Fresh Air Fiend

by Paul Theroux

  His name was Larry, and he was seventy-one. He had been out fishing in his small boat and, distracted by a nibble, soon found himself high and dry a half mile out. He had had no choice but to slosh and swim to shore.

  "Happens all the time," my friend said.

  And that was why, when I made my tour of the islands, I used the smallest boat I could find, a flat-bottomed fifteen-footer with a simple outboard motor. A kayak would have been more suitable, and would have given me greater access. Next time, I thought.

  If it is (as I think) axiomatic that anywhere pleasant that is easy to get to is eventually spoiled, it should not be hard to understand why the little islands in and around this area remain lovely. Even Little Gasparilla, the five-mile island just north of Gasparilla, is reachable only by boat, which is probably why its shores are full of ospreys, herons, and turtles. The beaches here and on Gasparilla—an undeniably splendid place with a bottleneck of a causeway (toll: $3.25)—are long and mostly empty, palm-fringed, and with white powdery sand. The proof that the beaches on Cayo Costa are seldom visited is that the ospreys actually nest in the low trees overhead. Elsewhere, these big, squeaky-voiced falcons nest on poles put up by birders.

  The tiny humps of land, mostly held together by mangroves, that lie behind these bigger barrier islands still contain old shell mounds under the sturdy gumbo-limbo trees. If you have the right boat, it is easy to spend a week exploring the small islands that seem to float in the recesses of Turtle Bay and Bull Bay. These bays are about halfway down the western side of Charlotte Harbor, but the harbor is so wide you can't see the far side from here: in the middle of it, among the dolphins and the occasional manatee, it is like being at sea.

  Nearly everyone in the area has a pirate story—actually the same pirate story in different fanciful versions, of the buccaneer Gasparilla and his cutthroat crew. It is likely that Gasparilla did not exist, though a Friar Gaspar certainly did—one of the passes was named after him on a Spanish chart made in 1783. Treasure undoubtedly exists, but it is less likely to be found in sea chests buried under the insect-haunted dunes of the islands than in the vaults of the Du Pont estate, and those of the surrounding mansions, in Boca Grande.

  This part of America was first explored by the Spanish almost five hundred years ago. The area has experienced successive waves of people looking for Indians, for gold, for silver, for slaves, for seclusion, and, more recently, for sunshine and game fish (the annual tarpon tournament attracts masses of fishermen). It is reassuring that a place so pretty and so apparently fragile should still endure and still sparkle.

  The people risking sunstroke on the beach, the folks on the yachts, the motorists struggling toward North Captiva, all of them believe they are in the very bosom of the place, but have little idea of just how huge and hidden most of these islands are. That surely is one of the many paradoxes of travel. I spent days in my small boat going from one waterlogged island, and one remote beach, to another, hardly seeing anything move except a heron, a gopher tortoise, or a ruddy turnstone. Yet all I had to do was make a forty-minute detour and I would be within hailing distance of a golfer in green pants or a potbellied teenager on a Jet Ski.

  The interior islands, and the ones with small populations, resemble the keys of Belize—very similar contours and vegetation, and the same tropical heat and insects. This is "the Mosquito Coast" in more than one sense. Building is bound to increase, more of the land will be steamrolled by developers, and some of the unluckier animal species are doomed, but it is safe to say that many of these islands, in spite of your trespassing, may never be violated—you'd drown, you'd starve, you'd become marooned if you tried.

  I nearly drowned myself in one of the sudden storms that frequently explode over these islands. I was about a mile from shore and saw the sky quickly blackening with clouds—it was like the lid of a kettle being slipped over the earth. I soon found myself trying to outrace the storm, and losing, fighting sixty-mile-an-hour winds and gusts of even greater velocity. The storm danger and the mud flats, the mangroves and the mosquitoes, have in their way kept much of the area liberated, obscure, and somewhat empty—in a word, ideal.

  Down the Zambezi

  IN THE EXTRAVAGANT African sunset, the Zambezi River was deep red, reflecting the crimson sky, and it shimmered in oxbows across the dusk-black landscape of the floodplain like a vessel thick with blood.

