Walking the Berkshires

Walking the Berkshires is 5: Bring on the Wood!

Walking the Berkshires has reached its 5th Blogiversary today.  Traditionalist readers are welcome to send gifts of wood (I accept nickels and nutmegs only, please).  There have been 1233 posts and 2246 comments since I began blogging here, although now that I link back to Facebook many additional comments happen there.  I am pleased by this ratio, since I write as much to connect as to inform (or entertain). 

Particularly with regard to connections, I have made some very special friendships along the way.  One longtime reader gifted me with his homemade Single Malt Marmalade, and another welcomed me to his home and showed me where my ancestors are buried.  Yet another has shared an extensive interest in Revolutionary war history and reintroduced me to the world of historical reenacting.  And I have met someone very special who was a longtime admirer from afar and who has opened my eyes to the possibility for new found joy.  All this and more, from these eclectic and erratic musings.  I am very grateful.

In retrospect, I really had no idea what WTB would come to mean to me, nor the form and content it would assume over time.  With interests as broad as mine, readers are as likely to encounter a series on a little known episode in American history as they are an irreverent look at Presidential fashion (the one post that launched an Instalanche) or the occasional revelation of personal transition. It is a lot to ask, and I am touched that so many of you check in from time to time for whatever the catch of the day (or every third day or so) may be.

I do have some personal favorite posts.  If I were to update this 2008 vintage greatest hits list, it might well include the following:

Once and Future Holy Ground

Name That DWF

Slave Soldiers in the Struggle for American Independance

Damn Yankees and Civil War Art

Dark Secrets on Gallows Hill

Teach Your Parents Well

Descant

Snow Falling on the Old Year

When the Potus Ad Libs & The Tea Party Chorus

"That is So Wrong!" - What Else Could be Improved with Zombies?"

My 2008 Cliopatria Ward Winning Series on the 1775 Canada Expedition and the Death of Montgomery 

Ebenezer Olmsted, Late, Failing Collector of Taxes

My Margaret Corbin Series

The Court Martial of Col. Matthias Ogden (series)

The Fact of Their Being

There are some additional posts of mine that attract daily visits from people searching for information on obscure historical incidents for which WTB has become something of an authority by virtue of what I have aggregated and analyzed.  Searching for "Morro Castle Disaster" leads to this post, while I get considerable traffic drawn to a post regarding this image of Canadians at Vimy Ridge.  Without question, the casual visitors are largely looking for images, but some of them stay for content.  Even when I have added nothing for days, there are 200+ unique viewers and 400+ page views here.

That last observation has lead me to think long and hard about the future of WTB.  There was a time when I felt driven to write something new every day - a time, it is fair to point out, when blogging was an escape as much as a passion.  I have other interests, now, and outlets for my writing.  It has been good while since I had the time and interest to delve into another long and engaging historical series, much as I still have that interest.  Much of my nature writing ends up in the local paper.  WTB has eased into comfortable middle age, and is resting on its laurels.   Perhaps it has lost its edge.

In any case, I have no plans to discontinue this blog, but I will be taking some time to consider its future.  Whichever way that path leads, I will be glad of your company.

Compromised

I once knew a man who painted pictures of Adolf Hitler on commission.  He was a gifted landscape painter, primarily a watercolor artist, and he lived in Swakopmund, wedged between the cold South Atlantic and the Namib desert, in a town with palm trees and colonial German architecture and at least four German Namibians who wanted their own private portraits of der fuhrer.  And this artist, a British subject who was a child in wartime London, swallowed his principles and collected his pieces of silver.

I have thought about him ever since the night we met in 1992, when the guest house where we had hoped to stay in Swakopmund was full, and the owner called his artist friend to see whether he could provide a place for two travelers for the night.  In exchange for taking him out to dinner, this man extended his hospitality.

