Traveling with Mark Jenkins is a mixture of the daring and the dangerous, the dramatic and the absurd. Here, he and three friends, with the aid of a remarkably intuitive African guide, set out to attempt the first descent of the Niger River, the legendary city of Timbuktu their final goal. Along the way, they are attacked by killer bees, charged by hippos, stalked by crocodiles. They pass through villages where every female child has undergone a clitorectomy, stumble upon a group of completely blind men living in the bush, dance with a hundred naked women. That Jenkins reaches his goal, riding alone across the Sahara on a motorcycle, stands in sharp contrast to what befell those who first tried to find Timbuktu and whose fates the author interweaves with the narrative of his own adventures.
To Timbuktu
By Mark JenkinsHarper Perennial
Copyright © 1998 Mark Jenkins
All right reserved.ISBN: 9780688163426
CHAPTER ONE
I am moving but can't see where I'm going. The river is bearing me. The prow of my boat cleaves folds of whiteness and pulls me through. My course is invisible but I keep paddling, steadily dipping the blades side to side. The cadence keeps me balanced.
The fog came in the night, dampening the thirsty earth, stilling the howling cicadas. We were too tired to notice it. Dead atop our sleeping bags, insects gnawing at the netting, sweating in our sleep, dreaming murky, disjointed parables as all white people dream here. In the morning we crawled out of our tents and the river was gone. We squatted silently in the mud like the Africans and ate the last of our food. Then we broke camp, loaded our boats, and pressed them like scalpels into the flesh of the river.
At first we tried to paddle in formation--single file down the middle of the river, gunboats staggered. Me in front as point man, on the lookout for crocs and hippos, sidearm on my lap; Rick next, then Mike with his gun, John taking up the rear. But the mist was too thick. One by one we were swallowed.
No matter. We are all going down the same river together even if we are lost to each other.
There are no rapids in this section, only arcing ribs of current disappearing into the ghostly void. It is deceptive. The surface of a river is only the skin, the muscle is underneath. You can't know this from shore. You must be out in a small boat; then you know it because you feel it. We are in kayaks, the smallest of vessels. In a kayak you are not above the river, you are inside it, part of it. Water envelops you and carries you on your voyage.
We are running higher in the water than normal because we have eaten our ballast. We left the last village loaded to the gunwales. The women came down to the river with their baskets balanced on their heads. They were colorful and gay as tall flowers. Worms of mud pressed up between their toes. We bought oranges and bananas and cassava and tins of Moroccan sardines and distributed the weight between fore and aft hatches. The French bread was a surprise. We took the whole basket, strapping the tan limbs to our decks as if we were cannibals.
Now it is all gone and our boats are lithe and nimble again. I feel free, like a plane in the clouds. But I know better. Water is not like air. Although I am the helmsman and may pilot left or right or even swirl myself in circles, my true direction is chosen by the river. My path is the path of the river.
The fog is starting to pull apart now. Bombs of sunlight are exploding on the surface of the water. I begin to pass through brilliant holes of light. Colors flash around me as if I were inside a kaleidoscope. I am so absorbed I don't realize Mike has appeared beside me. We must have been parallel. He doesn't speak. He glides in to starboard; we match strokes and ride like light cavalry through the discharges.
Around a wide bend Mike suddenly stops paddling and points with his blade. I look where he is looking. There is something ahead of us on the river, something moving through the shrouds. We take chase, our boats bounding through the water like dogs. We have no idea what we are after. Then we break into a clearing.
It is a man. He is poling a dugout across the river. The dugout is so deep in the river the man looks as if he is walking on water.
As we come closer, we can see him better. The sun is glancing off his shoulders. He is wearing rough shorts that hang from narrow hips. His body is knotted with muscle. He is standing with one leg forward and both hands on the pole, like a gondolier.
He is making his way from left to right across the river, drifting downstream. His movements are measured and efficient. He is nearing the shore and we are behind him, closing in, when he vanishes into the reeds. We wave our paddles and shout but he doesn't look back.
We enter the reeds at the place where we last saw him and follow a canal through thatched archways. At the end wefind his dugout and wet footprints ascending steps cut in a mud bank. We climb out of our boats. On top of the bank there is a passageway through the elephant grass. It bends back and forth, penetrating deep into the bush, before emptying into a small opening.
