Kingdoms in the Air

by Bob Shacochis

  La vida es sueno, the Latins say—Life is a dream. I think of Noel and his struggle in Bolivia. This time it’s not the fish but something much, much bigger, and it stays in the air for what seems like an eternity but in fact is only three years, and when it falls back to the water, it’s gone, receded back to the dream—you thought you had it but you never did and its descent is a form of bittersweet devastation. Sometimes you can catch the big one, but the result is pathos and tragedy. And you can lose the big one and yet it persists and remains, a triumphant vision, something to carry forward beyond the dream. There’s clarity here—these fishermen, these lovely men, the spread and flow of big water, the dance of the big fish, the ascendant luminosity, a blazing star built of muscle and teeth and fury, the golden arc of sweetness and sorrow, possession and loss. That’s what you discover in the marshes, what you bring home from the river. That, finally, is the meaning of the dream.

  The next day on the Paraná is a screaming disaster. That evening Noel and I fly back down to Buenos Aires to fish the delta. In the morning we are greeted by squalls but head out anyway into shining moments of solitude and silence, autumn light and autumn colors, and yes, kaboom, up a little creek as I cast a bull’s-eye next to a log. Pirayu, the Guarani god of water, strains for the sun. A week later, in the suburbs of the capital, scores of people will be swept away by the floods. Any dream has its limits, and this dream had breached its boundaries, waiting to be dreamed again, and better.

  (2013)

  Gorongosa

  On a sun-broiled morning in central Mozambique, we headed eighteen miles into the bush, our destination a shrinking stretch of soupy pool, one of the last remaining catchments in the drought-withered river, where the hippos had hunkered down during the wasting days of a dry season that refused to end. Afterward we would be choppering to other sites—remote wonders, unique to the area—although my attention had drifted when the itinerary was explained. The limestone gorge, perhaps, where the East African Rift Valley arrived at its southern terminus? The lacy cascade of waterfalls off the westward escarpment? The cathedral-size grottoes housing countless hordes of whispering bats? Not that it mattered—bad luck, you could say, since we would never get farther than the hippos.

  Because of the heat, and I guess for the breezy fun of it, Segren, the young pilot up from South Africa, unhinged the front doors off the R44, a Bell-manufactured helicopter aviators call a “little bird,” and we strapped in, the four of us, and ascended skyward from the small grass airstrip at Chitengo, the headquarters of Gorongosa National Park, once considered among Africa’s premier game preserves until it was destroyed by decades of unimaginably brutal war and savage lawlessness, its infrastructure blasted to rubble, its bountiful population of animals slaughtered, eaten, reduced to gnawed bones and wistful memory.

  In the copilot seat, with the panoramic sweep of the continent expanding out my open door—loaves of mountains on several horizons rising like a time-lapse video of Creation day, the veldt ironed out into a haze of coastal plains spread east toward the Indian Ocean—I adjusted the mic on my headset and joined the conversational squawk behind me, Greg Carr and Vasco Galante stuffed into the rear seats, already sweaty between doors that could not be removed, although they were dressed much more sensibly than I was for the tropics, or what would have been sensible if the word malarial were not so lethally affixed to Mozambique’s ecology.

  Greg and Vasco, it was becoming clear to me, were fearless, a matching set of muzungus, white guys, with a true affinity for the bush. Like Greg Carr, the American philanthropist who had committed his time, wealth, and considerable energy to the restoration of Gorongosa, Galante too was a successful business entrepreneur who slammed the brakes on the life he was living, threw away his map of old assumptions and foregone conclusions, made a U-turn, and went to Africa.

  Many of their sentences began, During the rainy season, and I would be directed toward something in the landscape that was not as it should be this deep into December—the evaporated Lake Urema, shrunk from seventy-seven square miles to four; a wilting Gorongosa massif and its deplenished watershed; the raku-cracked and burning floodplains of the savanna. What now expressed itself as terra firma would require boating skills during the Southern Hemisphere’s approaching summer when the park’s bottomlands swelled with watery overabundance. Awed and exhilarated, I leaned out into the rush of air watching the scatter of antelope below.

