Charlie lived in a typical college crash pad in Madison with roommates, though he slept in a pile of leaves on his bedroom floor where a damaged pigeon called Pidge recovered from its injuries before one day disappearing out the window. Charlie’s hair was golden brown, long, and curly, and his eyes were a piercing blue. I was enraptured. He told me he was madly in love with me, but he held back. Invariably appearing happy go lucky, he wasn’t truly. The son of a professor of English specializing in Puritan literature, Charlie was permanently stoned.
I was twenty-one in 1985, saving money for our trip by taking off a semester and waiting tables at a downtown Mexican restaurant (“Buenos Dias, my name is Dana. I’ll be your waiter today.”) I ate quite a lot there, as well as consuming delicious and filling meals at the Hare Krishna house. Overhead costs were trimmed by living nowhere. My clothes were scattered in various closets around town, and I crashed here and there.
First Charlie and I went to Paris where we stayed in the family pied a terre of a college friend. Dina had invited all sorts of fellow students in Madison to come stay without imagining anyone would take her up on it. On a dark ancient street (rue Gravellier) close to Centre Pompidou, up creaky stairs, the tiny fifth floor flat had a romantic view across rooftops topped with grimy skylights and countless chimney pipes. We spent a week roaming Paris, and on a blazing hot summer afternoon had a picnic with friends at Versailles, where I dived into a palace fountain.
We flew from Paris to Cameroon’s largest city, Douala. At airport Customs, I haltingly tried to answer questions angrily shouted at me in French, and to my distress the airport official threw my passport under the counter. Fortunately, a more knowledgeable traveler behind me in line paid the expected bribe (most likely just to keep the line moving), the passport was restored to my possession, and Charlie and I were shuffled through. Outside, taxi drivers descended upon us en masse.
When last seen, my sister Laine had been tearfully getting on the plane taking her away to the Peace Corps in West Africa. She was different now, waiting for us curbside, standing beside her boyfriend Ateba, a handsome Cameroonian soccer player now studying sports management.
Surrounded by cabdrivers hollering fares, Charlie and I were overwhelmed and dazed. Later I found out these prices were ten to twenty times the usual amounts paid by savvier locals. The men were soon scattered, though, by Laine’s forceful voice. She’d always been tough but was now commanding. Her long blonde hair had been chopped short. Focusing on a single driver, she chipped the price down to a reasonable rate.
Our cab bounced on rutted roads through the tropical city Douala. People and buildings lining the streets were awash in color as smokestacks above spewed gray. We went to Ateba’s uncle’s house to change money. He owned various businesses, we learned, among them a hotel where Charlie and I could stay that night.
The hotel was in the city down an orange-lit alley. Our room was a large nearly empty rectangle, with cement-block walls and wood-shuttered windows. Centered on the floor were two pads for sleeping. When we turned off the industrial ceiling light that night, the room was bathed in an intense twilight blue, shot through with vivid orange streaming in from the alley through semi-closed wood shutters. The stone room accentuated the night chill, and Charlie and I held each other for warmth. Then he rolled over to his own pad and I was cold.
We parted ways with Ateba and took a bush taxi to Kribi, a beach resort town known for a jungle-fed river that fell, tumbled, and rolled over rapids into the Atlantic. The minibus’ three wooden benches extended from front to back, and passengers—human and goat—were packed in. Laine instructed me and Charlie to push down our butts and hold tight until we were well on our way. She said that sometimes drivers would slam on the gas, then the brakes; riders would then fly forward and five more people could be stuffed in before the door was slammed shut. If that happened, a person could be left sitting on half an ass for a whole trip, five hours or more. With both ass cheeks secured, Kribi was just two hours away.
We had use of an empty beach house belonging to Laine’s friend Miriam. One morning I stood in Miriam’s kitchen after we had just returned from the town market. (“Quel est le nom de la legume?” I asked a girl selling vegetables, pointing at a one I’d never seen before. “Ca, c’est la legume vert.”). I stared at a piece of fruit on the kitchen counter, its thin skin peeled to reveal a juicy, fleshy, blood-red interior. I’d never seen this fruit before. Or imagined its existence. It had never even occurred to me that out there was an entire world of undiscovered fruit. Marveling at all I didn’t know, I gazed out the window at crashing waves stretching along the beach into the distance.
Laine and I had been jumping in and out of waves for decades: the waters here were much less frigid than Lake Michigan’s. Just up the coast from where we stayed was one of the president’s houses, so as we lay under the Equatorial sun on towels in the sand, sometimes uniformed soldiers with machine guns would stroll up the beach and ask us questions. At night Charlie and I slept on the balcony, the daytime tropical sun and nighttime rhythmic tides combining for luxuriant sleeps.