I do not remember that our host was particularly interested in us and our stories, but neither was he especially outgoing.  There were layers to him, like the glint buried within his deeply lined eyes that suggested a capacity, once, for laughter, and watchfulness.  He had Hemingway's short, stiff beard, but was not a garrulous storyteller.  He never said what life of disappointments drove him to self-exile on this desert shore, a survivor of his own mistakes.

During the course of the evening, he peeled a few cards from the deck of his life and lay them on the table, and left it to us to reconcile these things, for he would not.  He survived the bombing of London.  He painted Hitler's portraits.  He lived in a strange place of mirage and sea fog that blurred the edges and blunted expectations. 

I think he told us his secret because we were young and new to Africa and life had shorn him of his absolutes and illusions long ago.  I think his confessional was as much a challenge to us as an unburdening for him.

Whatever braided tracks had lead him to compromise something core in his humanity were not examined that evening.  I do not know, in fact, whether he was prepared to do so in the private reaches of his solitary heart.  But I do know he had a heart.

A few years later we returned to Swakopmund, staying at the guesthouse this time.  We asked after the artist, and learned that he had died of a heart attack a year or two before.   He had tried to save a life beyond the cold and pounding surf, someone he did not even know.

Memorable Meals

Every now and again, less frequently perhaps than a blue moon, a perfect night coalesces around an extraordinary dining experience. 

There was the time in Swakopmund, Namibia, when our host called over to the Hansa Hotel to see whether they had Mozambique prawns and learned that they had just received a batch of langoustines with tails the size of chicken lobsters.  They were not yet on the menu, but the chef came out to our table and asked how we would like them prepared.  Three of them covered a dinner plate.

There was the tiny, four table Mexican restaurant in Worcester, Massachusetts where our friend from El Paso, Jesus Mendoza, took us for an unforgettable authentic meal like his mother used to make.

And there was the meal we had last week at Naji's Mediterranean Restaurant in Great Barrington, Massachusetts on the recommendation of our friends at Domaney's Liquor Store who said that if we were looking for outstanding Lebanese food, particularly Baba Ganoush, Naji's was the real deal.

Baba ganoush from the grocery store is to the exquisite version served at Naji's what Taco Bell is to that little Mexican restaurant in Worcester.  The eggplant was roasted, the garlic and lemon notes accented the tahini, and the flat bread was warm and fresh.  We ordered it as an appetizer and bought more to take home.

We also ate pressed spanakopita that used a moderate amount of filo and let the spinach and feta shine through, and steamed mussels in a tomato oil broth that were indescribably wonderful.  The service was attentive, and when my companion said she was allergic to bell peppers, the chef owner came to our table to determine whether the lamb shish kebab she had ordered would be a problem.  When it was clear that the juice of the pepper was the source of the allergy, he cut four or five medallions of lamb and grilled them with tomato, pine nuts, garlic and coriander and served it with rice pilaf and broccoli and eggplant fritters.  It was so good, and we were so clearly enjoying it, that he made one for himself.

As this was a birthday night out, they gave me some homemade baklava.  The most expensive entree was $18.99 and there was a decent wine list with several unusual selections from Lebanon that I will try the next time I go.

What these meals have in common is food lovingly prepared with a personal touch.  Whether in the dining room of a three star hotel or a small patio with a handful of other diners, the effect was as attentive and intimate as a gourmet meal cooked for friends.

Potjiekos for a Sharp Dressed Man

When we came home from Africa the last time around, we shipped an entire pallet back by sea.  Along with the books and curios and a couple bottles of what was then still unexported Amarula Cream liqueur, were a No. 3 and No.1 potjie: the classic cast iron three legged pots of southern Africa.  These had been essential in our field kitchen, and we had become so adept at their use that it seemed only natural to continue the tradition at home.  But ever since then, except for the lid from the bigger of the two pots which gets used in the kitchen as a skillet cover, they have been merely decorative, placed on either side of the hearth and gathering cobwebs.

Until this past weekend, when I decided to cook pot food or"potjiekos" for my Easter dinner.

