Travelogue 204 – October 27
Intermittent Sunshine of the Lungs

I slept ten hours last night, and I can still say that I was out of bed before the sun was up, though that was at seven-thirty. The authorities over time have delayed Daylight Savings so that we can all feel like eager individuals. The very first thing I do – and there is not a dot of exaggeration in this statement – is to put on my running togs and enter the nearly freezing Minnesota dawn in my shorts.

I have resolved to be healthy on this visit home. I am compelled to because my lungs have declined into a scary state. There were a spate of nights in Ethiopia in which I awoke breathless, chest burning, dim and distant Christmas lights drifting across the ceiling. I was forced to track down an inhaler, and I thought my travails were over until I took a run yesterday. About halfway, the moribund lights started slowly spinning and my lungs were squeaking with the terrific effort of keeping my legs under me. How dispiriting! I determined then and there, doubled over, hands on my knees, that I must purge this disease. I must exert discipline over my frail frame, purge this delicate house for the fleeting flame of life, forge strength where there is weakness. I've got to exercise.

Sweet old October plains, they give me hope. The sky is absolutely clear. A full moon hovers over the western fringe of bare branches. And Saturday morning is quiet. I pass only two neighbors walking their dogs. Therese lives on a parkway. That means a long, straight stretch of plush grass. This morning, I can report that my lungs showed signs of recovery, slight though they may be.

I'm taking a risk that is greater than pushing empty lungs. Therese has lent me a sweatshirt, and the logo on front, in loud yellow and green, is 'Green Bay Packers'. The letters can be seen for blocks. It can't be much worse than wearing a silk screen portrait of Bin Laden.

I don't linger after the exercise, but wash up and pack Andre's vehicle, cherry-red Jetta, with laptop (Steve's) and cell phone (Roxana's) to do some work (all mine). Oh, but the tedious lessons of life never cease. I learn that 'wireless' isn't the uniform quantity that my imagination – faithful to visions of the world as a happy place – has projected. In the first two cafes, I find that the wireless service isn't strong enough for my little machine. By the time I've made it to lucky number three I've had so much coffee that I am very ready for work, juggling two or three internet windows and the same number in Word, while glancing through the local paper.

That's good because I got absolutely nothing done in transit. These days, flights are like long trances. I surrender myself to stasis and to movies – movie after movie. And I can report two good finds among the half dozen or more I devoured. My favorite was La Vie en Rose, the story of Edith Piaf. I was lucky to have no neighbor in the next seat, as I had to wipe away a tear or two. Edith and I share so much painful history: upbringing in the brothel, raw talent nearly undiscovered, the struggle in the streets of a city devastated by war and depression, drug habits and ruthless men. Well, okay, in my case substitute mediocrity in the suburbs, addiction to sugar, and good women who find me a disappointment. But let's not quibble; she and I are kin.

And then there was the movie about the space mission into the sun: beautiful young people on a cool rocket ship equipped with long tracks of mood music; inaudible dialogue that's clearly profound; distress signals; disobedient shipboard computers; evil and diseased humans; a mission to save the planet. It doesn't get any better. Much of it I saw twice, as movies on British Air loop. It's impossible to catch any film at the beginning.

'Sunshine' the movie was called. And once we were out of London, all the sky was just that. It followed us to the ground in Minnesota, sweeping the runway clear of gloom for us. And it's been sunshine ever since, chilly but brilliant as children's hopes – slums of Paris, slums of Ethiopia, California ticky-tack, all one, – visibility high.

Travelogue 203 – October 14
New Day on the Streets

I get a call at 3pm today. I get a string of calls. It’s my next group of volunteers, calling from Heathrow. These volunteers are three sisters from Ireland, and they will be spending two months here working with the children. It’s thoughtful of them to call. They’re telling me the flight is leaving on time. I even get a call from Suzanne’s husband in Ireland. I pick them up tonight at 1am.

I’m due to leave Ethiopia in a week, if all goes well. But it doesn’t feel like it. Maybe it’s arrivals. Maybe it’s the arrival of the sunny season at long last. Maybe it’s the false lull in school activities – (in actual fact, things have never seemed so precarious.) Maybe it’s the abeyance of the relentless string of Ethiopian maladies – head, stomach, head, stomach. Maybe it’s the return of my regular shoeshine guy from the countryside after the holidays are over. But I seem to see the streets again. Where was I before? A kind of anxious business fog, I suppose.

Today, the taxi is dodging a couple guys on bicycles. They are pedaling desperately. God knows I would, too, feeling pretty vulnerable among the weaving taxis. But you do see more bicycles around town these days. And that includes some sportsmen up in the mountains.

I haven’t stopped my training excursions into the mountains after the Brits left, even through my various illnesses. It’s too sweet up there. And I love the sport. I’ve been contemplating founding an athletic club here for talented but disadvantaged young people. Saturday morning, we took Ijigu’s latest recruits up over the mountains to time them in a ten-kilometer run.

There are so many runners here! Once we’re in the hills, we pass runners alongside the length of the highway we travel, pacing along by themselves and in packs. It’s impressive. We release the crew from the minibus and start the stopwatches. The two teenage girls are real heroes. They’ve never run this distance, but they turn in a good performance. Meseret is sixteen, and she lives alone in Addis Ababa, working at a cafe. She has great potential. I hope I can get this team up and running.

I’m so inspired by the athletes that I get up early this morning for a run. Five minutes into the run, I recall I’m no teenage star. There’s no sensation like being breathless in the Ethiopian highlands. It’s a good reminder of one’s limitations.

An hour later, I’m in the taxi riding behind these desperate bikers, who don’t look so desperate, after all. They almost seem to be taunting the taxi drivers, coasting down the steep hill in the middle of the road.

I’m reminded of my summer in Minnesota. There’s a movement among proud cyclists to take over the roads. Every so often, you encounter a mob of them pedaling along, blocking a major city street. I came across one of these mobs one day while I was on my bike. I had to cross the street that they were merrily commanding. Their group was a good quarter-mile long, so I endeavor to weave through their mass. They’ve been taunting motorists, yelling righteous slogans. When suddenly they see me weaving among them, they turn indignant eyes upon me and get ready a shout, then stop in confusion. I wave an apology. I’ve compromised their moment.

I notice another trend in Addis: cheesy cowboy hats. There must have been a recent shipment dumped into the city’s markets, because the hipsters are wearing them in droves. The wayala of our taxi is wearing one, leaning out the window proudly, shouting and dipping his brim into the wind.

Jackie’s gotten kind of ‘street’ lately. Maybe it’s her teen years. She’s coming up to her third birthday. I think it’s nutrition. The new housekeeper (I’ve been through a few lately) is very scrupulous about feeding Jackie, and feeding her lots of meat. My courtyard looks like a charnel house. And Jackie has begun to growl at any approach, especially if one of the ubiqitous bones is nearby. At first, it was cute, like the teenager’s first cool outfit or sulky snarl. Now it’s tedious. I lecture her, but she rolls her eyes.

The best part of these days is the return of clear skies. Standing in my courtyard soaking in the sunshine, I feel empowered to let myself drift into some eddy of timelessness. There’s no better cure for stress. And I had forgotten about that moment during this season, right about 6:30 in the evening, when the sky flares into a riot of colors. Suddenly there are east-west swaths of turqoise alternating with violet and rose. The few clouds are green and purple. Jupiter appears in the west, just above Scorpio, which is still invisible. Tonight a crescent moon, just leaving Libra, becomes luminous above the roof of my house. Just as suddenly, the sky is uniform, gloaming blue, still beautiful. It’s night.

Travelogue 202 – October 5
Money and Monkeys and By the Way

9.13 Sticktown is just a fading dream in lurid colors. We wend our way silently down and across the great gorge, its villages asleep under the majestic river of clouds. We stop just over the other side in a town whose name is too long to recall. We are now in Oromia. Across the river to the north, we were in Gojjam. Signs are in the Roman alphabet again, in the funny, vowel-choked Oromo spellings.

We have our first meal and lots of coffee in a cozy, new hotel. We stand in their courtyard, in the warm sun, for a while. Spirits are revived.

In a couple hours, we arrive at the tourist spot of the day: Debre Libanos is a monastery and famous holy site, founded by one of Ethiopia’s dearest saints, Tekle Haimanot, in the thirteenth century. It’s one of the most important monasteries in the nation. Nothing remains of the original. Apparently the old building is a casualty of medieval Muslim-Christian wars. In modern times, it was victim to another war. An insulted Italian viceroy executed 267 monks and 129 deacons during the occupation.

You turn off the main highway to get there, and almost immediately, you’re struck by another one of those surprising Ethiopian panoramas. Off to the left, there’s another Wild West canyon, hazy and roseate strata captured among the roadside trees. ‘Oh, that’s pretty,’ we say. If we hadn’t just come from the granddaddy of great gorges, we might have been more wowed.

What we are excited about are the baboons. Pete and I have been watching all trip, knowing these are the hills in which to catch sight of the famous gelada baboon. By this stage of the journey, we’ve given up. But there they are, dozens of them in the grasses just beside the road. We get out and commune a while. It is odd to see animals so closely related to humans, to watch how they move and to try to gauge what’s behind the eyes. I like the big guys, the giant old-timers with great wigs of brown hair and insanely sharp teeth and bright red chests. They are content to pick shoots of grass and chew while we watch. But we have to stop the drivers, who think it’s funny to throw stones at them.