From Kribi, we headed to Bill’s in Mbalmayo, where another volunteer Kate was also staying. Many stops on our itinerary were at the residences of Laine’s fellow Peace Corps volunteers, with Charlie and me bearing M&Ms and other junk-food souvenirs from the States. Visits to these altruistic at least somewhat socially isolated expats would invariably involve a party.
In front of Bill’s house was a mango tree, its ripe fruit littering the ground, the mangos’ sheer abundance leading to the waste of this glorious bounty. Bill felt like the rotting fruit. He had been having a frustrating time with his projects. He needed a break and had considered riding his motorcycle into a tree so he could be medevacked out, but he didn’t want to get too hurt because he wanted to come back to Cameroon.
That night, after we had drunk all of Bill’s wine, he and Laine and Kate left to get fortifications, climbing back up the hill to where his government vehicle was parked.
A moment later, there was a great clamor. Inside Bill’s house, I looked at Charlie. It had sounded as if a car were careening down a hill through trees and brush and crashing into a mud house. That was exactly what had occurred.
Car thefts of government vehicles had been rampant lately, so as a preventive measure a cumbersome bar had been clamped on, locking the wheel and brake. Bill had turned on the car’s ignition, forgetting about the anti-theft device until it was too late. The steering and brakes locked and down the hill they went, blazing a path through vegetation until colliding with the neighbor’s house. No one was injured, but a corner of a wall was knocked away. The following day was spent negotiating the labor to get it fixed.
We headed next to the capitol city Yaounde. Later in the trip, we’d fly into the Yaounde airport from the north of the country. This airport, I read, was the seventeenth most dangerous in the world. It was comforting to know there were sixteen airports that were more hazardous. This time we arrived in the pretty city by bush taxi.
Smaller than Douala, Yaounde nestled among green hills. In a central market, artists sold jewelry, masks, wood carvings, some of it roughed up to look older, much of it beautiful. In days to come, we would eat at a café running along a balcony overlooking the square. While there, a parade of vendors continually stopped at our table, ready to negotiate for the sale of their carvings, clothes, all sort of wares. Laine said that once she’d been eating at this café when someone had tried to sell her a giant carved wooden door.
Ateba’s family lived in a well-to-do neighborhood in the hills above the airport. One day after a torrential midday rain, I stood in the road next to their house, gazing at an astonishing triple rainbow pulsating in the sky over Yaounde. One of Ateba’s brothers approached and asked what I was staring at. When I told him, he dismissed it and pointed out an imposing house just up the road. “See that house? A plane crashed into it. It was totally destroyed, but they rebuilt it, making it even bigger than before.” “Was anyone killed?” I asked. “Yes, two people in the house and everyone on the plane, but the house is much improved now!”
We headed east, further into the bush. We came to Bertoua, where Laine’s Peace Corps colleague Lisa had also been having a tough time launching her community projects. The people in this area were especially wary of outsiders.
Before dinner that night Charlie disappeared, returning just after dark in an ecstatic state. He had climbed upon Lisa’s roof, assumed the lotus position and had been meditating while facing a giant sun magnificently descending into the jungle.
Following our meal was an entertaining night at Lisa’s, fueled by popcorn and wine. We departed the next day, not learning the repercussions of Charlie’s awesome experience until much later. Locals had been unnerved and distressed at the sight of the longhaired man on Lisa’s roof, convinced she had hired a sorcerer to cast spells on the entire neighborhood. At considerable expense, witchdoctors had to be summoned so neighbors could purchase protection for themselves and their properties. They were furious at Lisa for costing them money and wanted to be repaid.
We caught another bush taxi to Batouri, where Laine lived. Only one Peace Corps volunteer post was farther in the bush than hers; that guy was right next to the border with Central African Republic. While traveling along the orange, muddy, rutted road cutting through grassy plains and jungle, I was feeling a bit unwell. But we had a long ride ahead. I pushed down on the bush taxi bench, wanting to keep my seat but also afraid of shitting my pants. My stomach growled ominously.
At a military checkpoint, the bush taxi driver was ordered to pull to the side. A soldier leaned into the bus and requested identity cards or passports from all travelers. After gathering them, he went inside a nearby mud hut, their headquarters, momentarily returning to summon four people to be questioned: me, Charlie, Laine, and an unfortunate Cameroonian seemingly selected as not to appear biased against us. While Laine, Charlie, and the other man took seats outside against the wall of a mud hut, I was escorted inside. There was a table, chairs and a bare lightbulb hanging from the ceiling. Taking a seat, I was asked questions by two armed, uniformed soldiers: where I had been in Cameroon, what I did, et cetera. “What do you study? Oh, do you like to swim?” Present more than ever was the danger of shitting my pants. I tried to seem stern when I demanded to know what the problem was, what they wanted. My sister was friends with the American ambassador, I told them, he had eaten at her house, did we need to contact him? “Oh, no! Of course not, you can go,” said one soldier. Much relieved and firmly clenching my ass, I rose from the chair to leave when the other soldier stopped me, providing me with the actual benign reason for this distressing meeting. “Do you think we could be penpals?” he asked. “You could take my address and write to me.” My brains were so fried, butt so clenched, that I surprised myself by saying, “No!” We marched back into the bush taxi, wove through people and goats to our seats, and the journey resumed.
