Travelogue 225 – April 20
Escape, Part Two

Yet more about my Somali lifetime:
1.15 I’ve moved from the sterile Village, where the reptilian, two-toed ostrich struts in the yard and stares at me with its demented Daisy Duck eyes; I’ve moved downtown into Abdurashid’s hotel, the Muna Hotel. I have three beds for about half the price of the Village. The only drawback is the tight little alleyway behind my room where all the children of the neighbourhood gather for screaming relays in the evening.

The gunfire has diminished. The street battles between police and the kidnapping clans had revived by the time we returned to town, but now it’s quiet. Our guards are bored. They sip tea in the lobby watching Somali music videos on the high TV: self-conscious guys with mikes in front of patriotic slide shows.

The hotel isn’t far from the sea. One day we drive the several blocks, supplied with plenty of guns. Arriving at the city’s beach, I discover that the Somalis are subject to the same bizarre logic that drives Ethiopes out of the beautiful mountains and into the drab plain below. Who resides on this choice real estate beside the sea? Refugees in their makeshift tents. In the eyes of pastoral Somalis, dependent for millennia on their herds and the scrub grass of the interior, the seaside is fundamentally uninteresting. Item: the apathy about pirates and foreign fleets stealing millions of profit along their coastline.

In the early evening we sit outside in a pleasant alcove on the second floor, just high enough to see the horizon of the sea. We enjoy a gentle breeze and the sunset colors while the Somalis indulge in their favourite activity, talk. There is never a break in the chatter, even as the soft night becomes deep, black, and quiet as the sea.

We have a companion in the chatter and in the evening breezes. That’s lovely Hodan from Kenya. She’s in Bosaso working a stint with the UNHCR here. She’s more soft-spoken than the Somali-born folk. I’m tutored in the bias against Kenyan Somalis. They’re seen as stuck up. They’re seen as having given up on their heritage and values. Indeed, the ones I’ve met are mellow and relatively sophisticated. They have Christian friends in Nairobi and confess to going out without covering their hair!

Well it is that I’m comfortable in the Muna Hotel because I’m there for a number of days while the airline roulette wheel spins and spins. With every passing day, Abdurashid looks more tired. He begins to despise Bosaso. ‘They’re different, the people here. I don’t know.’ He shakes his head mournfully.

I’m seriously considering the goat boat to Yemen, shivering on an open deck for 24 hours, when the moment arrives: escape. It begins like one of our routine trips to the airport, but when it ends I’m dazed at tens of thousands of feet above the craggy coastal landscape of Somalia. Escape!

It seems that the usual ch’at plane has broken down. They’re bringing in another plane for the rest of the week while the original gets fixed. This substitute has seats and can be classified by the powers that may or may not be as a passenger flight.

I’m rushed into a tiny office. Jama sits behind a desk, and I sit squeezed among five fat guys from Khyrgistan. Jama launches into a florid speech and introduction, consoling the ch’at plane’s crew for their misfortune and expressing confidence that they’ll fix the plane in no time. Introducing me is the occasion of more tsk-tsking about Americans, a cross for all other nations to bear, our blindness, our blunders, this being a perfect case in point, though heart of gold I may house in my wretched breast, coming all this way to help his people, and so on. The Khyrgistanis sit stony-faced.

With Jama’s blessing, we are all crammed into a van and rushed out to the airstrip, where I stand in the sun while the crew tinkers around the wounded plane. They are men of few words, though nice enough. They’re Khyrgistani by post-Soviet nationality, but Russian by blood and language. I find out a little of their story from the youngest of them, who speaks English. They man this flight daily for seven months at a stretch and then go home for four. He smokes a cigarette and stares wearily out into the dry brown distances.

About an hour later, I discern salvation’s buzz in the sky. Among rippling waves of overheated air above the desert ridges, there it is, the sweet little dragonfly that will take me away. It lands among plumes of dust. While the ch’at is unloaded, I’m discreetly guided in through a back door. The ancient chairs are loaded up with bags of Ethiopian narcotics. Some is left onboard for our stop in Somaliland.

The crew climbs in, settles into various open seats around the plane. Several green-toothed old Somalis sit up front and commence the shouting banter that they will maintain for the whole journey. Everyone lights up cigarettes. I can report that cigarettes in ancient prop planes that sway like a dhow at sea and offer no barf bags are a true test of character. I passed, but not without some cold sweats.

Below, the land is brown and dry and carved with severe gullies severely dry except for a few short and rash seasons of the year. For a while, we’re in sight of the bright sea stretching into dreamy hazes, but eventually the coastline veers away from us. I’m sad to see it go.

There’s one stop along the way, Endayo in Somaliland. From the air, you see the oasis of iron roofs among angry rock. Cruising in for a landing, we see the SUVs and their trails of dust as they race us to the airport. We touch down abruptly on the rocky airstrip. The young Khyrgistani suggests dryly that I stay inside the plane, and I don’t argue. The mad ritual of unloading breaks upon us like a storm. The Russians stand outside smoking, quietly and utterly indifferent.

Travelogue 224 – April 13
Escape, Part One

And more of the Somali saga:
1.14 Every day we drive to the Bosaso airport, hoping I will board a plane. The airline that sold me a round-trip ticket in Djibouti has quietly discontinued its flights to Bosaso. Fortunately, Abdurashid has had a little chat with the man who runs the airline’s office (an active little office for one with zero services) and extracted a promise to refund the ticket. It’s a typical Somali encounter. We come to a sudden halt and Abdurashid jumps out of the car. His friend follows. They’ve spotted the man in question at a café. The discussion appears like any other: lots of smiles, hand on interlocutor’s elbow. But I know how direct these conversations can be. Ten minutes later, we’re on our way again.

I should add something about driving in Somalia. Steering wheels may come on either side. Most often they appear on the right. Since general practice on the road is driving on the right side, Somalia becomes the only country I know of where drivers are positioned by the road’s edge, away from oncoming traffic. It’s odd. The reason seems to be a Japanese marketing policy, the discontinuation of right-side models and dumping them cheap in the land without regulation.

Another important encounter is arranged. His name is Jama. He’s a large man, and the first time I see him he’s wearing a purple suit with broad, square shoulders. He towers over the minions on all sides as he strolls down the street. An open-back jeep creeps along behind him, two men manning the machine gun installed there.

They say Jama will run for president of Puntland next year. He has the physique and the aura for it. It’s hard to say whether his withering sarcasm will be a help or a hindrance in Somalia. I’m introduced a few times. The first time he has to cut our discussion short because he has a bad tummy. The second time he’s himself again, indulging in a long eulogy to his guest, delivered with a smirk and sketched out in rambling and satirically hyperbolic periods. Westerners are clearly the favourite objects for his double-edged accolades. In recommending me to the mercies of some Europeans who are travelling out of Somalia, he describes me in very sympathetic terms, while reminding his audience in loving embellishments how terribly greedy, sloppy, and inept Americans are.

In some undefined way, Jama has sway over airport authorities and airline representatives. He promises us to help. But even Jama has little power over the last minute bump once the crowd gathers for the flight, when family and friends of the rich and powerful show up for emergency seating. I’m left stranded a few times.

But it’s by virtue of these cold abandonments that I’m witness to the wild ritual of the daily ch’at delivery. Somalis will tell you that, in a manner very telling about their national character, there are three things you can always count on in Somalia: mobile service, internet service, and the daily delivery of ch’at, that universally beloved narcotic of the Horn of Africa.

Every day, as near clockwork as anything human in this desert, the little prop plane appears like a buzzing fly in the great blue firmament. It bobs above the western ridge beyond the airport like a spider on a heavenly thread. It arrives, kicking up dust along the earthen landing strip. Before the props have stilled, the crazed feeding begins.

About half a dozen beat trucks and vans have been held back by airport police. Now they roar into action, spreading dust and screeching to a halt at the back end of the plane, as a cargo door is lowered down. The bags are thrown down and shouting men swarm, cramming their vehicles full. Within ten minutes the first trucks are full and they scream into drive again, describing skidding turns in the dust while men sway precariously in the back on high piles of ch’at bags. Within the hour, delivery boys in white station wagons will be roaring around town with impunity.

It’s on one of these airport runs, as the dust settles from ch’at trucks that I meet the finance minister of Puntland. He’s caught a ride on the ch’at flight. Abdurashid pushes us to the fore of a small crowd greeting him. The minister seems a sophisticated man. He’s dressed well, and has a soft voice and a pleasant accent. I shake his hand as Abdurashid explains who I am. A TV cameraman records the event. Ch’at trucks rumble past. The moment passes in its own cloud of pollution, and we’re on our way back to the hotel.

Travelogue 223 – April 4
They the People

Continuing the Somali saga:
So what is it about Americans and ‘nation-building’? We are fascinated by it, like baby nation-moths to history’s flame. I’m no exception. I’m intrigued by the spectacle of an ancient land struggling to start over as one of the world’s newest states. The current administration in Puntland is only the second.

(May I insert a riddle here? How can a state named ‘Puntland’ exist among people who can’t pronounce the ‘P’ sound? It doesn’t exist in the Somali language. Answer: you just say ‘Buntland’.)

Puntland leaders only gave up on Somalia about ten years ago, after seven years of civil war. It’s been to this little state’s benefit, boosting the population of its cities, boosting trade through its ports and towns, encouraging self-sufficiency and the development of independent services. But still they say they would like to rejoin a federal Somali state whenever that happens.

The government of Puntland looks like any other compound on the street. Maybe it’s a bit larger, but unremarkable. Inside, there are three buildings around a central courtyard. Abdurashid leads me among the suits and the armed guards into the building on the left.

The vice-president of Puntland is an ageing fellow of wide girth. He’s got a few silver teeth in his broad smile. He has a befuddled air about him, but is alert enough once we’ve introduced ourselves. He’s familiar with my troubles in Bosaso, and asks about them. He reassures me. We talk about schools, and he’s welcoming.

There are plenty of marks of deference when you enter a Somali official’s office, but it doesn’t take long before the atmosphere is very casual. Abdurashid exchanges joking remarks with the vice-president, as he does with each of the several ministers we meet with afterward. It seems there’s been a recent re-shuffle, and everyone is new to his post. But the chief minister is friendly and brisk and bright. The information minister is ironic. They’re all surprisingly accessible.