I had some mutton chops, and decided on a lamb curry potjie in the smaller pot. I went with onion beer bread in the larger.  There is an old slab out back that was once the floor of a carriage house, and this was just the place to set up my bush kitchen.  There were plenty of small diameter twigs and branches in my yard after the storms of winter, and from these I made my cooking fire.  You don't need anything big for cooking outdoors with these implements, only a regular supply of fresh coals to scrap out and bank under the pots (and in the case of pot bread, put above as well).

I prefer pot bread to the white corn meilie pap which South African purists claim is sine qua non for this sort of thing, but I went with no less an authority than an English translation of Potjiekos from Huis Genoot, and if the recipe is good enough for its creator, André Swanepoel of Bellville, it works for me.

The recipe is a classic three ingredient combination: a package of onion soup mix, two cups of self rising flour, and a bottle of beer.  It makes a thick, toothsome bread, and I would perhaps suggest some active yeast as well for something with a bit more lift.  Nonetheless, it was just the thing to sop up the curry.  Some oil in the bottom of old number three, and in went the dough for about 45 minutes with a small twiggy fire on top to make the potjie function like an oven (albeit one that is much hotter below than above unless you are very careful about regulating the coals.

The mutton curry began by browning the chops in a bit of oil(neck and back mostly, with the bones in), and
then removing them and adding 2 diced onions and as much garlic as desired.  2 minutes later, the meat went back in and was covered with water. The I added 2 cups of diced carrots, potatoes and a turnip I had on hand, put the lid on, and kept the coals well supplied below.  Fifteen minutes before I felt like eating (1 cooked it for an hour and a half) I added 1/3 cup of milk and 4 tablespoons of curry powder.  The meat was tender and fell away from the bone.  I ate it with my fingers.

All it lacked was a few 750ml bottles of Namibia's finest Tafel Lager, and some Namibian friends to share it with, but I pronounced it baai lekker!  And yes, that is a warthog tusk bottle opener.  Lots of good stuff in that pallet we shipped home.  You ever need some previously poisoned bushman arrows, I'm your man.

To top it all off, an early birthday present arrived on Saturday, which in the interest of determining whether it was truly the right size I lost no time in trying on.  I have always wanted a straw Panama Barossa from David Morgan to go with my blue seersucker suit and increasingly pinstriped whiskers.  I will let you judge the effect for yourselves, but all I can say is; Leon Redbone, eat your heart out!"  At my place, if you like good eats.

White Earth No More.

Back in the waning days of Apartheid, Eugene Terre'blanche was the bearded white power face of the militant right wing in South Africa.  With a name whose Huguenot origin translates as "White Earth", how could he not be? 

I remember watching images of him and his boer commando riding in on their horses prior to the so called "Battle of Ventersdorp" in 1991.  They were beefy men in bush hats and khaki camouflage, emblazoned at the shoulder with the three armed emblem of the Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging (AWB), a blunt knock off of its near relative the swastika. 

Terre'blanche and the AWB remained militant during the years since South African independence.  In 2001 he was convicted of attempted murder of a black security guard and served three years in prison.  After his release, he revived the AWB and announced plans to apply to the UN to form a breakaway Afrikaner republic.

A violent man, a fascist anachronism in the New South Africa, he met a violent end last Saturday, reportedly at the hands of two of his black farm workers in a dispute over wages.  A predictable death, perhaps, but a martyrdom that South Africa does not need. 

Racial tensions were already elevated after the leader of the ANC youth league publicly sang an old resistance song with the lyrics "Dubula amabhunu baya raypha", which in Zulu means "Shoot the boers, they are rapists.", although South Africa's Human Rights Commission has ruled the song hate speech.  Concerns about the country's high crime rate are already a challenge in advance of the World Cup which South Africa will host in a few months time.  And President Jacob Zuma , who has appealed for calm, himself lacks credibility.  He sang the ANC song "Bring me my machine gun" to supporters during his trial for rape in 2005.  The court found him not guilty, declaring it was consensual sex, and the woman involved was subsequently granted asylum in the Netherlands.  Mandela, he is decidedly not.

