Groomed Orderly Dirty and Dying. Chapter 1.
My god.
I went to Uganda.
My God, I went to Uganda and I chased life. I clutched my beautiful life in my own battered arms and I squeezed and I wept until my eyes and hers were bulging from their skulls and fighting for air. I stoked her flame with the wind battering my face and denied her freedom until there were claws and we scrapped with death. We fought for air and ran with passion and my bastard lover left me alone, with my legs cramping and heart still burning on a packed bus leaving behind a box of dirt and messy memories on the airport runway. Life slithered away back under the mountains and I haven’t seen her since.
//
I made it back to Los Angeles last night, and although I’ve been “home” for a week I’ve mostly been lying in too much turmoil to think. I wake up with cold sweats. I have nightmares. I burst out crying. I was driving down the freeway yesterday and began screaming at cars.
//
I’m that guy.
There are thoughts so complex and so new slapping the walls and leaving holes in the plaster of my brain right now that I’m unsure of which way is up and which way is down. I brought a book of philosophy to Uganda where the open sky and hours of pedaling let me chew on the questions dripping with fat, grizzle and scandal, seared and served on platters of ivory until my jaw was sore and needed to rest. I got lost in the commotion of it all, and only now am I beginning to realize how just how lost I was.
After two weeks and 1,100 miles of riding I had lost myself in the mirror at night. The dirt lingered on my cheeks and the beard grew around my face and failed to hide the sad truth that the eyes looking back at me in the mirror were eyes I didn’t know. Those eyes had seen parts of the world that my mind hadn’t begun to grasp yet and were miles and miles ahead of the rest of me. They had been dragging me along, grabbing the rest of my body and screaming for more. They’re simple and they’re easy. They take it in and look around drowning my thoughts with more and with more and with more and with more.
Without these eyes I am nothing. But with them I am no one.
In my journal I wrote about 10,000 words along the 2,300 mile journey. That’s ~4¼ words/mile. Less words than thoughts per mile, but enough to supplement this book with what’s boiled out of the pot and fell on the pages along the road.
The last question I answered in my journal was the one I faced the most. I sat cramped in an economy seat and began to dance with the question of “Why Uganda?” on the way home. What follows, here and each time they are presented, are raw thoughts straight from my dirty fingers.
“ 09/15/19
I'm exhausted. Compounding hangovers, days of travel and a final round of bullshit on the way out have built a very legitimate spire of fatigue off of a very solid foundation of it dug deep into my bones through the last 6 weeks. So I'm here- too tired, too buzzed and too deep in thought to sleep. Not far enough to my right is a woman of sizeable girth, and a postcard from her time in Dubai, a little lower than a different version of the same safety briefing I’ve never looked at. To my left, 34,633 feet below, is a beautiful Arctic world of melted ice, with each drop beginning a dance it'll dance for decades. Of ice and of water and of everything that belies the state in the middle. There must be a fine line that the water either hates or loves between its two states. A life lived on edge between stability and instability. Tense and Beautiful. Who will I be tonight?
I'm only three beers in today but the effect is very much noticeable. It's not a smooth rounding of the edges but more as if the radio dial has been knocked out of tune. My antenna is a little crooked all the way up here and the static is filling into my ears and drowning out the drowning of the engines. There's a lot to sift through there now, and though I fear this road of ramblings is a dangerous one, it's one I'm bound to begin exploring. I've spent all my time exploring roads uneasily as of late and though I'm no expert, I'm beginning to find it amusing.
A Heineken for the road please.
I've grown up a relatively sheltered life. My sister called it Wonderbread and the image has a nice, simple, bleached connotation to it that matches the life we knew. We grew up together in the suburbs of San Diego and went to good schools and received educations similar to most middle class American white children. We learned of Columbus and Washington, the Boston Tea Party, the Revolution, Lincoln and the Civil War. We later learned of the Great Wars, the Cold War, and NATO. My education in High School even extended to the Arab-Israeli crisis, Guevara and Mao but throughout this entire 14 year process there was a large, overarching dismissal of the most fertile and most perilous continent of all lying quietly underneath. But I never wondered...
What lie there?