The monastery itself is another Haile Selasse structure, something so like a shiny toy in the distance, set against high cliffs, a toy you want to like and yet is just too awkward. We stand at the gates and debate whether we’ll go in. Mark doesn’t hesitate, but starts down a trail alongside the compound wall, toward the closest cliff, which hosts one of those high silvery falls.

We are still debating when we’re approached by a couple monks or monks-in-training. One is a dwarf. They offer us a tour, and we agree. It turns out the tour leads down the very path Mark has scampered down ... illegally.

The trail leads across a creek and then up a steep incline, up stones set as stairs. We aren’t really sure where we’re being led, but our guide, the dwarf, is having a good time. He’s joking and babbling about the monastery. His English is very good, and yet I’m still not sure what he’s saying. Pete and Neil have convinced him that Thomas is eighty years old and needs special attention, so we leave him behind to tend to our ageing friend, who, in fact, does need extra time to climb this hill in his expensive street shoes.

We discover at the top of the climb a damp cave. This was the original attraction for the great founding ascetic. He found this dark, cramped space, with its perennially dripping ceiling, perfect for prayer and meditation on the nature of God. There you go.

It’s while we’re there that we first notice the clouds. ‘Uh-oh.’ We aren’t quick enough. Halfway down the steps, the rain comes, and within minutes it’s a downpour. We run for cover of a tree. We dash across the swelling creek, jumping from one slick rock to another. We run for the cinder-block lavatories, which absolutely reek. Safe inside, we share our concerns about poor Thomas. We wonder what may have happened to him. We hope he’s all right. We debate who will go looking for him. He shows up, and we can’t help laughing: he’s completely drenched and forlorn, led by the arm by his small attendant. The cliche ‘like a wet cat’ fits Thomas so perfectly no one dares utter it.

He takes it well. We wait out the storm, pinching our noses. Eventually, we make a run for the minibus, where we find a crowd of locals has taken refuge. An elderly couple wants a ride to the highway. We’re willing, but we ‘re having trouble getting started. Mark’s been found out. Several monks have gathered at the door of the minibus, hollering at Mark. The dwarf is shoving an open palm in his face. Mark will not budge. He didn’t take the tour, he insists. He was going for a walk. None of us intervene. This is between Mark and the cliff gods. It turns out Mark wins, with the help of the drivers. Or does he win? About a half-hour down the road, Mark discovers his watch is missing. Spooky.

Travelogue 201 – September 22
Journey to Sticktown, Part Two

Drive up the north side of the Blue Nile Gorge on New Year’s Day and you pass through villages hanging on to hillsides, cultivating lovely green terraces hundreds of meters above the murky river. They’re not farming on New Year’s. You catch them in droves along the ‘highway’ – read dirt road, that nonetheless is their Main Street – clapping and singing in groups. These groups are circular and everyone is clustered very closely. They are struck dumb by the minibus full of faranjis that comes around the switchback ... struck dumb for a moment.

Across the great, wide gully, an hour or two ago, we were joking foolishly about the shifta, the local bandits. On this side, the jokes are picked up again. The boys have a penchant for chasing our van. They shout and laugh, they call out for money. A few run alongside for as long as they can. We call them ‘Kenenisa’ after the running champ and national hero.

But around every curve in the road, the groups become more formidable. And it seems that the equipment for boys in this singing and clapping ritual is a hefty staff that is rapped rhythmically against the rocks in the road. We’re still laughing when scores of boys are chasing the van, swinging their sticks. But we’re exchanging wide-eyed looks at the same time. The minibus takes a few loud blows. The driver halts once, and the kids immediately turn tail.

Every curve reveals a new congregation. ‘Stick people,’ we advise and slide the windows shut. ‘You! You!’ they shout with aggressive smiles, and they run. I could be in Paris, ensconced in my carriage on some narrow, barricaded street, upset because my powdered wig is askew.

We pass through the hilarious Terror unscathed, only to find some of the most glorious scenery awaiting us near the top. (See last entry and photo, please.) Our goal is – seemingly has been for days – the town of Dejen. At last it appears, some few kilometers past the ridge’s edge, as we ride into placid green hills like the ones on the other side. How could we help but notice the chebo piled up in great, upright piles like teepees: sticks and sticks. These will be burned later in celebration. Sophisticated wits that we are, we dub our new town ‘Sticktown’.

The name seems to fit. What better name for a pony express stop in the old Ethiopian Wild West? There’s Main Street, the highway, and the rest is slippery mud among squat, frontier homes. Dangerous men with white gabis over their shoulders walk along the highway. Others watch us from dark tea saloons. Our hotel is a compound behind high walls.

It’s nearly dark. Clouds are gathering for the night-long storm. We’re starving. We sit in the empty hotel dining room. We order food, and then forget about it. Four or five rounds of beer later, night has fallen and the place is packed. Sticktown has turned out for some holiday hoe-down. They are not shy. The Ethio-pop jukebox is jacked up and the bold are standing up with it, dancing for the crowd. We are the most vociferous of supporters, needless to say. The boldest is a man in a tan leisure suit. His eyes are unfocused; he coaxes the most painted of ladies to dance with him. His lazy glances settle among their bosoms. We decide he’s the mayor of Sticktown.

Soon, women in every sort of costume, traditional to tease, are standing and moving in very expressive ways. Our table has become silent. Oddly enough, the mayor’s striking wife is dressed most traditionally. She winks at me mockingly, and invites me to dance. I wow the crowd with my deep knowledge of traditional dance. Or is seems so in my foggy state. Lots of men telling me they love me: I take that for admiration of my dance style. Selam, the lovely mayor’s wife, doesn’t tell me she loves me. She just mocks with her eyes, and I can’t tear myself away. There’s a new mayor in Sticktown, Neil says.

Neil has troubles of his own. A lanky teenage boy in baggy jeans, with moves that suggest nothing traditional, has taken a shine to him. Long after Neil refuses him, he’s still mooning our way. When Mark returns from one of his stints in the Queen’s Bar – this hotel has two bars: ‘It’s like a cruise ship!’ Mark gushes – we direct the lovesick boy toward Mark, and Mark amuses us with a long, slinky performance with the boy. Alas, Mark realizes the joke and returns to the Queen’s Bar.

Bodies are writhing. Chaos is gaining primacy in the saloon. We cross the compound and climb the stairs to the Queen’s Bar. It’s empty but for our crew. Sadly, Kylo and the drivers have established a long loop of reggae songs, ‘One World, One Yawn: the Most Repeated and Indistinguishable Hits of the Century,’ is the name of the compilation, I think. Justine has taken over the area between six tables that passes as a dance floor. The (woman) bartender watches her hungrily.

I stand on the tiny balcony of the Queen’s Bar. I sway in the drizzle, and I watch the mayor and his wife leave the hotel, wondering if I should plant myself in the middle of the highway and call him out. I decide that wouldn’t be prudent. Down in the main bar, the women have fled and there’s no one left but Neil’s boys. Things might get rough.

I retreat from the night’s battles, from Marley-burn, and find my hotel room. There’s no running water in Sticktown. We wash from buckets in Sticktown, and that’s the way we likes it. We settle, greasy from the long road, in our bug-ridden beds, and we listen to African rain on iron roofs. We pray to our heavy-fisted God, and we scratch ourselves into dark, wilderness slumbers. No dreams because there is nowhere but the bogs of Sticktown. Good night, all, and Happy Millennium!

Travelogue 200 – September 15
Journey to Sticktown, Part One

Drive north out of Addis Ababa in mid-September and you encounter some localities familiar from ancient blogs, like Selulta and Chancho. But now they look fresh and Irish green. And that describes much of the half-day journey we pursue on Ethiopian New Year’s Day: bright green hills and pastures amid spells of mist. Lots of livestock.

The ten of us doze and chat. We take photos out the windows of the minibus. We stop in Fiche for lunch. A small crowd gathers to watch us. When he’s done eating, Mark entertains the children with magic tricks. It’s fun to see real amazement at old magic tricks.

About four hours into the driving, we come to the real goal of the trip. The first hint we’ve arrived is a sense of space ahead, the feeling you get when you’re approaching the ocean, a sense that the world is falling away. The sky expands. There are glimpses of distant ridges. Then the world does fall away. You’re poised on the edge of a gorge so wide and magnificent that it takes the breath away. Its far side is dim in the haze of the day.

This is the Blue Nile Gorge, and one thousand meters below snakes that grand old river, the ‘Abay’, as its termed in Amharic – a term that sounds identical to what children call their fathers.

It took us four hours to get here, and it takes us three hours to reach the opposite rim of the gorge. For one thing, there’s no asphalt on this road, (still one of two major arteries to northern Ethiopia). For another, we stop often for photos. Our first stop is only a few hundred meters down from the rim. There we find a beautiful waterfall. It crashes into a bed of boulders just beside the road’s bridge, and the stream continues on under the bridge, toward more falls. In fact, we almost become numb to the sight of high falls, like silver tassles among the rocks. They are everywhere along this road. I don’t know if this is only true in rainy season. I would guess most dry up in a few months’ time.