Everything corresponds well to the much-repeated conventional wisdom about Somalis. ‘We’re an oral culture,’ they’ll tell you. Indeed, everything seems to proceed through conversation. After a while, you sense the hum of these conversations through the walls and earth and air, like the blood stream of the society. In office or café, the tone is much the same: informal, direct, and unconcealing. It’s the business of the nation.

Maybe the deep roots of the oral culture in Somalia aren’t too mysterious. It’s only since 1972 that the present writing system had been in use. Over the centuries, Somalis have used Arabic script and various invented alphabets, until this system based on the Latin alphabet was adopted.

And so my day goes, meeting after meeting. After a few days, I’ve met most of the high officials of the government and managers in a variety of UN agencies and large NGOs. But I don’t meet the president of Puntland until I’m back in Bosaso, awaiting my flight out.

I finally talk Abdurashid and friends into taking me to the beach. We go to the eastern edge of town, where the bay curves off north, toward some hazy, jagged ridges that reach to the sea. Our men with guns behind us, we take off our sandals and wade through the shallow waves, sinking into the wet and packed sand, where telltale bubbles indicate the location of hundreds of crabs in spiralling shells. The water is a spectrum of radiant blues, a soft and warm aquamarine close to the shore.

There’s one large compound that stands alone in the desert not far from this long, white beach. It’s not gaudy or opulent, but it denotes some wealth. Abdurashid decides to stop by spontaneously. We drive right in, after the casual conference with guards. Along one wall inside are parked a line of jeeps with big guns. Uniforms and AK-47s are everywhere.

We stroll right into the house, exchanging friendly words with guards along the way. A secretary meets us on the stairway. We’re led into a large salon, where muted images of extreme sports flash across the screen of a large TV. The room is furnished in an Arab-like style, with low couches and pillows along every wall. The tables are low. The carpet is thick.

In comes the president. He’s a compact man, also clearly of advanced age, though his hair is black. It’s the weekend, and the president is in short sleeves. A heavy gold watch hangs from his wrist. He scolds Abdurashid for arriving without an appointment. Abdurashid laughs that off. The president also scolds him for how he handled my arrival; my story has traveled. Abdurashid waves that off.

We discuss the schools; we discuss travel problems. The president shares news of current negotiations with airlines to bring in more traffic. The president is a friendly man in a vague way. He’s watching the TV as he speaks. We have tea together. I’m self-conscious of my sandy flip-flops and my jeans that are wet at the bottom. But it’s a pleasant visit. We all shake hands amicably, sharing promises of great things to come, and our crew drives out of the compound under the vigil of dozens of guns.

Travelogue 222 – March 27
Garowe

Shall I resume the Somalia narrative, now that I’m safely ensconced in (blissfully) uneventful Bath?

1.7 I’m on the road south, from Bosaso to Garowe. Garowe is the capital of Puntland, that large chunk of real estate that comprises the middle section of old Somalia proper. Once you’re over the coastal range of salty hills, it’s mostly flat, scrubby desert for the five-hour drive.

Somalia’s empty. There’s not village after village, peasants along the highway, like in Ethiopia. The population of all Somalia is said to be about eight million. Next door, it’s topping seventy million.

I learn about camels on this trip. I learn that they can’t see cars. That’s the lore here. When approaching a herd that are close to the road, drivers roll down their windows and wave. Indeed, it seems as though the animals only start at the human motion.

We have a lively discussion about how many camels constitute a proper dowry. Fosio, wife of a well-to-do friend of Abdurashid’s, insists that it’s at least one hundred. Now, according to estimates of the cost per camel, that runs into the tens of thousands of dollars. Abdurashid says it’s ten to fifteen. They agree that if your bride-to-be loves you, there’s at least some room for negotiation.

There are check-points along the way. The second car in our convoy, the one with the guns and the guy in uniform, races ahead as we approach check-points. Local guards with guns peer in. They release the chain that blocks the road, or move aside the barrels.

One gets used to guns, especially the ubiquitous little AK-47s. They’re everywhere. I can’t go out without being attended by guys with guns. There are bullets in the car’s ashtray. One ride stands out in my memory: leaning away from the guard beside me in the backseat, gauging the trajectory of any accidental bullet from the barrel of the gun he handles carelessly in his lap. He slides it between his knees and the gun leans so that the barrel’s eye stares at me for much of the journey.

Garowe is a town of fifty thousand or so, sprawling liberally along the highway. The newer and nicer part of town anchors the southern end of town. This is where government offices are, as well as the college, the teacher’s college, and Abdurashid’s new public library.

It’s in the outskirts of these precincts, among the stone markers of land claimants like the ones I saw in Bosaso, that we find the first encampments of IDPs (internally displaced persons). Sixteen families have been living on this plot of land for two years now. They are victims of drought and flash floods and the tsunami of ‘06. Each family is living in its agal, which is the name of the traditional traveling tent for Somali nomads.

These agals don’t appear terribly traditional. They are rounded huts pieced together from bits of just about every fabric and material you can find along the roadside, from burlap to plastic bags, from cardboard to ragged blankets. These huts are closely packed in a tiny village, where children of all ages run in the dust unattended.

At our approach, mothers appear, nursing babies and shouting at the ones who run around. Everyone gathers to see me, shyly, uncertainly. Abdurashid intitiates a discussion about school. Sure, they say, they would like their kids in school. But first, they would like a house. Some two hundred IDP families have already been moved into a series of concrete flats nearby, built by UN Habitat. But the Japanese money behind the project ran out – even before the wells were dug or electricity arranged, before the school that was planned could be opened. No one is sure when construction will begin on new housing.

I play with the children while I listen. They’re very curious, but a little frightened. They have sand on their faces and their hands. Snot trails glisten on their upper lips. They’re children, and their eyes are bright. We gather them for photos, and most don’t smile. They stare mutely at the camera.

Travelogue 221 – March 23
Gobame

It seems like the exodus begins here, like the far point on an elastic tether that will bounce back to cozy Addis for a moment and then fling me out of of the country. It’s been about ten days, but it’s a moment secure in my memory: open land and dust, a crowd of squinty-eyed farmers standing around me, the school room made of sticks.

This is Gobame, a village outside Bahir Dar in the north of Ethiopia. It’s my last stop on a quick trip north to clinch this school deal. Only the previous day, we have consulted with the sultans of education in Bahir Dar, which is the regional capital. In a refreshing twist, they are universally cooperative. Land? We’ll have it tomorrow.

The road to Gobame diverges from the western road to the airport, which is convenient because I’ve got two hours for a site visit before my flight to Addis. We stop to consult with lonely soldiers in a box next to a long stretch of barbed wire. It seems we’ll be passing a military camp – bright silver roofs of new metal and long halls under a hill.

The road is long and laid with stones like breakers in a stormy sea. It’s dusty, so that we have to ride behind closed windows in suffocating heat. Sweat beads on the necks in the front seat, our driver’s and the kebele official’s.

We come across the village. It spread among fields into clusters of huts. We keep going. On a rise ahead, next to a well-ploughed field, there stands the existing schoolhouse. It’s two rooms made of sticks, so lightly bound that you can see through them. The seats are benches made of mud. There are about twenty children of varying ages and two teachers in the traditional white coats.

The community has been warned of our visit. There is a collection of dads outside, standing docilely. The kebele contact gives me a little tour; I pull out the camera. This site is the first choice among two possibilities. It seems like a good plot of land to me. They say we’ll have the adjacent farmland for cultivation in order to help fund the school. It looks out over yellow grasses and sparse trees, as far as the gentle hills surrounding.

We pile back into the car to drive to the second site. A few dads push their way into the back seat with me. The rest set off to the walk. This bit of land is in a flatter locale, a few kilometers away. It’s further from any cluster of huts. It’s dotted by piles of rock that the dads have carried here in anticipation of school construction.

The dads arrive together, walking along the road, sticks over their shoulders with both hands draped over them. They gather around us in a large, staring group. They’re an intense bunch, with wizened faces, piercing eyes, scarves wound round their heads as protection from the sun. They’re almost all in shorts and sandals, gabis or blankets draped over the shoulders. Shepherd boys gather underfoot.

The discussion begins. They surround us in a dense circle and shout. This is the debate about which site. Apparently, the majority opinion is for site number two here, but a few have some loud dissensions to voice. Number two is a foregone conclusion, as I find out, since it’s the closer one to sources of electricity and water. The kebele official does a masterful job at directing and then wrapping up the debate.

We take our leave with little time to spare until check-in at the airport. I feel a pang of regret at leaving them so quickly. The three of us bounce along the old road again, stifling in heat and dust.

When one of my sojourns in this country is nearing completion, it always feels like this, a tumble of days down a narrowing chute, toward interminable silence in overlit airports.

I’m back in Bole, strolling with Menna underneath the green eyes of our glib Savior, Medhane Alem, strolling along with ice cream from Bruno’s. Beggar children with huge smiles run toward us. They kiss Menna’s hand.

I’m in Bath. It’s snowing in one quick flurry of hard pellets. I’m so tired I’m dizzy. I look at the green fields above town and time is slipping. Was I wondering something? It was either: how long have those grasses shone so brightly, or how long have I been yearning for them?

Travelogue 220 – March 16
Under the Wings of Notre Dame

I’ve moved back to Bole temporarily. You officianados of everything Ethiopian recall that Bole is the rich district of Addis out by the international airport.

I happily set aside the haunted house I’ve inhabited for a year and a quarter. It’s haunted by the neighborhood: by the holy rollers next door, by the miraculous baby that cries 24 hours a day, by the ghoul with the hammer behind my house, by the ghost cats that dash across the iron roof all night, by the specter Bogale who rises from the earth and commands conversation, by the grubby, small sprites that play ball against my wall, by the crone who sets stinky fires next to bedroom, moaning for the thane of Cawdor.

And I move back to Bole. I’m staying in the back rooms of Sophie’s friend Tirsit. She just bought this little house in a tony new neighborhood. We live practically in the shadow of the still-new cathedral of Medhane Alem, three high green domes above tan walls that give the unfortunate impression of a California mall, three green domes over a triangle of rich real estate, three domes one can see from almost anywhere in the city. When I first arrived in Ethiopia, this church was under construction. It was one of my first sights in Ethiopia. I remember clearly it being pointed out to me on the drive from the airport. This Bel Air to-be was all dust.

