The Best Women's Travel Writing (10 page)

“This town has forty people,” Tom says.

I look around at the smattering of small structures. “Town?”

“Yep.”

“Whoa.”

We wander up onto the sweeping ranch porch. An elderly Mexican man with leathery skin hugs Tom and pours us each a shot of
raicilla
.

“Cheers!” I exclaim, clinking each glass. I shoot mine; they sip.

Tom leads us to an adjacent house with a dirt floor, where a teenaged girl is making tortillas. The air smells like smoke and earth. The girl looks up shyly when she sees all of us staring. “
Hola
,” I say, trying to make eye contact. She blushes.

I watch as she mixes cornmeal with water and places a ball of dough into a ceramic hand press. She pulls down the handle—thump—and nods, satisfied. With a graceful flick of her wrist, she tosses the tortilla onto a skillet over a wood stove. It sizzles. I am amazed by so many things: her ability to keep the fire at the right temperature, the perfection of her circles, the fact that she makes tortillas twice every day.

“
Bueno
,” I say, clapping my hands.

The guys goad me, so I agree to give it a try. It's way harder than it looks. I fumble around with the dough, which sticks to my fingers, creating a gooey mess in my palms. Every one of my tortillas is torn or misshapen or stuck to the press. I laugh, but it comes out sounding more uncomfortable than carefree. I look at the girl, and then the men, and something shifts deep in my gut. I have an urge to tell them
: I am a good cook. I make delicious lasagna. I take my kids to the playground and read them books.

Instead, I wipe my hands on a towel and walk away. I wander past the painted white church, scattered wooden houses, free-range cattle. Children dart past. I smile and wave.

At the one-room schoolhouse, I stop and peer in the windows. Joe appears behind me.

“Check out those desks,” I say. “They're wooden, like old times.”

He laughs and points to the wall, which is covered in hand-painted pictures. I wonder if my son is painting a picture right now at his school, or practicing his letters.

Joe turns to face me. “Hey Carrie?” he asks.

“Yeah?”

“I was wondering. Do you want to see Copper Canyon?”

In my head, Sidecar Sally screams,
Yes! You do! This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity!

“Do you?” asks Joe.

I itch my leg, and then look back at the children's pictures. “I would love to,” I say. “But I can't.”

He seems unfazed. “O.K.”

I smile and try to act normal. But inside I feel raw, like fingernails are scratching my flesh. I look back toward the house where the girl is making tortillas. I imagine her holding up a ball of dough the shape of Sidecar Sally's heart. She places it on the press. The handle descends and smashes it flat. On the fire, it burns.

Carrie Visintainer is a Colorado-based freelance writer. Her essays have appeared in
Matter, Cahoots, Mamazina,
and
The Best Women's Travel Writing 2008.
Her travel blog, Carrie Go Wandering, can be found at
carriegowandering.blogspot.com
.

BRIDGET CROCKER

Taking the Oars

Sometimes a woman has to paddle against the current.

T
he caustic incense of mosquito coils and floor polish caught in my throat as I dropped my duffel in the foyer. Within these peeling yellow walls and barred windows, my boyfriend Greg had lived for the last several months, running a whitewater rafting company in Zambia. Although I'd just arrived for my second season, I wasn't planning to stay. I'd only flown halfway around the world to tell Greg to his face. After five years together, I owed him that much.

As I waited in the empty house, Doreen and Angela, my two best friends from the previous season, burst through the warped wooden door. Their easy smiles were almost as big as the enormous hand-woven basket they'd made for me as a returning gift.

“But, sister, why are you crying?” Angela asked. She set down the basket and touched my cheek as tears forged down my dust-coated face.

“I'm getting back on the plane for the States this afternoon,” I told them. “I'm leaving Greg.”

Doreen grabbed my duffel loaded with river gear and carried it into the master bedroom while Angela struck a match for the tea kettle.

“You are needing to rest,” said Angela resolutely. “That is all. Sit down.”

Doreen sidled onto the armrest of my chair and started petting my blond arm hairs—“fur,” she called it. She wore a puzzled frown. “I think I am not understanding you,” Doreen said in her throaty, rich-timbre accent. “Bleedget, why is it you will leave?”

“I'm tired of following him around,” I sniffed. “I need to get a life of my own.”

“But he is not hitting you,” said Angela, straightening her tall, solid frame. “He has a very good job. And he does not care that you have no babies, although you have been together for some time.” Angela, a single mother, smoothed thick black hair away from her dewy forehead and shook her head at me. “This is a good man.”

Yes, Greg was a good man. But was he the right man for me? I wasn't convinced.

“I can't do this anymore,” I told him when he turned up from the office. “I need to do my own thing.”

“Well, what do you want to do?” Greg asked, setting down his paper-stuffed backpack.

I wound my long braid around my wrist. “I don't know.”