  That vivid arterial image seemed appropriate to the Zambezi, which is teeming with life throughout its 1,633-mile length. "This magnificent stream," David Livingstone exclaimed when he first traveled down it in 1853. More tellingly, he called it "God's highway," an access route for Christianity as well as commerce. Livingstone imagined the Zambezi's future as a vast thoroughfare, with good-sized trading ships plying the river, bringing prosperity to the interior of Africa.

  From my vantage point in a small plane over the upper Zambezi in western Zambia I saw old, eternal Africa, clusters of mud huts and fishermen in dugout canoes. What could have been clumps of boulders scattered all over the river were pods of hippos, preparing to scramble up the banks for their nighttime grazing. And the small villages of thatched-roof huts glowed by the light of cooking fires and candles.

  It was pretty much what Livingstone had seen all those years ago when he traveled hopefully upriver, making charts. He went to Africa from Scotland in 1841, when he was twenty-eight, and except for brief absences, he spent the rest of his life there, thirty-two years. Among his gifts was his linguistic skill (though he spoke with a thick Scottish accent) and his ability to get on with Africans who, having seen so many instances of enslavement, were understandably hostile toward outsiders. Livingstone could be difficult—he often exhibited manic-depressive behavior. Yet his travel was to a great extent a record of his success in charming the African chiefs up and down the river, putting their suspicions to rest.

  In the Zambezi twilight, the landing strip looked like a small bandage on the great flank of the floodplain. We descended through the smoky air of the dry-season bush fires and rolled to a halt on this grassy plot.

  In the morning I could see that the riverbanks were lush, and that was the first indication I had that, no matter how drought-stricken or starved the rest of the land was, the banks of the Zambezi were green from end to end.

  I had woken to the sounds of the busy bird life of the river: kingfishers, bee-eaters, herons, egrets, and fish eagles. From time to time I could hear the warning sound of a hippo, which is misleadingly comical, like a tuba played underwater. Now and then there was a sudden splash—a jumping tiger fish, startled by the blowing hippo. Tiger fish can grow to thirty-five pounds, have ferocious teeth, and are known for their terrific strength in battling anglers.

  "We're off the map here," said Bernie Esterhuyse, and it was true—I never found this bend in the Zambezi, called Ngulwana, on any map. With his wife, Adrienne, Bernie runs a small tent camp devoted to tiger fishing. Like many other South Africans over the past few years, they had migrated north to the Zambezi Valley to start a tourist-related business. Apart from a few small villages near the river, they have no neighbors.

  "The Litunga gave us permission to build here," Adrienne said later, referring to the king of the Lozi people, the dominant tribe in the province. "Most of this land is his."

  We were driving through deep sand toward the market town of Lukulu, two hours away.

  "Where's the road?"

  Strictly speaking, there was no road. The idea was to go cross-country, following the riverbank, in the general direction of Lukulu. This Zambezi floodplain, stretching for miles along the river, was very sandy, like a beach that had become detached from an ocean, part of the Kalahari sand veldt. The soil was pitted all over with the sort of holes you see crabs skittering into.

  But these were rat holes. The rain had been so sparse the season before that the river had stayed low and the rats had not drowned in their holes, as usually happened. As we labored on, rats were diving for cover.

  At a
cluster of huts under some deep green mango trees, I saw a group of women pounding corn in a mortar, taking turns with the loglike pestle. Like many other riverside villages, it was orderly and well stocked. "We know we are lucky," one of the women said, acknowledging that they owed their lives to the river.

  After we passed the time of day, I wondered whether, in leaner times, anyone ate those rats. The word for rat is khoswe in Chichewa, which I had learned as a Peace Corps volunteer in Malawi. "Kodi ichi amadya?" I asked. Are they edible?

  "We Lozis don't eat them," another woman boasted. She followed what I said: because of the wide dispersal of Malawians, I was to discover that Chichewa was understood along the Zambezi. "But the Luvale and Lunda people like them."

  The Luvale and the Lunda are the far-flung and poorer tribes of this immense area of the upper Zambezi, the Western Province of Zambia, once known as Barotseland, kingdom of the Lozis, who are still loyal to their king.

  The river traffic I could see was not motorized, but there was plenty of it—men in dugouts big and small, paddling slowly upriver. Still speaking in Chichewa, I called out to the paddlers, asking them where they were going.