In the enclosure are five men squatting on their haunches. The figure in the middle, an old man with kinky gray hair, is drawing with a stick in the dirt. The other men are watching him.
As we step from the tunnel, the men stand up and face us. The old man holds the stick at his side.
"Bonjour," says Mike. His voice is cheerful but soft. He does not want to disturb whatever is happening.
They don't speak.
"Eneeche," I say in Malinke, the tongue of this region.
Again they don't reply.
The men are all barechested, wearing only tattered shorts. They are dusty. Their stomachs are corrugated. They have deep chests. The veins in their long arms bulge and at the ends of their arms hang heavy, knuckled hands. Their legs are animal legs, lean and scarred. Their feet rough and caked with dirt.
Using words in French and Malinke Mike asks the men if there is a village nearby. He tells them we are out of food and hungry.
The men stand dead still and say nothing.
We point in different directions and watch for their reaction. Their heads do not turn.
Only one man has wet feet. He must be our boatman, our kin. I step toward him.
"Nourriture?" I point to my mouth and make the movements of eating. He does not respond and I look into his face.
Suddenly my eyes are jumping from face to face.
"Mike!"
"I know. I just figured it out."
The pupils of each man are solid white.
Mike is almost whispering. "They have river blindness."
"How did they get here?"
"He poled them across."
"How could he?"
"You saw him."
None of the men have moved. They are like wooden posts driven into the dirt, telamones supporting the weight of the African sky.
Mike kneels down and examines the picture the old man made in the ground with the stick.
"Mark, what is it?"
I stare at the drawing. There is a circle; inside the circle are several wavy horizontal lines. They remind me of running water.
"I don't know. Looks like a circle of water."
Mike stands up and we step back. There is nothing we can do. We leave. Back to the river.
Strange things happen in Africa. Fantastic things. Things you can't understand. You sense they portend something but you don't know what. Africans are accustomed to it. For them strangeness is commonplace. They don't try to decipher it. If they have a problem, they talk to a lawyer or an accountant or a shaman or a necromancer. Depends on the problem.
Back at our boats moored in the reeds, there is not enough room to turn around. We must back out. As we exit the channel, the river catches us amidships. Mike wheels his prow upstream and allows the force of the current to push him around. I don't spin myself about. I let my boat slide backward down the river.
We glide downstream together, Mike facing forward, me facing backward. Kayaks, being pointed at both ends, can travel in either direction with grace. We say little. We have been on many expeditions together. It is what we have done best together. We know there is plenty of time to talk--soon as you really have something to say. Mike and I usually talk at night, after the day has settled in, lying on our backs in the dark in the tent.
We stay close and let the river carry us where it will. Past the reeds, down around the next bend and out into openbrown water. Then the current begins to slide us off toward the bank.
"I think we should wait for Rick and John."
Mike nods and flicks his wrist, splashing me with his paddle.
Instead of pulling ourselves back into the middle of the stream, we let the current continue to angle us toward shore. We are heading for an eddy.
I hit the eddyline first, riding astern up onto the ridge of turbulence. My boat begins jerking, the bow and stern snapping back and forth. I stroke hard to port until I've pulled myself over the edge into the smooth water. Immediately my boat is becalmed. For a moment I am motionless, held in suspension like a boy on a swing at the top of his arc. Then, almost imperceptibly, I begin to glide forward, upriver. I am inside the eddy.
Most people believe rivers flow in only one direction. This is not true. Along the margins of a river the water curls back on itself and runs upstream, as if it has forgotten something. The movement is particularly pronounced along the inside bank of sharp bends and directly behind boulders that split the current like a wedge. It's a natural phenomenon. Rivers only appear to be linear. Inside, rivers are recursive.
Mike follows me up onto the eddyline but instead of crossing over, he stops midway and begins to play. He doesn't fight the opposing currents, he uses them, churning himself in circles.
The eddyline is where the two slabs of water, rushing in opposite directions, pass each other. It is a boundary. All the water inside this border, in the eddy, is bewitched and flows magically upstream. All the water beyond the eddyline flows downstream, like a river is supposed to.
Downstream is the direction most people go. That's what we are usually doing. Mike and I and Rick and John, four white guys from Wyoming paddling through black Africa. But there are people who go upstream. Some of them have kayaked the entire length of a river backward. They do it using the eddies, maneuvering upriver from one pool to the next, bucking the current in between, portaging around the waterfalls carrying their shells on their backs like turtles. Some have gone all the way to a river's source this way. It is arduous, but they have their reasons.