They’ll tell you this is the biggest Orthodox church in Africa: Medhane Alem, Savior of the World, a reference to our man on the cross, of course, though I like to think of the church as Notre Dame. Maybe it’s a certain medieval flavor the church lends – rather incongruously – to the chic blocks that have sprung up around it. There’s something that conjures up Hugo’s Paris cathedral for me, hunchback at the bells.

Though the chic neighborhoods are close, few seem to want to face the church. There are a few exceptions. One of which is the high-rise that hosts the new, American-style movie theater that has proven to be a God-send for me in these dark, sickly times. Movies in English have become nearly extinct in Addis lately. Another exception is the Gibson Academy, a school for kids from the most uppity of upper-crust families, no matter how much it looks like an elaborate LA diner behind high walls.

And there’s the Swiss Cafe, an expensive little hangout on the corner, with outside seating featuring a view of BMW and Mercedes headlights, and beyond those a choice of either the cathedral walls or the walls of posh new housing developments. Inside there’s ... wireless! If only I had a card in my old Powerbook. There’s a steady stream of beautiful people, powerful people, and loud people. There are some nice cakes and nice chairs. You might be lucky enough to be regaled by storms of Chinese conversation. And all day, images from the National Geographic channel dance muted on the wide-screen TV in the corner.

Otherwise, the church is something of an architectural leper, faced by stalls of religious items or walls of happier complexes. The church is semi-permanent home to hundreds of beggars. Their encampments surround the perimeter. At night, the lean-tos and bags and bare mats are abuzz with activity and dialogue. Bonfires are lit here and there. Zombies flit among the shadows. A faranji’s skin crawls walking by this house of God at night.

But that was always a part of the beauty of Notre Dame, I suppose, the fusion of ugliness and mercy, blessings and bad fortune, mud and mayhem underneath the soaring and enduring Gothic towers – or in this case, the Spanish mission, Olive Garden style towers of our Lord.

Travelogue 219 – March 8
For Whom the Bell Tolls

Lest we range too far from home, I had better interrupt the fun and games in Somalia to report on the month in Ethiopia.

While I’ve been busy reporting about the geographic neighbors, we’ve missed the entire month of Ethiopian January, which stretches in long, noisy angst from Western mid-January to mid-February. If only I had missed it myself. I think I would rather dodge bullets in Somalia.

Ethiopian January has a long, miserable tradition as the month of weddings. It’s one of the longest stretches of both good weather and fast-free weekends before Lent comes along. So off we go, in the thousands, to wed, eat, dance, and queue up in our cars behind the video guy sitting in the back of his pickup.

It so happens that there’s a favorite wedding park just down the road from me. This means that every weekend the street down to Piassa is choked with cars festooned with ribbons and honking uproariously.

It just so happens that several of my closest neighbors have marriageable commodities this year. So not once but twice the big top canvas goes up in the street outside my wall, furnished with the flashy, rented PA system. Wedding parties go all night. In pauses between the music, everyone claps and chants in an endearing tradition of advanced social brain damage. And lest you think conjugal unions are not made enough of in this part of the world, I should note that the wedding night is not the only party. There’s also three days later at the bride’s family’s house – an occasion called ‘Mels’, which by an odd twist can mean ‘Answer’ or ‘Change’, as in ‘keep the ...’ – and then a week later at the groom’s family’s house. I can’t remember what that party’s called. Probably the equivalent of ‘Boxing Day’.

What makes Ethiopian January stink even higher of new beginnings is the odd seasonal ambition that drives weary husbands onto their iron roofs for repairs. It must be something in the wedding tajj, or honey mead. Or maybe it’s a way for men to escape the hormonal excesses of women in wedding fever. The hammers come out. It may not occur to those who have never lived under corrugated iron, but this is not the quietest medium for work. Even walking across it makes that theatrical crackling noise that worms its way under human skin like the screech of fingernails across a chalkboard.

Three times I wave the white flag and retreat to a hotel. It’s a fun break spending a day at the Taitu, Addis Ababa’s oldest hotel, hanging out with dozens of faranjis, watching BBC in the lobby. But it’s not the most restful holiday. The Taitu is a big wooden box made of rows of echoing wooden rooms. The mattresses sag and the pillows are so hard your skulls rolls down them like bowling balls down Pike’s Peak.

In short, by the end of this festive month, I’m a wreck. When I head up to the mountains early one Sunday morning with Ijigu and Menna and Pomi to start my training for the Tesfa Mountain 5K, my body breaks. By the end of the day, I’m gathering symptoms like the neighborhood collects manic, flushed brides, and by nightfall I’m laid out flat. I still haven’t recovered. In fact, the ultimate white flag has been flown, and I’ll be retreating in several weeks to the airport and from there, far away, to lands where weddings peter out in quick and honest boredom, where doctors bore us with predictable cures.

You may ask what illness has laid me so low. That’s the 64 thousand-birr question. I must have spent nearly that amount trying to find out. I saw about five doctors, and they all had their own diagnoses and prescriptions. My arms and behind are bruised and scarred with the tests and shots administered at each place. It’s all a blur now, my extremely sweet and dedicated staff hauling me around from clinic to clinic. I waited on bench after bench in all sorts of anterooms, time a slow, clicking blur. Each doctor asks the same questions and manifests the same anxiety in his eye. Is it malaria? Is it typhoid? Is it an infection, in the lungs or in the intestine? I have a variety of answers to choose from, all delivered with certainty. When we see that there’s a consensus about several meds despite the varying diagnoses, we jump. They seem to have some effect. The fevers break. I’m exhausted, but I’m feeling human again.

In a couple weeks, I’ll be in the US, sitting in waiting rooms again, reading People magazine, wondering in the back of my mind how to make the most of my three minutes with a distracted professional. I can’t say my hopes are riding high for my chances in the US health care system, but it’s something to do. Maybe some brazen virus or worm will stand up and catch the eye of even the most blase doctor.

Travelogue 218 – February 28
Seaside Madness

I can’t say I’ve ever seen much of the town of Bosaso: glimpses from squad cars and the sheltered tourism of a few days, surrounded by guns and hidden behind polaroid windows. But I’ll try my hand at a patchy and prejudicial portrait.

Discounting the mad fragments of city life spied from the inside of a squad car, my first calm vision of the town is from the roof of the International Village. This hotel, this haven of silence, is a series of white villas set around a broad concrete expanse dotted with spots of green: magnolia, oleander and palm, ferns and frankincense. To complement the exoticism of the human menagerie, white and Arab and black, that would normally populate these quarters, there are in residence some odd animals. There’s a ragged old ostrich and three or four lovely, delicate little desert deer of some variety with straight, corkscrewed horns. I have them nearly to myself, it still being too close to the holidays, and because of news of the kidnappings.

From the top of the villa that hosts my room, I can look out over the town and to the Gulf of Aden. The sea is sharp blue. The minarets are white witch’s hats. The dense homes and shops are colorful in a way that makes me think of the Mediterranean. Though the roofs are iron, they’re painted soft blue, green and red, like colors in children’s chalk. The sturdy walls are white and yellow and pink. Facing west, you look toward one of the formidable, tawny ridges that encircle the town, this one marching right to the sea. Out there among the scrub is the dinky airport. In the foreground are soccer fields where kids raise dust all afternoon. Turning away from the sea, you see the outskirts of town and empty desert out to the high hills beyond.

That afternoon and evening, we hear gunshots near and far. The police have found and besieged the kidnappers and the clans protecting them. I sit on the patio with a book in my lap, and I listen. It’s an odd feeling. The next morning, I hear that three bad guys have died.

Abdurashid arrives that evening. Everything seems copasetic. No more interrogations. He and his group go to sleep at a cheaper hotel. In the morning, we do some sightseeing. We go to the port. It’s a nice contrast to the Djibouti port, being just a curling finger of concrete and buttressing stones, reaching into the shallow bay to the abrupt point at which war began and funds ran out. Getting into the port area is a matter of chatting up the guards, a pleasant reflection of how everything gets done in Somalia. With so much to fear, there’s little fear. Everyone is accessible.

At dock are a fabulous collection of small ships that ply the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden, many of them wooden and looking vaguely medieval. The only metal ship in the harbor looks to be from Egypt. From every long and shallow window protrudes long tawny muzzles and the sleepy eyes of Somali camels. The bustle at the docks is everything I missed in modern Djibouti. Here and there are a few small cranes, but most work is strong hands and bent backs. Trucks are rumbling in and out, all of them painted with sunset scenes and palm trees and stings of nonsense words. No one has a second thought for the white guy.

From the port, exit from town is a straight shot south, down the only paved road in town. Straight the shot may be, but choked with intense business. If you think life stops when governance stops, check out the markets of Bosaso: miles of stalls, crammed streets, and the din of happy commerce. And strangely, the guns dwindle here. One of the more remarkable sights will be the money merchants, men at stalls with boxes, bags and chests full of dollars and Somali shillings. That so much storage space is needed for shillings isn’t surprising. It takes a fistful to buy a cup of coffee. And you’ll notice that all these clean and crisp bills were printed in 1991 ...! No, it’s not the boxes and boxes that will surprise you, but the absolute lack of security. Not a gun in sight around these guys. This can stand as our parable about mysterious modern Somalia. The clans would not allow tampering with the money-changers.

Another fun item that will strike you as you crawl along the main avenue is the state of street art. Many shops have rather elaborate paintings on their walls, describing their wares, colorful representations of car parts, food items, cosmetics. And each little mural is accompanied by a proud signature and phone number. It makes perfect sense, of course, in a country where literacy is somewhere around 35%. It makes for a festive street, especially combined with the piratical art on all the trucks. It occurs to me that this might be the training of a few medieval European artists. It’s a valuable service. It’s profit and prestige for the wealthier shop owners.

Outside town, beyond the land claims in the form of rectangular plots surrounded by stones, marked off by the local bourgeoisie, the desert begins. We head toward the high, barren ridges.

