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Little things about Zanzibar and the Long Way Home

| kiell

When my boyfriend was feeling a little better after our IV drip adventure, drinking his prescription-strength Gatorade and eating a stale cookie or two (bought from a stall vendor, complete with a millimeter thick layer of dust on the package), I went shopping. I was hoping to buy a few kangas, the Tanzanian printed cloths women wear as skirts, turbans and baby holders, printed with proverbs I don’t understand. When I was at one of the shops, haggling over prices, two young men got into a scuffle–not quite a fight– and a fat, strong-looking, grandmotherly lady stood up and went over to one of the men, giving him a full strength whomp in the shoulder with a stick of sugar cane she was chewing before sitting back down. Everyone laughed, even me.

Drinking exotic-tasting spiced coffee, a slight breeze on the backs of our necks.

Daniel looking for a wifi access point, walking around with the netbook like it was a metal detector or a divining rod.

Athletic, sweaty men running with a pushcart in Dar es Salaam, keeping up with car traffic.

We took a long taxi ride to Jambiani beach, watching the land and people go by. Grilled maize, lumber yards and power tools, a boy balancing a stack  of plastic bowls and pitchers taller than himself, tire shops and land rover parts, a funeral procession with men standing on the back of a fenced-in pickup truck.

On Jambiani, we sat on scratchy woven hemp twine chaises, contemplating the unreal turquoise ocean; the fishing dhows were beached twice a day when the tide went way, way out: nearly a quarter mile. You couldn’t even hear it anymore. Kids rolled bike tires along the beach, tires almost as big as they were, laughing and playing, and little blue sandy crabs ran for their lives as if pulled by a string or blown by a little puff of wind. Stormy weather sat out on the horizon like a plateaued mountain, topped with puffy clouds.

Colobus monkeys sat in the trees, preoccupied with something on a particular branch, while we ate the catch of the day and the sun disappeared completely but its evidence remained. The moon, like a spotlight, illuminated the receding tide and the reflective white sand.

On the night that we didn’t order the catch of the day, but rather the beef, Daniel was again so incredibly ill that we were up all night. This time the clockwork vomiting kept us up again, scared and tired, but not quite so afraid as in the previous week. The tide, in at 4 in the morning, lapped literally at the foundations of our little screened cabin, loud, roaring, calming (to me at least)–a reminder of the presence of where we were, despite the food poisoning. Grounded but not grounded. Serene but not serene. Ready to go home, right now.

In the morning, kids played soccer on the beach, a homemade goal set up against the coralline rock, practicing their impressive moves. I remember thinking to myself, I can’t imagine growing up in such a beautiful place, where families live off the ocean. Little fenced in seaweed gardens were exposed when the tide rolled out twice a day. Piles of coral rock lay in the morning arranged at low tide, to be collected and later sold out of the bed of a truck. Fishermen with nets tossed small fish to kids up on shore. The older ones gathered them by handfuls, the youngest one picking up a fish now and then, and when it flopped in the air he would squeal and twirl it around by its tail.

Eventually, we took another taxi ride back to Stone Town, back to the ferry, back across the ocean to Dar es Salaam and started the long journey home. Having gotten some bug or another, I was so sick by that point that I could barely stand in the line for customs, could barely contain my nausea. I thought they would take my illness for nervousness and detain me like a would-be bomber on our flight home. Multiple multiple immodiums and bottles of water later, we landed in MSP, our luggage stranded somewhere in DC. But, one way or another, we were home. Home, home, home.

~

And now, it’s almost time to leave again. Is it normal to have every year of your life go faster than the last?

Summer Scenes

| kiell

We camped in the middle of August with Val and Peter, leaving Minneapolis in the middle of a heavy rainstorm, feeling apprehensive about the bad weather. When we got to the park a few hours later, the weather had turned, and we hiked in to the site to set up camp and help out with dinner. There was just enough time walk a bit further down the path to a little dock for a private sunset swim. Hiking the next morning to Lake Maria, we sunned on the dock, swimming, having lunch in our wet bathing suits—cheese, bread, stone ground mustard, apples. We picked a lunchbox full of fresh blackberries from the bramble behind the ranger’s office, our arms and legs stinging from thorny branches, our lips stained purple.