  "To market!" The market at Lukulu was a day's journey upriver.

  These fishermen told me that their villages were distant. During the dry season they lived in the temporary fishing camps of reed-walled huts with thatched roofs that were numerous on the riverbanks.

  They had gardens too, fields of corn, which they made into flour. Boiled with a few pints of the Zambezi, this was one of their starchy staple foods (called sadza upriver, and nsima downriver), a soft dough they ate with fish or stewed greens. Cassava and beans were also sprouting in these riverside gardens. At a distance from the river, people foraged for wild berries, called muzawe, which they made into porridge. Though drought conditions prevailed throughout much of the province, the Zambezi provided the means of life for dwellers on its banks.

  All the way to Lukulu, we saw people in the distance crossing the sandy floodplain using ox-drawn sleds, with heavy wooden wishbone-shaped runners skidding along the sand. And sometimes—speaking of appropriate technology—a dugout canoe was pulled across the sand by a pair of oxen.

  Some of these conveyances were piled high with vegetables or firewood, to sell at the market, but several held very solemn-looking people.

  "Adwala," one of the ox drivers said to me, of the passenger. He's sick.

  They were on their way to see the only doctor for many miles around, Peter Clabbers, who runs Lukulu Hospital. I made a point of seeing him myself when I got to the town, which was small but sprawling on a bluff that overlooks the river: a Catholic mission, several schools, a busy market, and an even busier hospital.

  "I see one new HIV patient almost every day," Dr. Clabbers told me as we walked through the clean but spartan wards of Lukulu Hospital. Dr. Clabbers, from Holland, has been at the hospital, one of the best on the upper Zambezi, for three years. He told me that AIDS and HIV cases were continuing to climb ("I used to see two or three a week"), and that tuberculosis, cholera, and meningitis patients were also numerous. There were some violent injuries, too.

  "I see the victims of land mines occasionally," Dr. Clabbers said. The border of Angola was less than eighty miles away, and for almost twenty years the UNITA forces of Jonas Savimbi had been waging a guerrilla war in these outlying provinces against the elected Angola government. Upriver, near where the Zambezi looped through Angola from its boggy origin in Zambia, life was still disrupted by the effects of the war. Many live explosives lay scattered near villages and in the bush.

  "And now and then I see some young boy who's blown his hand off after finding a grenade and playing with it," the doctor added.

  Leprosy—Hansen's disease—has been largely cured, though there are still some lepers in Lukulu, both outpatients and residents in the local leprosarium. I met a man in his sixties, Moses, who was severely afflicted—he had lost most of his extremities—but he was good-humored.

  He said, "My problem was that I spent fifty-three years in a village being treated by a local doctor." That was a euphemism for a witch doctor.

  As he was a Lunda, I asked him whether it was true, as people said, that the Lunda ate rats. "They do, but I don't," Moses said.

  The Lukulu market was bustling, and like many riverside markets on this part of the Zambezi, its bright colors were an effect of the used clothes lying in enormous piles, draped on racks, or flapping like pennants on long lines. In Zambia the clothes are generally known as salaula (secondhand), because they originated as charitable donations in the United States and Europe. They are sold cheaply in bales and sorted by clothes vendors—racks of old blue jeans, heaps of T-shirts, dresses, skirts, and shorts. They are still serviceable and are so inexpensive their existence has just about destroyed the indigenous Zambian textile industry.

  At the fish market, Julius Nkwita was selling small piles of dried fish, about 60 cents a handful. Sometimes he swapped his fish for cups of flour or an item of clothing. He might have been one of those men in the dugouts I had seen on the river earlier that morning, paddling to the market.

  Julius had five children, ranging in age from three to fourteen. His wife and four of his children were in his home village, some distance from the river, while he stayed in his seasonal fishing camp—just a reed hut—with his oldest son, fishing intensively.

  "I camp on the riverbank," he said. "I catch fish, dry it at my camp, and when I have enough I come here by the river to sell it."

  I was curious to know whether he had made his own dugout canoe. No, he said, he had bought it, "for two cows." A cow in these parts was used as payment for big-ticket items like canoes, sleds, and brides. A twelve-man canoe, a seventeen-footer, might cost three cows.

