The Way It All Goes Round

             I sat down to write this blog at about 8:30pm. Computer nights are luxury nights in the village. I usually buy a soda, cook something on which I can pour my precious ketchup, and carve out a tiny corner of America. That night I was planning on watching The Untouchables, which I had never seen, and then writing this blog afterwards. I got exactly 17 minutes into the movie (right when Sean Connery makes his appearance…has any other actor played so many nationalities without switching accents?), when the phone rang. It only rang once, which means that the person in the village who was calling me either A. had no money on his/her phone (we do pre-paid voucher here) or B. just wanted me to pay for the phone call. I’m guessing B, but we’ll keep that to ourselves. I picked up the phone, knowing that there are about 3 people in the village who warrant a call-back at my expense after 8pm. The name that came up, sadly, was one of them. My dear friend Mama Beni, who was so instrumental in making our pig project happen. What is she calling me about? As fate should have it, she’s calling about the pig.

            He has escaped.

            There was a time when the starlit adventure that I am about to embark on would have scared me, excited me, made me question my return. Now...now I just wish it was warmer. It’s about 20 Fahrenheit out, and it is windy. I throw on 3 layers up top, wool socks, and my warm red cap. I know that we are going to exhaust ourselves chasing a pig through a corn field. We are either going to A. get him back in his pen, B. lose him in the dark and wait for him to return, or C. watch him get hit by a car and eat porkchops tomorrow. Only a question of how long it will take, and how ridiculous it will get. To keep matters short: it took an hour, got pretty ridiculous, and the outcome was A. So that’s good.

            There was a time when I would stop to ponder in the middle of the darkened cornfield, or reflect while I was sprinting dead-out down the road after the swine: how is it that I have arrived here? What twists and turns have me chasing this boar (whose name is Wilbur) through the night? But after the first year you stop asking these questions...because the answer, of course, is: “you asked to be here.” Now my focus is on the pig. How quickly can we get him back in there? How soon can I get back to Eliot Ness and Capone? How will I catch this pig? He is agile, he is spry. I must think like the pig. I must become the pig (there are those who would claim I did this long ago). Eventually a passing guy helps corner him, grab a leg, fasten a rope, and lift His Porkiness into his pen. All in the line of duty. What is a quiet evening without a little pig-wrangling? Too quiet, that’s what. On to the blog that I originally planned on writing.

            A few words about the mazingira (environment) in which I live. It is a windy village, with gentle, undulating hills. This time of year it is especially windy, and the corn and grasses, which have long since dried out to a light blond, wave and slow and stop and blow, like a tide of gold coming and going. There are many, many houses here. A lot of them are newer, built with wood-fired bricks, tin roofs, and if life has been good, cement walls. Those are all lived in, or will be soon (some are built by villagers who live in town, as pseudo-retirement homes). Then there are huts built with hard mud walls and thatch roofs, which seem to grow out of the ground like someone planted little house seeds. These have been around forever (very few of the younger generations know how to make them anymore), and if you go inside, the walls and thatch roofs are a shiny, cancerous black, a testament to years of indoor wood fires. Scattered amid these brick and mud houses are decaying wrecks of abandoned mud houses, some very long in the decaying. The old mud huts fade slowly, their walls returning unto dust, as slow as death and as sure as taxes.

            Connecting all these houses is a network of roads, paths, trails, and lines of trampled grass which would seem to indicate that someone, sometime, had thought this was the right way to go to...somewhere. I walk these paths every day. Some are big enough for a car to pass, some are paths for grazing cows, most can accommodate a bicycle or two, and some are so thin you can’t fit both your feet in them side by side. Many cross streams: a few with bridges, a couple with a useful jumping stone, and most requiring the removal of footwear. I’ve seen paths that lead nowhere, that vanish behind a tree or down a rabbit hole. I have walked on paths that twist and turn in the middle of an open field, avoiding something long since vanished. I wonder who made them: who was the first person to go from point A to point B? Do they know why the paths turn? Were there bees right here, or a curmudgeonly snake over there? I know dozens of paths in my village, maybe even a few hundred. Yet my friends here know them all. Each and every one. They know the paths like they know the people; they grew up with them, they’ve seen them age. They connect us all; they keep us sane. The paths have become old friends of mine. I care less where they lead than I once did. Now I remember when I met them, I remember all the sunsets I’ve seen on them, all the jokes I’ve told and laughed at on them. I don’t mind so much where they go, I’m just glad that they are still going. And from time to time I think about how much I’ll miss them.