A CNN story puts it this way:

For many here, the atmosphere now smacks of those scary, dark days before South Africans voted for a new democratic South Africa in 1994 -- when the white man and the black man were so suspicious of each other that many thought this country's transition to democracy would be violent and bloody.

But South Africans were led out of the twisted spectre of racial hatred by Nelson Mandela -- whose leadership and calm management prevented a potentially explosive conflict.

Mandela is now an old man, who cannot be expected to quell another rising tide of hatred and it is now left to a new generation of South African leaders to heed the lessons which he taught them 16 years ago.

But the bonds of nationhood that Mandela strived to build are still fragile and many in South Africa fear that Terreblanche could be even more divisive in death than he was in life -- and tear apart a nation still struggling to let go of the past.

I sincerely hope not.  But I would look for some gesture from Mandela in the coming days, particularly if things do not settle down.  Old habits die hard, for good or ill.

"One Sun Sets and Another Sun She Rises."

This has never been a confessional blog.   It can verge on poetry, turning with sharp eye and quick witted tongue to the forgotten sides of a story, but it is not a place where I have chosen to share the things that unsettle me and keep me off balance.  I am one who turns the inward focus outward, recasts the personal as universal.  I go into my head, away from my heart.  I show what I want you to see. 

Ah, but that is really an untenable position for a writer (and one who writes in a public forum, no less).  And though I have been resisting it for a number of months now, I find there is more to share.  Though it frightens me to go to this place with you, on this Good Friday with every bud bursting with new life I find that I can.

My marriage of 14+ years (and a relationship since 1991) has sadly, inescapably, run its course.  It is coming down around me like hard rain outside my window.  Much still remains between us - affection and care and fierce loyalty to our children - but there is no getting around the fact that our love is gone and she no longer wishes to be my wife.  How empty that feels, not to be able to set things right as is my natural inclination.  To have to be my own redeemer. 

And yet the longer I live with it (and I have been living with this knowledge for many months now), the more I come to feel that it is the right choice, even if one I never would have had the courage to initiate.  My default has been to settle for less out of fear of losing more, and fear of middle age (for I turn 42 in a week's time), of admitting that what began with such hope and expectation has been a mistake, and of being isolated and alone.

This is no Gordian knot that a sharp legal ax can sever - we are going slowly, slowly, toward a time when we can afford to have separate places to live and continue to share parenting.  It will not happen this year, but it will happen the next. 

Our home life proceeds much as before - the children mercifully unaware as yet of what we are planning - and working together with counselors has actually given us the skills to be together now, in this transition, that at an earlier time might have sustained our marriage.  But at night we go our separate ways (she to the bedroom we once shared on the floor above, me to a futon couch on the floor below).  We will do this for the foreseeable future while she seeks the additional training and paid work that will allow us to disentangle and move on to separate households and whatever our altered lives may bring.

Like Spring, I took my marriage on faith, but like a fool who plants the seed and neglects the garden it withered on the vine.  Did it slip like the ring from my finger, or did I withdraw my hand as from a dog that snapped,  singe my wings on a maddening flame?   I knew at some fundamental level where this was leading, years and years ago, and refused to accept it as possible.  

Mine will be the first divorce in my family, among my aunts and uncles and cousins of the first degree, though the pressure to stay came from me alone.  I bore up and took on greater burdens these many years, and added my own measure of salt to the soil, but I am still reckoning the cost in spirit.  And I am lonely, and my faith in myself - let alone a feeling as vital and frightening as love - is often hard to keep in view.

When she and I met in Africa, we discovered a shared love of birds, but my eagle eyes and open stride far out-ranged her own.  Then malaria  sapped her stamina,  her lungs filled with pollen, our first child was born still and she fell further behind.  She turned instead to the growing things that stayed in place, content to observe what lay by the path rather than seeking the next bend in the trail.  She taught me to see the quiet glory of the smallest flower, the riversmooth stones and the drones of bees.  She told me my head was in the treetops, while her eyes were on the simple things below that others overlooked.  I preferred to think of it as me giving our marriage high beams and she low, but they got sadly misaligned along the way.

