Into Thick Air (31 page)

 

I PEDALED HOME and promptly recorded my visit with Pellerito. I kept a list titled “Warnings and Encouragements.” Nobody was indifferent when I mentioned my plan to pedal through Djibouti.

Mother-in-law Rosa set down her glass of
vino tinto
and gasped, “Oh, God.”

Graduate student Andreas, a German who boarded with Rosa, confessed, “I want a Hemingway experience: crawl and shoot, crawl and shoot. And a big safari camp with lots of drinking.”

Neighbor Dave, after correctly parking his garbage can for curbside pick-up, said, “Djibouti, Africa? That sounds scary. If it's in Africa, you think strife and very big animals.”

Sister-in-law Ingrid stirred her green tea, smiled, and said, “I love that name,
Djibouti
!”

Bike mechanic Tracy looked down, spun a pedal, and hooted, “Ohhh, boy!”—a polite substitute for “You're nuts!”

But nobody had actually heard of Djibouti, much less visited. Locally, the closest I'd gotten was a chance encounter at the post office. A woman was searching for a priority-mail envelope while I calculated the postage for the birth announcement of my daughter. I guessed, from her sunken-eyed supermodel cheekbones, that she was from the Horn of Africa.

Elfy was a microbiologist from Ethiopia. After some talk about life on the high plateau, I asked about her neighbors down in Djibouti. She sealed her big blue envelope and said, “These people—before the man gets married, he must kill another man and cut off his sex.”

I said that I'd read of the practice in the 1934 book by L. M. Nesbitt,
Hell-Hole of Creation
, and found this frankly discouraging.

“Oh, but they are a pleasant people. It's a tribal thing.”

Elfy had never visited Djibouti. Tucson was scary enough. “My first night in the city I hear all the sirens and noise and think: this must be a very dangerous place.”

She was right, of course: every year over a hundred Tucsonans were mortally squashed in car accidents or shot dead. But it was hard to ignore the bit about the castrators, especially after discovering that Wilfred Thesiger said much the same in
The Danakil Diary:
“They invariably castrate their victim, even if still alive.”

I tracked down and called a Swiss photographer who'd recently worked in Djibouti, and asked about Nesbitt and Thesiger.

“Rubbish!” said Mr. S. “It was very rewarding for them to say they had been to a place that is so dangerous. Everyone repeats this. Rubbish!”

That, I said, is a relief. Mr. S. carried on. “Djibouti is a little bit insane. There are the Legionnaires and the prostitutes. It is part of the charm. Of course there are occasional knife fights and murders, but it is not so bad as Detroit.”

I called the Djiboutian embassy in Washington.

“Do you have bicycle experience?”

Yes, I said. Last year I rode in Patagonia, and the year before, Russia.

“What about the security in Russia? You must be careful in such a place.”

He didn't mention
Hell-Hole of Creation
, leaving it for me to ask, What about the security in Djibouti?

“You should not have any problems. Usually in afternoon we are eating the
khat
. It is a plant—a stimulant like coffee. It's just a pastime, usually from one to around seven o'clock.”

Should I try the
khat
?

“This would be very interesting.”

Djibouti should be very interesting.

“When you go there you won't feel any stress—you' ll just enjoy it.”

There was stress. The Discovery Channel took action to staunch the
cash hemorrhaging from its internet venue, eliminating the most costly feature stories and half the staff. As a writer, I was unemployed, and now Djibouti was not only a hole in Africa, but also a hole in my wallet.

I chewed this over until the bad news came out looking good. Had I not been well paid for the first four trips? Now the money I'd saved would pay for the last two. In this ceaselessly optimistic view, I'd merely collected up front. Better yet, no job meant no computer and telephone. Free at last.

And best of all, my wife still supported me. Sonya not only understood but shared with me the urge to move, see, and wonder. Some see it as pathological; we saw it as life. It would also be nice for her to have me out of the house for the month.

