In late July, I will be visiting a friend at her summer home on Lake Erie in Canada. Instead of taking a break from writing, I’m penning this several weeks ahead of time. Friendship and anticipating the rhythmic slap-dance of waves along the shoreline are the lures encouraging me to undertake the eight-hour drive north.
As a child, I was put to sleep each night, at least in the summer when windows were always open, listening to water bounce off the bulkhead that protected our Mercer Island yard from being washed into Lake Washington. Because of this, I have always been drawn to homes on water or within walking distance to swimming holes and wooded shorelines, where swimming or sitting under a tree watching birds diving for fish was far preferable to cooking myself in the sun. That is also why we chose our home in Wilton. There is one walkable pond nearby and another, Goss Park, a very short drive northwest.
Access to water is also why I originally agreed to live on the African continent for several years. I knew our ultimate destination was a small village on the banks of the Chari River in Chad. This intrigued me and I looked forward to exchanging my life in New York City for the chance to experience life along a very different waterway in a part of the world that had been unchanged for centuries. There were no roads to this village. Only horse, cattle and wild animal trails led to it from a sparsely populated inland portion of this sub-Saharan country. The Chari River was the only easy access to Bougoumene for most people, including us.
I hope you won’t mind me sharing something I wrote about my first introduction to the Chari years ago for a book that still resides on my computer. I’ve kayaked and canoed on many ponds, rivers and reservoirs in the Monadnock Region, which are far different experiences than the one I want to introduce to you now. Let me begin.
We climbed down the embankment and quickly loaded our pirogue. Late-morning sun heated the earth, and the river was calm when we began our journey upstream towards Bougoumene. We left as the afternoon meal was being prepared. The rhythmic ktunk, ktunk, ktunk of millet pounded into grain greeted our arrival in Mailao at the beginning of our journey and continued to accompany us as we poled away from the shore.
There was little or no breeze to diminish the pulsing heat. Even the egrets and vultures on the riverbanks moved in slow motion. Our boatman rhythmically dipped his long pole into the water, found a footing on the soft bottom, pushed us forward, rested a moment as our craft moved upstream, and then retrieved his pole, making only the slightest “shlurp” before he once again drove it downward. This was the only sound I heard on the Chari that afternoon. A light, mid-afternoon breeze occasionally ruffled the river grass along the shore. At times, as we glided from one drying channel into another, the river’s sandy embankments were so close we could reach out and touch them.
It was too hot to move or talk. I was afraid that if I changed positions, I would miss the slight puff of air on my face which came every time we moved forward. But hot as it was, I had no intention of reaching my hand over the gunnel to let it cool in the Chari, let alone hold on too closely to the edge of the boat — not with the chance one drop of that disease-filled water might land on me.
Before leaving for Africa, in preparation for my voyage, I had read every book I could find on sub-Saharan Africa. “The Dictionary of Tropical Disease” was at the top of the list. I wanted to know what we were getting ourselves into. I knew about elephantiasis, river blindness, hookworm, sleeping sickness, and a myriad of other horrors which I wrote off as avoidable. But one, schistosomiasis, was found in droplets of water. Small parasites passed by snails could enter the body through the skin and later lodge in a person’s liver, bladder, intestines, lungs, or even the brain and spinal cord. It could take weeks, months, or years before symptoms appeared. Wondering how one could avoid water, I made a special note of “schisto,” given I would soon have to find a way to live on and travel over a river which I believed could claim our lives or at least dramatically shorten them.
Activity along the river slowed as the heat increased. Our cat, Lobelia, began the trip riding in my arms, but soon moved to the top of one of the trunks near where I perched. I was intent on keeping my feet away from the water that was slowly seeping in through many tiny seams and filling the bottom of our boat. (Much later I learned schisto was only seasonal and could be avoided.)
As we moved further away from Mailao and its residents, the sloshing water against our craft was all we heard. Nothing moved or called out to break the silence: Not the egrets and vultures resting on the exposed sandbars, nor the hippos wallowing in the muddy pools they had trampled into the tall reeds at the river’s edge. There were no birds in flight nor even voices from the settlements along the embankment. The three of us in the pirogue were also mute. I felt as though breaking this nearly perfect silence was as unthinkable as speaking aloud during a chamber concert. There was a power in the quiet that I had not experienced before. It was not just the heat and the hypnotic rhythm of the pirogue. It would have been just as difficult to fall asleep as it would be to speak. The silence was a presence, and it enveloped me. It felt as if nature chose this perfect blend of warmth, syncopated movement and the absence of sound to make us aware of the rhythms of the earth and give us this place and time to reflect upon our passage through life.
The afternoon sun crept towards the horizon as we moved south. I feared we had been forgotten: That no one would remember we were coming; no place would be ready for us and we would be left to fend for ourselves once we arrived. With trepidation, I waited for the next bend in the Chari where we would finally be able to see Bougoumene in the distance.
When we neared the village, we couldn’t help but hear the excited chatter from the villagers, many of whom were, by now, descending the embankment towards our slowly approaching craft. The canopy of the bili tree lofted high above the shoreline and a group of men dressed in light blue robes gathered under it. Several of these men were seated on woven mats fitted into well-packed patches of earth beneath the tree. They watched our craft as it pulled up to the path leading to the village. A few men broke away to help unload our boat. The voices of women ululating in greeting broke what was left of our silent voyage. The chief brought two chairs for our use while he formally welcomed us.
Surrounded by the people of Bougoumene, we understood we were now a part of their village community. We were beginning new lives in a new setting, in a very ancient town in a very ancient land steeped in history and tradition.