We’re content to look at the falls for a while, but the driver is nervous. He says this area is a favorite for shifta. That means bandits. We jump in the van, and of course, launch into many insensitive comments and alerts about bandits, boys being boys. Justine, the only woman on the trip, doesn’t find any of this humorous, but shows commendable patience.

The town halfway down becomes a bandit town. Boys run after the van, and we ask them if they’re bandits. Men with staring eyes and guns between their knees watch us from their front steps. We don’t ask them anything.

At the bottom of the gorge, among steep walls, run the muddy-brown and swift waters of the Blue Nile. Spanning it is a high bridge of Italian design. Thomas, an authority of all things Italian, squints at it and says it’s 1930s. I can’t verify that, but it’s old enough that supports have been raised for a second bridge almost next to the first.

Ethiopian officials have a thing about cameras. The drivers warn us, no photos of the bridge. This warning circulates several times around the van. And still, halfway across the span, Neil leans out his window with his camera, having tuned us all out long ago. The federal police, the grimacing-skulls, of whom I’m so very fond, stop us on the other side. There are words, but Neil calmly defuses the situation, deleting the photo while two uniformed lizards look on.

It’s a long road, but the view never gets dull. If anything, it becomes more delightful. As we near the opposite rim, we come across Shangri-La, green Alpine hills and terraces, crystalline falls and quiet farmsteads. I hope I can post a photo here.

The next morning, after our fateful night in Sticktown, we hit the road early. It has rained all night, but the morning is blue-skied. At least, it is above the gorge. When we arrive at the canyon, we see that down below the clouds have never parted. We look down into a serene and still inland sea of billowing white cloud.

Travelogue 199 – September 10
Intrepid Athletes All

Mud and mists and alarming pain in the lungs: these were our only rewards, but intrepid athletes all – well, only four of us, in actual fact – intrepid soldiers of athletics, we rose every other morning to make our assault on the mountains.

Ijigu arrives at seven to wake us. Rising from lack of sleep, from hangovers, and from the warmth of winter beds, we meet his summons. Ijigu is elite runner and general team attendant – and unanimous favorite of the Brits among my local staff. He is always cheerful and helpful, but never so cheerful as when he gets to take us out on the trails.

We pile into the team minibus and we motor uphill, nearly to the city limits. There we stretch and start at a brisk and anxious walk along the first trail. Anxious because in a matter of fifty meters or so we will encounter the first hill. It’s the longest and steepest hill of the course. It takes us literally to the top of the mountain ridge. Even the most fit among us – at sea level – are immediately breathless and light-headed, stung by the altitude. It’s a scary feeling to be so suddenly robbed of heart and breath. But, intrepid athletes all, we push through the pain and, by the end of the first week, we’re running up most or all of this incline.

At the summit, we’ve reached the rarified heights of athletics. Here, along a maze of dirt trails among the eucalyptus, train the cream of Addis Ababa’s runners. Ijigu, bored by our pace, falls into his loping, mountain habits, dashing into the trees and re-emerging at intervals to check on our progress. We plod by groups of them, doing high-step drills or passing like phantoms single-file among the trees. Kids in uniforms are playing soccer. Some laugh; some encourage. One can’t help but feel honored to be in their company – to feel exhilarated by the thin and chilly morning air and the glimpses of long green mountain slopes among the rainy season mists.

The Great Ethiopian Run was cancelled, as I reported, because of political weather, but the Brits take it in stride. We immediately begin plans for our own race. The Shiro Meda school is in the foothills. We train in the mountains. And most of our time in Addis Ababa is not spent downtown or in rich and faranji-friendly Bole, but in the hilly, poor northside, underneath the mountains. So, our run will be the ‘Tesfa Mountain Run’.

Mark and I leave the crew at John’s house one afternoon to walk the course. It runs about six kilometers along the top of the Entoto mountain range. It’s a very beautiful track, forested and still most of the way. In the last mile, the trees open up and the runner gets a panoramic view of the hills on the north side of the ridge, sloping away from the capital city. Our course ends at Entoto Maryam church, the first in Addis Ababa, established by old Menelik behind his first palace in the new capital.

The day of the race starts out cold and wet, but just as we set out in the minibus, the clouds part. We stop at the summit above my house, and we line up for launch. Two of our children hold the START banner in front of us. Wogayehu holds two stopwatches in either hand. Sost–houlet-and, she counts backward, and GO. We begin with a shout, rushing forward in a pack, until we hit the first hill.

The minibus passes us each on the course. Thomas leans out the side window with his camera and leaves us with wry comments on our plodding progress. At the end, the children stretch a home-made ribbon across the road, about a hundred meters up from the historic church. We each get a photo kicking through the ribbon in glory.

The rest of the children and parents are waiting for us down the hill at the Shiro Meda school. This is our Millennium party for the families. We’ve purchased a side of beef. Half a dozen parents sit at a long table outside, cutting up meat, onions and peppers. Bakalech is stirring with a stick the roasting food in a huge, shallow metal bowl that sits on a low fire. Inside, the parents sit formally and patiently at rows of tables. They are silent when we enter; they smile and nod at our greetings.

The kids, on the other hand, are boisterous. Mark has taught them a short song about the Millennium, which they perform for the parents. Then they sit on mats surrounding their parents while we conduct an awards ceremony for runners and for children. I’m forced as MC to announce my own award as second in the male runner’s category. I’m so nervous, I announce it twice ... and then once again at the end of the ceremony.

One millennium safely tucked away, with full stomachs and achy limbs we part. The children and teachers get two weeks off. We faranji head off to the bar to recount our adventures and victories, intrepid athletes all. New Year’s is still a few days away. Far are we from guessing the adventures still ahead ... in Sticktown.

Travelogue 198 – September 8
Times Passing

The media still chirps about the coming Ethiopian Millennium. The radio has a trademark jingle and advertising has become morbidly repetitive. In the real world, there’s little sign of the gleaming dawn. If anything, things seem grimmer than before.

The Great Ethiopian Run was postponed until November, news that my Brits – arriving to take part in the race – heard on the plane. The concert in Meskel Square was cancelled. Stern pairs of police have begun patrolling the streets again.

Celebration has submitted to fear. Eritrean and Somali agents are lurking: we musn’t provide them with targets. Locals take the cancellations well: by and large they weren’t too engaged in the first place. Foreigners bite their lips and tell themselves the trip was worth the millennial prices.

I’d say ‘so it goes; we carry on’, except that some of us don’t. Melesech, Leeza’s and Saba’s mother, passed away on the 2nd. She had been sick, but it was only afterward that most of us heard that her liver had failed her. Before that it was only stomach ailments.

It’s the day after the Brits arrived and I’m plunged into the chill fogs of family mourning. I’m scolded for my neglect and my absences. I’m forgiven and embraced. We sit joined in the gloom of bereavement, in the gloom of Saba’s tiny home, cleared for the wake. New arrivals initiate new rounds of wailing. This is the luxo, Ethiopia’s three-day rite of mourning.

I’m sunk into an aching lethargy. Memory hardens again into a leaden chain of loss. I’m numb and subdued even through the funeral, which in Ethiopia is a fiery catharsis. Hundreds flock to the graveyard. I arrive with Nebiyu, and we walk together among the crowd along the muddy road that bisects the huge graveyard. The crowd seems strangely urgent. We skirt puddles and stand aside for cars that bear the family and bear the well-to-do mourners.

I’m separated from Nebiyu. I realize I’m beside the hearse just as the back door swings open and a wild, multi-voiced keening begins. Saba rushes past, hoarsely screaming ‘Imaye!’ (‘my mother’), her clutched hands in the air. The coffin is lifted out and whisked away, and the chorus of suffering follows, squeezing through narrow alleys of graves. I’m pushed along through bogs of grass and mud.

The vanguard reaches Melesech’s grave and she is lowered in. Old ladies continue to push from behind. Wailing rises and falls from all around. Inside the suffocating circle are the hoarse shrieks and heart-breaking, sing-song laments of the immediate family.

Eventually, Saba and close relatives sweep by again, and the crowd surges to follow, though with less vigor than before. I linger behind, an island in the stream, until I’m left with the grave. I’m left with Leeza’s grave, and I feel an old horror and pain rise. Saba’s boyfriend calls to me, and reluctantly I abandon her.

Back along the pitted dirt track: we gather before the church, where some words are being recited. People are suddenly serene. They file past the family with sad nods and hand-shakes.

The formal luxo begins. The customary tent has been set up in the street. Hundreds gather there, filing past the family again, whom have been installed outside in a row of chairs. We are served lunch from huge pots, and we sit soberly inside the tent on benches. There are soft strains of conversation.

A few days later, the luxo has returned inside Saba’s small house. I sit among family, mostly old ladies in white shawls, who are no longer subdued. They chide Asfaw, Melesech’s cousin, because he breaks into weeping. It’s bad form to cry after dark. They gossip about family and about prices in the market. Saba rests on a mattress on the floor in the back of the room, staring blankly with half-closed eyes. Several other ladies sit with her, blankets over them, leaning against the wall. Saba hasn’t been alone since her mother passed.

And still the Millennium approaches, cruel in its blind march forward. No one is prepared. Somehow we must be ready to celebrate.

Travelogue 197 – August 23
Redolence of Things Past

My house is redolent with a musk of nostalgia. It’s the odor of mold, and it’s not a subtle fragrance, but nearly overpowering. It reminds me of all the various basements I’ve crashed in over the years, beginning with my brother’s in Tacoma, Washington when I was a teen.