  At Greg’s instruction, Segren eyed a safari track to navigate out toward where the platinum thread of the Urema River emptied from the traumatized lake into the dusty jungle. The pilot dipped the helicopter down into the river’s high-banked channel and we roared along its downstream course at treetop level, my companions remarking upon the bed’s sorry condition—black patches of dampness embroidered with a fringe of hoofprints, scum puddles churned by expiring catfish, and, increasingly, weed-clogged runs where the absent flow had encouraged a vibrant bloom of flora, the greenest thing in sight.

  Last year, when CBS’s 60 Minutes came to Mozambique to produce a feature on Carr and Gorongosa, the hottest conservation story in Africa, they had filmed the river from the air as scores of Nile crocodiles flipped one after another off the banks into its robust current. Maybe there were some crocs down there now, nestled in the mucky overgrowth, but we couldn’t see them. Reedbucks and occasional impala bolted across the bed’s golden sand into the cover of the jungle, but it was Africa’s flamboyant birds who owned the desiccated river. Egyptian geese, grotesque marabou storks showcasing the ass-bald head and plucked neck of carrion eaters, graceful herons and lanky crowned cranes, majestic fish eagles. Then we were hovering over the upstream edge of the pool, the squiggle of crocodiles visible in the khaki-colored water, and Greg pointed to a grassy bar about three hundred yards back where he wanted to put down.

  On the ground, Segren announced he would stay with the aircraft and keep the engine running and we climbed out with the rotors thumping over our heads and began walking through the high grass at the base of the steep bank towering above us.

  This was my first time in Africa, but even before Vasco’s warning, I realized we were in elephant country, their rampant footprints post-holed shin deep in the hardening cake of fertile soil, an ankle-twisting hazard. I had also registered Vasco’s sudden intensity of manner, the heightened alertness, his head rotating as he scrutinized our surroundings. “Okay,” he said, trying to sound lighthearted, “this is a place where elephants come. If you see an elephant coming from the north, you go south. Turn and go.”

  Although more people are killed by hippos than any other wild animal in Africa, the elephants—the remaining elephants—of Gorongosa were unforgiving. For generations now they had been engaged in a kill-or-be-killed war with humans, the once prolific herd decimated by rebel soldiers harvesting ivory to finance their insurgency or gathering a windfall of meat for their starving cadres or just gunning down the giants for the wicked hell of it. By the end of Mozambique’s civil war in 1992, only three hundred of an elephant population ten times larger were left alive, and those three hundred, according to National Geographic cameraman Bob Poole, who had been filming in the park for a year, were “skittish and aggressive.” If you were on foot, as we were, walking into an elephant’s range of smell or sight could be justifiably categorized as suicidal.

  But as we approached the pool, crocodiles underfoot in the soggy weeds, or a land-foraging hippo spooked by the sudden appearance of humans between it and the water, were a more immediate and tangible concern. Greg and Vasco traversed the bankside, climbing higher for a better vantage point to scout downriver and, I suspected, to be better positioned in case of a charge.

  In the wild, the pittance of what’s left of it, the ancient primal verities still apply. (Extreme) caution and (mild) anxiety translate as ingrained virtues, rational responses toward the perilous unknown, yet once Greg and Vasco trained their binoculars on the water, I could feel the
tension in the air undergo a euphoric meltdown. Hippos! Exactly where they should be, according to their birthright, at peace in their own habitat . . . after being wiped out completely, thirty-five hundred of them, during the endless war.

  As my companions dialed the aquatic spectacle into focus, I began to share the joy, unpuzzling the strange visual logic of what I could see, a rippling logjam of glistening tubs of chocolate flesh, googly-eyed and agitated, clustering down below in the muddy water, choreographed by paranoid shifts and rearrangements that never really changed the tight composition of the jam until a bull slide-paddled forward to calculate the threat of our presence. Saucer-size nostrils flared and exhaled spray, a wet snort like the release of hydraulic brakes in the fragrant stillness, now absent the distant background thrum of rotor blades.