We had other children who found a wilderness of discovery in our small backyard, who began by short rambles before scrambling up mountainsides.  They offered me fresh eyes, soaking up my woods lore and stories unfolding in every found moment.  They became my companions in the natural world, while my wife seemed content to stay inside.  Yet she yearned to be present for the firsts in their lives.  She could not bear to sit reading on the deck by the cove while we hiked to the cliffs on the far side of the island and so that place was lost to her.  Life pressed down, containing that sparkle that had captivated my heart.  I felt it, and recoiled, and the distance widened.

In the first months of this new transition, I wasn't sure that I would tap the backyard maple tree at all this year.  I didn't know if I would still be in this house, or whether I would be alone.  I am grateful for the meager output of sap I was able to reduce to syrup this disappointing year.  I expended more energy in boiling than the monetary value of the product of my labor, but that is not the right calculus.  Each ringing drop in a galvanized pail said to me " here we are...in this moment."  I was the only one outside to hear it, and I remembered that when my son Elias was learning to speak his first observations included; "Bucket, drip, drip, drip."

Now I am planning a garden and know that while my divorce is a certainty the timing is at least a year away.  So I imagine spading the earth, working in compost provided from a neighbor's dairy herd.  I think about the seeds my children and I will press into the soil, laying out hopeful rows for bright, growing things.  I think about where to transplant tomatoes in hope that the late blight doesn't return, and dream of salsa and gazpacho and heavy fruit on the vine.  Anything is possible before you begin.

That is all still weeks away, of course.  We can get killing frosts in late May.  But the propagative urge is strong in Spring, and it overrides the hard fact that harvests and marriages fail.   Life's slow accumulations will bend your back and overfill your cup.  What we prune away and what we carry forward can lighten a buried heart.  But still I miss the human touch, the mature feelings once had for each other alongside the fierce and sacrificial love of parent for child.

So much for me now is about letting things in.  I write with these highly sensory words - plangent, tactile, alliterative - turning them over on my tongue to taste the sour and sweet.  I do this, just now, because I am detached from sensory acts of touch and shared exploration in a sexual sense, but more specifically because in matters of the heart and spirit I go into my head.  I stand watch, and wary of what I feel, of what feelings are directed my way.  I do this while appearing outgoing, for I am not shy, but vulnerable.  I feel fiercely, but I do not trust the raw emotion in me or those I am close to.  Too volatile, too unpredictable.  Too much learned long ago.  This may explain why I write poetic prose - that, and a love of language and wordcraft.

Something is giving way, now, like pelvic bones parting in the passage of birth.  Like a clot of blood, root split rock, blue ice calving from the face of the glacier.  Will lungs clear, or will parts shear away that have withered from long neglect?  Will love be the ghost limb that aches at the stump? Will there be quietness with the cleaving, something new that remains?  Will I take her arm some day at other weddings, too well known to wonder whether the passing years have been kind to us, or cruel?

I don't know, and I won't know until I come to those places that cleanse or further clarify.  But I am aware, and present, and letting the wind blow through my open door.  I have all the big questions and all the doubts but I am here in the stream, head above water, not standing on the bank of that dark river.  Even though I tread water I do not stay in place.  Maybe my destination is the far side, or maybe I will fetch up at some landing downstream or even somewhere across the bar out in that bright salt water.  

Anything is possible at the beginning, and life is full of beginnings.

