Kingdoms in the Air

by Bob Shacochis

  When Carr reached out to the villages dotted across the buffer zone and the Gorongosa massif, many peasants had rarely, if ever, seen a muzungu, and certainly not one bearing swag— cloth, wine, tobacco—to appease the resident spirits. Near Nhatsoco, a settlement on the mountain, Carr was rebuffed by the area’s curandeiro (spiritual leader, witch doctor—take your choice) when he sought the priest’s alliance in his effort to stop people from clear-cutting in the rain forest. His team had arrived in a flurry of bad juju—their helicopter was a sinister red color, a village chief wore inappropriate clothes, an unhappy ancestor—a snake—chose to make an appearance. Sent away as a rude meddler, Carr, an innately humble man, apologized but persisted, eventually gaining the priest’s blessing. By 2006, locals were being paid to guide tourists up the sacred peak, build tree nurseries, and begin replanting hardwoods across the slopes.

  Everywhere Carr goes in the district these days, he is treated inevitably like a rock star distributing goodwill and golden eggs. In return Carr asks the villagers to stop setting fires in the park, give up poaching, forgo hacking down trees. Not surprisingly, perhaps, the bad habits carry on, at least for the time being, though a shift in attitudes is palpable. Carr, with no illusions, says, “It starts somewhere”—a more felicitous life, a less destructive way of doing things—but by the time he hands back Gorongosa to the Mozambican government twenty years from now, no one doubts that its human and ecological landscapes will have undergone a mind-boggling transformation. The project’s staff, 98.5 percent Mozambican, already light up with the feeling that that future, with its attendant sense of triumph in their remaking of a war-torn country, has pulled into the station.

  For the record, the only foreigner on Gorongosa’s team of managers is Carr’s wry-humored communications director, my slimed and foot-sore companion Vasco Galante, a tall, balding, solid-bodied former basketball player for Portugal’s national team.

  It wasn’t quicksand after all but a bog of liquefied silt. Greg and Vasco bottomed out crotch-deep and eventually extracted themselves from the goop and we continued our march upriver, though in a matter of minutes, Greg, undaunted, had plunged into another bog. This time as he struggled free he began to notice that wherever a plant with tiny yellow flowers grew, the bed would support his weight, and farther on we came to a place where the flowering zigzagged across the channel. Heedless to my admonitions, Greg racewalked toward the far shore as if he were trying to beat oncoming traffic. Perhaps he worried about crocodiles hidden in the weeds, although I had begun to learn that Greg’s momentum was an indomitable force, at times imprudent, and uninhibited by ambivalence. Certain now that what we were doing was a variation of crazy, I looked across the river at the opposite bank, the feral tangle of thicket, vine, and scrub palmetto roasting in the feeble shade of blanched trees and spiked ilala palms, and resigned myself to the crossing.

  We scrambled up a natural drainage chute carved into the bank, found the seldom-used safari track we had hoped was there, and followed it back downstream for two miles, a stretch where several days later Vasco and I would find elephants coming up off the river, and a hippo cow and calf napping in the bush not thirty feet from where we now walked. Then the track turned away from the river into the windless, stifling heart of the jungle, and we were soon inhaling intense fumes of the unforgettable leathery piss odor of wild Africa.

  For the first half mile the trees were stripped, smashed, toppled over, leaf-eating pachyderms passing through like a tornado, and we became instant students of their mounded dung, studying the color and relative dryness to determine the herd’s proximity. “Just keep talking,” Greg said hopefully, and whenever our conversation flagged, I would loudly announce to the jungle that we were, in fact, still talking.

  We walked with relentless determination, which is how one walks when Greg Carr sets the pace and you intend to keep up with him. With the sun overhead there was little shade on the track, the sauna-like ferocity of the heat as threatening as the thought of lunging carnivores or slithering black mambas, and after an hour it was evident that we lacked sufficient water to stay hydrated. Magically my shoulder bag filled with rocks and we began to share the punishment of lugging it. Sweating profusely in jeans and leather boots, I envied my companions’ bwana shorts and minimalist footwear—Jesus sandals for Vasco, preppy sockless boat shoes for Greg—the current muzungu styles for a jaunt through the goddamn jungle.