Travelogue 217 – February 20
We’re the Same

1.5 I’m driven to the western precincts of Bosaso, where streets wander among random compounds, the walls and gates of which are painted colorfully. One such gate is guarded by men in uniform. Inside, the courtyard is well-tended, green with gardens and white with clean concrete. Soldiers smoke and chat.

The house is cozy. Behind a door off the foyer is a large, air-conditioned room with a long, polished conference table. On one high wall is a vast world map. On another, behind where I’m seated at the table, next to the Sarge, who has become meek in this place, are two full-sized flags hanging side by side, the Somali and the American. On the wall opposite are fuzzy photos of wanted men, presumably terrorists. There’s a smaller room through an open archway, where two secretaries and a computer sit idle.

Here I’m entertained by a succession of well-scrubbed men, always entering in pairs and always a degree higher in rank than the ones previous. Our first hosts are young. They could be Somali students from the U of M, taking a break between Micro and Macro, between stats and frats. They follow the familiar interrogative trajectory, from reassurances through the friendly and inoffensive, into the taunting and predatory.

Recess is interrupted by the adults. This pair is tall and middle-aged, casual manners draped over intensity. The first is full of concern and bonhomie. The second is dark and sarcastic. He has lines of world-weariness in his face. The first delivers his plum line right away, the line he will resort to more frequently than the thin poetic imagery can bear. He directs my attention to the flags behind me, side by side. ‘We’re the same as you,’ he says.

Mr. Sympathy pulls out a pad and pen and begins asking simple questions, gazing into the cool, conditioned air of the room and pulling non-sequiturs from it with all confidence. He meanders; he repeats. Eventually he asks how it is that I came overland from Hargeisa, though the central question in my little drama is enacted at the airport. That’s the cue for Philip Marlowe to take over. He doesn’t stand on ceremony. He repeats that there’s nothing to worry about, but within minutes he’s digging through my luggage. I name every item to relieve the tedium. ‘That’s my underwear,’ I say. ‘This is your underwear,’ he says. ‘You carry a lot of underwear!’ ‘Yes, I like variety,’ I say. ‘That’s my camera.’ The juniors are excited by this. They demand the memory chip. Sure, why not? They dash off to play on the computer.

I haven’t eaten yet, and Marlowe begins to weary me, so I become taciturn. He carries on with my stuff. He delights in the scribbles in my notebook. There are some box-like sketches from a discussion about one school’s layout that he finds particularly titillating. Mr. Sympathy says this is Marlowe’s specialty; he’s a very good artist. You don’t say. Marlowe asks about phone numbers in the notebook. ‘Yep, a guy I met in Djibouti. Try it. Say hello for me.’ Marlowe reads a bit of prose back to me. ‘Personal thoughts,’ he says with a smirk. Yep.

There’s a phone call. I don’t know it at the time, but it’s the office of the Vice-President of Puntland. This is Abdurashid reaching out to help from the capital city of Garowe. He’s on his way, but it’s a five-hour drive. What I do know is that the tone in the room changes. Marlowe starts folding my clothes and packing them neatly back into my bag.

I’m summoned into the secretaries’ office. The juniors are enjoying my photos. They’ve found some from my trip to Tigray. Several show the guys in Saba’s family fooling around with old AK-47s from the days of the civil war. ‘What’s this?’ That’s me with a gun. ‘Hm. Is that your girlfriend?’ Nope. ‘What’s HIS name?’ That’s Mark. They scribble this down on a bit of scratch paper on the secretary’s desk.

In case one should think I’m brave in being sarcastic with this bunch, I have to renounce any credit. The feeling of fatigue they inspire is just like being stuck after school with a bunch of pre-teens whose parents are late. For ferocity, the lizard cops in Ethiopia have these clowns beat.

My grim minders in the first room are concerned about me. They order some food. They tell me that everything, including my photos, will be run by the CIA in Djibouti for clearance. ‘Cheers,’ I say, raising my new bottle of water. They insist on a photo, and take it while I’m chewing the roll they’ve brought. They want me to stand in front of the Somali flag.

There are a couple more performers late for the show. They march in like firemen. The latest boss sees me and comes at me. ‘What are you doing here? Do you want to be killed?’ I pause and reply, ‘No’. There follows a beat, and the man stalks away in disgust. This might be the moment I want to be remembered by, though the comic effect was unintentional. And though this just might be the most human of this Keystone crew. He’s tall and thin, and it looks like a quarter of his skull was staved in at one time and stitched back in place a la Frankenstein. He sits calmly across the table from me, and there’s a look of intelligence in his skewed eyes. He reassures, but in a way that rings true. He then directs his attention to a series of folders that are brought in, clearly none of which apply to me.

The show finally does close. It’s been decided that I will be housed at the International Village, where by all accounts I’ll be safe. Indeed, I have to judge by the proliferation of guns on the premises of this spacious compound that they’re right. We’re all friends on my last sweaty ride on the hump in the back seat. My friends remind me of that fact with many warm-hearted testimonies. ‘Remember the flag! We’re the same!’

Travelogue 216 – February 15
The Wolf Pack

1.4 I don’t get to sleep right away the first night in Bosaso. I have a few visitors. First comes the hotel owner, obsequious but insistent, at 9pm. When did I come in? How did I arrive? Where am I from? Oh, I see, I see, with a wide smile and glittering eyes behind his glasses. An hour later, he returns with an officer from immigration and his son to translate. The same questions and more. The official wants my passport. They are stern until it’s time to leave, and then there are lots of reassurances. The reassurances will become a ritual. The official takes my passport with him. I lie in bed for a while before I can sleep, wondering who will stop by next.

The next morning, I have to take my leave of Ali, whose pleasant company has been the sole comfort of my trip to Somalia. I’m supposed to catch a ride with a friend of Abdurashid’s down to Garowe, the capital of Puntland. But first there’s the matter of my passport. Everyone is eloquent with reassurances as we drive through the crowded blocks, my face hidden behind tinted car windows, across town to the police station.

I’m guided into a large room with lots of chairs and a desk and told to wait a minute. That’s the last I see of my escort to Garowe. Men drift into the room, one at a time. Everyone is very deferential. They sit here and there. I assume they have petitions with the same officials. It turns out they are cops of some sort or another. After a while, in comes the Sarge, and everyone jumps up out of his chair in a show of respect. The Sarge wears sunglasses, a military shirt, a black Adidas cap, and a pistol in his holster. He sits at the desk, and he fidgets.

We start by looking over my passport and some other papers. There’s desultory discussion among the men in the room. Minute by minute, they lean in eagerly, inspecting me with growing hostility. I sense that it will be open season soon. It reminds me of writing workshops I’ve attended: polite comments in the margins, but once the pack is assembled, all bets are off. It isn’t long before they’re baring their teeth and glaring at me, snarling and slapping my passport against the desk repeatedly as they argue. There isn’t much questioning in this interrogation. It seems as though they’re arguing the entire case themselves, taking increasingly damning positions for the prosecution.

The central fact in my case is that they neglected to stamp my passport at the airport. They took my money, flipped through all the pages of the passport with the proper disdain, but didn’t stamp it, and I didn’t notice. Finally there’s no help for it: they have to take me to the big bad man at the police headquarters. We pile into a few of the ubiquitous white station wagons. The big, bad, and balloon-headed personage sits at a massive desk facing a long conference table, where I and my entire police escort sit. He hears them out with glowering eyes, puffing a cigarette with great malice. He asks me one question, and then immediately commands that I be silent, glaring at me for long moments as though to burn all insubordination out of me. I try to look chastened. He turns back to his empty desk and dismisses us with a few words and a wave.

Back at Sarge’s office, I’m informed that I’ll be fined $1,000 and taken back to the airport. This seems as good a cue as any. I reach down for deep indignation, and I announce with a good deal of righteousness that I have it within my power to bring half a million dollars in aid to this country’s children, but that if I board a plane today, I will make sure that not a penny arrives. What’s more, I’ll make sure everyone at all US embassies in the Horn and among my community of aid agencies knows that Puntland needs another ten years of time-out.

There’s a pause. Sarge muses behind his dark shades. The others relax into their chairs. There’s a flurry of muted discussion. The Sarge leans forward with his hands clasped on his desk. He now delivers a long complaint in his patchy English about how I’ve misunderstood. Everything they are doing is only for my safety. The logic is tortuous, and there’s little in the semblance of an argument to follow, but I become convinced, nodding with sympathy. ‘I see. Yes, I see now.’ How could I have been so selfishly blind? There are more mutterings. There’s a phone call. There’s silence.

Sarge seems very self-satisfied. He eventually tells me they’re taking me to see someone else. I cringe, but the officers are very reassuring. There’s nothing more to be done. We all start to chat like old friends. I tell them about the schools in Addis Ababa. Sarge spent many a year training in Ethiopia, so he speaks Amharic. I pull out my camera and call up photos of my kids. The Sarge consents to a picture, and I capture him and his chief jackal behind the desk. He doesn’t take off his shades, but he smiles.

Word comes that it’s time to move. We form the convoy. I take my customary position in the back seat between two of the sweaty jackals with guns. Here I go, one dark degree further into the shadow worlds of Somalia.

Travelogue 215 – February 7
Bosaso

1.4 The plane descends. The sharp-edged hills back away, allowing us an expanse of flat dirt for landing. The runway is unpaved. We taxi forward and as the plane turns, I catch my first glimpse of life on the ground in Somalia. The Bosaso airport is no more than a small jumble of squat buildings behind a guarded fence. Once we’re stopped, a stream of people runs toward the plane to greet arrivals.

There won’t be anyone to greet me. I have no idea what I’ll do. As I inch my way down the plane’s aisle, among piles of Hajj kitsch, I strike up a conversation with Ali Hussein, the Yemeni guy stranded with me at the airport in Djibouti. He is a short, quiet man with humor in his eyes. We disembark down the stairs, among the arrivals handing bags down to locals. He leads me out the gate and across the gravel of the yard to an office with one desk. We’re surrounded by men in uniform and with guns slung over their shoulders. One man resembling a civilian looks over our passports and our faces with distaste. Ali has to lend me a twenty-dollar bill to pay for my entry visa. I should have watched closely where the money went.