She did worry for my safety.
I
worried for my safety. Only a month before my departure, Al Qaeda terrorists blew a hole in the USS
Cole
in Yemen, only thirty miles across the Red Sea from Djibouti. Still, nothing was exploding in Djibouti, not even the volcano guarding Lac Assal. The port of Djibouti was ranked by the
World Survey of Climatology
as the hottest city on earth, but anything was better than the winds of Patagonia. As for the estimated 20,000 prostitutes, that was a risk I would have to face.

Djibouti might be uncomfortable, but it was unlikely to actually kill me. Besides, if I was to ride to Lac Assal, it was now or never. I was forty-three, squinting at fine print. Although I'd skipped the stage in life that includes matching silverware, I had matching children. They sat at the dining table on the evening I prepared my final notes and maps. My brother John came by and polished off a bean burrito. He looked over my shoulder and said, “It's not a good sign when your guidebook comes from the CIA.”

Sonya asked if I'd bought life insurance yet. I pulled out my policy and began to read the fine print, realizing only now that there would be no benefits if I expired due to a hernia, fowl-herding by plane, or suicide bomber.

Silence. My brother and wife didn't find Djibouti very funny. Then my boy Rudy suddenly cried, “She's spitting up!”

It was baby Rosita, making full use of her esophagus while flapping her arms. Despite the clear danger, Rudy was attracted by the spectacle. He
moved closer to see for himself. She grabbed his hair and hung on like the bite of a gila monster. “Ahh! She won't let go!”

I was glad for the distraction, and for the feeling that at least the little ones wouldn't fret over my absence. I disentangled the two and brought them to bed. Just before Rudy slipped into sleep, he squeezed my hand and asked, “Why is Africa so far?”

 

THE TENDER WARMTH of Tucson in November was replaced by ice rimming the window beside seat 27A. The lady in 27B wore a purple fleece jacket with a Praise-the-Lord pin. She made faces at the Sky Mall catalog, pointing to the French Professional Hose Nozzle and asking, “Does anybody buy this stuff?” But mostly she studied the “Disciples” curriculum for her Bible study group.

I mapped the landscape in my journal, recording how the Rio Grande floodplain is revealed in a thin scrawl of mesquite. As we approached Cincinnati, the sun sank into a lush and ludicrous red. The jet dropped into a boil of cumulus, and the wings bent and unbent like a soaring bird's. Beneath the clouds it was night. We came in low over cars crawling like glow bugs alongside the great black belt of the Ohio River.

“
This
,” said my neighbor, “is the part when I pray a lot.” We touched down. “And this is when I say, ‘Hallelujah! Thank God!' ”

Two jets later, six miles above the Red Sea, my seatmate Sohail Malik excused himself to visit the bathroom. He was a dark-suited banker from Pakistan via London, and I didn't expect him to return wearing nothing but a pair of sheets and a look of complete contentment.

He graciously explained that wearing the
ahram
is required of every pilgrim, rich and poor, heading for Mecca. “Your right shoulder must be exposed. You wear no other clothes but these.” He practiced his prayers until we approached the port city of Jeddah. When I invited him to look out the window at the place where he would begin his journey, Malik leaned over and said, “Beautiful, really beautiful.”

It was dusk, and I saw many cars on a freeway under the pumpkin glow of sodium vapor lamps.

“They say that Eve is buried here.”

He showed me the little scissors that he would use to ritually cut off a lock of hair after seven round-trips around the black cube of the Kaaba. We landed and he exhaled. “Now we are entering God's house. There is nothing to worry about, for God will take care of me.”

As for me, he cautioned, “You bring in the white sugar, you are beheaded immediately. Do you know this word? I mean narcotics.”

The flight crew locked up the liquor as we idled in Saudi Arabia. Small silent men in green overalls cleaned the plane. Nobody boarded. The remaining Djibouti-bound passengers—French heading for their former colony, and Africans—buckled up as the Airbus bellowed into the night and sped along the length of the Red Sea. The water was black, and where the blackness opened wide into the Indian Ocean, a peninsula of lights jutted from Africa.

The airport was small and neat. I traded $20 for Djiboutian francs so worn they felt like tissue paper. I held one banknote to the light. It depicted three camels pausing to consider the leaves of a thorn tree. The watermark was of two long knives and a spear.