"One door opens, another shuts behind
One sun sets and another sun she rises
Love comes to you in old familiar ways
Love comes to you in shadows and disguises"

My Latest in the LJ

It has been a while since I pointed you toward my biweekly piece of nature writing in the Lakeville Journal, readable here with free subscription.  Fair use extract:

"I still remember other nights and other places. I can still see the Southern Cross, twisting in the steel trusses of the old wind pump where I perched in the veldt by the waterhole, waiting.  I think of nights spinning tales of Norse gods and northern lights while sailing a dog watch with my uncle beneath a rain of blazing meteors in the Gulf of Maine.  Of the wispy lights of June fireflies beyond the garden gate. Of that once in a hundred years aurora that spread above Millerton one March night when my parents, sister and I were driving home from dinner.

These are the notes I hear in the roaring firs, the rain-spattered panes, the silence of lovers and the pulse of stars. Walt Whitman felt it, crossing Brooklyn Ferry, the multitudes we each contain. So did the Amherst recluse when she heard the interposing fly."

"The White House" / Williman Cemetery: The Plot Thickens

More data seems to be emerging almost by the hour since I first learned of the existence of a forgotten family graveyard in South Carolina. I've been spending hours on the phone every evening with my new friend the local historian, and together we are like two hounds on the hunt; matching what I know of the family relationships to what he finds in the physical records and we both locate on-line.  It is marvelous, thrilling stuff for a genealogist, but it is more than collecting vital statistics.  It is taking me to places that put some flesh on those dry bones, and some of it is the sort that can make your skin crawl.

The senior Willimans and their offspring were of a class of merchant / planters whose acquisitiveness and business interests have left their mark across nearly fifty years of legal records in Charleston, South Carolina from at least 1777, when then 31-year-old Christopher Williman purchased 970 acres on the Ashley River north of the city.  He resold it in 1780 but held the mortgage, on which he subsequently foreclosed after 1790 and added it to his growing estates in the vicinity. 

In 1782 his lands were confiscated when he was condemned and expelled as a Tory, but were later restored in 1784 (subject to a 12% fine on all his real and personal property).  In 1787 he acquired the first 267 1/2 acres of what was ultimately a 720 acre purchase from Col. William Scott of a neighboring plantation called "The White House" which became his primary residence.  During his lifetime, all of his 2,153 contiguous holdings on the Ashley River were known as "The White House" plantation, and when he died on December 31, 1813, these passed equally to two of his widowed daughters:  Mary (Williman) Peters and Margaret (Williman) Bethune, my 4th Gr-Grandmother.  Mrs. Bethune received her 1,028 acres in 1814 from the southeast portion of the estate when the plantation was partitioned, retaining the original "White House" settlement, while her sister's lands became known as "Ashley Woods and Jerico"  These names still appear on streets and in housing developments on the land today.

The cemetery was once part of the White House Plantation, and closer scrutiny of plantation maps which my South Carolina friend is mailing to me should help determine whether it falls on the Bethune or Peters portion.  Angus Bethune, who died not a fortnight before Christopher Williman, is buried there, and I have learned a good deal more about this ancestor than was previously in our family record.  For one thing, I believe he was not just part of the plantation economy, but as an importing and exporting merchant he may very well have made at least one investment in the direct importation of slaves.

In December, 1802 (a significant date, as we shall see), Angus Bethune went in with two business partners and bought the schooner "Samuel Treadwell".  This vessel has an interesting history, having been named for Samuel Tredwell, the deputy port collector of Edenton, North Carolina.  Tredwell was the fellow, who among other things, picked out the spot for the Cape Hatteras lighthouse, which in turn was captured and defended in 1862 by the 9th New York "Hawkins Zouaves", in whose ranks may be found my 3rd Great Uncle, Theodore Abbott!