  The second hour, Vasco and I began to drag our feet ever so slightly, the monotonous slog of the trek contradicting its urgency. Greg, on the other hand, was having a terrific time, supernaturally energized to be shipwrecked in the middle of nowhere, an opportunity flush with the thrill of rule breaking, and by the third hour, as my need for two-minute breaks became more frequent, he would shuffle restlessly, unable to stand still as Vasco and I squatted in the shade, parched and mindless. Our slowdown finally summoned Greg’s inner (antsy) child and he suggested we stay put while he went on alone searching for the elusive cell phone signal. No way, Vasco and I protested. Our pride would not allow it, and we stuck together for another mile until, on the verge of heatstroke, it became painfully obvious that our pride wasn’t quite the virtue we had imagined.

  We shook hands, wished Greg Godspeed, and watched his blithe disappearance around a bend in the track, wondering what body parts he might be missing if we ever saw him again. The late afternoon sun had begun to splinter into golden beams, planting shadows in the jungle, and, unable to depend on the success of Greg’s solo mission, we began walking again, our pace marginally faster than zombies. After a ways Vasco snatched up a long stick. What’s that for? I asked a bit dubiously. Just in case, he said. For animals. Minutes passed in silence and I kept thinking I should pocket one of the occasional rocks I saw in the track. Vasco, I said, what kind of animals are you going to hit with that stick? You never know, he said, and we both laughed at this absurdity. He told a safari joke that ends with a hapless fellow preventing an attack by throwing shit at a lion, which he scoops out of the deposit in his own pants.

  By four o’clock we arrived at a landmark that Vasco, for the past hour, had expected to see any minute now—an old concrete bridge spanning a dry wash. This is it, said Vasco, removing his shirt and collapsing flat on his back. I pulled off my boots and socks, rolled up my pants, unbuttoned my shirt, and laid down as well, dazed and blistered and generally indifferent to what might happen next. We had walked ten miles from the near side of the river, plus another three or four trying to find a crossing. It was unlikely yet that Greg would be in cell phone range, four and a half miles farther on, and so we were puzzled when we heard a search plane overhead, flying out toward the hippo pool, unaware that our failure to return in the early afternoon had set off an alarm with Beca that had now reached the highest levels of the federal government, or that a large herd of elephants was nosing around the disabled helicopter while Segren, engrossed in Finnegan’s book, read the first eight chapters.

  Barking signaled the approach of baboons, challenging our right to recline on their bridge. The jungle dimmed toward twilight, its harshness replaced by a counterintuitive sense of abiding peace. I closed my eyes, remembering the quizzical eyes of the antelope—oribi, waterbuck, nyala—we had seen throughout the day, poised to flee but not in any rush as we passed by in quiet admiration of their elegance and beauty. What a shame, I dared to think, that we had not seen a pride of lions or trumpeting elephants. A sun-stricken fantasy, akin to a death wish. When Vasco asked what time it was, I told him four thirty. They’ll come for us by five, he predicted, and, as night fell upon Gorongosa, they did.

  We found Greg blissed out, up to his sunburned neck in the cool blue water of Chitengo’s new swimming pool, eating a bowl of fresh fruit cocktail, a full moon rising behind the happiest philanthropist on the face of the earth. The safari guides would call us damn fools for our reckless misadventure. Fair enough, and we would have to live with the mischievous glow of t
hat assessment, persuaded that our bad luck—an outlandish privilege, a backhanded gift—might never again play out with such serendipity, marching across Africa in league with just the sort of heaven-sent fool a better world could thrive on. A world, I would expect, where standing around waiting to be rescued is not an option.

  (2010)

  What I Did with the Gold

  Although the island has taken on great significance for me, it’s no more inherently beautiful or meaningful than any other place on earth. What makes a place special is the way it buries itself inside the heart.