At a young age we were exposed to Africa. But very minimally, and the pictures that were shown were small glimpses of it's perilous extremes. I watched early UNICEF and Sarah McLaughlin commercials on Africans dying of AIDS, war and famine. We saw small black children with puffy stomachs and rib cages sick and coughing and the images we watched on the couch fell in line with the ones we were taught on Sunday of a place that may or may not exist called hell. And these images and concepts would be put far in the dark reaches of the mental closet to gather dust and grow solid. They'd later be revisited, but only briefly. We're shown Hotel Rwanda and see the gruesome images that define the ‘Africans are bloodthirsty savages’ mentality found common in the West. We learn briefly of racism in the Apartheid and many finally have the realization that white people can exist in Africa too. And that is all. That is an American, quality education on Africa. And this lack of understanding of a part of the world so large and so fertile does nothing other than create this massive, continental black box of death, war, plague and famine. You don't go. You don't ask questions and the result is most Americans, myself included, couldn't name more than a handful of countries in Africa or tell you anything about their culture.
Months ago I peeked into the box. I had yet another spontaneous idea and ended up alone on a ferry with my bicycle and camera and crossed the straits of Gibraltar into Morocco. As the boat pushed through the storm and the Rif mountains broke the clouds I was flooded with emotions. Those mountains over there, the ones I will soon cross, are mountains of Africa. The air is now African air and the people here are from the land of pain and suffering.
But the air smelled no different and the people were brown and praying to Mecca. They were kind and I was so pleasantly let through their gates. Where is this hell you speak of?
I had an incredible journey through Morocco. I found a healthy economy, freedom, and the insides of homes the locals invited me into filled with feasts and families. I met doctors, lawyers, nomads and farmers and began to understand how this land may not be just simply defined by a black box and racist cliches. I had found salvation.
After I returned I began to read and talk about the land that I once didn't think existed. The gravity of having been to Africa slowly wore off and in its wake left the realization that I'd not only just scratched the surface, I was scratching entirely at the wrong one. Talk to any African and they all agree- North of the Sahara is not real Africa. The landscape is different. The people are different. The culture is absolutely nothing alike what lies below the Sahara and the Africa I thought I saw was in fact just a small exception.
That deep rooted American ignorance began to perpetuate and make itself aware. And in its realization I begged for more. I'm so dangerously in love with understanding by adventure, and knew I had to return and head south of the Sahara to peek into that black box. I found it at my feet in Morocco and the ideas of opening it littered my dreams long after I returned home. I dreamt of the impossibilities I knew where possible in Africa. I dreamt of its dirt on my face and people in my arms.
6 weeks off University this summer meant I had time to return to this international education I'm beginning to love much more than the one confined to a classroom. But 6 weeks isn't enough to do much. So I zoomed in, and instead of crossing country borders like I’ve done before on a bike I decided to stay within one. The one place unanimously agreed upon as beautiful, safe and interesting by those that know. So I fixed my bike, packed my tent, bought a bigger memory card and found myself hugely nervous to step into my final connecting flight to Entebbe. I was the only white person on that plane and as I came out of a nap somewhere over Sudan the energy in the air shook me upright. Blue lights reflected off the black skin of the people all standing and talking loudly with one another huddled over my shoulders. I shrank into my corner unknowing of where I was and what I was settling into. And this sentiment only grew as I loaded my bike into a tired old taxi and drove through crowded night streets that bustled with a chaotic and dark energy I hadn't known. I stayed with a local man that night and showered out of a Jerry can. Motorcycles buzzed through the alleys. Mosquitoes picked at my face. 6 hours of confusion and disbelief in Uganda, 6 weeks and 2,300 miles to go.
I had a hell of a journey ahead.”
So yes, I went to Uganda, and before I left my friends asked me if I was going to die. If I would ever escape Africa and its dirt or give into its grasp and fall deeper and deeper until I rotted away. The questions of my peril I had never honestly considered hit fast and hit hard as I set off for the first time with a man I didn’t know on a planet far from home and I quickly understood that the questions my friends were asking were based on true, legitimate fears for my safety. And that true fear is here- Right now. It’s in my face and shaking me from idealist dreams to this very real world through my very awake eyes. The fear is riding through bustling city streets in Kampala on the wrong side of the road. It’s getting blown to the side and off it by small smoking motorcycles with four people on the back. It’s at intersections where red lights are more of a suggestion. It’s reaching out of taxi windows trying to touch my white skin and in bustling back alleys where I can no longer ride and march with the children grabbing at my things. The fear is in the blatant disregard for safety careening left right and everywhere screaming noise and billowing soot straight through my senses.
“08/12/19
Oh mother put me to bed.
I want to hear the crickets and the owls that play their songs at night in the garden.”