In any case, his namesake schooner, under different ownership, was condemned in January, 1800 in that same port and on Tredwell's watch as an illicit trader in the West Indies . On September 25, 1800 ( presumably now under new ownership but with the same home port of Edenton), she was boarded and inspected by the U.S. Navy while en route from "Martinico to St. Kitts".  Evidently the Samuel Treadwell was not detained on this occasion, and the next record I can find of this schooner was is in reference Angus Bethune and his partners;

"all of Charleston, merchants (who) purchased the schooner Samuel Treadwell, Barney master, and shipped on board a cargo of merchandize (sic), and sent her on a voyage to Africa;  that they were equally interested in the said vessel and cargo.  That the said vessel proceeded on her voyage, and arrived at her destination in safety, and traded according to the objects of the party aforesaid with great success and gain; and that she arrived in the port of Charleston returning from the coast of Africa, in July 1803, laden with a valuable cargo."

The timing of this voyage and the dry, legal wording of its details are quite significant.  South Carolina voted in 1803 to repeal its earlier prohibitions on the importation of slaves from Africa, and openly resumed this practice between 1803 and 1808 until the federal constitution mandated the end of the transatlantic slave trade.  A ship laden with merchandise and heading out to sea at the close of 1802 to the coast of Africa can only have had the object of trading for the most valuable cargo available. 

It was a short trip out and back.

Slavers with west Africa often imported additional  African exports such as ivory, guinea grains (pepper), redwood, gold dust, gum and beeswax, dyeing materials and medicinal drugs.  The Samuel Treadwell could have traded for some of these items, either exclusively or in addition to a primary cargo of slaves. There is a strong case to be made that Angus Bethune and his partners wanted to be among the first out the gate when the illicit smuggling of slaves could be openly resumed with legality. 

Whether they had been involved with the trade prior to then can only be surmised (though their shipping out prior to 1802 does look rather suspicious).  South Carolina repealed its non-importation law late in 1803, so a July arrival of a slave ship in port would have still been illegal.  Still, the reason given for the repeal of the law in the first place was that it had become unenforceable and slave smuggling was a regular practice.  A schooner of that period averaged 50 tons and as a slave ship might have transported 85 people in its hold.  Questions, questions...

Rather tellingly, the revenues collected on imports in Charleston in the years 1804-1807 show a marked spike when compared to those which immediately followed.  West-Central Africa was a new and lucrative market for slave traders at the turn of the 19th century, with South Carolina importing 20,000 during this period.  Could the Samuel Treadwell have made it this far and returned on an 8 month voyage? For now I can only speculate.

I believe in clear-eyed genealogy.  Ancestor worship is not good history.  Part of me is excited by these discoveries and thrilled to pursue further research.  Part of me feels it was appropriate that I learned more about of my slave-holding, quite possibly slave importing ancestors on Martin Luther King Day.  The dead are not finished speaking to us, but it requires new ways of hearing to make sense of what they have to say.

Namibians have a proverb that says;

"You can't smell yourself.  Let another one smell you." 

Those old merchants and planters knew what they were talking about without having to spell out the nature of that "valuable cargo".  They could not smell their stench in that sanitized legal language.

Some of what they say to me is; 'We are stuck in the same old conversation, products of our time and place.  And here we remain, while life goes on without us.'" 

So I stop, look, and listen, testing assumptions, probing beneath the surface, open to whatever is revealed to the light of day.

The Fact of Their Being

Somewhere in my carbon copied files, tucked away with my memories in corners of the attic as a concession to the demands of the here and now, is the letter I wrote at Christmastime  in 1997 about the death of a baby elephant.  It was a moment when it seemed as if the world was too small a place not to be shaken by the loss of such a creature.  Someone living out in the semi desert of Damaraland  had walked into camp with the news that there was a little elephant up the dry riverbed that had lost its mother.  Our Namibian father Elias Xoagub piled us and several of his other dependents into and old land rover and we headed East,up the Aba-Huab, among the riparian lead wood trees and camel thorns whose thirsty roots tapped what they could sense and the elephants smell six feet beneath the sand. 

We found it,so newly born and newly dead that it had not yet been scavenged.  So heavy that it took four grown men to lift into the bed of the land rover.  The baby hairs on its quilted skin were finely detailed beside those on the back of my resting hand, as one of my color slides from that day records.