Outside, Ali bargains with a taxi driver. A crowd gathers, and they are surprised by Ali’s Somali. He makes them laugh, which I know is critical to the bargaining process in this part of the world. We get into the dusty white station wagon and we’re driven out the gate of the airport, shuddering along the desert dirt road, swinging down and up through gullies. It’s a road I’ll get to know all too well.

You enter town through the wealthy west side, big houses built haphazardly in the open spaces between old town and the airport. Here are your first symptoms of life without government. There are no services. There are no asphalt roads. And the houses are built exactly wherever home-owners feel like laying foundations. Advance into town, and you’ll encounter the legacy of law and order, though no active signs of them. The streets resolve into a grid, though they are still all dirt. And structures conform to ghostly zoning.

Ali Hussein has a hotel in mind as safe enough, the Juba. There are walls and fences. The rooms are pretty nice. There’s a clean lobby and patio. It’s beyond his budget, but I offer to pay. He has a long dialogue with the skittish man at reception, who eyes me with misgiving. We learn about the kidnappings.

It’s only been a week or two since a Spanish woman and an Argentine woman were kidnapped from these streets and held for ransom. The man at reception shakes his head with dark displeasure and says that he can’t guarantee my safety. I have to stay inside the hotel and out of sight. We have no choice but to agree.

There’s no food in the hotel, so I wait in the patio area in the day’s last light while Ali goes out for dinner. There’s a Chinese guy at the next table. He gives me a glance as dim and dismissive as does every bearded man who passes on his way to wash. I sigh with What-have-I-done on my lips. I’m well used to being despised – I’ve been married; I’ve traveled in Arab countries; even worse, I’ve traveled in Western Europe – but the feeling here is raw. It’s like I’m being sized up for slaughter. But the sun is sweet on my shoulders. It’s all I have and almost enough.

Ali returns with spaghetti. I’m to discover that Somali dishes are scarce in variety, and they all revolve around spaghetti or rice. What’s more, I have to eat with my hands. Apparently, there’s a well-evolved technique to it, involving a deft turning of the noodles around the first two fingers, while scooping other items up in the palm. I make a terrible mess and give up on technique, grabbing and stuffing with abandon. Our napkins are pages of a newspaper.

Ali and I try an after-dinner walk, seeing if we can make it around the block. One hundred meters on, an old man leaning against a wall makes a lazy comment, and Ali takes my elbow and turns me back around. Day done. I go to my room, ready to sleep.

Travelogue 214 – January 28
Djibouti, Adieu

1.4 When I packed for the trip, I counted costs on my fingers, and then added a few more, but I hadn’t the prodigy of digits required for this port o’call. Two days out, and I’m worried about money. I discover that the majority of my hundred-dollar bills are no good here. Money-changers have decided they won’t touch hundreds older than 2000, scared of counterfeits. Anything produced under Bush, I suppose, seems false. In desperation, I show them my credit card. They shrug.

I’m directed to a bureau de change that occupies a lower rung on the greasy ladder of respect. It’s run by two Indian guys, one slender and effete, the other too big for his clothes. The latter broods from under a low brow and the dense black hair that stands above. Despite his bulk, he moves like a cat. This is the one who deals with credit card withdrawals. He handles the phone with surprising daintiness, and responds to static and snubs from US offices with great equanimity.

The slender one and I lean against the cash counter protected by inches of semi-transparent plastic. We watch the milling henna beards and skirted loafers. There’s a constant roar of chatter. The crowd moves in waves across the plaza. Disputes erupt. Members are exiled and followed by jeering men. Old men with canes are held apart by broad-chested younger ones. Cacophony subsides into its mundane form. The outward appearance of aimless chaos is deceptive. This is very directed chaos. It’s business: commodities and ships and sales. In his gentle Hindi-tinted voice, my friend explains how these agents fluidly shift through a broad spectrum of languages moment by moment, Somali, Afar, French, English, Arabic, Amharic, Hindi, a modern Babel that’s probably little different in essence from Red Sea, Persian Gulf, and Indian Ocean ports for centuries. It’s the ugly and cheery age-old jostle of language and money.

My transaction is a no-go. The monolithic brother hands me back my card with an expression of perfect irony, his gaze utterly disengaged and drifting out the window. His serenity is appealing. I head back to the ‘Historie’ for a beer. There’s nothing to be done. African siesta has settled in, a white blanket of finality.

I stare blankly for a while. I return to my room. It’s a long siesta, but the peace of defeat is lulling, and ultimately rewarding. When I return in the time of long shadows to my internet place, I stumble upon a key to unlock secrets. My power of money is restored. I’m flush and rejuvenated. Ah, sweet electronics. I’d share more, but I hate to burden Cheney’s vigilant web boys with more secrets. The world is so full of them now, all so threatening, all so scary.

Myself, I’m scared enough about the trip ahead of me. I’m up early, jolted out of anxious imagery of dangerous journeys. The taxi cruises serenely to the airport. I’m directed by serene cops to stinky chairs in the lounge. The place hasn’t properly opened. People in uniforms arrive in slow, staggered waves. Passengers come, too. The passengers start pacing. Something is wrong. They can ask questions in the right language, and they find out our plane is delayed. After more pacing, our plane isn’t coming. We stand outside in a group, arguing with the guards. One jilted passenger is Ali Hussein. He’s Yemeni, but grew up in Mogadishu. There is a trio of jolly businessmen from Jordan. There’s the svelte pair of expat Somalis from Sweden. Ali Hussein explains for me the comings and goings of airline and airport officials, the interminable loud negotiations.

It’s decided that we will buy tickets on a Juba Airline flight from Saudi Arabia, headed to Hargeisa and Bosaso. We have to pay cash for these new tickets. Mohammed the Swede urges me to buy, reminding me of the price of hotel rooms in Djibouti. ‘Don’t worry,’ he assures me as we’re ushered through check-in and into the departure lounge. Thank God there is a tea counter because we spend the next four hours there, among hordes of Somalis waiting to go home after the Hajj. They all have cases and bags full of religious kitsch they bought in Mecca. They are salt of the desert earth, this crowd, simple and restless and loud folk: wizened, pacing grandpas with deep beards and piercing eyes, and miserable grandmas slouching inside their layers and shouting across the wide slouching spaces between chairs. My head is pounding, and my heart groans with remorse. I consume too much tea.

We’re caged together for four hours because they’ve overbooked the flight. The solution is to change the flight plan. The plane that was supposed to go first to Hargeisa and then to Bosaso will now go to Hargeisa with its many-throated burden and then return to Djibouti to ferry the rest of us separately to Bosaso. The plan is an admirable one in the simplicity of its logic.

Weary and resigned to an evil fate, I finally do shuffle onto this plane. Distracted as I am by misery, I still feel a sense of honor and wonder entering the vessel, so venerable an antique with its low, round ceiling and round portals. After the masses have settled into their stiff 60s seats, piled their immense bags around them in precarious ways, and warmed up for the next hour of their dissonant opera, the propellers are ignited, spinning beside my portal. We’re off.

I regain some of the romance of travel as the metal beast churns through the air, laboring at a low altitude over the northern coast of the Horn of Africa. The roar of the engines would drown out the rage of the devil himself, and the rhythmic drone and vibration rises through my spine and into the serenity centers of the brain. And finally beauty re-enters the world. The view out the starboard side is gorgeous, mountains deeply creased by erosion, brown and ancient, tumbling down to the seashore, miles of empty strands beside translucent water, glowing in bands of green and blue. There’s no turning back now, and for the moment, Somalia is enchanting.

Travelogue 213 – January 25
Djibouti, Part Deux

1.3 The lead task on my leisure agenda while I’m in Djibouti is to find a beach. Supplementary task is exploration. I have one day before my scheduled departure for points east. And the day ends up being much more about the supplemental task than the primary one. Reason: for all Djibouti’s coastline, there’s precious little beach.

The city spreads along its bit of southern shore on this enormous bay, and also along the slender, hammer-headed promontory that makes the city such a good port. Today I hike up the east side of the peninsula and back down the west side. Results in the beach scan? One, and it’s such a mediocrity that I commit myself to sore feet and a brush with sun stroke looking for that pearly stretch of sand that must serve the sizeable contingent of internationals. No luck.

Here’s what I find. Not too far up the east side, past stolid bastions of ministerial power, and past one huge church and one huge mosque, almost across the street from each other, looking like the tall, official organs of God’s potency, there is a beach. It’s a lonely stretch of brown sand, not very attractive. But sea is sea, and I’m content for a while, watching the morning sun climb, already blazing at 7am, over the water. The waves are calm as lakeside.

Behind me is what looks to be a Malibu beach club and hotel, tables with umbrellas behind a wall, and a few hungover, disheveled white people standing, bemused, in shorts beside their truck. And that could be a theme to this part of the east end, a piece of California: dusty neighborhoods under lazy palms, a little tawdry, soaked in sea-salt samadhi. But there the beach ends. Further off to the right, there’s a Sheraton, according to my memorized map, and maybe they’ve cornered some choice beach, but I don’t detour, thinking that further up the peninsula must be heavenly sands.

Wrong. Further up the peninsula, diplomatic impunity closes its grip. There are miles of embassies and residences with ch’at-chewing guards leering at passers-by. It’s a dull road, unless you enjoy eye-balling modest shows of money, mostly adhering to the dubious aesthetics of Gulf Arab luxury.

Finally, the road dead-ends at a formidable fence. Beyond is a whole lot of construction – government buildings by the look of it. Behind the last little mansion on the road is a dusty lot where something else will go up. There you can stand above the shore, water lapping against massive stones, and you can look back along the exclusive line of coast. It doesn’t look like I’ve missed any swimming there.

From the fence, you can walk back down the west side. The new asphalt road matches the tone of this side, the industrial side. Though it takes a while to reach the work. First is the massive and cold face of the ultra-luxury Keminski complex, behind high walls and intimidating security. I ask the muscle-bound guard what’s inside. A hotel. And what’s the price? He smiles coldly. ‘3,000 a night, dollars.’ Right. Further down the wall, I pass an immaculately tailored and groomed Arab man, closely followed by an immense personal guard. “Good morning,” the Arab says pleasantly, and with no accent.