And why is my house the focus of such fond stinks? A couple of nights ago, the place was flooded. Just when you think kerempt, or the rainy season, is diminishing, that’s when it will hit you. We had a storm to remember. I awoke at one a.m. to the roar of torrential rain on the tin roof. It was unnerving, the unrelenting volume, but that was just the beginning. The torrent turned to hail and went on for quite a while. In the morning, there were piles of ice like snow banks behind the house.

And in the morning, there were the remains of the storm, strewn through half the house, streaks of mud and puddles of water and ice on my uneven floor. The flood seems to have been stopped at the threshold of my bedroom by some mysterious and much-appreciated intervention. Similarly it stopped just before the live power cords on the ground in the salon. The gods of my nostalgia: what was able to creep in under my bedroom door so infected my carpet as to arouse very powerful triggers to the memory.

It’s an age of water and an age of disasters. On my way into Piassa in the morning, I pass one of Addis Ababa’s new city lakes, and I feel I might just be in Minneapolis, but for the beggars, cripples, waifs and wretches clogging one’s muddy way. The lake is actually a construction site. It has been one since I first arrived in Addis Ababa. Since then, though, I must say it has gained the prestige of fencing. Whatever it will be someday will be massive and important. It will occupy a huge chunk of land across the street from City Hall.

For now, it must stand as a symbol of the real (e)state of affairs next to the stately symbol of what we’d like, the sinkhole of the commonwealth. Oromia, by all reports, is becoming one such murky quagmire in our patchwork state. The approaching millennium affords all kinds of causes their day under the summer clouds. Bands of armed bandits calling themselves freedom fighters (all the rage among roaming armed bands) are said to be roaming about eastern Oromia demanding hard cash in the name of ... well, of whatever ethnic or religious principle comes to mind, I guess. There have been bomb scares, too, just to spice up the holidays.

This makes life difficult for anyone doing business in Mojo or Debre Zeit, ... say, someone like me. Just the other day Saba had to head off toward Mojo to negotiate for the release of one of our staff from the county jail. He was the unfortunate man in the middle, caught between employers in Addis who needed furniture moved from one site to another and officials and landlords always alert to chances for graft. He was charged with theft and held overnight while officials meditated the opportunities. Our man has been let go, but the paperwork grinds on toward its forgone conclusion: money in the proper hands. And Saba spends two hours in ‘customs’, along with crowds of others trying to re-enter the capital city.

That zone east of Addis is notoriously difficult. In nearby Nazarit, we had to walk away from a proposed school because the education officer wanted jobs for family and rent money for friends. Meanwhile, in Mojo, the owner of a private school is spreading lots of cash to shut us down. “We don’t need schools in Mojo,’ the enlightened education officer tells us. Hmm.

I have my comforts: the scent of sour sentiment and scenes of Mississippi mud in downtown Addis, they lend me inspiration. Onward ho!

Travelogue 196 – August 19
Transfiguration

I’ve returned to Ethiopia at the height of the rainy season. The first impression is everything I dread: cold, damp, and moldy. The clouds never part. The house is dark and forlorn.

But after a few days, the clouds and my mood lift. The weather resumes a familiar pattern, lacking all pattern at all. Rather, it moves in waves across the sky, predictable only in being dynamic. It never stops. It might be sunny through strips of ambiguous cloud, while a black storm front builds on the horizon. It might sprinkle on you while the sun stays shining. It might be hailing in half an hour. The wind will rise suddenly and shake the trees of moisture. The concrete of my little courtyard is green with damp. The weather is something I begin to wonder at and even enjoy.

Today is Buhe, the end to another of the Ethiopian Christians’ many fasts. On this day, and adjoining days, troupes of boys parade around in a happy ritual not unlike trick-or-treat, in which the boys go door to door and sing a lyric that they adapt for whomever answers the door, making the song a silly song of praise. If you don’t give, they set off firecrackers.

I’ve heard two explanations for this fast in August. The first is the Assumption, when Mary gets swept up into heaven. This seems to be the popular explanation. Most people will answer that they’re fasting for Mary. Considering the general love for Mary here, that doesn’t mean they understand the origins of the fast.

The second I like better. It’s the time of the Transfiguration, which is the celebration of Jesus being proclaimed by the Father on Mount Tabor. Christ glowed, they say, which I suppose we all do in our dad’s pride. At the time, shepherd boys danced and sang all night. This leads into the tradition of Buhe.

Another thing about this season I had forgotten: the early evening migrations. In a pause in the showers, Jackie and I are playing in the yard when suddenly we spot, almost at the same moment, the first winged intruder. I believe they’re termites. Hardly a cause for celebration, but they are a fun sport for Jackie and me. Soon they’re fluttering overhead by the dozen, four gossamer wings struggling to keep going toward some instinctive haven. When one sinks down into our yard, Jackie starts jumping and snapping her jaws. Apparently, she finds the brown juicy bodies tasty. So do the birds. Detached wings drift upon the breeze. The game reminds me of when we lived at the school in Shiro Meda. It makes me nostalgic. From across the street, I hear the children screaming and laughing as the bugs descend into their yard.

Some other autumnal pests are descending on Addis. I’ve never seen so many white tourists here, presumably early for the millennium. Spanish, German, Dutch, French: I’ve heard them all as they strut up the street. In the hotels of Piassa, as I’ve mentioned before, the tourists are the backpackers. They always seem very proud, for reasons I haven’t figured out. I say ‘hello’, but they ignore me as an impostor in their dream. The taxi guys are happy, though. Business has been slow this summer.

Travelogue 195 – August 13
Fat Times

Everyone here in Addis Ababa is in agreement: I’ve gained weight. They insist it’s for the better. Even Melesech, who has lost as much as I’ve gained. She didn’t have it to lose. She lies in bed, as she has for months, with a permanently stunned look in her eye. She was in the hospital while I was away, bleeding internally. ‘You look good,’ she murmurs in Amharic, and I can’t answer for the bitter sadness and helplessness in my heart. She’s never been well, since Leeza died. There doesn’t seem to anything anyone can do. But we hope, and we take her to doctors.

If I’ve gotten fat, a fair share of the blame belongs in Great Britain. As Pete will confirm, I’ve become a great admirer of British cuisine, a cuisine known round the globe for its delicate qualities: sausage and mash, mushy peas, fish and chips, stout and ale. Ah, the refinement of it.

And now that Pete has moved out of London, I can taste it in its native environs. As far as I can tell, British cuisine has deteriorated in the capital, giving way to tepid palates grown accustomed to weak international dishes, Asian, Italian, Greek and Middle Eastern, African, etc. Alas.

The triumphs this trip: fish and chips and bitter. We scored some fabulous fish and chips. Maybe that’s not too surprising, being in a coastal fishing town. The fresh salt air wasn’t dulling my senses, either. So, so good it felt to be seaside – for the first time in years. Even among my passes through Rome, I haven’t made it to the sea.

And this place is perfect. Maybe it isn’t technically the sea – a channel instead? – but even standing on the great green cliffs (not so very far from Dover) I can’t descry the continent. So it’s sea to me. The hills are beautiful, and old town, filling one vale between them, flowing down toward the calm, grey, flatness of the sea is serene and pleasant.

It’s down among those narrow lanes and their squat, ageless pubs that I get my education in bitters. Pete is a connoiseur. I’ve resisted darker beers, for no good reason beyond an attachment for lagers formed in central Europe. But I’m talked into tasting, and then into a pint. One has to put in some time with bitters. With some, it’s like sticking your nose into a freshly trimmed hedge. But steady on: the rewards are considerable. Taste from a lager after you’ve put down a hedge or two, and you’ll find it flat and bland. The real bitter is flavor, no doubt about it.

And now time begins to bend. Maybe the Normans had no fish and chip joints, but I can imagine that bitter wouldn’t be too alien to them. Climb back up to the cliffs and you’re in their world, back to the beginning of something, overlooking the seas they crossed to defend William’s honor and defend the crown promised him by his Saxon brother-in-law.

Half his castle is missing, along with much of the hill it was built on, lost to erosion natural and planned. But it still makes for a nice tour. There’s a great view of the sea, and enough left of the old structure to make it interesting: the beginning of a new England. John from Worcester says the Anglo-Saxons built nothing higher than an arm’s-length. Certainly they don’t seem to have left anything behind. Unless it’s Stonehenge, the old stuff is Norman.

Particularly amusing is the fifteen-minute history presentation in the little theater, complete with plastic kings in the corners that light up, and yellowed-film re-enactments in which overweight Normans swing in slow, inaccurate arcs.

Pete and I take a tour of the 1066 battle site, which is not actually in Hastings, but in ... Battle(!), a tiny town quaint and gone tony in the way almost every town in southeastern England has gone tony, except Hastings.

The battle took place on a rather steep hillside, believe it or not, with the Saxons holding the crest. Now, and for a thousand years, the crest is commanded by Battle Abbey, a beautiful establishment, founded by William to cleanse himself of the blood spilled there. (Did you know that the Pope was on William’s side? The Normans carried His banner.) The old arch was placed where King Harold is supposed to have fallen with an arrow to his eye.