Sometimes a young elephant mother has a difficult birth.  22 months is a long gestation time, and even in the caring matriarchy of a breeding herd it can happen that birth happens alone.  Perhaps she abandoned the new life that had frightened and hurt her.  Perhaps, as the authorities from the Ministry of Environment and Tourism suspected but which seems to me now quite unlikely, it had contracted a.disease like hoof and mouth - and indeed they later burned the carcass lest it pose a threat to livestock.  Who can divine the patterns that bring such life to an end just as it begins?  How can this big old planet contain such enormities?

That week there were elephants walking quietly past our bedrolls as we slept.  I found the tracks of solitary bulls not 15 feet from our tent.  An elephant's hoofprint has a signature pattern that with open eyes even an amateur tracker can discern.  Over the coming days I learned which tracks belonged to which bull, and took another photograph of my bare footprint next to theirs. 

During that year of living with elephants, their undeniable intelligence and the complexities of sharing living space with such complex beings, the breeding herds always drew my eye.  I could never approach them in safety, the way it often occurred with the old tuskers, those gentle old men.  But once I was witness to the fact of the brief life of a baby elephant, and so I know the answer to that old chestnut about whether the unobserved tree makes a sound as it falls.  The fact of its being, just being on this earth, is there to be felt whether audible or not.  Its being does not depend on me, though feeling does.

(For Nikky)

Lamming it in Namibia

 (Image courtesy of skyscrapercity.com)

 I'll admit, there are days when I yearn to cash all my chips, get an old land rover and disappear into the Namibian bush.  It would be a vain attempt to recapture my glory years there, and wrong for any number of reasons, but still, it has its appeal.  I am not, nor plan to be, a fugitive from justice, but apparently it occurred to at least one fraudulent investor fleeing extradition charges to take the money and run and set up house in grand style in Namibia's capitol, Windhoek.  According to The New York Times:

"In 2006, a federal jury indicted Jacob (Kobi) Alexander, an Israeli-American business wunderkind, on charges of wire and securities fraud. Mr. Alexander and his family flew to Namibia, which has no extradition treaty with the United States.

The fugitive more or less tried to buy Namibia. He sponsored scholarships and built low-income solar-powered buildings, and he lived in a spectacular home in Windhoek. Last summer, according to The Wall Street Journal, he apparently felt confident enough to throw a four-day bar mitzvah for his son — and charter a jet to fly in 200 friends from New York City."

Namibia is not some Banana Republic, though it cleaves proudly to its "non-aligned status".  You could live very well indeed there with a 1st world income.   Mr. Alexander spread around $14 million in cynical donations to curry favor in Namibia, much of it invested in his own enterprises, and time will tell if that buys him anything extra during his upcoming extradition hearing in June. He was initially admitted in 2006 on a 2 year work visa with the promise that he would spend $300 million Namibian dollars in the country (then worth $42.25 million US).  He transfered $16.9 million from a bank in Israel before extradition proceedings were brough against him.  I would not hold my breath waiting for him to come up with the balance.

Frankly, if you are going to lam it in Namibia, you should show some class and earn it.  There is, for example, the extraordinary tale of Henno Martin and Hermann Korn: two German emigrants who avoided interment as enemy aliens during WWII by hiding out in the Namib desert from May 1940 to September 1942.  Martin's tale of their epic of survival and lonely contemplation - "Wenn es Krieg gibt, gehen wir in die Wüste" - is available in English translation as The Sheltering Desert and is a great read.  Martin and Korn were geologists and made valuable contributions to that field based on what they observed in the Namib. The Geological Society of Namibia awards an annual Henno Martin Medal to the best scientific publication of a geologist in Namibia. 

You can't buy that, Mr. Alexander.  Character is not a commodity, and $16.9 million won't last you long once you've tried to sway an independent judiciary and pay off your lawyers.  Better go down to the Buchcellar in Windhoek and pick up a copy of The Sheltering Desert.  You are going to need to know where the water is.

CWCID: Jungle Trader