  The pilot, for a reason known only to him, had shut down the engine. Occupied by the marvel of the half-submerged pod, we simply noticed an improvement in the depth of the silence around us and made no mention of it. There we stood, spellbound and revering, allowed by the moment to believe in an Edenic world so harmoniously, benevolently perfect, one forgets to remember that the most readily available dish on the menu might very well be you.

  The glory of the hippopotamus seems shaped by bizarre hallucinogenic juxtapositions—the utility of its rounded amphibious design packaged in the exaggerated ugliness only seen elsewhere in cartoons; its blob-like massiveness adorned with undersized squirrel ears and stubby legs akin to a wiener dog’s, bullfrog eyes that are nevertheless beady, pinkish peg-toothed jaws like a steam shovel’s attached to the compressed porcine features of its face. We were enthralled, flies on the wall of hippo heaven. Then we withdrew as gently as shadows, back to the helicopter, which maybe had a problem. But dreamy and high with hippo love, we didn’t much care.

  We climbed in, Segren muttered something about weak batteries, we climbed out. “I don’t think I’d let my mom ride in this helicopter,” said Greg. He and I walked upriver and sat cross-legged across from baboons collecting on the far bank, remarking on what we could figure out about the tribe’s hierarchy and habits, occasionally extrapolating our insights into opinions about the monkeyshines of the primates half a world away on Wall Street, the two of us content and carefree. Then Vasco walked down the bank to tell us what we had already ­suspected—the helicopter, with a dead starter, wasn’t going to get us out of here—and even then we greeted our predicament as a frivolous interruption to an otherwise magnificent day.

  But we were in no-man’s-land, the great bloodthirsty Darwinian free-for-all, probably twenty klicks beyond the Chitengo compound’s cell phone range, the VHF radio on the little bird was of no use, and we had to guess our chances of being rescued before tomorrow were zero, since no one knew of the fix we were in, let alone where, exactly, to come looking.

  There was a boyish brightness in Greg’s eyes when he suggested we go for the full unadulterated experience, seize the rare opportunity to traipse (illicitly) in the park, cross the river and hump all day through the forge-like heat of the primordial jungle into the happy zone of cell phone reception, and text message the cavalry.

  “So what do you guys think?” Greg said as we stood on the wrong bank of the croc-infested river. “Wanna walk?” Vasco and I looked at each other and shrugged. We were not bound to see much indecisiveness from Carr, a man whose permanent optimism was exceeded only by his irrepressible, well-aimed, and sometimes kooky enthusiasm (like plopping down on a restaurant floor to do push-ups). Anything could happen tramping around in the jungle, but we faced one certainty: It was not yet noon and we had to be safely back to civilization by sundown, the predatory commencement of people-eating time.

  “I was hoping to show you a lion tonight,” Greg Carr told me the night before, the first thing he ever said to me, yet I had arrived too late at Gorongosa to enter the locked preserve. The lion Greg had in mind, however, had roared throughout the evening, and early this morning, before commandeering the helicopter, we had driven out into the bush looking for it but found only vultures convened at the skeleton of its kill. Now, less than twenty-four hours later, Greg’s desire to hook me up with a lion was quickly losing all of its appeal.

  I asked if either one of them had the foresight to bring along a sidearm . . . you know, just in case. Greg said no, and Vasco said, Yes, this is my pistol, showing me the miniature penknife he carried in his pocket. I was the only one with gear, a shoulder bag crammed with nothing useful except our water bottles, and to lighten the load I removed a book, William Finnegan’s chronicle of Mozambique’s civil war, and tried to give it to Segren, who had chosen to remain behind, but the pilot did not want it. What else have you got to do? I said, frowning. Regardless of his schoolboy’s distaste for reading, the book was staying.