We tour the whole field, following a path that is set with placards describing the progress of the day’s battle: from the initial successes of the Saxons, who had already beaten the Danes in York and just managed to march back to face William, through the rumors of William’s demise and his famous raising of his helmet to give heart to the troops, through the faked retreats of the Normans to draw the Saxons down the hill, and on to victory at the top of the hill and the launch of a dynasty.

We manage to get lost, and discover a lovely fish pond and some fields that might have changed little since the eighteenth century, when the land was cultivated for pleasure and profit by aristocrats in wigs, fields shaded by huge yew and oaks. (Yes, Pete had to teach me what a yew tree was, though honestly, it look like nothing more than a drooping fir to me.)

Travelogue 194 – August 4
The Bridge

8.2 Helicopters circle. Traffic congeals along unlikely avenues. Roadblocks go up. Traffic cops blow their whistles. There’s a kind of hunted look in people’s eyes. Mortality is on the prowl again.

Public disaster is its own little climate system. Within its perimeters, within a few miles from the epicenter, you sweat under an oppressive anxiety. You look over your shoulder. You hesitate and second-guess yourself because nothing feels right. You snap at friends. You’re easily distracted and unsettled.

I circled the site today, traveling from errand to appointment and back to errands, crossing the river several times, and finally passing the place itself. Crossing over the highway, you can’t miss it, a chunk of the roadway thrust into the air where the bridge was wrenched free and fell into the Mississippi. It gives you a shudder and a fleeting feeling of land’s-end.

First word is a phone call while we’re at Steve’s last night. Roxana passes on the news from her call that a bridge has collapsed. Where it was, she didn’t catch. But the concerned calls continue to come. Steve’s got the TV on, and we are stunned at the image. Everyone has a story about their last pass over the bridge. The media voices drone through scarce facts and over limited video. ‘What did you feel when you first arrived at the site?’ she asks the transportation official.

Late tonight, I’m riding my bike back to Wes’s. We’ve made it through the first day of trauma. I have to cross the river. The closest bridges are shut. I have to cycle back to Hennepin to cross and then alongside the river to where my original path picks up.

The site of the collapse is awash in light. Rescue teams are still at it. The glow is forlorn, and it attracts a slow stream of tourists and melancholics. Small groups stand above the river, staring in morbid curiosity and murmuring.

Cars rest at the bottom of the river. Divers struggle against the Mississippi current to shine torches into the windows. I turn away and pedal past cops manning barricades. I’m eager to get away.

8.4 I wake earlier than I had planned. One thing about tent living, you’re exposed to the elements. Elements like jet engines churning the early morning air not too far above your head, taking off from the nearby airport, resounding like dream-shattering, aural mementi mori: ‘your time is coming.’

I get on the bike and work off a few quick miles. As I approach the café, a military helicopter roars directly over us, headed toward the river.

I absorb some caffeine and brood over inconsequential things, and I set out again. Today, I pedal across the university bridge. There are more people than usual on a summer morn. They’re standing at the edge, looking upriver. I assume they’re trying for a glimpse of the new ruins, but they’re not. On a field at river’s edge below, the helicopter is parked among an assortment of emergency vehicles. It’s Bush. He’s come to town to look over the fallen bridge.

Is the copter his ride or an escort? ‘It’s a decoy,’ opines one spectator. Nothing’s quite real here, until it’s time to clean up. Bush spends the afternoon at a fundraiser while the work in the river resumes.

Travelogue 193 – July 26
Red, White, and the Blue River

Life leads to funny places. What do I know about wine? I can discriminate between red and white on most evenings. The latter gives me headaches. One glass of the former makes me happy. Two glasses are likely to lead to faux pas. Three and I might fall in love, or some such other embarrassment.

Stephanie was in Ethiopia just this spring, leading the children in painting exercises. Now she’s driving to Minnesota with her boyfriend, carrying cases of wine in her trunk and stacks of children’s art on her back seat. She put together a fundraiser in her home state of Michigan, fusing art and wine, and making lots of dough. She made cute labels for the Michigan wine from pieces of children’s art.

Just the elegant setting should have been a draw to the Minnesota version of her event. Deneen hosted the event in her loft in a St. Paul artists’ co-op. The building is in a downtown neighborhood called Lowertown, which is a knot of brick relics converted into condos and malls, eerily quiet as only a Minnesota city could be. Deneen’s building is opened up inside so you can look up the tall brick shell and see the stacks of balconies that lead into artists’ lofts.

Ride the elevator and you may notice with a start the scorpion set in the plastic ceiling grate protecting the lights. Your heart jumps though you recognize it for plastic. It’s like the outlines of bugs are hard-wired into our alert systems. I study the menace in his claws and multiple legs and his low carriage, ready to pounce, and I feel like this little creature has been stalking me on this trip. I’ve taken a few stings.

We set the wine on one table, the cheese and crackers on another. We set the children’s art on just about any surface we can find, leaning the small matted pieces against the brick wall – the plentiful, cascading brick of this lovely loft – and lean them into the high windows that overlook the river.

We stand at the TV, watching Stephanie’s video of the kids dancing. The artists stand at the windows remarking on the evening light in the river valley. We teachers stand together and gossip. There’s a tug of war over the chocolate port, far and away our biggest seller. It’s a small crowd, and fortunately I’m not called upon to comment on the wines we’re tasting. That one is red, I say. This one is white. A toast to the little ones dancing on the TV screen. They have a future.

A few mornings later at seven a.m., I’m reciting the pledge of allegiance for the first time since grade school or high school. Mary and I are presenting to a Rotary Club. They meet at the clubhouse of a golf course. Outside the window, beyond the flag, lie the peaceful green hillocks of the course. The Rotarians have fed us a very nice breakfast. The old man next to us tells us about the fox in his yard.

The pledge made, I’m standing before a dozen or so at their tables. I’m referring them to Roxana’s power point and stumbling. It’s a tough crowd. I stop and look closer, from eye to eye, and I see in them how many charitable groups have presented here. I see how far away Ethiopia is. The children are dancing.

We do get one donation. It’s from the man who commented on the madrasas in the Middle East, inculcating radical Islam. He tells me later that a relative of his went to school with one of the Emperor’s family fifty years ago. He writes down the man’s name, saying he must be a minister by now. I agree to look him up.

Travelogue 192 – July 26
Running

Suddenly it’s raining. When I enter the café at two, it’s ninety degrees and mostly sunny. Half an hour later, I look up and notice the rainfall outside.

The weather counts. My vagabond life has moved out of doors. Four weeks into my Minnesota visit, I have to find new digs at short notice. What I’m able to arrange is a tent and a sleeping bag in Wes’s back yard.

I travel by bicycle. Wes’s house is about an hour’s ride from Roxana’s apartment, which is my only regular access to computer technology. There are no internet cafes in Minneapolis. In a pinch, I can stop by the university and pretend to type in a password at the computer lab.

Everybody has a cell phone. I have one, too, but it doesn’t work. I’m guessing someone hasn’t paid the bill.

I run outside to slip a plastic bag over my bicycle seat. I’m wondering how to handle the unfortunate coincidence of downpour with appointment across town. But I see grace when I look above. Minnesotan Zeus, capricious weather-maker of the north, likes a rich palette. His one dome of sky is many stories, blue patches among milky white strata, beside high, black thunderheads, and darker masses to the east. Today’s story is about jarvis’s reprieve from a drenching.

And this is kind of like the tale of Tesfa, after all – Tesfa meaning hope, I remind the reader – a bit of doggerel scratched in sand. It’s an operation with a big heart and big ambitions and an office that roves – from Craig’s basement to car trunks to boxes and tents – with rotating phone numbers and then none, with borrowed and broken computers strewn across three continents.

All in all, I have to be happy at the end of the day, bicycling to the home of the day late at night, zigzagging among silent residential streets in South Minneapolis. The air is still and humid. The moon is up, its lines indistinct in the hazy sky. Crickets sing among the hedges and in the parks. I check in with Wes when I arrive, quick whispered hellos and news, careful not to wake the family. And then I climb into my blue pod of a tent. It crinkles as I crawl in. I lay across the sleeping bag. I unzip the flap that opens my screened window. I can look up at the stars. I fall asleep trying to figure out what piece of a constellation I’m looking at.

In the morning, it’s on the bike again, back into town for work. I spend a lot of time on that machine this month, and I love it. Occasionally, I think my friends are mystified. I ride it to meeting places even when I have a ride. But in a few weeks, I’ll have no bicycle.

One of the highlights this trip: the new ‘Greenway’. That’s a bike path, recently completed, that travels along an old railway line east to west, from the river to Uptown in Minneapolis. I look for errands along that route so I can cruise its smooth course, pedal without stopping. It’s the best meditation.

Travelogue 191 – July 5
Cornici

I have to pre-empt the Tigray series again with another expedition, this one instigated by a crew of friends and believers back home. And that's where I write from today: 'back home'. That means Minnesota -- bright and sunny and clean old Minnesota, my happy and peaceful state picking up the pieces after its raucous national holiday.

I came by way of Rome and London. The latter for business, the former a pleasure required by the return ticket in hand whilst 'back home' in Ethiopia. Ah, Roma: it's like a long and luxuriously slow novel that I pick up every summer.

The Eternal City is baking when I pass through. I'm staying with Ugo, in his flat on the top floor of the mid-century high-rise among blocks of the same in Colli Albani.