Laine’s house in Batouri had electricity, but water had to be retrieved from an outside well, then boiled. She worked on community development projects, which varied from gardens to latrines, focusing on whatever villagers needed or felt was most important. She rode from village to village on her motorcycle.
Upon arrival, I was sick a few days: a searing headache, the runs. Light hurt my eyes but sometimes when I closed them I envisioned flying over buildings of a magical golden city, with latticelike streets and elegantly domed temples. Opening my eyes, it all disappeared. Closing them, I was in flight again. This may have been malaria or side effects of the malaria medicine, hydroxychloroquine.
Once a week, Laine would hear the mail plane’s buzz over Batouri and hope for a letter or some communication from the outside world—at the least, her Newsweek magazine. Reading Newsweek one day on Laine’s porch, I came across an article about US campus activism against apartheid and was totally thrilled to see the featured photo was of our great friend Gilly Costello! Wearing cool sunglasses, she was at the head of a protest march in Madison, demanding divestiture of funds from South Africa.
Laine had projects with a local government official in Batouri, Monsieur Tiati. At times their relationship had been strained, but when he heard that her brother was coming, he’d expressed eagerness to meet me. There was no way around it, Laine told me one morning at her house, even if I was sick. Buck up. For protocol’s sake, a visit to his office was in order. Charlie stayed home while a morning walk through the town’s central market did little to calm my queasiness. Laid out for the taking was a bloody debauchery of bushmeat: hairy limbs from indeterminant animals.
Monsieur Tiati greeted me with enthusiasm, declaring he’d like to take us out for drinks. It was ten in the morning, I was ready to decline, but Laine spoke to me in English (which Monsieur Tiati didn’t understand): “Dana, you have to. It would be a grave insult to turn him down.”
Monsieur Tiati had a new BMW SUV. He insisted I sit in the front, with Laine in the back seat. He had recently gotten the vehicle and at this point only drove in first gear as we crossed and recrossed the small town’s map, finally parking outside a café only a block or so from where we’d started.
Inside Laine got a lemonade (that was allowed for her, a female), but Monsieur Tiati ordered us beers. The chosen brand, he told me, was the pride of Cameroon. The sight of the tall bubbling glass set on our table made my stomach gurgle, but Laine egged me on. “You’re doing good, just guzzle it down.” And I did, without incident. Monsieur Tiati and I discussed how good the beer was. There was more small talk, at which Laine excelled. Diplomacy reigned supreme.
Days later I felt well enough to ride triple down the rutted road out of Batouri; I was behind Charlie behind Laine on her motorcycle. Not far away, along the Kadei River, was an idyllic swimming spot. But that meant going through a military checkpoint, where the sight of the three of us on a single motorcycle might entail too big of a bribe or worse. Still, we rode this way for as far as we could, then leap frogged. Charlie got off and Laine drove me far ahead, then came back for Charlie and drove him farther along our route.
On this orange-dirt road, I enjoyed the solitude. Following the curve, to the right was a mud house with a mother, father, and two kids playing in front. There was a curious moment when all our eyes met: a recognition of otherness. Likely, they were puzzled by my weird appearance—no motors announcing my arrival, no heavy bag at my side, just a white dude out for a stroll. It was one of those crystallizing moments. Here was an existence found nowhere else. But that was true for everyone everywhere. Nothing was said as I moved around the curve and out of their sight.
Once the three of us got back on the cycle, we bounced off road, riding a crude muddy path through reeds to the streaming brown waters of the Kadei. A man with a carved-out pirogue—a work of art—offered for a fare to take us to a middle sandbar. He paddled us across and left us to eat, swim, and dawdle under the sun amid forest sounds. He went back across the water and hid onshore behind a tree, keeping watch. He didn’t want to lose the fare taking us back.
On a later outing to the Kadei Laine saw hippos, but this day we were blissfully unaware of any danger. Hippos are territorial and kill three thousand humans a year. “God protects fools and babies.” We were one, the other, or both.
Returning to Bertoua, we met up again with Ateba, and one night went dancing at a local disco, ignoring the French who were ignoring the Africans. Each party had its own small round hut in which to socialize and a large central structure had a dance floor. The Cameroonian men and woman danced with rhythmic hip movements that were elegantly slight while unsubtly seductive. My own moves might be described as more expansive. Dancing to DJ’d dance tunes, I whipped arms, legs, and body around in joyful abandon. Returning to the others in our grass-roofed hut, Ateba told the others about my smooth moves, “You would not believe it! You would laugh until the day after tomorrow!”