  —Richard Nelson, from The Island Within

  Someone—a literary critic—has written that twenty years of distance gives us not just an event or place to return to but also our former self. Or, I might add, somebody’s former self, not especially recognizable as your own.

  Van Britton’s younger brother was certain he remembered me, offering as proof the details of my residence on Old Providence Island when I lived there in the early seventies.

  “Mistah Bob, you used to live in Freshwater Bay.”

  “I lived in Old Town,” I gently corrected him, “near Raimundo Lung.”

  “You used to ride a white horse,” he continued, undaunted.

  “No, my horse was red.”

  “Your wife’s name was Sherrie, no?”

  “I wasn’t married,” I felt obliged to tell him. “My girlfriend was Marta, the panya girl who lived with her mother and sister and brothers in Old Town.”

  Van’s younger brother paused, momentarily subdued, trying to untwist this piece of information. After a minute his head slowly bobbed, his face brightening into a shy expression of the pleasure that comes from remembrance. “Mistah Bob,” he insisted. “Back then, you didn’t have a beard.”

  Back then, he was only thirteen or so, what the isleños call a sprat, a sardine. I had never fished with him, as I had with his older brother, up on the Serrana Bank, and I didn’t know whether I knew him or not since his affliction—a right eye that rolled back into his skull when he shifted his line of vision—was peculiar, I seemed to recall, to more than one of the Brittons.

  “No,” I had to tell him. “I had the beard.”

  “But it was black, eh? Now it is white.”

  “That’s true.”

  “Yes,” he concluded triumphantly, his right eye rolling blank. “I remember you, Mistah Bob. It is very nice to see you again, mahn.”

  “It’s very nice to be back,” I said, acquiescing.

  Throughout the exchange, Van had been giving me knowing looks, studying me with a wry half-smile. I had come upon the two brothers at their compound—sort of like a rasta camp for nonexistent ­tourists—in the middle of a jungle clearing, the two of them enjoying a quiet late summer day, sitting across from each other on log benches muscled into position on both sides of a long, handmade wooden table. I sat down next to Van, who automatically reached behind him for a calabash gourd filled with pungent weed.

  “Do you remember me?” I had asked Van. We had not seen or spoken to each other in almost twenty years. He peered into my eyes for a second before he answered, resolutely, Yes, and then remained silent while his kid brother, exercising his right as an islander, constructed a past for me that wasn’t even remotely true, yet nevertheless plausible. Now I suspected that Van himself was bluffing, that he didn’t know who I was either—until he suddenly spoke up.

  “Mistah Bob,” Van began, squinting through the smoke of the stick of ganja he brought to his lips, finalizing his appraisal. Behind us, his girlfriend stirred a Dutch oven set over a wood fire, boiling rice. “Mistah Bob,” Van began again. Apparently he had scoured his memory to his satisfaction and I was there, loud and clear, yet once again transformed, another island variation on the theme of my identity. “Mistah Bob,” he said a third time, exhaling a river of blue smoke. “What did you do with the gold?”

  I suppose there was bound to be some misunderstanding about that, but whatever I said would only complicate matters. Providence is a small place—small—and the smaller the place, I’ve learned, the more it thrives on mystery, intrigue, conspiracy, shadow play, and the intimate connectivity of myth. Nobody is quite anonymous, but no one’s story is ever quite reconcilable with the facts. There’s no ­contest—the fecundity of an island grapevine would put many a novelist’s imaginations to shame.

  Gold, the breakfast of empires.