Ugo has jump-started his artistic career since the last year's chapter. He's had an exhibit of his photography. He displayed a series about the story of Jesus, but featuring a nude female model in an empty room with brick walls. The exposures are long, so that any figures beside the woman are ghostly. He pours green and red light into the room at various angles. Several shots are very attractive, how ever dark and abstract the message may be.

Ugo wonders what my agenda is this time. I say, 'walk'. And that's just about all I do. I'm a bird released from his cage when I make it to the West. It could be Watts or it could be Rome; I just want to walk all day. It feels like freedom.

My favorite walking route on this trip (after the Metro and a bus) is to cross the river on the Ponte Sublicio and walk through Trastevere to the Ponte Sisto. I stop in my beloved Campo de' Fiori for a long coffee at Le Matte Teste and watch the neighborhood. The cute Romanian waitress is still there, singing along to the Beatles and Stevie Wonder. I've been away too long time; she only half recognizes me.

I return to the river and walk along the bank below street level up to the Ponte Sant'Angelo. It's a peaceful way to go. You don't catch many sights , and you may have to dodge a bike or two, or skirt a homeless encampment underneath one or two of the bridges, but it's quiet. You stroll beside the green water on a broad bit of pavement. Up above are the plane trees along the Lungotevere. Climbing back into the city, I bypass the Vatican and explore the neighborhoods north.

One late afternoon, I end up back in the center. I like the old, winding streets just across the river on the Ponte Sant'Angelo. Without thinking about it, I come upon the Pantheon, one of my favorite spots. I soak in the place, leaning against the fountain in the middle of the piazza, and finding myself becoming an unlikely nuisance to photographers.

I think there are more cameras than people in the piazza. Certainly more lens tourism than naked-eye appreciation. It's that odd ratio that makes me a nuisance. I've chosen an innocuous position, but I'm so absorbed in the sight -- the age and majesty of it, standing since the days of Augustus -- that I attract the notice of the camera people. They are on schedules; they ebb and flow, circle and fidget so furiously that I must look like a statue in time-lapsed footage. They just need the angle at every tourist stop, and they need it quick. This guy's got the angle, they must think. They position themselves in front of me, back into me. Click. Finally, I become the photographer, couples handing me the dream machines to imprint their trips to Rome. I must be a natural dreamer: the structure is framed rather nicely in the digital screens from my spot. Stand there, between the colossal columns of the towering portico. Click: you are recorded and remembered, along with old Agrippa. The monument does its job.

Travelogue 191 – June 27
Muddy Doldrums

Seventh in the Tigray series. Hang in there!

4.17 Adigrat. All the best traveling involves a healthy amount of lingering. Lingering so healthy it would be unhealthy back home. If you drag home-style productivity into the travel experience, you’ll end up being one of those checklist travelers whose chipper litanies after the fact, complemented by volumes of photography, are so deeply alienating. Better you waste some time. Pass an entire trip without a spell of disaffected doldrums, and you know your travel-planning was off. That mid-trip melancholy, feeling adrift and lost, is the best sign that you are loved by the gods of travel. (Who would those be? Hermes? Carolyn, please inform…)

I’ve hit the sweet-trip doldrums. Saba and I can’t decide how we’re traveling to the next destination, Do we take the bus or hire a driver? The dilemma arises from our commitment to visit the historic Debre Damo monastery, which is a ways off the highway. Saba’s family searches for drivers; I interview cabbies in the town center; we wait.

I wake up early and walk down to the Catholic Cathedral – landmark in Adigrat, a leftover from Italian occupation, I believe. It’s a nice-looking building, a simple version of what you might find in Europe, though Spartan in ornamentation. There’s a campanile and a tiled dome. All is tasteful, except for the plaster super-Jesus above the door. He looks friendly enough, though kind of lumpy. It’s the Superman colors he’s wearing that put me off. I know he walks on water but I don’t remember the faster-than-a-speeding-bullet verse. I leave that to the theologians.

Back at the hotel, I’m restless. I decide on a long walk. I’ll head toward the mountain pass in the west. There are two old churches guarding entry into town on either side of the descending road. I brave the western neighborhoods – ‘you, you! Money!’ kids on my tail and old folks staring – until I reach the winding dry riverbed that courses down from the mountains and through town. I’m walking among small farmsteads, finding peace at last, and I’m reflecting on how this wide riverbed must roar during the rainy season – just as massive clouds gather over the mountains and thunder begins to rumble.

The story goes exactly where it must, in accordance with the ironclad logic of the travel doldrums. There are no gentle entrances for bad weather in Ethiopia, no reprieves or wistful mists. I’m drenched within minutes. I follow a few groaning cows down a slippery mud path back toward town. Once in town, people watch me from doorways and windows as I stomp through every puddle mid-road. I have the streets to myself; that much I can be grateful for.

And no less grateful am I for the hot water in my hotel room shower. Right about the time the storm is passing and the last raindrops are falling, I’m stepping under a new and much more pleasant stream. By the time I’m done, long shafts of sunlight are breaking through the clouds, slanting toward the east.

It isn’t long before the sun has consolidated his hold on the big blue sky again, blue growing ever deeper and rays slanting at ever more radical degrees, exaggerating the shadows of our cluttered little world. I want some horizons. I want some space. I ask our cringing landlord if the roof is open to visitors. It is. I’m even able to have a beer delivered to me there. I sit on top of an anonymous block of concrete and I contemplate the mountains in their darkening, end-of-the-day hues.

I’m on top of the city, on top of Africa. I’m on top of fogs of frustration and grief and joy. Minute by minute I rejoice, I reject. I want to leave; I want to stay. For one still moment, we find a truce, the country and I: me and this crazy, arid sunset paradise, land of aquamarine churches hundreds of years old, land of yellow stone and red earth, of magnificent silences and angelic smiles and innocent aggression, of native gentility and bedrock religion, of forever sun and avenging clouds, of ridges long in miles and ages, and of the drifting humanity at their feet, drifting for millennia, many millennia before they had a name for mountains or for themselves. It’s a terrible beauty, and hard to live with.

Travelogue 190 – June 23
Feredeshem!

Sixth in the Tigray series – into the hills ...

4.15 Adigrat. We come to the heart of the journey. For dear Saba, it’s the purpose. We will visit her family outside Adigrat. We will visit ayat, the grandfather who has become mythic in stories at home.

The family meets at a Shell station on the north side of town. There’s no way to Feredeshem except to hire an Isuzu flatbed. Once the driver has completed some important gossip across the street, we load up and rumble out of town: the Sabas and I in the cabin and the rest standing in the back.

We reach the armed men in uniform blocking the highway, and they are quite angry that I and Saba #2 have forgotten our identification, but they wave us on. At the second barricade there is no passing, just a turn right onto a dirt road, a dirt road that diminishes and wanes by the mile, until the ride is quite jarring and at points we are spinning wheels on traces of paths on slopes that are nearly bare rock.

It’s not far before the landscape simply cuts loose with stunning vistas like a Western painter’s dreams. It’s magnificent. Imagine the American Southwest undiscovered and unbranded, developing along its own historical path, far from the Europeans.

Later, I ask Saba’s cousin Hadgu and his mother how long the family has been out there. They recall a few names, but have to wave surrender before the enormity of the question. I joke, ‘since Lucy’. They find that hilarious.

Arrival comes in stages. First, we come to the hilltop schoolhouse under construction, just five empty rooms of cinder block alone on a hill. One of Melesech’s brothers is waiting for us there. I believe it was Gebre-Meskel. Asfaw disembarks and walks ahead. We coast across the hilltop, descending slightly, until we can go no further, parked at the edge of a steep fall.

This is where we hike, down into a glorious valley with a view of hunchback mountains receding into the mist, into far Afar. And all the way down into the canyon, on terraces and jutting rocks, are small homesteads – including Gebre’s. Gebre is Saba’s ancient grandfather. His is a small compound of rock walls and old, twisted tree branches, three rooms around a dirt courtyard that have been there for most of the last century. By the entrance is an enclosure with two bee hives for honey: they look like hollow logs drilled with single holes for the bees, covered with rags and wood.

Part of the courtyard is sheltered by a roof of corrugated iron. Underneath is a low platform covered by eucalyptus leaves and cow hides. Here sits Gebre, beautiful old man, nearly 100, in a brown suit coat and gabi over his shoulders, in shades and a brimmed, brown felt hat vaguely Bolivian in effect. He has a white, Whitmanesque beard, and sits alone in timeless dignity, as though meditating decades of milk, livestock, honey, and barley; meditating on his brood of twelve and the far reach of his progeny now.

The family pours out to greet us, Gebre’s children and their children and children’s children. They lead us to seats on the cow hide. One auntie screams into Gebre’s ear about Saba, his grandchild from Addis Ababa come to visit. Solid Saba seems overwhelmed. I quickly get out of the way and enjoy the show. One of the old uncles parades lambs and chickens by us to see what we would like for lunch. Saba insists they not trouble themselves. Still, we aren’t there long before ti’olo is served. We crowd together and eat with twigs.

When I get a chance, I go outside and walk around our terrace above the canyon, trying to take in the scope and beauty of this place. I pull out the camera, and shy children gather around me. I make them laugh with the pictures that are captured inside. If Pey helps me figure out how to upload photos, I’ll post one.

