by Tim Cahill
Cynthia felt sorry for the poor chimp.
I identified with it.
There are almost no roads in the northern Congo, and people travel by river. But the Fleuve Congo wasn’t truly about transportation. It was about commerce. Even at the smallest villages, the captain brought the engines to an idle, and people paddled out to the barges in small canoes called pirogues. They came to sell smoked fish, or oranges, or live dwarf crocodiles with their snouts wired shut, or chickens or goats. There was no refrigeration on the barges, and food was kept alive until dinner.
Sometimes, one of the flat-topped barges was uncabled at a village, and another two or three would be added. Shopkeepers, who maintained covered stalls on the various barges, sold batteries, lamps, soap, salt, shampoo, T-shirts, shorts, hard candy, and music cassettes. Bargaining was a high-volume affair. Folks shouted at one another in the way I might address someone who’d just shot my dog.
Over the space of a week, I came to see that this was the accepted manner of bargaining, and that people enjoyed it. There was always a smile hidden somewhere very close behind the seeming abuse.
Occasionally, we stopped at the larger villages, and hundreds of us—thousands—poured off the gangplanks and invaded the village, most everyone making for the forest. There were only three public toilets aboard the Fleuve Congo. And as folks did what they had to do, still more people from the now soiled village poured aboard the Fleuve Congo.
Eventually, the Oubangi emptied into the Congo proper, and in the town of Mossaka, we became deck passengers. A local politician had booked our cabin weeks before. Cynthia was concerned about the film she’d shot over the course of six hard weeks, and the captain, a fine man named Eugene Mongoli, allowed us to pile our gear in the wheelhouse.
In the early afternoon sun, the metal decks of the barges, where we lived, were hot enough to fry an egg. People sat on boards or bricks or rolls of foam padding. Sheets rigged on sticks provided some protection from the sun. At each stop, another 780,000 people boarded the barge. There was now so much sheer humanity aboard the Fleuve Congo that no one could take a single step without bumping into someone else.
The words most heard were “sorry,” “pardon me,” “excuse me.” It was a world of constant apology, and my choice, as I saw it, was passive acceptance or madness: this perception despite the fact that everyone else seemed to be having a swell adventure. Cynthia obtained the captain’s permission to stand on top of the wheelhouse and shoot crowd scenes along with sunrises and sunsets. Michael, already fluent in French, worked on his Lingala vocabulary, which was the local dialect. He underlined useful words in a dictionary—starting with a—then strolled about looking for opportunities to work “abstinence” (ekila) or “absurd” (esongo na elonga) into a conversation.
I, on the other hand, could not work. The essay that proposed itself was about heaven and hell, about the Edenic forest and the sweltering barge. Exquisitely uncomfortable and unable to write a sentence, I spent many moping hours on one of the flat-topped barges devoted to livestock: goats and pigs and chickens and me all bunched together under a tarp that provided a little bit of shade. One of the goats fell in love with a pig, to the porker’s great annoyance. It was entirely esongo na elonga: a lesson, I thought, about all of us swirling down the drain of the behavioral sink. I was suffering a profound variety of culture shock and longed to be back in the forest, in the monkey-shit rain.
After two days on deck, I became entirely disconsolate and sought the company of drunkards. One beer, maybe two, then back to the goats: back through the general hubbub of too much humanity apologizing to itself. Excuse me, pardon me. It’s too much, I thought, it’s serious. C’est trop. C’est grave. I imagined the future of the human race as an endless ride on the Congo barge, and shuddered in the heat.
Cynthia found me hunched up and brooding among the animals. “Can I do something for you?” she asked.
“Yes,” I said, “go away.”
I met folks named George and Slava and Josephine and Enrique. Many of them were extremely attractive. Movie-star quality, we’d say in the United States. God, however, was easily the most handsome man I’d ever met. He stood a couple of inches over six feet: a lean, well-muscled man of about twenty-five who seemed vastly amused with life in general.