  There was once a golden highway in this part of the western Caribbean Sea—these days resurrected but snow-blown with narco ­traffickers—running from Cartagena to Campeche, whereupon it doglegged eastward with the Gulf Stream toward Havana, turned north up the coast of Florida and east again below Cape Hatteras to direct its trade across the Atlantic. This route was the legendary Spanish Main and throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, on its prevailing winds and favorable currents sailed the fabulous wealth of Mexico and the Americas, transported to the royal court of Madrid aboard the plate fleet, the treasure-laden galleons of the Spanish Crown, and forever at the mercy of God and hurricanes, uncharted shoals, and, of the utmost relevance to my tale, those rogue seamen and cutthroat adventurers known as the buccaneers. Multicultural long before such ethnic stews were fashionable, the pirates of England, France, and Holland bivouacked primarily on three strategic islands scattered along the Main: Jamaica and its blasphemous Port Royal; Tortuga, off the coast of Haiti (where barbecuing sank its New World roots); and, approximately 500 miles north of Cartagena and 150 miles off the eastern coast of Nicaragua, the island then named Santa Catalina—St. Catherine’s—known today as Isla Providencia or, as its Afro-Anglo inhabitants have always called it, Old Providence (its colonial designation, Catalina, passed on to its tiny sister island, now connected to Providence by a footbridge). Regardless of its far-flung obscurity, Providence was considered prime real estate by the privateers, for virtually all homebound ships sailing north to the Atlantic from South America passed within sight of her timbered peaks, like fattened geese adrift on a pond, and more than one was raided and sunk, or plowed into the island’s thirty-six square miles of barrier reefs to end up permanently established on the bottom, its ghosts counting the centuries until the invention of the aqualung.

  By 1600, Dutch pirates were holding cookouts and cocktail parties on Providence, a style of social life you might expect to have altered radically when, in 1629, the Company of Adventurers of the City of Westminster sent aboard the Seaflower, of all people, a stiff-spined batch of Puritans to scrape out a few plantations. The gin, however, proved mightier than the Lord, once the Puritans realized they had been situated in a most divine position for plundering Spanish treasure ships. It was a Welshman named Henry Morgan, though, who would soon place Providence on the bloody map of history.

  The future Sir Henry greatly desired, wrote his Dutch surgeon John Esquemeling in The Buccaneers of America, “to consecrate it as a refuge . . . unto the Pirates of those parts, putting it in a sufficient condition of being a . . . storehouse of their preys and robberies.” Which is precisely what Morgan did—or so say the islanders today—when he arrived in Providence in 1670 with two thousand fighting men aboard thirty-seven picaroons to stage his most infamous, daring, and brutal exploit, the sacking of Panama City. The fleet proceeded from Providence to the Caribbean coast and off-loaded twelve hundred banditti, who marched across the isthmus to the city and marched back three weeks later, leaving Panama’s seven thousand houses, two hundred warehouses, eight monasteries, two cathedrals, and hospital burned to the ground. Of rape, torture, and cold-blooded murder, there was plenty. “Of the spoils thereof,” said Esquemeling, “he [Morgan] carried with him one hundred and seventy-five beasts of carriage, laden with silver, gold and other precious things.”

  The contemporaneous value of the loot, it has been estimated, was between three and six million dollars. Back on the Caribbean coast, Morgan went secretly aboard his flag
ship and put out to sea, followed by three or perhaps four vessels containing the greatest part of the treasure. Contrary to the historical record, Providence islanders argue passionately that Morgan stopped there on his return from Panama, sailing into local waters with three ships, though only two proceeded on to Jamaica, because, the folklore has it, either one of the treasure ships hit the reef on its approach or, most insist, because Morgan scuttled a ship after unloading its golden cargo and burying it with several slaves to guard and enchant the trove. Then the pirate hoisted sails for Port Royal and, caught up in the volatile politics of the day, never returned.

  After Morgan, Old Providence experienced, like Gabriel García Márquez’s fabled Macondo, one hundred years of solitude. A sanctuary for outcasts, fugitives, and escaped slaves, it was resettled in 1788 by Francis Archbold, the Scottish captain of a slaving ship, who established a cotton and tobacco plantation on Catalina (where the Archbolds—or Archibols—reside to this day). This explains why the people of Old Providence speak a vaguely Elizabethan patois—You vex me, mahn. Tis as I say, Alphonse.—with a Scottish accent—Gid mairnin, sah—but it doesn’t explain why the islanders claim, rather emphatically, that they are descendants of Henry Morgan, his beautiful red-haired mistress, his captains Robinson and Hawkins, and his crew.