Into Thick Air (38 page)

“Tomorrow, everyone will know. There are very few Americans that visit Tadjoura.”

And, I add, very few Afar that visit the United States.

“I'm afraid to go to America. It seems to be a violent place. We know few American people, but many American things. Movies, videos. Even the smallest child in Tadjoura has seen the
Titanic
.”

I say nothing.

“And 100 percent of the girls become romantic after this movie.”

We're chewing the
khat
, naturally. I believe tonight's high-grade leaf is known as “truck-driver.” I waited for the now-familiar tickle of cathinone, as welcome as sleigh bells approaching on Christmas Eve.

Ali comes by, plops down, and unwraps his
khat
. Hemeda and another Ali join us. Then another Ali. Hatke confesses that his name, too, is Ali. He's called Hatke to avoid confusion. I sense another long night, and excuse myself to shower off the day's salt. Ali number three holds up his hand:
Stop.
There are things you must know.

First, don't take a shower while chewing
khat
. The sudden change in skin temperature can cause a heart attack.

Also, don't exercise during a
khat
chew.
Relax
.

Finally, never leave home with a mouth full of
khat
—you may catch a cold.

Is there, I wonder, a bad time to chew
khat
?

The answer: No, there is no bad time. Further, don't try to kick the habit. You' ll feel miserable.

This accords with the World Health Organization, which says that the primary danger of
khat
is psychological dependence—which is to say the same danger as one hundred channels of television. Some go crazy.

But, says Hatke, “These are
our
rules. Everybody has different rules. I've
chewed in a
mabraze,
a special room just for
khat
. Sometimes people in a
mabraze
all fall silent after one hour. Some begin ambitious projects in their minds, projects they'll never finish, and usually never begin. Others simply try to make toy houses out of the
khat
stems.”

We fall silent. Hatke casts the empty bucket over the balcony, then reels in another keeper: Cokes and smokes.

We talk of my plans to pedal to Dittalou tomorrow. “God willing,” is their earnest hope. I used to believe they said as much merely as reflex. But now I've the feeling they truly believe that tomorrow is a distant and unsure future, and that everything from the miraculous appearance of a diving mask to your eternal resting place is the will of God.

Except for Hatke. He's been tainted by nearly a decade in France, where things happen because people are willing to make them happen. Tonight he moans of the utter hopelessness of getting his flat fixed up during Ramadan. I ask him why he ever left Europe.

“In France the black man is not welcome. A French wife doesn't change this. You feel it. You are always referred to as an African. But when my wife visited Tadjoura she was welcomed into the community. She felt at home, so it was decided to make our lives here.”

Another cat fight starts up in the alley. Ali number one, inspired by the imminent arrival of Hatke's family, is drilling a hole for a stairwell gate meant to keep the goats out of the building.

Hatke admits that life in Tadjoura for his wife will take some getting used to. “As an Afar, you are not an individual but a member of a tribe. Your wealth is measured in how much you help other members of your tribe.

“One day we Afar will surely be more like Western countries. But then the question becomes: what of our identity? In the back of our minds there is an Afar nation. But simply to say this now makes me wonder: what is a nation?”

Exactly,
I'm thinking. Although this is not a
mabraze
, I've begun an ambitious project in my mind, the exact nature of which will never be known because it seems Hemeda is again making eyes at me, in her untamed way, one eye at a time.

AS THE VULTURE FLIES, the rumpled landscape of Djibouti is only one hundred miles across. As the bicyclist rides, it seems to go on forever. It takes four and a half hours to reach Dittalou, fifteen miles and far above Tadjoura, in a dripping forest of hornbills and baboons. Along the way I dare not wander off the road. Like the man at the embassy said: land mines.

The mines are the legacy of a smallish Djiboutian civil war only ten years past, between the Afar and Issa. Since independence from France in 1977, the Issa have run Djibouti, in part because Djibouti Town is in Issa territory. The Afar would like things otherwise. Parity within Djibouti government would be a nice start. But the “Afar nation” in the back of Hatke's mind is much more: the unification of all million or so Afar. To do so would require Djibouti, Ethiopia, and Eritrea to give up large hunks of territory, a proposal to which their traditional response has been
Drop dead.

The Afar have yet to drop dead. Like the Kurds of Asia, they occasionally lose patience and revolt, but mostly they wait. Djibouti's summer heat is not ideal for waiting, but the Afar can escape Tadjoura for Dittalou. Nearby is what Hatke called “water running over the surface.” It's a creek, under big trees with flakes of bark like sycamores. Candy-red dragonflies bob and dip their tails in the water, and fat-headed tadpoles wiggle up to gobble the eggs.

It's getting late when I drop back into the slobbering-camel desert. I hurry past the soft humps of coastal dunes with their weirdly branching palms, stopping only once to let a stake-bed truck pass. In the back, standing tall among the jostle of goats, a man in a
Titanic
T-shirt yells,
Peace be with you!

Hatke is out of town but left his flat to me, for a night under the whoosh of a ceiling fan to discourage the mosquitoes. In the morning I gulp a Malarone pill and leave most of my first-aid kit as a gift for Kamil. For Hatke I leave a fat package of Ultra Lotus Baby diapers I picked up in Tadjoura, as well as a Top Ramen noodle dinner carried all the way from cosmopolitan Djibouti Town.

That's where the lucky ones shop, and here they come now, on the twice-weekly car ferry that moors crookedly on the pier. Off the ferry comes a rush of people carrying electric fans and baby strollers, only to meet head-on
a crowd of one hundred propelled by the urgent need to bring twelve sacks of charcoal, a dozen five-gallon plastic jugs, three goats, two red volcanic boulders, and one bicycle to Djibouti Town.