  Julius sold bottle fish and large bream, tiger fish, and the catfish known as barbel, smoke-dried like kippers. Fishing remains the primary occupation for men on the upper Zambezi. In the course of traveling much of the river's length, I was to see not just nets and fishing tackle, but an almost unimaginable variety of fish traps—all sizes, from the smallest, which resemble narrow lampshades, to the largest, five feet long, shaped like large bulging baskets and strong enough to hold the angriest fish. The women use the river to water their gardens, and because there is always water in the Zambezi, it is possible for gardens to flourish year-round.

  "Oh, yes, we have many hippos," Julius told me. He said that hippos gobbled the gardens. Out canoeing, he was occasionally attacked by a hippo.

  "What do you do if a hippo goes after you?"

  "Swim away from the canoe," he said, explaining that the hippo concentrates on the canoe rather than the people in it. The animal single-mindedly tips over or destroys the boat when it feels its territory or its attack zone has been entered by something alien.

  Down by the river, at a Lukulu landing, people were being ferried to and from the far bank in canoes. Some boys were swimming, and the river's muddy darkness made it seem ominous.

  "Aren't you worried about crocodiles?"

  They laughed and said, "It is not deep here!"

  That did not reassure me, yet within a few weeks I found myself looking for midstream sandbanks where I could swim—if my brief, urgent thrashing could be called swimming. Crocodiles tend to ignore canoes but do attack humans—people bathing, doing laundry, washing dishes—in the river. The very shallow spots and sandbanks are generally free of crocodiles—and hippos, too—though it is rare to see anyone swimming in the Zambezi.

  After spending a few days around Lukulu and at the fishing camp at Ngulwana, I set off with Petrus Ziwa in a four-wheel-drive vehicle over the Luena Flats.

  "My mother was from Malawi," Petrus said, explaining why he, a Zambian, spoke Chichewa so well. At sixty-two, he had far exceeded the average life span of a Zambian male, which was a mere thirty-six. A Jehovah's Witness, hoping for my eventual conversion, he tried to hasten the process by quoting Scripture. He had an abiding fear of snak
es; even on the hottest nights he slept with his face covered, usually wrapped in a towel.

  "Egyptian cobras and black mambas," he said. "They are strong, Daddy."

  This "Daddy" was interesting. The term of respect in Chichewa is Bambo, Father, but Petrus always translated this "Daddy," as in, "The battery is dead, Daddy" or "It is too hot, Daddy" or "Please give me your watch, Daddy."

  In this season, the hot, beautiful floodplain was a broad expanse of sand scattered with clumps of fine golden grass. We headed south along the sand, using a compass. Our destination today was Mongu and the Litunga's royal compound on the Zambezi canals at Lealui. At Mbanga, a small collection of buildings and mango trees in the middle of the plain, I asked a man how far it was to Mongu.

  "By foot, it is ten hours," he said. "By vehicle, I don't know."

  There was no bus because there was no road. We passed wishbone sleds—one with a load of cassava, another carrying an elderly granny, the last with a sick person, all of them pulled by plodding oxen in the hot sun.

  "Going to Mongu," they said. Mongu was a real town on a real road, with a post office, a hospital, and a market. But still, it took a whole day to get there from here on foot.

  Everything was measured differently, in the currency of cows or the distance of foot-hours. The separate notion of time and distance was pleasant, and its simplicity was strangely relaxing, modifying my sense of urgency. Here, among people for whom not much had changed in many generations, whose expectations were modest, I was happiest taking one day at a time, as they did, and feeling lucky to be so near the life-giving river, a source of food and water.

  "A roller, Daddy." Petrus was pointing upward.

  It was a racquet-tailed roller, tumbling across the sky toward the Zambezi floodplain to impress a possible mate as we traveled slowly through the deep sand, in places higher than our hubcaps. Other birds with bright plumage, white-fronted and carmine bee-eaters, flew past us. I had seen their colonies on the vertical sides of the Zambezi banks upriver. By midmorning, as the day grew hotter, we seemed to be the only thing moving on the sand, though of course hawks hovered, and vultures, too. The big game, lions and elephants and buffalo, were on the far side of the river, ranging across the Liuwa Plain, where the dark line of trees at the western horizon marked the course of the Zambezi.