I flew to Atlanta to visit my mom, spending ten hours in the car with her driving to Florida and feeling really lucky to have her. Catching up with my grandparents over cocktails and 5pm “salties,” having really good, really real conversations. Mom and I tanned through the clouds by the pool, swimming in the rain when it started. Doing one or two (or six) last cannonballs before going in for dinner, with her laughing and running up to the pool, hugging her knees and jumping in, her hair so straight when wet.

Daniel and I drove out west and back for two weeks, through torrential prairie downpours the first night, lightning eventually illuminating the hills forming out of the North Dakota flatlands and making camping impossible. The red, brown, sage and black striated earth of Montana made us regret only driving through and we want to plan a return trip in the future.

We stayed with a friend of Daniel’s from South Pole at the permaculture farm he lives on on Orcas Island, a few hours north of Seattle by ferry. He let us sleep in his quarters, a double layer canvas tent lit with a smoky oil lantern, drink his home brewed beer, and make pancakes with fruit we picked on our walk and eggs taken straight from the chicken coop. The three of us hiked down a mountain on the island on a mossy-quiet, switchback-riddled path, short but steep. We stopped at a pair of lakes nestled on the side of the mountain, skinny dipping off of a rock ledge into the breathtakingly cold water; dark, clear and still, save for us gasping at the chill. The sunset that night was purple-orange, one of the most beautiful we have ever seen.

In Portland, we stayed a night with artist friends we met in Beijing earlier this year, comparing travel notes and catching up, eating pad thai and wandering around the funkier-than-thou jewelry shop openings, microbrew pubs, secondhand clothes shops and record stores. Later in the week we went further west to see good family friends, driving out to Tillamook and following a gravel path to their super-secret beach spot and making a huge driftwood fire in the sand. We watched riders on horseback gallop down the waterside with Mabel the Oceandog loyal at our feet.

 

Grasshopper at Craters of the Moon National Preserve, Idaho

 

 

Dogs in an RV

 

Back east, we drove through the snowy looking sands of the Great Salt Lake Desert at sunset, coming all of a sudden through a twisty mountain pass and confronting a vast, unreal flatness. Through Colorado on Highway 14, our prairie driving mindset was again shattered by nighttime mountain driving, foxes and moose crossing our path, almost less scary not being able to see off the precipice on the really sharp curves. We drove and drove that same night, unsuccessfully looking for a campsite in Wyoming and Nebraska and gave up in the wee hours of the morning, drinking the best-ever warm beer and falling asleep on the nearly exposed mattress springs of a roadside motel, late night TV on in the background.

 

Carhenge, Alliance, Nebraska

 

On our last marathon day of driving, Daniel read aloud to me from a book he bought for us as I drove, and we stopped midday for overcooked bison burgers and bitter diner coffee, the South Dakota sun warming us through the window.

In September we camped with close Danebod friends by the Temperance River gorge, clambering down slippery log stairways late at night to feel the cold Superior wind on our faces, lying on our backs on the bridge over the river, listening to the crashing water and counting the north shore stars. We hiked during the day across the red lava rock flows, pocked and studded with pale green lichen and butting up against the insanely blue water. I listened to Daniel talk about this cove or that rock formation, fond memories from his childhood, realizing with a sorrowful but excited shock how soon we’d be leaving.

Pre-Deployment Thoughts

| kiell

This particular brand of anticipation is different than I had expected when I first considered applying for a job with the Antarctic program. It’s a blend of excitement, ordinariness and relief—that I got a job at the South Pole, that I don’t have to spend another winter without my partner, that Daniel and I will be working at the same station. It seems so routine and normalized after his season that one would be going to Antarctica for a job that sometimes I forget about what an incredible, unique thing it really is.

This July, I got a call from the manager who interviewed and hired me as an alternate for the General Assistant position for last year’s season, asking me a few questions, making sure I was still interested, and letting me know that he would hold a place for me if my other interviews didn’t pan out. A few weeks later, I got a quiet offer letter by email, which I signed and faxed back. It seemed so anticlimactic after all the stress, excitement and anguish of the application process in early 2009—but easy enough that it feels a little bit like I didn’t work my ass off for it, which I did. And now that deployment is here, only days away, it feels like it isn’t happening, which it is. And I can’t wait.