When you are descending a river, eddies are places where you can pull in and park. All rivers have them. To know where the eddies are is to know how to find tranquil water amid the ceaselessness. Eddies are a good place to rest, to look back upstream. Sometimes you can see farther ahead looking backward.
Mike is still dancing on the eddyline, his paddle held out like an acrobat's pole. He's practicing low braces, high braces, pirouettes, working the water. He's not interested in the reflective pool inside the eddy. If he didn't have so much gear strapped to the deck of his boat, I know he'd try a few rolls.
"Buck"--he's grinning at me--"did you ever think we'd end up here again?"
I am still facing backward, slipping upstream.
"Yes. You?"
"Yup."
We were working on the Eskimo roll before class. It was winter. The creeks and lakes around town were trapped under two feet of ice, so we were practicing in the pool.
The Eskimo roll is a fundamental maneuver in kayaking. Unlike all other boats man has invented, kayaks were designed to be rolled.
To hunt sea mammals through pack ice, maneuvering easily and swiftly along remote leads, Eskimos needed a craft as sleek and agile as their prey, something that could spin on a dime when a seal surfaced behind them. Consequently, they created a boat that was shaped like a seal--pointed at prow and stern, with a round, keelless belly. It was even sewn from sealskin. But a keelless boat is tipsy, so they cinched the deck tight around the paddler's waist. Now when the boat did tip over, it wouldn't swamp. The only trick was getting back up. It had to be done immediately. Humans freeze to death in a matter of minutes in Arctic water. Hence: the Eskimo roll.A smooth sweep of the paddle underwater, a quick flick of hip and knee, and presto, back to the surface like a cork.
Mike got it right away. Rolling in full circles slick as a seal. Water was his natural habitat. He was a state champion swimmer, a "fish" in high school patois. Round head, orange hair tinted lime from the chlorine, foot-deep chest. He moved through the sapphire liquid like a submarine. His lungs were so powerful he could swim three lengths of the pool underwater without coming up for air.
It wasn't so easy for me. I swam with the swim team to stay in shape, but I wasn't a "fish." I was a gymnast. At least that's the sport I competed in. What I loved was climbing mountains. Rock was my natural habitat. In the water I tended to muscle things and you can't muscle the Eskimo roll; it takes technique.
Mike made it look easy. He'd pretend he was shot and slowly fall over sideways, sink under, hang upside down from his boat for a second, then explode back up. He could even do it without a paddle, perfectly timing the thrust of his shoulders, sweep of his arms, and snap of his knee. It's called a combat roll.
An ordinary roll was enough for me. I usually hit it, but sometimes I had to bail--peeling out of the cockpit underwater, then ignominiously dogpaddling my capsized kayak to the side of the pool.
Of course we didn't make it easy on each other. That would have been unsporting. When one of us went under, the other would hold his boat down so he couldn't immediately roll back up. It got to be a game. Who could stay under longer.
After a while it became unnecessary to hold each other under; we did it to ourselves. Flipped over and just hung there, upside down underwater. This is an unnatural position for humans. You get disoriented beneath the water with your head pointing down. You can't breathe so you start to panic. Your lungs begin to burn and your heart starts thundering and your brain misfires and suddenly a chemical fear is coursing through your body. Adrenaline, pure animal instinct. Fight or flight--roll or bail. We were trying to teach ourselves how not to do both. How to control fear. After a while we weren't practicing the Eskimo roll anymore; we were practicing sangfroid.
One morning Coach caught us.
Coach was a compassionate, taciturn, merciless man. He looked like Clint Eastwood. He led the swim team to seven consecutive state titles. He was one of the few people on earth who expected more from himself than from you. Kids swam hard for Coach, swam to guthollow, limplimbed, red-eyed exhaustion.
With Coach there were different punishments for different crimes. If you pushed a kid into the pool, a minor offense, you'd get a few thousand yards. Snap someone with a towel leaving a welt big enough for Coach to notice, and after confessing, you'd get laps plus weights. For serious transgressions--arrogance, vanity, pride, or hubris--your sentence was something special. The Hallelujah.
There was a ritual to the Hallelujah. The guilty had to wait for an unforewarned day. It was always conducted directly following workout when you were already beat. No kids who couldn't take it ever got it.