Past that is the briefest of interludes with the sea, almost a beach. There’s definitely a pile of dirty sand. I’m even able to retrieve a seashell or two. And the view is all Djibouti: the huge port, looking all money, sky-high cranes and stacks of multi-colored containers, looking at a distance like toys. Sadly, you only get one whiff of the hustle-bustle, further on at the heavily-guarded gate to the port. Otherwise, it’s all admiration at a distance. And everything a port should be, the stink and the noise and the crazy activity, is hidden behind walls. One watches the cranes.

Further down the road, across from the dock, is the presidential palace, another tribute to Arab sensibilities, tall, clean lines in pastel colors, with pointless balustrades and kitschy bits from the classical catalogue, standing in the middle of a heavily-guarded compound with lots of barren soil. He has plenty of windows with a view of the port. That seems appropriate.

I return from the long walk with an impression of this place as one of those millennial, rich, authoritarian city-states that channel so much of our money nowadays. All resources are ruthlessly directed toward the port and airport. There is a native population, of course, but they are very quiet. South of the palace, I enter a few of their neighborhoods, familiar hovels and dives and one-window shops. I’ve seen the stats: they’re poor. But they keep quiet, and somehow they survive among the crazy prices.

I close the day with a beer at the ‘Historie’ again. From the patio, I watch a curious ritual. There are a lot of policemen in this town. They wear quaint uniforms that appear colonial era, khaki tan and high peaked hats. They’ve parked a van in the square. Every so often, one leads a young man from among the groups hanging around here and there chewing ch’at, over to the van, one hand at the youth’s elbow. The ritual is calm. No one complains. The police are restrained. The boys sit in the van until it’s full.

Travelogue 212 – January 21
Djibouti, Part One

1.2 My journey leads far off into the lands of our dust-kicking neighbor, Somalia. And the first stop is in our mutual midget neighbor, Djibouti. I’ve scheduled a few days there because my senses are yearning for stretches of salt water. I haven’t stood beside the sea in a long time.

Our passage through the air is short and takes in lots of distressed brown lands that slowly stretch and mellow under the influence of the sea. We come upon rows of small white clouds, and we see suddenly the blue line of the sea, landing within sight of it, the runway almost an asphalt line between wastes of blue and brown.

I’m instantly happy as I disembark. The air is humid and dense with the salty smell of the Red Sea. I don’t mind the wait for my visa, since the small airport has open doors and I can breathe in the warmth and the water.

Djibouti is a one-city nation, and immediately outside the airport you’re among the suburban streets of the capital. There are other towns in Djibouti, of course, a couple across the bay with nice beaches, so they say. But I never make it over there. I call my green airport taxi, a station wagon with the steering wheel on the wrong side, and haggle the driver down, paying no more than 1700 francs into the city, or about $10.

It’s early afternoon when I arrive downtown. The sun is blazing. The streets are empty: both Djibouti and Somalia shut down between 12:30 and 4. No sooner am I out of the taxi than I’m approached by a lanky boy with fine green grit between his brown teeth, bits of leaf of khat, the brain delight of all the horn of Africa. “Bon jour.” He matches my stride and tries French, then switches deftly to English. “What you need? You from the camp? You need girls? Big boobies. Come on.” Djibouti is a military town, French and American. Thus the refined tastes in pleasure, I suppose.

I say a cheap hotel would do nicely. “Come on,” he says again and leads the way. We start among the sunny squares of the posh part of town, pretty in a run-down Old World kind of way, a meeting of worlds: Arab arches and French arcades. This vibe falls away quickly, and we’re traversing blocks of a more familiar cast, among squalid, squat buildings and roadside stalls, among the calls and comments of men sprawled against the wall, chewing. The police stop us, apparently recognizing Shaggy Tooth and concerned for my safety. He reassures the officer, and I don’t complain. That seems to be enough.

We descend a stairway hidden among stalls, and we emerge in the market, among alleys of stalls with electronics and shoes – the surest merchandise across East Africa, it would seem. And suddenly, we’re at the Hotel Banadir. It’s an obscure doorway into a shabby courtyard. The man at the desk never quite awakens, but we do wheedle a key out of him. For $20, I can rent a room just larger than the single bed and its sagging, filthy mattress. The big window overlooks the courtyard. It occurs to me that a place that sleeps away the afternoon is not likely to respond to “Shh!” at 9.

Thanks, Shaggy. I shake his hand and make clear that I’m going the opposite way. I have very quickly resigned myself to Djibouti’s biggest demerit: the prices. I trace my steps back to the cleaner section of town and systematically find the cheapest option among acceptable beds: $60. It’s the three-story Ali Sabieh, a hotel that looks much better in the lobby than in the rooms. The bed is acceptable, and so is the bathroom. Hot water is not an option in Djibouti or Somalia. There’s only one knob in the shower. You only get a sheet to sleep under, but you don’t need more.

Outside, I find an air-conditioned bar where I can say ‘un cafe, si’l vous plait’ and I don’t even have to repeat myself, so I feel very worldly. I’m enjoying the tiny cup and the sugar cube; I lazily watch the Steven Segal movie. I’m enjoying listening to the buzz of French and Arabic and Somali. In this way, I while away the African siesta.

At 4, the shadows are long. There’s a cool breeze. People have emerged: men in colorful skirts, geezers with henna-dyed beards, veiled women, soldiers, boys selling postcards and gum. Every one of them is selling postcards. I find that odd. Later, sitting serenely on the patio of the restaurant ‘Historie’, I watch a supernaturally old crone creep toward me with her box of cigarettes and gum and postcards. She meticulously takes every item in her crooked fingers to show me. I’m hoping to see something I actually need. I settle for a lighter. There’s always a use for fire. She shuffles away, spending so many of the precious minutes left to her, down the patio, across the street, until the last shadows have melded into one.

Travelogue 211 – December 26
Back to the Source

On Christmas morning, a full moon is setting over the opposite shore of Lake T’ana. The sun isn’t quite up yet, and the calm waters are Monet shades of pink and violet. There are blessed few people out alongside the lake.

On Christmas morning, I’m in Bahir Dar. I haven’t been back to Bahir Dar since the very first trip to Ethiopia, four years ago. Bahir Dar is a town on the southern shores of Lake T’ana and the capital of the Amhara region. It’s the closest major town to the headwaters of the Blue Nile. And it’s still one of my favorite spots in Ethiopia.

Bahir Dar looks just the same, mellow streets and mellow sun. The waters are a soft and peaceful green. There are, though, a few changes. My little lakeside paradise at the Ghion Hotel has gone to seed. It still boasts pleasant garden among the rooms, but the quiet patio with chairs under an afternoon spread of fig branches, open to the breeze off the lake, is now compromised: it’s fenced off from the lake and covered by an unattractive iron shelter.

The second change more than compensates. That is a pedestrian walkway along the shore from downtown almost to the headwaters of the Nile.

I’m up at 6:30 to walk the length of it, which only takes a half-hour or so. You pass inlets wild with reeds and papyrus. You pass morning glories and poinsettia and papaya trees. Out in the lake, lone fishermen in tiny papyrus boats are checking their nets. The path ends suddenly at a marsh, within sight of the first islands in the mouth of the Nile. Actually it ends at the trunk of a fig tree, from which a startled ibis takes flight. I turn around and head back to the new T’ana Hotel, a luxury spot with a very nice patio overlooking the lake, where I can have a full breakfast among a host of travelers, Italian, French, American, Kenyan, etc.

On Christmas morning, after breakfast, I walk out the front entrance of the T’ana Hotel, which is not the feat of a few steps down a staircase. The hotel is set quite a ways off the road, at the end of a long driveway through bits of farmland. Once at the road, I catch a minibus taxi, having only a slight idea where it will go. Yes, I was right: five minutes later, we’re crossing the Blue Nile on a wide, low bridge. I call for a stop and then walk back across the bridge. The usual stern policeman sits on a chair with his gun at the start of the bridge. I don’t have my camera, so I pose no security risk. I take my time, watching the swift, muddy current below. The river is wide and punctuated by grassy isles of mud like unstable stepping stones. The actual headwaters are just out of sight.

I take a path through a primitive city-village on the shore, along dung-filled dirt alleys, following the river toward the lake. As expected, I’m stopped by a marsh. Abiu and a friend are goofing around on a makeshift pier of igneous stones from the hills. The shirtless and grinning friend cuts me a papyrus reed as a gift. Abiu offers to guide me to Debre Maryam, a church on one of the islands in the mouth of the river. Off we go.

We’re further from the lake than I thought. We trek along a wide dirt road. It ends. We trudge on, down many a walking path, crossing fields and passing small farms. Most of the farmers cultivate ch’at or cabbage. But there is also mango, papaya, banana, and coffee. I try ishr, a small orange fruit that Abiu likes, but it’s sour and gummy in the palate, not good for a sweaty hike without water.

Debre Maryam stands on an island that’s only about thirty meters from shore, across a quiet channel. Abiu and some local boys shout across for the ferry, which is an amorphous raft of papyrus reeds. They shout back they want twenty birr. I shake my head no. The boys are anxious. I’m not. I like sitting in the sun, watching the slow and obscure tide through the channel. Eventually, I say ten. There’s a lot of shouting about that. The raft drifts across.

The pilot of the raft disappears, and Abiu picks up the long pole. He and a curious shepherd boy push us off and across, so slowly and with such soft lapping of the waters I could sleep. It turns out our twenty-birr Charon is no ferrymen at all, but a shriveled old woman in sackcloth. She collects my birr with a steely glint in her eye. Charon she is because she wears the fare of a previous soul around her neck, an intriguing old coin, huge and polished almost smooth by time. It features on one side the decayed profile of some plump, eighteenth-century European lord, by the looks of him; and on the other side is a two-headed eagle.

The island is quiet. The church is closed. We see a priest in his high turban vigorously row off in his own little boat. We stroll a while among the priestly fields of ch’at and turn back. A dour midget of a priest rides back with us. He is suspicious of me, maybe concerned for the virtue of his buxom servant girl, who rows the raft for us. But of course I make no notice of her charms, immersed as I am in the wisdom of melodious waters.

