Kilabuni Nights – Chapter XIII: In Peril

24 Feb 2010            0900 local Madibira, TZ

Beyond Madibira wisps of dirt slither out from here to there.  They are not paths, not quite.  Paths are known to lead somewhere.  A curve lunges out for a moment towards a clay hill, then scuttles away into a field of tall grass.  If you are lucky you will find an unneeded bottlecap or a scrap of shoelace; some sign that these trails have been forgotten only by men, and not by the gods.

Today, it is THE TRAVELLER and his hardy band cutting through these dim memories of foot-trails.  From above, one can see the golden chaff of Africa spreading unimpeded by the senses in every direction.  Millions of years ago, this was fertile hunting ground for the velociraptor.  No longer, you hope.

I write these words today in the dawn after a great adventure.  We had a close brush with it last night, and for the first time in weeks I feel it more privilege than duty to be holding my pencil to the page.

Adventure – the word stands in the corner of our world’s mind gathering dust – the relic of bygone eras.  Heyerdahl, Amundsen, Drake, Magellan, Shackleton, Odysseus, Hillary – these heroes live on the pages of yellowed volumes.  Today our intrepid are tethered to the ivory tower of academia – aeronautics, astrophysics and the like.  The time when discovery may have sat over the next dune or swell has slipped through our grasp.  Courage, bravado, derring-do – from time immemorial these qualities have berthed the favourites of history.  Of a sudden obsolete?

In a way, the unassailable ignorance of these men was a boon to us all.  So much more did they do than set their feet on novel extremities and uninhabitable wastelands.  Unable to quantify, classify and dissect what new worlds they encountered, instead they taught the drive to make the intractable tractable; to explore these alien worlds using tools comprehensible to the minds of those who only comprehended the familiar.  In those days, it didn’t take a rocket scientist.

We have found the remainder of the globe; cleared the obscuring dust from the map – but at what cost?

Adventure and the Dangers of Ambulation

Instructing the Young TZs in SPORT HOCKEY

I was happily able to take a vigorous exercise yesterday morning – the first exertions not directly related to our mission that I’ve had the chance to enjoy since departing the Detroit Airfield.  An hour of pliometric drills was followed directly by a two-mile trot through the secondary school and surrounding area.  Broadly speaking, the micro-climate of Madibira has shone on us with exceeding favorability and yesterday continued the line.  I did take some strange looks from passersby on the road; running for the joy of exercise seems a notion these East Africans have yet to apprehend.

Following my exercise I did a bit of laundry by hand, finishing out a damn spot better than my wash-contraption back home, if I do say so myself!  By this hour the sun was high in the morning sky, and it rolled time for me to teach my Form 1 English charges at the secondary school.   I had, as a paean to Boots, been pressed into service as a teacher of Form 1 English and Form 2 Mathematics.  The former of these revealed a nettlesome dearth of foundational overlap between the English and Swahili languages, while the latter afforded me a theretofore unglimpsed window into the pedagogical rapture of ‘Teacher’s Edition’ textbooks.

I waltzed effortlessly into the class, barking notes at my pupils with the practiced grizzle of an old sport-hockey captain.  Much to my horrification, though, I was far from the only constable of this post.  Another instructor was evidently considerably advanced into a lesson of her own, wanly walking the armada of desks[1] and periodically rapping students with a reed.

Confusion and chagrin swirled below my countenance in equal parts.  This development was unforeseeable.  BOOTS drolls on constantly about the dubious protocols of his fellow teachers; he says few of them deign to observe any regular schedule of instruction, and I was beginning to see what he means!  At no point in the prior three days of this period had these students been instructed by the teacher before me, nor was she observed on the posted schedule for that time.  Educators here hold instruction on a whim.

I am happy to report that my newly freed moment was well taken.  A swift visit to the Twin Lion Pub, a plate of Texas Chipsy and a spot of reading later and I found it to be near evening-time.   It being an hour when Katelyn’s generator would be running, BOOTS HIMSELF and I decided to make an attempt at preparing our electric gear for the remainder of the expedition.

The trek to Katelyn’s compound is nearly 3 miles, a tall order given the advancing dusk.  Happily, after our second mile a government vehicle barreled down the road and offered a lift.  The quarter-hour saved would prove to be critical.

A ways from Katelyn’s compound there is a tiny village untouched by modern convenience and corruption.  The inhabitants have never known a bulb’s nor a spigot’s flow.  In fact, the pan-East African  tongue of Kiswahili has not even taken root in this quiet spot, a native dialect surviving to this day.  Truly an opportunity to put the intuitive qualities of SPORT HOCKEY to the test!  Our party set out into the bush at 1700 hrs.

An hour into our trek the trail we had been following dipped abruptly, terminating down a slope into a briskly moving river.  Disappointed but never deterred, BOOTS HIMSELF disclosed that he had spotted a side-trail that would almost-certainly take us back to the consolations of civilization.[2]

It was not long before our path began to narrow, and then become indistinguishable altogether.  As penance for our folly, we were now sufficiently turned around as to be formally considered ‘lost.’  Foolishly, we had left without the expedition chronometer.  Dead reckoning – those words that shake the spine of every explorer – we were left to the timeless mixture of skill and luck.  To our credit, our ad hoc conferrings never grew disputatious.  Wholly aware of our predicament (our anxiety intensified inversely to the failing light’s), we could not but agree on a direction and tread obstinately on our way.

The grass.  The grass lengthened with the droll wildness of a vagrant’s hair.  Advancing nightfall, awful noises in the distance – how I longed for the companionship of my chronometer and machete!  For the first time in the expedition we were feeling the bony fingers of that nameless fear that musters forth at the prospect of becoming the supper of a beast in the wilderness.  In the darkest recesses of our minds, we prayed to avoid not just the roar of the lioness nor the peals of the hyena.  What would our state be if forced to endure this bountiless wild for days?  Weeks?  It has been the fate of more than one explorer to find himself in the swollen bellies of his comrades.  Surely, no man ever imagines himself capable of resorting to such savagery, but which of us could the desperation that would visit us in the hours and days hence?  In a corner of our souls we have been conditioned to never give murmur to, we each of us imagined our fate the same as the Donner party.  “Tearing the flesh from a corpse and passing the reeking shreds to our mouths; the taint of an imaginary corruption upon it.”

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[1] (class sizes are as large as 45 students, a good portion of whom must share desk-space)

[2] As a point of veracity, it is necessary to share that moments before striking off onto this newly discovered path we were chanced upon by an old man who insisted that only the path on which we had arrived could provide a route back.  I found this advice strongly, strongly compelling, but Boots was excited about his ‘shortcut’ and I am not particular by nature.  We stomped off into the tall grass.