  For several miles we hiked upstream along a game trail flattened through the grass, the riverbed still glazed with stagnant water beneath a lush carpet of weeds, an ideal habitat for lurking crocodiles as advertised by the warthog carcass we hurried past, its hindquarters shorn off as it had tried to flee. Farther on the channel’s vegetation began to get mangy, exposing islands of muddy skin, their crusty appearance more to our liking as we walked ahead, the bed drying out until Greg had convinced himself conditions were favorable for a clean and effortless crossing. Let’s try it, said Greg, and I watched in horror as he and Vasco took six steps out into what I assumed was quicksand, their legs disappearing in a steady downward suck. I responded in the manner most typical of twenty-first-century Americans, grabbing my camera to record the flailing of their last astonished moments.

  It seems implausible that some lives might ever intersect, separated by every divide destiny can thrust between two people, yet should their story lines somehow twist together, they form a single braid of near-mystical affirmation for unlimited possibility. Say, for example, an African warrior—Beca Jofrisse—and an American tycoon—Greg Carr: the unlikely pair of administrators who occupy the summit of Gorongosa’s organizational chart. One a former Marxist-Leninist freedom fighter, the other a capitalist swashbuckler who made his fortune developing information technology.

  A genuine introduction to Lieutenant Colonel Beca Jofrisse’s country begins with the unsettling sight of an AK-47 assault rifle emblazoned on its national flag, and the story of modern Mozambique—its tyrannies and bloody struggles and ideological promiscuities, its surprising transformation from the planet’s biggest nightmare (in the early ’90s Mozambique was the poorest country on earth) into one of sub-Saharan Africa’s very few nations where hope, peace, and stability are not delusions—can be found contained in the proud generation of woefully scarred and stoically victorious people like Jofrisse, a gentle statuesque man whose frozen stare into the whirlwind of the past is regularly broken by embracing smiles.

  In 1968 at the age of nineteen, Beca Jofrisse began his long walk north across the length of Mozambique to the border with Tanzania to join the luta armada—the armed struggle for independence from Portugal, which had inflicted a five-hundred-year-long battering of the mainland’s indigenous populations since 1498, the year Vasco da Gama rounded Cape Horn and landed at Ilha de Mozambique, claiming the shoreline he sailed past for the Portuguese crown. The white man’s ravenous enterprise had many appetites—in the seventeenth century gold, in the eighteenth century ivory, in the nineteenth century slaves—and in 1891, during the European powers’s “Scramble for Africa,” Portugal established formal control over three colonies—Mozambique, Angola, Guinea-Bissau—which seventy years later would erupt in open rebellion.

  The battle for Beca Jofrisse’s country was waged by Frelimo—the Mozambique Liberation Front—from its headquarters in Dar es Salaam. When Beca finally crossed into Tanzania to enlist in Frelimo’s revolutionary army, he could scarcely have imagined that more than twenty years later he would be fighting on, his country still a raging war zone, his enemies his own misguided people.

  In Tanzania,
the literate Beca excelled as a student of military basics, which earned him a trip to the Soviet Union for more advanced training and an indoctrination into the tenets of communism. Returning to Tanzania, he was deployed back across the border into the fray and in 1972, ordered to cross the Zambezi River, his unit battled their way south to spread the war into the province of Sofala, the home of Gorongosa National Park, forced to close in 1973, engulfed in combat and the scorched earth campaign of the colonial military.

  By 1974, Portugal’s trifecta of wars in Africa had proved to be a losing ticket, and in July of that year a new government quickly agreed to hand over Mozambique to Frelimo. The independent Republic of Mozambique was proclaimed the following year. Overnight the Portuguese, 250,000 of them, pulled out of the demolished country in an orgy of sabotage and vandalism, leaving behind an infant nation with too little infrastructure and too many guns.

  Out of this maelstrom of “peace” and economic chaos another monster was born, the Mozambique National Resistance (Renamo), a disorganized but homicidal insurgency assembled by its sponsors—first white-ruled Rhodesia and then apartheid South Africa—to ensure that black majority rule in Africa became synonymous with disaster. Renamo’s objective was to sow havoc, wreck everything, and paralyze the country, and it would bathe Mozambique in blood for the next sixteen years.