God had just graduated from college and was going to Brazzaville, where he had secured a job teaching school. Cynthia met him early on, and right away he apologized about the name. He’d grown up in a remote village where his father heard educated people talking with great respect about this person called God. It seemed a good name for a son, and young God lived half a dozen years before he realized people other than his father found the name either offensive or amusing. “But,” he told Cynthia, “I’m stuck with it.”
God had traveled a lot on Fleuve Congo and was our single best source of information. There was, for instance, no set schedule. Some nights we’d anchor in the middle of the river, some we’d run all night long. It depended a lot on Captain Mongoli’s mood, and the heat of commerce conducted at various villages. God had a kind of sixth sense for the captain’s humor. He’d predicted our arrival at the confluence of the Oubangi and the Congo to the hour.
Now I wanted to find out when we’d arrive in Brazzaville. My drinking buddies had varying opinions: some thought two more days, some three.
“Who knows?” Maurice asked.
God only knows, I thought, and set off to find him.
I bumped into Cynthia on the way and together we sought him out on all levels of the Fleuve Congo universe. He was, in fact, waiting in a long line for what was now the only functioning public toilet on the barge.
We stood with God, inching our way toward the toilet.
“Tim,” Cynthia told him, “is going insane.”
“How much longer?” I asked.
“Twenty-four hours,” God said. “We should be in Brazzaville tomorrow morning at this time.”
That, I thought, was acceptable. I could certainly bear it for one more day.
But now Cynthia had a problem. She wanted to get off the barge very quickly so she could film the disembarkation, which would be a madhouse. Everyone with something to sell, we knew, would want to get off quickly in order to get the best prices, or find the best corner to set up a makeshift stall.
“Tim and Michael can carry the gear,” Cynthia said, “but could you help me get off and find a high spot to stand?”
The man said it would be no problem. Cynthia was happy: she’d get her shot, with the help of God.
I spent the remainder of the last full day drinking beer with Maurice and maundering on, mostly in English, about the difference between Eden and the end of the world as we know it. There was a reason, I informed the drunks grandly, to protect wilderness areas and it had to do with our collective future and the cost of constant apology. Maurice agreed with everything I had to say and I finally bought him the beer he didn’t really want.
We pulled into the port of Brazzaville at ten the next morning, just as God had foreseen. People began pouring off the barge, but God never showed and I wasn’t going to sit around waiting for him.
“Absenteeism,” said Michael, trying to recall the word in Lingala.
Cynthia, who had put her faith in God, was bitterly disappointed.
“He helps those who help themselves,” I muttered softly, and then grabbed my share of the gear and—apologizing all the way—got the hell off that God-forsaken barge.
Near Massacre Ranch
I was driving north, out of the flat and featureless sands of the Black Rock Desert, bouncing over a jolting gravel road that rose up into the Black Rock Mountains, a set of volcanic outcroppings with all the charm and color of a rusted anvil. Outside the air-conditioned comfort of my truck, northwest Nevada occupied itself in belching fits of ongoing and unforgiving geology. Exactly thirty-two miles out of Gerlach (“where the pavement ends and the West begins”), I acquired the second flat tire of the trip. Also my
map blew away, and I made an imprudent decision that put me square in the middle of the Massacre Ranch, where, God help me, I encountered the Naked Cowboy. All that came later.
For the nonce, it was midafternoon, in late August, exactly 98 degrees in the shade—I hung a thermometer while I worked on the tire—and a blistering wind out of the north whipped itself into a series of imbecilic, whirling sand-colored funnels.
In Black Rock country, there are few road signs pointing the way (I counted four in seven days) and many, many gravel roads running in every which direction. Some of these roads are simply a pair of ruts running through the sage, and you think, “This is a cruel joke and certainly not the road indicated on the map.” But it is.
A traveler in the Black Rock needs a compass and a good map from the Bureau of Land Management. Maps of Nevada, purchased in gas stations, are useless, and only include roads that skirt the desert. There are other maps, topo maps, that one might use, but the road signs have been erected by the BLM, and what the BLM calls Steven’s Camp might be labeled Grassy Knob on some other map. What one map calls Table Mesa, another might call Rocky Butte. On those startling occasions when one sights a sign, it will have been erected by the BLM, which does not care what anyone else calls a certain rocky butte. To them, it’s Table Mountain.