We got it a week later. Coach blew the whistle and we all climbed out to shower and crawl into our clothes and bicycle home and fall asleep in our dinner plates, then he turned to us.
"Jenkins. Moe. Back in the pool."
We knew what to do. We dove back in and began treading water in the deep end under the diving board. Coach slowly walked down the length of the pool and stepped up onto the board. He moved out to the end, seated himself with his legs crossed like a black belt, which he was, and peered down at us.
Already the pool was strangely calm after suffering three hours of flogging. As if it were flesh preternaturally closing over a wound.
"You two like to push it, don't you."
We grinned up at him like the adolescent fools we were.
"Okay. I want you to imagine that your hands are tied to a pole above your head."
We understood. We'd been here before. Even if it was the first time for some poor sucker, he would have alreadyheard the rumors and would know what to do. We raised our arms up into the air.
"Elbows out of the water, gentleman."
To tread water using both your arms and legs is not hard. You rotate your arms in wide flat ovals and frog-kick your legs one at a time. Everything is synchronized and your head stays well above the surface of the water. With practice you can do it for a long time.
To tread water without your arms, with your arms not only useless but raised above your head as extra weight, is different. You must frog-kick strenuously, but if you kick too hard, as if you're frightened that you might drown, you become exhausted within minutes and your head starts to go under and you do begin to drown. So there's a method. First you must lean your head back until your eyes are staring straight up at the ceiling. At the same time you must allow yourself to sink until only your face is above the surface. Then you must kick only enough to keep your mouth from filling with water. The liquid will be all around your face, splashing into the corners of your eyes, but you must stay calm.
We frog-kicked with our arms up in the air and Coach sat there. He did not say things to make us angry or inspire us. He simply sat there, above us.
For the first few minutes Mike and I razzed Coach. We shouted at him about how easy it was, how we could do it all night, how he should go out and get us a pizza so we could eat it while we were treading water.
Coach smiled.
We clapped our hands and shouted. We clapped our hands in unison as if we were at a rock concert. We sang lewd songs.
This didn't last long. Shenanigans used up too much strength. Besides, something else starts to happen after your body has been moving in a slow, powerful rhythm for a while: Your mind is set free. Your body is operating on its own, autonomous and self-governing, so you can go anywhere you want.
I don't know where Mike went, but I went off to Europe.
When I was thirteen, my family had moved to Holland. Just picked up and left. Mom and Dad were from the limitless ocean of South Dakota and had wanted to sail away since they met. Then I came along. Then Steve. Then Pam and Dan and Wendy Sue and Christopher. By then they had it figured out. Go even if you can't possibly go. Even if it will take a miracle.
We only lived in de Nederland for one year but nothing was ever the same again. We were just dirt and snow kids from the high plains of Wyoming when the rest of the world got lodged inside us like an arrowhead too close to the spine. I started dreaming about Europe the day we got back. I dreamed about it at night and daydreamed about it in class. This had been going on for three years. I got so good at slipping off to Europe I could get there in a matter of seconds.
So I was somewhere on a nude beach with a medieval castle doing heroic things when a wave of fatigue spilled over me and I realized that soon I wouldn't be able to talk anymore.
"Mike?"
"Buck?" "I been thinking about escaping."
"Yeah."
"You want to go?"
"Sure. Where're we going?"
"Europe."
We had to stop talking after that. We had to conserve our energy.
We treaded through seconds and minutes. We treaded through dinnertime, our stomachs sucking up into our ribs. We treaded through pieces of memory that slipped away before we could find out what they were.
After a while everything started to turn blue. A deep melting blue. The water. The air. The concrete ceiling. The underside of the diving board. Even our arms drooping above our heads like limbs in a Salvador Dali painting.
Then we went past the point when you think you are too tired to go on for another second so you close your eyes and try to make time disappear. But even then, even when itstarted getting rough, it wasn't that bad really because Coach was right there. Right above our heads. He still is.
And time did disappear. It had to.
Just when we were empty, our arms still hanging on to the air but our legs sinking as if tied to cement blocks and our heads quietly going under, Coach spoke. We could hardly hear him.
"Hit the showers."
Continues...
Excerpted from To Timbuktuby Mark Jenkins Copyright © 1998 by Mark Jenkins. Excerpted by permission.
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