Travelogue 210 – December 22
The Breakfast Club

There’s something cheering about a fat, hairy man blowing you a kiss in the morning, ‘Ciao, Giorgio,’ I cry, passing him in front of the Ethiopia Airlines building in Piassa – curving wall peach and avocado green in the sunshine. ‘Ciao, bello,’ he replies. Of course, Giorgio is Italian. But he isn’t.

Some time mid-century, so Giorgio tells me, Haile Selasse rescued forty Armenians out of Jerusalem, survivors of the holocaust in Turkey that someone in our quick State Department just discovered languishing in his inbox at an inconvenient moment. One of these was Giorgio’s grandfather. The Armenian community flourished here. (As evidence, I produce my dentist, Dr. Mickey, and the pretty stone Armenian church in Piassa.) But restless Giorgio went to Italia as a young man. There he became a sculptor. Now, at the other end of life’s journey, he’s considering coming home.

Danieli has adopted Giorgio as an accessory. Danieli is a crazy Austrian, continuing my chain of them. He’s middle-aged, a big man with a wild, greying mane, a Beethoven jaw, wide-set eyes, and a magnificent pot belly. He’s actually Israeli by birth, though central European by blood. It’s his second time in Ethiopia, and he plans to spend six months. Danieli’s itinerary is very free. His final plans seem to revolve around women. There is the girl he met on his last trip that is now in police training camp outside Addis Ababa. They touch hands through the fence. She tells him to go buy her shoes. Then there’s the Muslim girl whose daddy he appealed to to let her travel with him to Harar. Apparently the man has relented.

Yesterday morning, all the talk at the Taitu Hotel was about the Gambela girl. “Phoo!” Danieli exclaims. “She could dance!” This long story involves several Piassa night clubs, a clan of Taitu foreigners, and the girl’s sexually explicit moves. One of the implicated men was another Israeli, who has joined us at the outdoor table, a quiet young man with long hair and beard. They exchange polite reminiscences of the girl in Hebrew. Danieli wants to know what happened after he left. Giorgio laughs at him. “Playboy,” he calls him in his gravelly, smoothly accented voice. Danieli objects. “I have my limits,” he declares in his harshly accented voice. “I would never do that. She is sixteen. No!”

I’m diverted from my usual morning routine because I’m looking for someone at the Taitu, someone I never find. My routine is to collect my thoughts at the old Razel cafe in Piassa. This cafe has done something extraordinary; it has remained at the height of fashion for all the time I’ve been in Ethiopia. And it has maintained its standard in coffee and pastries. It’s a relief to know that one can still feast the palate and the eyes at the same city font.

Any day of the week, the beautiful people will come: stunning women in expensive styles to make old white guys weep and confident men in the style of confident men in Addis – which means they look like Americans on a Sunday, except their sneakers have been polished. It’s an odd sign of our times that the poor men here wear suits coats and slacks, but men with power look like they’re pushing a stroller around the Mall of America. A few young ones will appear in a very clean rapper’s uniform, something teenage American, 1998 in a white suburb. And then there are the two ten year-old boys who come in and drop a week’s salary for most papas on a carbohydrate orgy. And what do the beautiful people eat for breakfast in Addis? Burger and fries, almost universally.

But lest we forget where we are in the world, incidents like the following will happen. I look up and a woman is rubbing her head. She’s bashed her head against the serving platter of a waiter on the stairs. Everybody’s staring out the front window. Everybody is up and rushing toward the stairs and the doors, a wild look in their eyes. There’s smoke in the street, and smoke billowing into the cafe. They’re pulling down the metal grates over the windows and door. I glimpse police grabbing men and smacking them across the face. A crowd is running this way and that. I don’t move until I know what the story is.

So what happened? Apparently a car went by that was on fire. That tells you the level of tension in this place, despite appearances in the stylish spots. I set down my pen and close my notebook. I’m revisited by the agonies of the ordeal two years ago after the election. I’m reminded how all my pretty plans are vapor in the face of the next terror.

The crisis passes, and the beautiful people resume their seats.

Travelogue 209 – December 14
The Girls

The sun roars like a lion. We faranjis all have red necks. Tomorrow are time trials. I want my girls to roar like the sun.

I’m distracted this month. My most pleasant distraction is Team Tesfa, which is a new project that I shouldn’t have started. The team is just five strong, Ijigu and four teenage girls with a glimmer of promise as runners.

Meseret’s story represents many others. She’s seventeen. She moved to the city from some small town, away from her family, in order to become an athlete. Fast forward to when we meet, and she’s working in a cafe all day and has no time to train. She dropped out of school a long time ago.

Today, they’re sitting around the cafe table. The place is bright with leonine sun. My back and red neck are warm. The girls are shy and silent. They wink at each other and smile. We’re signing contracts today. These are the final documents for registration of the team. And this occurs with no time to spare. The winter’s major cross country meet happens in two weeks. I’m hoping there are no glitches. One never knows in Ethiopia, but we have a man on the inside.

Here they are, the four young lionesses, acting shy. But I’ve seen them run. Here’s lovely Meseret with her golden smile, an innocence to her, a simple confidence. She runs with regal grace, and I read that as great potential.

Beside me is Tsion, contrast to Meseret, the brooding and proud teenager. She has a bright smile when you address her, but otherwise she sulks and slouches. She always has an argument ready for us. Even this I enjoy about her. She reminds me of a pit bull when she runs, all muscle and earthbound. She’s very determined, and so far she’s the best of the lot.

These two have started tutorial classes with Haregwa from the Shiro Meda school. Both left school long ago. Their first session is at my house. Tsion couldn’t write the English alphabet. Meseret has her troubles with Amharic writing. It’s been a long time – and those were country schools.

I’m watching Meseret as she works her way through the contract. She mouths the words, and with a good deal of animation, too. I hadn’t realized how much drama was packed into this legal document. Then again, I can only hope there is: the sound of her future in these dry words.

We sign. We stain the papers with coffee. I harangue them good-naturedly about the time trials coming up. It takes a while to explain the concept of goals. The girls chat about the course and times. We come up with a fairly modest number. Not entirely seriously, I lecture them, locker-room style, about being hungry. ‘You’ve got to want it!’ They’re smiling politely. I find out there’s no Amharic word for ambition. Of course, I shrug. ‘Anbessa!’ I say. ‘Lion!’ This is what they call Kenenisa and other great athletes. My final result: very meekly Meseret points at her chest. ‘Anbessa,’ she whispers with a self-conscious smile. I have to laugh. It’s not a boastful culture. You have to respect that.

Travelogue 208 – December 6
The Nose of Sisyphus

My first week in Ethiopia is bliss. The sun is strong. The mountain breeze keeps it pleasant. My staff is welcoming. Their work while I was gone was good. The schools look wonderful, filled with new art, thanks to the two months’ work of our volunteers from Ireland. When I arrive at school, the little ones are joyfully foaming at the mouth, brushing their teeth with tiny brushes donated by the Irish. My house is quiet and cozy. I’m thinking, ‘Well, this is pretty nice. What’s my rush in getting out of here?’

And then I really arrive in Ethiopia. Or I should say, Ethiopia arrives in me. Overnight, the super cold moves in. These aren’t charming seasonal sniffles. This is rheumy-eyed brain-melt with a continual stream out the nose, complete with bone-deep fatigue and existential woe. If it follows its usual course, it will muscle down into my lungs and take up a month’s residence as a racking cough and life-sapping asthma.

After four years as a slave to petty diseases, a question suggests itself. A hypothesis inside a question, a question inside a philosophy, a philosophy inside a regret, and that inside a breathe: exactly when was it that I committed suicide? The question suggests a method of inquiry: sifting back through the four-year trail of colds, fevers, coughs, nausea, asthma, fatigue, diarrhea, headaches, stomach cramps, and flu to assess ‘life’ as a medium of travel.

But I don’t have the energy. Tomorrow I devote myself back to the conundrum of living without living. The exit from my house lets into a subway tunnel, mucous grey, underneath the city. Above the ground is color and energy. Below are the shadows of color, a static nuisance. People are obstacles. Sound is jarring noise.

When you’re sick, you rush away from the living. You find quiet corners for tea. The topography of the city deteriorates until it’s all safe havens and bathrooms. (The latter, I must comment, is particularly humiliating for a male traveler, especially in a country where any ditch or wall will do for locals.)

Always a minor hypochondriac, now I’m a major case. I’ve been outfitted with germ vision. Disease crawls, in colonies the color of key lime custard, along fingertips and doorknobs and tabletops. A friendly handshake makes me sweat. A cough across the room makes me twitch. I douse everything in lime juice, even french fries. Glasses are suspicious. Green leafy vegetables make me nauseous.

And if this weren’t enough, if the sights and sounds of life abroad weren’t just the sunny side of inescapable alienation, being ill is the cave inside the shadow. ‘I’m sick’ prompts laughter. These faranjis! In a culture where home and family form the very fabric of the cosmos, one does not want to be the solitary bachelor in bed with only his illness. It’s one thing to prefer solitude, but no one volunteers for this type. This is lunar orbit, conserving on oxygen.

I sniffle and wheeze in my corner of the hip cafe, and I warn the youngsters, ‘Wa! Pozor! Beware! Choose your poison carefully. The Creator, Great Nature, the Father of Waters, the Belcher of Life sets out his pharmacopoeia of free will. Ponder long over the colorful pills.’ But they never listen.

Health is a philosophy unto itself. It’s a philosophy that brooks no questions. It’s the hypothesis with its own proof: innocence. Innocence is a state before decisions. Every decision narrows the playing field, just like every meal skewers the metabolism.

Wa! says the old man. But it’s just another bright day in Ethiopia. The sun rolls along its track in the sky. Prometheus has liver disease. Sisyphus has emphysema. Life goes on.

Travelogue 207 – November 26
White to Dark

We get a white Thanksgiving. It's not totally white. Maybe a half-inch on the ground. Roads and sidewalks are white. Some roofs are white. It depends on the angle they're pitched at. Parks are green with white fringes. The snowfall began late in the afternoon yesterday. I take a run just as it's getting dark.

The snow drifts down gently, yellow shadows in the globe of street lamps, like feather-tips against my face. And despite being rush hour, all seems silent. Headlights float in procession along the parkway. Some Christmas lights sparkle already. Here on the pedestrian path, there's the sound of footfall and of my breath. There are several worlds within sight of each other, but they aren't linked by any other sense.