You travel into this spare, barely inhabited expanse of sage, sand flats, and bare, volcanic hills with food for two weeks, with water—fourteen gallons in my case—with extra gas, and a plethora of spare tires.
I lacked only the rubber plethora, so that when my right rear tire began to sound like a helicopter landing in the distance, I thought: Well, goodness, won’t this be a jolly adventure.
Actually, I thought nothing of the sort. I thought: “I am going to find a man named B. F. Goodrich and beat him to death with a tire iron.”
An adventure is never an adventure when it’s happening. Challenging experiences need time to ferment, and an adventure is simply physical and emotional discomfort recollected in tranquillity. This is the definition I’d recently spouted to several hundred people who’d actually paid to hear me speak. I had attributed the basic underlying quote to Ralph Waldo Emerson. Someone pointed out that, in fact, it was the gushy Romantic poet William Wordsworth who said, “Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity.”
So I was wrong. So what? Does that make it any less true? Adventure and poetry share a certain process.
I mean, William Wordsworth takes a walk and sees a bunch of flowers, okay? The poem doesn’t spring to mind spontaneously. He goes home and thinks about it. In the fullness of time and during the doldrums of tranquillity, this little ramble in the Lake Country becomes a poem.
What was it that happened back there the other day? William Wordsworth thinks. Well, I took a walk. No, actually I wandered. I was wandering. Why? Well, because I felt quite alone in the world. Just so. I was lonely. I wandered lonely … as … as what? As a rock? Oh, heavens no. Rocks are lonely enough, one imagines, but they don’t wander. So, once again: I wandered lonely as a … a bug. A bug? Unfortunate thought, that. Perhaps the wind? Very nearly there, but a bit too fast, actually. How about a cloud? Why, yes, a cloud. Clouds generally move quite slowly, and they do so in a properly ethereal fashion. I wandered lonely as a cloud. Jolly good!
Wordsworth went home and flopped down on the sofa with a six-pack and bag of chips. He lay there for about a week (For oft when on my couch I lie / in vacant or in pensive mood), and thought about how some lakeside flowers lifted his spirits one forlorn and dreary day (They flash upon that inward eye / Which is the bliss of solitude: / And then my heart with pleasure fills, / And dances with the daffodils).
My own peculiar situation had not yet begun to ferment into anything resembling poetry. At this point, a mere thirty-two miles from the nearest town, I lacked the necessary tranquillity and was experiencing only emotional discomfort.
There was no one on the road, and no one likely to be coming along anytime soon, which is why one needs food and water for two weeks in Black Rock country. I maneuvered the truck about in such a way that the tire in question was positioned in the late afternoon shade, then opened both of the doors to the wind in order to keep the cab cool. It worked. When the tire had been successfully changed, it wasn’t much more than 110 degrees inside, quite pleasant, really, and, as I sat there sweating, it occurred to me that something was dreadfully, terribly wrong. The big BLM map, which had been spread out on the passenger’s seat, was gone. Blown away. Probably wafting on the wind, winging its merry way to Reno, more than a hundred miles to the southwest. I was, at that point, experiencing a deepening and as yet unfermented adventure.
Presently, I found myself out in the sage-littered hills running around in a poetically futile series of unavailing and ever-widening circles. But, of course, the map was gone, and I was intensely annoyed, and not very tranquil, and wished that there was someone with me who might be blamed for what had happened.
“You left the doors open and the map out? In this wind? You nincompoop! We could die out here without a map.”
When there is no one to blame but yourself, solitude is not bliss.