Before we go, Saba bows at Gebre’s feet to receive his blessing. He makes a short speech that brings tears and laughter from the crowd. He lays a palm on Saba’s head in blessing.

The way back is comic. We hike back to the truck and find waiiting for us a mob of extended family. Saba is beseiged by them; she submits to a half hour of more hugs and chit-chat. I sit in the passenger seat. A very old man comes and shouts a long speech at me, something akin to the city councilman’s peroration of welcome and thanks.

Saba is fried. She abandons the crowd and gives the signal to go. Relatives are hurt that we won’t come by their houses for coffee or meals. They plead with her. She becomes desperate to get moving.

At the sound of the engine, the mobs move on the truck, climbing up into the back until there’s not an inch to spare. The ride back is long and circuitous, the driver patiently making sure everyone gets dropped off where they need to be, and stopping for locals who need a ride down the hill. There are no buses or garis. Few have horses; the only way to Adigrat or Zal Anbessa is on foot. Interspersed along the long road to town, lonely men and women walk. The distance on foot takes all day. We pass a wedding, just a circle of people singing and clapping around the lucky couple.

The crowd in the back gets us in trouble with the border military. These grim reapers stop us and make everyone get out. No one in the back has ID. They must walk. We’re close enough to town that they can catch a taxi, so they still proceed into town. The logic escapes me, but I smile anyway, trying to appease the police-lizards, meeting their unblinking glare with apologies in my humble tourist’s eyes. Their spite doesn’t waver, even as they wave us on.

Feredeshem! The sun sets over Adigrat, and I think of the family we left behind in the hills. History and time and the corrosive anxieties we vainly assemble into stories, all disperse with the daylight. They’re still out there, making a fire, gathering around grandfather.

Travelogue 189 – June 12
The Crossroads

Fifth in the Tigray series – still wandering in the great yellow north ...

4.13 Adigrat. Saba’s family leads us to the Hohoma Hotel, but that establishment is full. We wait in the tiny restaurant while Asfaw checks on another place. I’ll become well-acquainted with this characterless but clean room during my stay in Adigrat. There aren’t many options for hanging out in Adigrat.

What should be a bustling town dominating a major highway and one corner of the country’s map is, in fact, kind of a sleepy frontier town. What bustle there is is military. That major highway I mention, it leads to Eritrea. About a mile out of town on that two-lane road to Asmara, you’re stopped by men with guns. About a half-hour past that, you’ll be crossing the border.

There is a tense echo of war in the air here. It reminds me of the feeling I had in Turkish Cyprus. Lots of uniforms, lots of UN vehicles, lots of memories. These are tough people. When you watch Tigrinya TV, you get martial music, reels of war footage, pop music videos that swell with brassy jingoism – Tigray jingoism, not Ethiopian. Several of the most popular women pop singers were soldiers in their youth.

There’s lots of talk from other ethnic minorities in Ethiopia, and even the occasional bomb, but I’m quite sure that the Tigray people would pick up arms again if challenged – to a man (and woman). I don’t think any other group in Ethiopia is committed this way, top to bottom.

When we visit, Asfaw’s house, he shows us pictures from his days fighting in the hills against the Derg, the Communist regime. There’s an oddly calm atmosphere in these photos: no bravado, no sense of drama or even danger. But there was danger. There’s a faded photo on the wall of Asfaw’s home of his brother who died in the war.

The photos come out after the lot of us have crowded around the table for Adigrat’s most traditional dish, ti’olo, and have eaten far more than the stomach was designed to handle. Ti’olo consists of dumplings of barley dough rolled as you eat by the woman of the house, dipped into a red chili and meat sauce and yogurt. You eat ti’olo with the only native Ethiopian table utensil I’ve ever seen, a wooden two-pronged fork, slim as a chopstick. In the country, that’s just a stripped twig.

Back to the Shewit Hotel. I like this place. Half the price of the Hohoma and a lot more character. It’s a squat old structure, ochre in color, with a square, open courtyard in the center where the pigeons coo in the morning and evening. The rooms are basic, the water hot. The venerable old building was dropped among indifferent, bustling blocks of residence ... and among simple entertainments. Even in the morning, you’ll see the many red lights. They don’t signify what we westerners expect, or at least not as a primary purpose. Those are the t’ala houses, serving cheap traditional brew.

The hotel is a short walk from ‘downtown’: that lazy traffic circle with the dead fountain in the center. It’s another of those 60s-70s oddities you find everywhere, cement with large, bland grey marble tiles, several levels held together with concrete arms. Somehow it does capture the tenuous and shabby nature of the modern town set among history and open land – the land visible beyond in beautiful ridges like Bonanza.

On the other side of the circle is ‘Aratenya Yohannes’, one of the few cafes serving cake. I’m led there by a boy offering lottery tickets. My first reaction to his appeal is to wave him off, but he tags along beside me and says, “You’re handsome.” I believe in rewarding exceptional intelligence, so I offer him cake if he can find me a place that serves it. Thus I discover the Aratenya Yohannes, a very comfortable little venue, run by a big and quiet man who looks to be half Italian. He sits behind the counter being unimpressed by whoever he sees, even faranjis.

And back to the Shewit Hotel. They have a bar below. Day or night, it’s attended by a young woman with one of the most slack and world-weary faces in the eastern hemisphere. I do manage, after a few days, to get one sad-as-Mary half-smile out of her.

One evening, I’m abandoned to my own devices and I spend a few hours in the bar – quite happily, as it turns out, because there’s a championship game on, Chelsea-Blackburn. It’s a great game, going into overtime.

Somehow, one never feels as lost in the wilderness as when one watches football overseas. It’s a dim room with sweating walls in dying pastels and mid-century, heavy tile on the floor, almost black with age. There are several strings of Christmas lights hung above the bar. My Magdalene bar-keep does a slow and labored version of the dance called work, dousing glasses in water, pouring, wiping surfaces.

Halfway through the match, predictably, patrons call for Ethio-pop and our long-suffering Mary mutes the game, cutting off that wonderful lifeline to my soul, trivial British banter. I realize that much of my love for football in Ethiopia is just that voice: frivolous, inane, perky, suggestive of all sorts of comforts. And it’s gone. Mary, another beer, please.

Travelogue 188 – June 7
Dally, Shall We?

Fourth in the Tigray series – yes, we’re back up north for a while....

4.12 Mekele. Saba and her friend Saba (count them: two Sabas) are supposed to be arriving by bus. Originally, that bus was supposed to leave the day before I fly, arriving in Mekele that same day as I do. Then the bus was delayed because there aren’t enough passengers. So last I know, they’re arriving the day after I do.

I call Saba late on my second day in Mekele. It takes me quite a while to get through: the network is problematic up here. “Where are you, Saba?”

Now, pay close attention! This anecdote will teach you much about Ethiopia. “Where are you, Saba?” “I don’t know.” Right. I can hear the bus in the background. Looking out a bus window, one is hard-pressed to name a location. Though, addressing someone who expected you in Mekele around noon-time, a response like “still on the bus” might leap to mind. It does occur to her to tell me it’s raining hard wherever she is. I glance up at the Mekele sky, a little cloudy but benevolent on the whole, with a bit of concern. “Really?” Saba’s done with the conversation. I say, “Okay, well, call me when you’re here.”

I wait; I dally. I watch the sky to see if Saba’s rain approaches. I try to gauge how far the nearest rain is. Well, folks, ... not only doesn’t it occur to Saba to say, “Oh, I’m still on the bus,” but it doesn’t occur to her to say, “We won’t be arriving today at all.” Their bus left late on the first day, making for three days of travel instead of two – information in her possession and transmittable in an estimated three seconds of phone time. It just doesn’t occur to her.

I wait; I dally. I try to call. I worry. I decide she must have stopped in on relatives. She must be staying with them. She has a few in Mekele. She has them littered all over Ethiopia, as far as I can tell. She’ll call, I tell myself. I hang out at the glorious Milano hotel, owned by an incongruously flamboyant Ethiope, back from many years in Italy. I watch him glad-hand locals, his curls dyed orange, prancing about on very high-soled boots. The next day, I wander. I take in the castle hotel described in previous log. I’m a regular in Mekele already. Citizens wave familiarly.

I check in on my hotel at regular intervals. It’s about 2pm when I find them at my hotel. “Saba! Imagine meeting you here!” I don’t bother getting mad. She wouldn’t understand. Instead I listen to complaints about the bus journey. And I register some surprise at the resolution of my two Sabas: let’s go! We were scheduled to press on toward Adigrat; what are we waiting for? Okay, I check out of the hotel, and we walk down to the bus station for the two-hour trip north.

We catch a minibus. There are the usual amenities: three to a tight bench, not an inch to move, windows shut against demon germs, shrieking baby behind me. A couple earplugs and I’m ready to enjoy the scenery.

The first half-hour we climb one of the barren ridges outside Mekele, chugging up switchbacks, up the face of Rushmore, it seems. We finally surmount and arrive on a plateau of tough, dusty desert – not too tough for locals, who walk miles alongside the highway between villages. We pass several quarries for the pretty yellow stone that everything is built from.

