comprise the core around which this thing I name self is woven.

We insist on clinging to our belief that somewhere deep in our past was a time when we knew not loss, when the experience of evil, of isolation, of the void had not yet scarred us irrevocably, a time where the apple hung plump and whole in its god-assigned place in a benevolent order; we call that place—that time—home. But I am not so sure that this time ever was; at least I do not see it reflected for long on the faces of the very young. I look closely and I see sometimes contentment, sometimes pleasure but also misery, suffering, endless pain. Nonetheless, this belief that I once left such a place drifts in silently behind me wherever I have been, filling the empty places there with misty loss and regret. It is as if I once had this thing; as if I once swam weightless in it, once was carried floating gently in the belly of my past; as if the world until recently provided me with what I needed, as if the present is just an aberration.

When I speak now of "home," even casually, I am really speaking in part of that small fire in twilight slowly deepening, of the air cooling and saltwater going orange and glassy smooth as night comes on…and of those stories never told me, that tribe I never knew, that place whose loss I mourned deeply though it never really was. If we (a social group, a socioeconomic class, a culture) tell each other our history––our story––once and again, and each telling is a question asked over and over and if we all nod and say to each other yes, that is how it was yes, I remember I believe I was there this is true...then will we remain coherent and hold each other and lend strength and be wise and pass through our grief and live another day?

I ask you: how else will I recognize it when at last I arrive home?

(Jan-November, 2000)