…
In the words of the immortal Steppenwolf song, I was out looking for adventure in whatever came my way. I had started the search in the Black Rock Desert proper, called the playa. It is the bed of the ancient Lake Lahontan, flat as a billiard table, seventy miles long and up to twenty miles wide. The playa occupies over one thousand square miles and is sometimes called the flattest place on earth. In 1848, emigrants on their way to the California goldfields made camp near Double Hot Springs, at the far eastern edge of the playa, a major stop on what is called the Applegate-Lassen Trail.
A wide track enters the sand near the town of Gerlach and runs north and east, toward the black rock that gives the desert its name. In the winter, an inch of water sometimes covers the playa, and people trying to drive the desert have buried their vehicles to the axles in greasy silt then died of exposure, frozen to death out in the middle of the flattest place on earth.
In 1997, a British racing team, driving a car powered by a pair of jets, broke both the sound barrier and the world land-speed record—763.053 miles per hour—on the playa. My own drive across the sands was just a bit slower, and I dutifully kept to the established track, as per the usual BLM instructions. Dust devils danced in the distance, sometimes tracking miles across the plain to rock my half-ton truck with an audible thump, like a wrecking ball in a velvet glove. In those instances, sandstorms obscured the view briefly, then opened up to cloudless skies and terrifying monotony. Heat rose up off the scorched sand so that the flat and featureless plain ahead shimmered in rising waves, like an animated fun-house mirror.
Mirages glittered to the north. They covered the inane vacuity of the playa with mirrorlike blue waters, cool and calm as a child’s dream, and they retreated before my advance, moving ever into the distance, like the rainbow’s end. There were a half dozen of these lakes and they swam in the field of my parched and cracked-lipped vision like a series of especially vivid hallucinations. But mirages are not hallucinations; everyone sees them, and they are only a trick of refractive light. Emigrants, moving across the desert to the California goldfields, wrote in their diaries that their oxen, dying of thirst, were “driven mad” by these deceptions of luminosity.
The black rock itself sits at the southern foot of the Black Rock mountain range. It is a limestone formation, several hundred feet high at a guess and much darker than the brownish-orange mountains rising above it. From the playa, the rock looks like a burned and fallen cake set on a rusted iron woodstove. Above the rock, and to the north, the entire range is ridged with terraces formed by the receding banks of the late Lake Lanhontan as it slowly sank away into sand over a period of fourteen thousand years or so.
The Double Hot Springs is set just above the sand, in a field of salt grass and sage. I camped th
ere for three days in a solitude that was a little like bliss, only hotter. The springs are set in oblong bowls perhaps twenty feet long, ten feet wide, and about ten feet apart. The one to the east is larger, deeper, and small bubbles rise out of its emerald-black depths. Dragonflies cruise the slowly simmering pool. The one to the west is clear and cornflower blue because the underlying rocks are light in color. They form a sloping funnel that dives under an overhanging ledge and appears to plunge deep into the earth. It looked precisely like the kind of sump I had often seen while exploring caves, and every time I looked at it I had the disturbing sense of the earth turned inside out. It was always a slight embarrassment, as if I had walked in on someone naked doing something I didn’t want to know about.
Ralph Waldo Emerson met William Wordsworth on a trip to England in the early 1830s. It is my entirely unfounded contention that Emerson talked about emotion recollected in tranquillity with Wordsworth, who blithely snitched the line. The proposition is self-evident. Proof is not at issue here, only exoneration.
Ralph Waldo, I also found in my research, wrote an essay containing the dictum that “Nature punishes any neglect of prudence.” After changing the tire outside Gerlach, it occurred to me that if I wanted to experience a lot more adventure, or even write a poem, it would be wise, if not actually necessary, to neglect prudence. That would lead to discomfort and strong emotion, to be examined in tranquillity, provided I survived the experience.
And so, my decision made, I drove off into the desert, with no spare tire and only a schematic map—“not drawn to scale”—in an old BLM brochure I had found in the Gerlach gas station the last time I had my tire fixed there, which was yesterday. Yes, sir, I would just drive out into the desert, with no spare tire, and no map, looking for Waldo. Actually, I was looking for the emigrant trail through High Rock Canyon, driving a route I dimly recalled from the long-gone BLM map.