Moments after I board, the ferry inexplicably begins to pull away before the loading ramp is pulled up. Three policemen blow their chrome whistles and the people still on the ramp scream and jump, onto either the pier or the ferry.

The Bay of Tadjoura is deep and dark; mats of root-beer-colored seaweed are pushed away by the bow. It's time for prayer, and the passengers do their best to figure out the direction of Mecca. The water jugs come out for the ritual washing, and the prayer rugs go down.

In an apparent effort to make up for the bumbled departure from Tadjoura, our captain relies on no fewer than three crew members on the bow to guide him to the Djibouti Town pier. Sadly, all three are yelling and pointing in conflicting directions. The captain is so far off the mark that the crewmen of an anchored cargo dhow leap off their prayer rugs, unsheathe their knives, and race to the mooring lines, ready to slice them if a collision is imminent.

We slide by with twenty feet to spare. Twenty minutes later I'm riding through the Ramadan torpor of Djibouti Town. A rap on the door of the Djibouti Palace wakes Ahmed the clerk. Lucky me gets the key to room 9.

I take a nap. Everybody else is.

I wake at 4:30. Everybody else does.

After a fish dinner at the Maskali, Nasir the cook invites me to his home. It's five minutes away on the back of his 49cc motorbike, to a blue plywood box with a ceiling fan. He shares this spotless twelve square feet with two other men and a single copy of the Koran.

“This window,” says Nasir, “lets in the sea breeze, so it is not so hot in the summer.”

I wonder, did it get hot in your Somaliland home?

“Oh, no,” says the refugee. “It is like California—very nice, all the time.”

He changes into sharply creased slacks and a green button-up shirt, then takes me out on a night of endless introductions and questions. I don't mind. Everybody in Djibouti has a notion of America—very nice America,
violent America—but these are merely visions that float on the horizon. Djibouti makes me extra-proud to be a real walking American. My trip is so odd—
What? You have come only to see Djibouti?
—and the country so small that it is not an exaggeration to say that by the time I leave, most of Djibouti seems to know me.

So the hookers ignore me on my last day of cruising the European Quarter. The postcard vendor says,
Hello, journalist
. The barber at Coiffures Vijay doesn't bother to demonstrate the alcohol bath for his razor.

This familiarity sharpens the bite of leaving Djibouti. After the shave I sit in Menelik Plaza and say to myself, Be reasonable. This is no paradise. The flies are awful. The plaza is pathetic. One building has collapsed for neglect and nobody bothers to haul out the rubble. Most of the town looks as if constructed by ten-year-old boys. The refugee kids stoned me. The fruit drink poisoned me.

I walk back to the hotel as the sky purples and the fast is broken. Checking out of the Palace, I notice that the Coca-Cola clock above the front desk is exactly as it was when I checked in, stuck on 2:37, the second hand struggling up, then falling back again and again.

The taxi to the airport looks capable of blinding speeds, equipped with racing spoilers and air dams and scorpion decals. The driver putt-putts at 25 mph. He practices his basic English with me, and in doing so is one of the last Djiboutians to learn that I am just a tourist, not with the embassy or on business. I came to see Djibouti.

On impulse, he makes a gift of the shiny thing that dangles from his mirror. It's a necklace, a leather thong tied to a chrome ring crudely cut with the name of Michael Jackson. It's the ugliest necklace I've ever seen, and I hold it to my heart like the Hope Diamond.

The jet noses into the night and banks over a land without lights, apparently sleeping. I know better. It's Ramadan, and the ventriloquist fisherman may well be working the jaws of his talking shark. The
khat
is surely being kept moist under wet burlap. And five hundred feet below sea level, I imagine, the flip-flop geologist is skipping stones across Lac Assal.

—Bill Beer,
“We Swam the Grand Canyon”

 

IT WAS BEDTIME in Tucson. The blinds were drawn against the January cold, but they did little to muffle the sporadic yowl of sirens from the fire station. My three-year-old didn't mind. He liked disasters, and he had a very important question.

“Did the captain of the
Titanic
get in trouble for not bringing enough lifeboats?”

He was staring at a fantastically detailed illustration of the great ship in deep trouble. The bow was under and the stern lifted high above the black sea. The ship was nearly vertical, and the ranks of still-glowing portholes made the
Titanic
look like a sinking skyscraper.

I said, No, Rudy—it wasn't his fault. And now it's time for lights out. I've got to get up early to go work in the desert. I'm still making my plant map.

“How long will you go?”

Only four nights.

He considered this. “Are you going to Africa again?”

No—I promise.

Three weeks earlier, I'd returned from Africa with a mind to paint my file cabinet the colors of the Djiboutian flag, start a
khat
plantation, and finally watch
Titanic
. Not a one happened. I'd begun planning the final trip.

Driving west into the desert the next morning, I imagined myself pedaling my bike along the same road, sailing along on a smiling tailwind, bound for Death Valley, California. Fifty miles out of town, I passed a two-track off the highway that wound into the foothills of the Quinlan Mountains. At 60 mph the hills looked like nothing more than a rock pile and a bunch of well-fed saguaros, but I guessed the dirt road would lead to the perfect first camp.

With Death Valley I would end my quest for the pits in the same way I'd begun bicycle touring some twenty years earlier: alone, riding out of the only city I really knew. There would be no farewell at the airport weapons scanner, no malaria pills, and no passport. I considered myself a whiz at English. If I encountered a tribe of Harley-Davidson enthusiasts, with a glance I would know if they were lawyers in leather or true psychopaths.