While sitting comfortably among our friends, my hand was taken and clasped by a man I didn’t know well. Here and throughout my trip, men took and held my hand as we spoke. At first it was disorienting and disquieting, a bit erotic, but it became commonplace and comforting. Cameroonian men were allowed to affectionately hold hands.
We had plans to head north, where Cameroon turns from green to brown, its top border at the Sahara’s arid belly. Replacing southern Animist beliefs was Islam, though Christians were throughout the country. When Pope John Paul had visited Yaounde, Laine had seen the top of his white hat drive by.
Before the train we were to board even stopped in the station, athletic Ateba was onboard, having run in front of the crowd and claimed seats for us. We followed with our bags. Ateba wasn’t coming with us on the trip; he and Laine kissed goodbye, then I sat in the seat beside her. Charlie was across from us, facing us, next to another man.
At various stops, train passengers would hang out the window and buy goods. The man beside Charlie was drinking beer. On one occasion, outside the window I saw four men walking along the tracks, together carrying an enormous snake at least a dozen feet long. After I exclaimed that this was the longest, fattest snake I’d ever seen, a fellow train rider told us, “You think that snake is big? We have much bigger snakes where I’m from.”
As the train cut north through jungle, Charlie and I passed silly drawings back and forth, making each other laugh. All at once, the man beside Charlie angrily jumped to his feet. “These white people come to our country and ride our train, and they make fun of us! They’re racists. Kick them off!”
The new Laine reared her head, striking back while mixing truths and semi-truths. “Everyone on this train saw my African husband saying goodbye to me. I have lived in Cameroon for ten years and you know nothing about me. You’re drunk and embarrassing yourself.” The crowd took her side. One woman shouted at him, “What are we supposed to do? Not allow white people to ride the trains?” After the passengers ejected him from the car, we were surrounded by a curious crowd. One woman, maybe the least attractive woman I’d yet to see in a country of beautiful women, said to Laine, “You have your African husband, but also have two extra brothers. Can’t you give me one of them?” To much laughter and approval, Laine listed how many goats and other requirements she demanded before she’d hand us over.
The train let us off in dusty, orderly Ngaoundere. Its giant mosque was spare, and the elegantly clad people here were more reserved than down south. One sunny afternoon, we hiked outside town with a friend of Laine’s, through rocky, high-grassed hills to a summit overlook. On a huge boulder overlooking the town, we sun-bathed like lizards while hearing the call of baboons.
Later at night in a crowded bar, the W.C. was the backyard. Returning from that dizzying experience to the throng of other beer-drinkers, I spoke to a young man who told me that he thought the white man was like Jesus, there to save Africa. It didn’t occur to me that he meant it, though he may have. I assumed he was kidding or trying to con me.
Leaving Ngaoundere, Laine, Charlie and I stuck out our thumbs, hitchhiking north to Garoua through hardscrabble terrain. From the back of a low-riding pickup truck on a long ride with two Italian engineers, I watched the landscape dry up.
In Garoua, we stayed with more Peace Corps folk, Larry and Eric. Near a local hotel, I fed a giraffe kept outside in a pen. We were visiting in the rainy season so the nearby preserve at Waza was too overgrown for us to see actual wildlife. The danger with giraffes, I was told, is that they could kick off your head, but this doe-eyed fellow with his black tongue seemed more melancholy than menacing.
Laine rode a motorcycle with Charlie behind her. I was on the back of another, piloted by Eric, riding bumps up and down a rocky road that seemed barely a path. We were headed to Mokolo, a village known for its beauty and mysticism.
Not far from the border of Nigeria, Mokolo perched above a valley of massive volcanic domes: a stunning, eerie basin of primordial stone monoliths, what remained of mountains washed away a millennia ago.
Family compounds in the village were separated by perfectly stacked stone walls. Inside, round stone houses had conical grass roofs. We were led inside one to meet a fortune teller. An old man kept a crab in a bucket with a bunch of sticks. You asked a question, it was translated to the man, then he asked the crab. He covered the bucket and chanted. Then he opened the bucket and looked at the sticks, now rearranged by the crab and providing the answer. My sister Kathi was pregnant, so I asked if her baby would be a boy or girl. The crab said it would be a girl. Unless it meant Kathi’s second child three years later, the crab was wrong. No matter. Earlier that day I’d experienced another mystical moment.
Bobbing on the back of the motorcycle going to Mokolo, I’d looked to the top of a nearby rocky ridge. Backlit by the sun, six or so children’s silhouettes danced in a line, waving sticks above their heads. Stunned at the unexpected sight, another instant crystallized as perfect. Joy appeared, spontaneous and profound. Such ecstatic moments of splendor and glory were found in this country.