The taxi driver called the city “Djibouti Town.” His Peugeot wagon was equipped with mysterious red lights behind the dash vents, so instead of air conditioning there were slashes of red across my chest and the seat. I pointed and shrugged, Why? The driver swung his shoulders, grinned, and said, “Disco.”

It was 10 PM. Occasionally the headlights caught a few people chatting by the roadside, men with high foreheads shining with sweat. Some stood like flamingos on one leg. From this statistically meaningless sample I imagined Djibouti as a nation of skinnies. But I could not imagine a disco in this dark and sea-damp city.

Ahmed drove slowly. We passed an even slower moped buzzing like a hornet. The little scroll of Arabic that hung from Ahmed's mirror hardly swayed until we stopped at the Djibouti Palace Hotel. There were street lights here, but none illuminated the hotel behind a low white wall and several trees with trunks painted white. Satellite dishes atop the third floor were visible, but little else. It looked a little like a whitewashed castle, but more like a place to be interrogated.

Such is the nonsense that occurs to a man who's flown over 9,000 miles without realizing how strange it can be to arrive, in the night, in a little postage stamp of a country. I dragged my bike box through the front door of the Palace. Two young men sitting behind the counter hopped up and exclaimed in concert, “Malusa!”

Apparently, few people call from the United States to arrange a reservation. Actually, none. I was the only tourist.

Ahmed—the clerk, not the driver—checked me in. He gave me a stiff towel, a bar of GIV Beauty Soap, and a roll of pink toilet paper, and escorted me to room 9. It was clean. Ahmed immediately whipped out a TV remote, turned on CNN, then pointed to a sign. It was the air-conditioning schedule. Cooling was available only from 9 PM to 9 AM and 1 to 4:30 PM. The rest of the time you really should be out doing something.

I asked Ahmed, via my fingers walking along a city map I'd photocopied, where I might visit tonight. He indicated the Menelik Plaza of the European Quarter—only a few blocks away.

The sidewalk was potholed and clumped with fruit skins and crumples of newspaper in languages I didn't recognize. I saw no one but a few sleepers in the shadows until I turned a corner and came upon abundant non-European life in the European Quarter. The buildings were French antiques with warped shutters. The second floor overhung the first, making an arcade with arched portals onto the street. I stopped for a sidewalk sweeper, and on the opposite side of the street a pair of shutters opened and a lady beckoned, “
Mon cheri! Mon cheri!
” I sheepishly waved hello and good-bye. I didn't want to hurt her feelings.

Blending in with the locals was, for chromatic reasons, out of the question. Men in plastic sandals and secondhand slacks greeted me in French. I managed to say hello in Arabic, and this made them smile. I peeked into a bar and ducked out before the prostitutes latched on. I was wondering where the French lived when a young African approached and offered himself as a guide. In good-enough English he said his name was James, and immediately made clear his personal situation.

“No work in Djibouti.”

I believe you, I said.

“Tomorrow I bring you the
khat
. Very nice.”

Thanks, but no thanks. And I don't need a guide.

James would not abandon me. He pointed out the sign for the Restaurant Bon Coin: a cowboy roundup amid saguaros. He brought me to a souvenir stand selling “Harley Hog Wild” belt buckles. I offered to buy him a mango juice. He declined sullenly, then trailed me back to the hotel. At the entrance he made his bid for one thousand francs—about $6.

“I want a beer.”

I said that I wouldn't buy
myself
a beer for a thousand francs.

“I stand here and ask you: why don't you give me the money? You have money. I don't.”

It is that simple, I said, but I didn't come to Djibouti to give my money away. I did not want you to follow me. I offered you a mango juice.

“OK—five hundred francs. With this I can buy a beer in a store.”

No.

“OK—I will take two hundred francs for the mango juice. I do not like this drink.”

I gave him two hundred francs. He fingered the money, then burst out, “I am good man for you, but you are bad! I protect you. We walk past the people waiting for you. The Mafia. Without me, they get you”—he made a sudden stabbing motion—“with the knife.”

He turned and vanished. The clerk Ahmed just shrugged. His cheek bulging with
khat
, he sat on a rug and watched MTV.