“Then you might as well stay here in Africa with me,” he said, looking hurt and rejected. “It's not like this is all that bad. Besides,” he added, voice cracking, “we agreed together that I'd take this job. I don't want to do it alone—I need you here.”

For too long, Greg and I had mistaken being in need for being in love. We sat next to each other on the couch without touching. “You promised me, Bridge. You said you'd come with me if I took the manager's position.”

He was right. I pried the top off a warm Mosi Lager—wishing it was whiskey—and started unpacking my river gear out of the duffel and into the master bedroom closet. I kept my word, ignoring the promise I'd made to myself, pretending that being needed was good enough.

Over the next few months, I devoted myself to speaking Nyanja and training on the way-over-my-head Class V section of the Zambezi River known as the Boiling Pot. I abandoned myself to learning the intricacies of Victoria Falls, known locally as
Mosi-oa-Tunya
, “the smoke that thunders,” and I absorbed the culture that mirrored the landscape: a deeply carved chasm cut through heat-baked savanna.

I pushed down my discontent, hiding it under endless gin and tonics and spliffs of homegrown
dagga
.

When I'd first met Doreen, last season, she was a highsider—a porter and training guide who helped weight the rafts through the Zambezi's high-volume hydraulics. She was barely five feet tall and less than a hundred pounds, but as a highsider, Doreen carried heavy coolers, oars, and rafts in and out of the steep Batoka gorge, matching the men load for load. The other highsiders, all male, started complaining that she was taking more than her share, making it harder for them to provide for their families. Doreen didn't have a family of her own, they argued, so she didn't need the money like they did.

It was decided that Doreen must quit being a highsider and become the manager's “house girl”—and so she came to work for us, doing the washing, ironing, and floor polishing.

Doreen joined our groundskeeper, Gabriel, and guard, Mr. Amos, bringing our total number of staff to three.

“You have to do something about them,” I'd told Greg. “I don't want to be the Madam—it makes me uncomfortable to have them doing all the work.”

Back home, I had cleaned plenty of motel rooms for money in-between river guiding seasons. To me, having servants was an affront to my working-class ethos and Aquarian sense of global equality.

“What do you want me to do?” Greg responded. “Throw them out? Then they won't have jobs.”

Obviously, that wouldn't do. “Fine, then,” I proclaimed. “But I'm not going to monitor the ironing or oversee afternoon tea.”

As it turned out, Doreen and I had a few things in common, besides scrubbing toilets for cash. We were both twenty-one years old and had grown up next to rivers: me in a small town next to Wyoming's Snake River and Doreen in a Tonga village outside Choma, near the upper Zambezi. Before meeting us, she'd never been around
mzungus
—white people—in her life. Before coming to Africa, I had never been around black people in my life.

We became best friends, spending afternoons swapping dance moves while playing UB40's “Red, Red Wine” over and over. We eventually broke the cassette tape, so Doreen brought in her tapes from home of Zairian
kwassa kwassa
and Lucky Dube, a South African reggae megastar.

“What's your biggest dream?” I once asked her. “If you could have any job in the world, do anything with your life, what would it be?”

She looked at the floor, and then cautiously up through thickly fringed lashes. “When I was a highsider,” she said, “I was just wanting to take those oars in my own hands.” She smiled earnestly. “I was wanting to steer the boat and be the one who is guiding, as you yourself are. That is my dream.”

Months after unpacking my duffel bag, acquiescing to scout my life from the riverbank rather than push off shore and run it, I was sitting in the lounge with Chuck, one of the American river guides. We were stretched out on the brown velvet couch watching a pirated version of “Damned River,” recorded off U.K. television and rented out by the Indian shopkeepers in downtown Livingstone.

“Bleedget,” Doreen whispered, peeking around the doorway. Her face was furrowed and twisted in fear, her energy unusually frantic.

I locked onto her pulsing, fluttery eyes. Something was wrong. Really wrong.

“Come,” she said, “Bring … your things,” she motioned to my room. She meant my first aid kit—or magic, as the Zambians started calling it after I cured a highsider's cold with Benadryl.

“What's going on?” Chuck wanted to know.

Doreen looked at the polished floor.

“We'll be back,” I called over my shoulder as we ran through the garden, toward the gate. The ancient Mr. Amos appeared, head swathed in a ripped up t-shirt. He pocketed his slingshot and opened the gate for us to pass.

“Yes, Yes. Hello, Mrs. Greg. Yes.” Mr. Amos hunched over, looking at the ground. I'd told him to call me Bridget countless times, but he still called me Mrs. Greg, even though we weren't married.

I followed Doreen from the manager's house down Kanyanta Road in the direction of Nakatindi Village, where I assumed we were going until we cut down a small footpath leading to the guide house several blocks away.

“It's Chiluba,” she told me as we sprinted from the trampled grass onto the red clay road in front of the guide house. “Her husband …” Doreen shook her head, unable to say the words.