            It’s the same with the trees. There are all manner of trees in my village: ones that belong, whose seeds and genes are as much a part of this place as the dirt, and ones that were brought here, like pine, bamboo, and eucalyptus. The eucalyptus are my favorite. Oh, don’t get me wrong. The damn things are unkillable, like vampires. But they’re pretty vampires. They grow straight and tall, towering above the local trees which are twisted, and short, growing horizontally and in spirals. The eucalyptus have long, dark green leaves that are shaped like scimitars. If you crack the leaves open, they smell like clean windows and freshly washed floors. But my favorite part is that if you stand by a tall eucalyptus tree when a strong wind blows, which it very often does, it sounds like you’re standing by the dunes, with the ocean just over the horizon. I close my eyes and I’m back at the beach.

            The next part might sound weird. Or perhaps...just perhaps...it actually is weird, and to me it sounds normal. But like the paths, I’ve come to like a few trees more than others. They have shapes, they have personalities. Do some of them have names? I cannot tell a lie (sure I can, but I’m not). There’s the Sailboat Tree, a eucalyptus which stands outside my house, slanted and sailing south like a clipper, pointing me home (and which, every time I walk uphill to my house, I wonder...if it fell over, would it hit my house, or fall just short into the yard?) Then there is the Engagement Tree. You’ve heard of that one, I believe. There is also the Lollipop Tree, a personal favorite. From almost anywhere in my village I can turn and find The Lollipop Tree. It stands by itself atop a very tall, very long hill. The top of the hill, and therefore the tree, is exactly 5 kilometers from my house, so I often run to it, then back. The hill is almost a kilometer long, and it’s steep, and it’s grueling. But waiting for me at the top, every time, is an old leafy friend. Each time I make it up alive, I say a little thanks to The Lollipop Tree. Last, but not least, there is The Swinging Tree. It stood by the main dirt road connecting my village to other villages further inland, not far from the soccer field. It is aged, and it is huge, with limbs so old and tired that they’ve curved back towards earth. One evening I was walking down to the soccer field, and saw a little girl holding a bent-back branch. She suddenly ran forward and threw herself into the air, and swung up and down and up and down from the tree, giggling like crazy. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen anything that simple and beautiful.

            Here’s the problem when you fall in love with trees that are planted for timber: they get cut down. A few months ago they re-graded the dirt road running by the Swinging Tree. I took a walk down that evening...and the tree was gone. I shouldn’t have been upset; that’s what the tree was planted for, to be cut down. I shouldn’t have been upset, and yet there I was, like I’d just lost a friend. But, as I said, eucalyptus trees are vampires. So sure as the sun comes up in the east, next fall, once the rains come, that dead, felled stump will throw up another shooter. In ten or twenty years, that little girl’s daughter will have her very own tree to swing on. And then it will be cut down again...and that’s the way it all goes round, I guess.

            Those are the things that I met here. But there are also the things that I brought here with me, or were sent by loved ones, or that I bought here. And sometimes I stop and look at them, and think about the paths they’ve traveled, and the ways that they have become important to me.

            My computer: bought in the West Village in 2008, on a sunny day with me and my mother. It’s served me well; had a bunch of broken thoughts punched into it and never laughed at any of them. It’s been my own private movie theater, my jukebox, and a couple of blessed nights, my way of seeing all your faces. Skype is a hell of a thing.

            My coffee: grown in Kenya, bought in America...and shipped right back to East Africa. What kind of story would it tell?

            There’s the pullover I’m wearing now, which I got for Christmas over ten years ago from my aunt and uncle and cousins. I remember putting it on in their house in New Jersey. It’s kept me warm for so long and in so many apartments, on so many different nights, and now in a couple different continents. Could they have known when they got it how long it would last, how warm it would keep me?

            My pots: bought in nearby Makambako for a dollar or two a piece, that have been the instruments of failure and success, that have seen me burn rice and bake delicious cornbread (sorry for the immodesty...but I make a mean cornbread). They are the tools of that wonderful alchemy that I’ve discovered here. People call it cooking.

            My leatherman: weighing down my right pocket every day next to my inhaler and my keys. I’ve used it to butcher goat meat, peel a few hundred oranges, open a countless number of sodas (by far its most common use), fix a number of village wells, and, oh yeah, carve an engagement ring.

            My iPod, the bearer of news and music and calm, which comes via my sister. It was given to her in Christmas of 2004, and still works beautifully to this day. It also has the added blessing of her name engraved on the back, reminding me daily that my past life wasn’t something I made up, it was real.

            My potato peeler, bought by my beautiful fiancee, which has prepared more potatoes, carrots, and ginger than I would have thought possible, and has sliced some skin off of most of fingers at some point or another.

This is the world I live in, and these are the things I carry. For whatever drama I occasionally detail, for all the pig-wrangling and fire-fighting, it’s mostly pretty quiet. I don’t dodge bullets and I don’t save lives. I live here, amidst and among some pretty awesome characters. It’s beautiful, and it’s simple, and sometimes, when I stand atop a tall hill while the sun is beginning to set, I can see forever.