It gets darker as I jog along. It's feeling good, so I keep going. I arrive in scenes more and more northern. There's a brooding spirit of Christmas descending, deep forest greens verging on black, with red lights and orange lights, and snowflakes drifting in as heralds of the season, soft as breath.

In the morning, it's still coming down. I awake from ten hours' sleep, refreshed and pleasantly dazed. It's my first Thanksgiving in a long time. We're scheduled to go to Therese's parents' house, but first there's work to be done. Outside the cafe, snow is gathering momentum. Still, the people are streaming in: runners from some race in town, whole families with shouting children. I'm smiling through all the noise. What's happened to me?

The mood persists. My first Thanksgiving dinner in years is altogether too idyllic. A long dusk settles over the snow-dusted world outside as I sit down to a long table with Therese’s family, three generations of them, with two year-old Gracie in her high chair. The Packers have won, and this Wisconsin group is pleased. I’ve won a good game of chess, so I’m pleased. The food is perfect, and the company is very comfortable. I’ve never liked holidays, but today they make sense. Ah, so this is what all that is about, I’m thinking. It’s a revelation.

Minnesota is emerging from its past. It lives, this place that was full of ghosts and shadows. Every corner, every address, every stretch of light was Polaroid grey with grief. There could be no relief for me here in the years after Leeza died. But I feel a pulse.

And now I leave. Midday the day after Thanksgiving, the commuter train slides underground and into the airport terminal. By takeoff, it’s night. The Twin Cities are curving grids of yellow lights. The rivers are a juncture of blackness.

The day dawns early somewhere between Greenland and Ireland. And our jet engines eat up the morning. By the time I’m out of Gatwick, and by the time I’ve made the chilly trip on two trains to Bath, the sun is low and its light is feeble. The four o’clock northern dusk descends on me.

I get only one full day in England, and then I’m back in day-hungry transit. I fly out of Heathrow, again against the sun. We consume the afternoon with the same voracity as fuel, and dusk arrives over southern Europe. We hang in shadows a long, long moment, and then it’s quiet night.

The plane is very quiet. After fueling in Amman, there are only a dozen or so of us on the plane. Most of the others know each other. On the tarmac in Amman, they talk NGO talk. Without knowing too much about it, I would describe NGO talk as something between celeb talk and bureaucrat talk. Names are dropped. Many of them are geographical names. Many are acronyms. They eagerly interrupt each other with droppings. Two pair off with a low hum of planning. They disperse when it’s time to take off again, and the solemn, black sky embraces us.

It’s the first flight from Britain to arrive on time in quite a while. Ijigu is surprised to see me. It’s fortunate he’s there. We depart into the cool mountain air of Addis Ababa. There are fewer lights than in Minnesota. There are more stars. There is the dark outline of mountains ahead of us. We cross the parking lot, and even the taxi guys are subdued in their appeals. Sober night.

Travelogue 206 – November 15
Great Nature Has Another

So I get the whole show on this trip. Yesterday it snows. It's not the kind of snow that collects. It comes down in little pellets that sting. It gathers in waves and drifts that snake across the road as you drive. I have to cross the Mississippi, and Andre's little red car shudders in the strong winds. It wants to veer into the cold, tragic river. It bucks at a sudden memory of the bridge that collapsed last summer. It wants the icy impact and wants to drown its gritty engine oil in the father of waters.

I'm thinking about the monsters alone in the bitter cold. We're dead center among autumnal holidays, days cast in the orange of failing embers, days for Time's sad glances. They are holidays that play well in Minnesota, where great nature orchestrates the blaze of decay that thrilled our New England forbears.

The day of ghouls has passed. The day of saints has passed. Leaves are thick in their yards, strewn about and spilling from piles. The holiday beasts are abandoned outside their houses. There are skeletons and witches, stuffed monsters and jack o' lanterns.

What a piece of work is man! Such ingenuity, engineering such subtle jests at God, ghoul, and self at one stroke. The ghouls walk, and we burlesque. We mock death with masks, and we give the masks to children. And our creatures, they sit in yards, naked in their futile intent. They're left to the cold, to the cool contemplations of lonely types of me on cloud-covered nights.

Contemplate things made so small in the slow typhoon of decay, while winter's first winds bare the trees, bring down the leaves, threaten snow, and chase us indoors. These satiric puppets stare down the assault alone, like giggling gargoyles. We give them up: we laugh at ourselves at last. There are a few monsters dressed up as Bush, or as the World Bank. That got a laugh weeks ago. Now the beast and the message perish together, sagging in the dust.

After the ghouls, the monsters, and the monster-saints come the veterans in this autumnal parade of futility. Coincidentally, I'm led to the VFW bar on the eve of Veteran's Day. The Liquor Pigs are playing here since the Viking closed. The stage is set in the large dining room, where long cafeteria tables have been moved aside for dancing. Old couples sway and turn to the see-saw rhythms of guitar and fiddle.

Craig and I sit in the bar proper, where craggy old men brood in isolation, suspicious of the new crowd. Our table is underneath the huge screen lit with football action, and very near the display case with a stuffed bald eagle. The room is dimly lit, with ruddy autumnal light. It's like an evening in a folk America forever preserved from the summer light of places like ... Iraq?

I have an appointment in another America, or I might have basked in this soft, artificial light. The next place will glare with brash light and blare with splashes of music. We'll drink margaritas and play chess as though a library had a bar and attendants in very tight clothes. As though a library might pass around mikes and project Spanish words to obscure pop songs on a screen.

Mexican karaoke: the one with the mike gets to pace among the restaurant tables. The matron at the next table belts out accompaniment. She must be somebody, the way everyone stops by for a greeting. A group of very white university students surround the center table and studiously ignore the activities. One of the boys is coming up with excruciatingly self-conscious ploys to touch the girl next to him, the one sitting very straight, whose choo-choo hat is turned very precisely to the right of center and shifts not one centimeter all evening. Me, I read the words as they are sung, sure that my high school Spanish will kick in suddenly, and I'd better not miss the elementary sentence that will trigger it. I'm pretty sure no one sang 'te quiero'. But the choo-choo hat was blocking some of the screen.

Travelogue 205 – November 1
All Saints

Today is All Saints' Day, and a better day couldn't be had for wandering among the unmartyred. The heavens are crisp and clear. It's just chilly enough below to keep mortals awake, but the sun warms their animal backs at midday. Me, I spend my unofficial lunch hour strolling among parks downtown, soaking as much of that autumn heat as I can through my jacket of animal skin.

Today is also called Hallowmas, or the mass of the hallows. Thence comes the name of the e'en preceding, during which the graveyards yield up their messengers. Indeed, in many countries, celebrants of the Day of All Saints follow the ghouls back to their resting places. They make festive picnics among departed relatives, their minds far from the examples of saints.

It makes sense when one realizes that the first saints in Christian tradition were the martyrs. And the first celebrations of their lives were eucharists performed over the graves of martyrs. Celebrations they were, history tells us, as would befit a triumph of the purified soul. And so it is, the dead always leading the way.

I like saints. Maybe it's the Catholic blood in dead daddy's blood, dried genes that thread through the planet's soil back to the old Hapsburg empire. Maybe it's just the fun reading they make. Heaven's prerequisite that saints produce miracles is a wise strategy, judging religion by entertainment value. I'm not sure how miracles inspire morality, love or compassion, but the stories keep our attention. Maybe they evolve from the heroes' tales from the ancient world, tales that may simply be telling us 'ayzu', in Amharic parlance: take heart, be strong.

But then the strong among us are freaks, after all. There isn't too great a divide between ghouls, heroes, saints, and the undead, is there? Gandhi and Spiderman, Einstein and St. Francis: they all cast morbid spells on us with their uncanny powers. Most of appreciate St. Francis for talking to birds more than for his efforts to imitate Jesus in poverty and humility. And at the end of the day, is that such a bad thing?

Miracles and super powers. I'm reminded of the early Christian saint who grew copious body hair just in time to save her virtue. I'm reminded of Abuna Aregawi, Ethiopian saint and founder of the famous Debre Damo monastery in Tigray. When he reached the foot of the cliff below the future site of the monastery, God provided a huge serpent for him. At St. Michael's directions, the snake gathered our venerable saint in his coils and pulled him up the cliff. This feat becomes the model for the subsequent tradition for entering the monastery, climbing up by rope -- by which we mortals are reminded of our profane nature.

I was there in April, and gave it a good effort. That was after hiking about ten kilometers with five kilos of sugar on my back for the monks. It is absolutely a lovely spot for a miracle. The monastery stands on top of a tall mesa, and there really is no entry but up the clean white cliff. A bearded monk with a mischievous grin preceded me, swinging side to side and climbing with alarming agility. I launched in, sure that some residual, incorruptible spirit left in me would rise to the occasion. And sure enough, that little bit of saintliness inside got me a little bit of the way. I reached a part of the cliff where the rock bulges outward. I stopped, secure on a couple footholds, and made Satan's mistake of looking down. That's where I stopped. Some boys scrambled up after me and wrapped an extra rope around me. Up above, a husky man of god pulled while I climbed. No miracle from Jarvis for the books. But, to be fair, most visitors don't even try without the extra rope. Perhaps that just demonstrates stupidity on top of my unholy normality.

Another cool reason to study the stories of our saints is to learn a lot of arcane terms like heortology, menology, paterikon, and my favorite, synaxarion. I've decided this is the greatest reward to religion. I doubt it will turn any keys to heaven, but it will make for some delicious language. Just tasting words like these makes you feel like something is going on. I'm inclined to think that's enough, but I'm pretty easily satisfied on the spiritual plane these days. I always liked classical languages. Super powers and Latin: that is a killer combination.

Anyway, tomorrow is All Souls Day. That's when the normal set get some attention. All the dead faithful saddled with sin, stalled at the very portal to heaven, are honored on All Souls Day. The good news is, we get to nudge them on with prayers and masses. It's nice that the regular guy gets his day. It makes for a quiet holy day. The ghouls sleep in. Michael's divine pythons sun themselves on mesa tops. Mortals drag themselves to chilly, cavernous churches to pray. Ave, ave.