Chiluba's husband was the muscled, smooth-talking Alick, one of the senior Zambian river guides. Chiluba and Alick had a one-year-old daughter together, Tandi, which means “love” in Ndebele.

Alick had recently picked up with a rich, leathery German woman—a client off a whitewater trip. She'd moved into a hotel flat in Livingstone and outfitted Alick with a new, high-dollar wardrobe.

Doreen and I passed through the guide house gate. Angela was in the dusty yard, her baby girl Mwangala jutting out from her hip, son Kachana hiding behind her legs, sucking his fingers. Angela worked as the maid at the guide house, living in the back cement lean-to with her children and her sister, Ivy.

“You have come,” Angela said, relieved.

The gray walls inside the one-room shack were adorned with glossy pictures ripped out of my old Victoria's Secret catalogs and fashion magazines. Cutout vixens in black and red lingerie peered seductively at Chiluba, who was curled up knees-to-chest on a no-mattress twin bed pushed against the wall. Her head was resting on her knees as she sniffed delicately.

“Chiluba?” I said softly.

She looked up at me, tears mixed with blood spilling from her nose and cracked-open lips. There was a deep gouge above her right eyebrow. Although her doey brown eyes were bruised purple and nearly swollen all the way shut, Chiluba's pulsing gaze clung to mine, then hardened.

While I examined her she stayed motionless, silently waiting to hear my medical opinion.

“It's not so bad,” I said, forcing a smile. “Don't worry, we can fix it.” I touched her arm gently, then went to work, wetting some gauze with peroxide. Doreen and Angela breathed steadily behind me. Ivy had the kids outside playing in the dirt yard, distracting them.

“I do not know what I could have been thinking about,” began Chiluba, “Speaking to him that way. About
her
.” Jaw set, she breathed heavily out her bloody nostrils as I dabbed at her cuts with the gauze. “I just saw them together coming out of the Fairmount Hotel, and it was as if I went mad.”

“Even Tandi saw them,” added Angela, clucking her tongue.

“What did you say to them?” asked Doreen. Along with being incredibly shy, Doreen was terrified of marriage, which was why she remained single and childless at twenty-one—practically a spinster.

“I waited until he came home, and then I begged him to stop seeing that woman, to do it for our child's sake,” Chiluba covered her mouth with her hand, holding back waves of grief before continuing. “And do you know what he told me? He said, ‘Stop interfering, it is none of your concern,' and then his eyes turned a deep black. It was as if he disappeared from himself, something was taking over his body. There was nothing that could be done to stop him.”

“How long has it been going on, Chiluba?” I asked quietly.

“It has been getting worse these last months. Before, I could manage, but now, you can see, it has become a burden. Everyone is seeing me this way, and I do not want my child to feel me being so weak.”

I pressed her split eyebrow together and taped it shut with butterfly closures. “Why don't you leave him?”

From the doorway, Angela let out a cynical laugh and looked down, toeing the floor. “We are not like you women. We cannot just leave when the man is behaving like this. It is against the law for us to divorce our husbands. He is the one who can divorce us for any reason he likes, but we ourselves have no way to leave.” Angela's husband died from cerebral malaria shortly after Mwangala's birth. She would be on her own if it weren't for her younger sister helping.

“What do you mean,
it's against the law
?”

“Yes, it is true,” said Chiluba. “The only way I can leave Alick is if he divorces me, and then I must return to my family, if they will allow it. It is a very shameful thing when you are divorced, and the family most usually does not take you back.”

“But you and Tandi can try to go back to the village and …” I started formulating a plan, an escape route to rescue her.

“No, no.
I
go back to the village. Tandi goes with Alick. Then his new wife or mistress,
she
raises Tandi.” Chiluba's head reared back like a wild horse. “I would rather take a thousand beatings than see
her
raise my child.”

“So what can you do?” I asked Chiluba. I had applied triple antibiotic cream to all her wounds and sealed the deep cuts with butterflies and waterproof tape until they were impenetrable.

“I must learn to keep my feelings hidden.” Chiluba was finished crying. “Do you understand what I am saying?”

“Yes,” I said, sliding my arm across her rounded shoulders, “I do.” And then, searching for the words in Nyanja, I whispered, “
Nifuna kufa chifukwa nimvela impepo meningi
.”
I feel like dying because I am too cold
.

Chiluba nodded, and the three of us held onto her, trying to warm her cracked, frozen heart.

My third season in Zambia, I applied for and landed a job guiding on Ethiopia's Class III Omo River. Of all the rivers in the world, it was the one I most wanted to run, primarily because it was the stomping grounds of LUCY (
Australopithecus afarensis
), one of the earliest humans. Since the first descent in the early seventies, the Omo had been run sparingly, and only a handful of women guides had ever rafted it.