The journey greens up in the middle, near Wukro, and the long desert views break into small hills and vales and charming little homesteads. It reminds me of Cappadocia. This geography holds until you reach the famous Negash, site of the first mosque outside Arabia, in the town where some of the prophet’s followers found refuge during his lifetime. Harar-green is the little dome, which you can see from the highway if you’re alert – (not the original mosque, but pretty darn old....)

Just beyond the town is a conical little hill with an old church built on top. It’s so unlikely and pretty that you watch it come and go for fifteen minutes. All the scenery in this region is striking, kind of over-the-top movie-Western backdrop, but settled by age-old farming families in their humble stone houses, many painted with square crosses. This greater region is famed for far-flung clusters of medieval churches carved into cliffs and rocks, the kind that make Ethiopia famous among history buffs.

We descend along the side of another dramatic ridge, greener than the earlier one, and we cruise along a surprisingly lush and cultivated valley, until suddenly we’re in Adigrat, speeding by swarms of school kids in red sweaters, deposited by a crazy 60s fountain, in sight of the imposing Italian cathedral. Adigrat, set in a half-bowl of three high ridges, the one to the west currently swallowing up the sun. A host of Saba’s relatives is waiting for us. They surround us and chatter and grab our bags, leading us to a hotel.

Travelogue 187 – May 28
Fish on the Rocks

Fourth in the Awasa series – pre-empting the Tigray series. The must-see walk.

5.7 Awasa. Pick a sunny morning and devote it to this walking tour. Make your way down to the lake and head south. If you’ve travelled down the main street, you’ll arrive at the jetty for small, expensive tour boats. There will be a Pepsi bar with loud music. Turn left and follow the shoreline path. To your left, there will be a little reedy marsh populated by the gruesome storks who thoughtfully pace.

You’ll have to take a detour: national security. If you miss your dirt road inland, a federal policeman will brusquely inform you. You’ve come to the promontory that divides this shore into north and south. The northern part of this little spit of land is critical to national defense, the southern critical for tourism. It’s there that you’ll find the Wabe Shebele Hotel that I mentioned earlier, the one with the monkeys. But we’ll skip that turnoff today.

We’re headed for the fish market. The dirt road detour will eventually deposit you at the lake again and at the entrance to a park occupying the southern shore of the peninsula facing a green little cove, very pretty, that looks across the lake to the southern hills. You can guide yourself to the fish market by the shouts of the crowd.

The guidebook calls it ‘the fish market’, but don’t be fooled by the formal name into visions of Seattle or Venice. This is nothing more than a mob at the lake shore, milling around the small metal rowboats that are bringing in the day’s catch. Boys are untangling nets. Fishermen are digging through the fish at the bottom of their boats, showing them to buyers. Curious boys crowd around. Other boys are cleaning fish on stones by the water’s edge with their curved knives. Kites are wheeling and swooping overhead. Ugly gentleman storks are wading in, and huge snow-white pelicans make skimming landings nearby.

I stroll back out of the park with a little boy tagging along, hoping for a tip. Rationale for the tip: that he tagged along. I stop for a photo of the far hills among the near reeds. A young man with a receipt book asks for ten birr. He says it’s an entrance fee for the park. I say I’ll be right with him, but in the meantime he can catch the dozen or so locals passing him by at that moment. Several of them laugh. He protests that they’re buying fish. I say I’ll buy one myself. Surely it’s cheaper than ten birr. He gives up, which is surprising. Rarely do I get off so easily when Ethiopians ask for money.

Outside the park, continue on lakeside. You’ll share the path with only the occasional shepherd and his several cows. It’s quiet. It’s short. You run into another resort. But the road curves up toward the hill that you’ve been contemplating since arrival in Awasa, because it’s the only hill visible from town. Tabour Hill is a flat-headed little mount with steep sides. As you reach the incline, choose your type of path: easy-going or steep and quick. I go for the latter. One benefit is that it climbs along the lakeside slope, right above the resort. I’m rewarded with many pleasant vistas, especially right above the resort, glancing at the water through the rich variety of trees planted for the rich.

Up on top, you’ll see the whole lake. The southern half, which you can’t see from town, is very pretty, surrounded by hills. Below you to the left is a village of thatched roofs and farms, and further down, a branch of the city reaching around from behind Tabour. It’s peaceful, but don’t sit until you’ve sussed out where the tykes and their sheep are. They will find you and start up about money. The nice thing about shepherds is, they can’t stray too far from their charges.

Much-needed meditation of beauty accomplished, look for another path down. You have two reasons for that: a different set of views and a shorter journey back into the city. I suggest the side overlooking Awasa. It looks steep, but it isn’t too bad. Once you start down, you’ll come across a path that will deposit you on the southern edge of town. You’ll be twenty minutes from the Pinna Cafe, where sugar and caffeine will revive and awaken your weary body and aesthetically-glutted spirit.

Travelogue 186 – May 22
ja-MI-cah and the Black Waters

Third in the Awasa series – pre-empting the Tigray series. Last we checked in on jarvis he was waving down southbound buses in Mojo.

5.6 Mojo and points southward. “Where you from, mon?” The voice is distinctly Caribbean. The driver leans into his door, and eyes me with a kind of hazy, timeless friendliness I haven’t seen since the 70s in Santa Barbara. We’re idling beside the road, waiting for more passengers. I’m in the front seat, a place of honor. He eyes me across the frozen profile of an attractive young lady headed for Ziway. She will refuse to acknowledge the faranj for the entire journey, a decision that will embarrass her when she falls asleep and repeatedly leans into me.

I laugh when I hear his accent. I should have predicted. Yes, this is the road south, and the tone is distinct from that of the northern roads, which was severe and drenched in ancient, rugged history. Here, you sway for hours along the road among gentle plains dotted with acacias. A blue mountain or two stand in the distance. The lakes appear off port side, off starboard. They’re the color of jacuzzis, salty, pale desert green. Villagers amble alongside the road. Herds cross at will, and our driver swerves or stalls as needed. He seems to know most every other driver on this happy highway, sending off lengthy codes with his horn and giving a thumbs-up.

Occasionally he looks aside at me. He furrows his brow, summons up some rusty English, and he delivers a sentence about places of note, usually something I know already. We cruise to many a stop, as passengers disembark, as we exchange passengers with other vans. Off we go again, among new series of morse klaxon. Some several hours into the journey, the driver winks and rubs his tummy. “Me hungry for some rice and oxtails.” He snaps his finger once to the reggae on the tape machine. It’s Sunday, and everybody in ja-MI-cah be eating rice and oxtails.

It isn’t long before we arrive at ja-MI-cah, the northern suburbs of Shashemene, a luxurious place compared to the town itself. The driver has decided in favor of lunch and flags another van for us, making sure I’m reserved the front seat. We part with promises to hang out in Shashemene one day.

I’ve been traveling for weeks, and I’ve just about given up on seeing anything much different out of Ethiopia than variations on dry and golden. And then, just about the time you pass through the teeming hillside town of Arsi Negele, something happens. I can’t put my finger on it at first. I just sense it, like a new scent. I’m a little uncomfortable, like I’ve crossed a border unawares. I figure it out: green!

Hillsides gather thin coats of grass, like a light patina of moss. Trees proliferate, and with a greater variety. The large fronds of the false banana appear, and the sprawling branches of the fig. The livestock lose their edge of desperation; they get fat and happy. The grass grows and grows. In a half hour’s drive, it’s a new country. And there, at the apex of Edenic growth, you come to Shashemene.

What’s the magic to that name? What’s the secret in the reference to rice and oxtails? For those of you unfamiliar with reggae or twentieth-century innovations in religion, Shashemene represents the promised land – or at least a toehold in the promised land – to practitioners of Rastafarianism, those New World worshippers of Ethiopia’s last emperor, Haile Selassie,(or Ras Tafari before he was crowned,) those blissed followers of Pan Marley, those One World, Old Testament smokers of sacred leaf and visionaries of a globe united in 70s fashion. An ageing Haile Selassie, though embarrassed to be called God by Caribbean hippies, acquiesced in their entreaties and granted them a large allotment of land north of Shashemene – now called Jamaica. It’s there still, odd Mecca to the stoned of the world.

I pass it this time, with rainbow-tinged promises to return, and continue on toward Awasa. The green fades a little; the Ethiopia of long highland ridges reasserts itself, and not much further, the lake appears below us, green in the sun and inviting.

The road swings around the northern side of the lake. It’s there that the hippos are reputed to hang out, in the tekur wuha, the black waters. You can’t see a thing from the highway. I have vague plans to hire a boat to search them out, but never do it. The boats are too expensive, and I think I can walk from town. I try one early morning, setting out before the sun rises. I don’t get anywhere near the black waters; the shore-side path peters out and dies at the fence of a resort. But the walk is wonderful.

What do you see lakeside at 6:30am? There are men among the rocks washing themselves and their clothes. There are gari drivers washing their horses. There are fishermen drifting among the reeds and beyond. These latter shout to you and sing. Morning people are songsters here. Solitary men walking to work belt out traditional-sounding melodies, though for all I know they’re improvised.

Most of all there’s blessed peace. Delicate, long-legged birds run along the tops of lily pads. A fresh breeze and tattered clouds keep things cool. The crooners go about their business, and in between them there’s lots of quiet walking. I sit beside the lake a long time. Somewhere behind me, one farmer works his tiny plot. A little boy wades in to wash his face. Sunlight creeps down the sides of hills across the lake.