Walking Through the Woods Toward Home

Packed in my mind lie all the clothes
Which outward nature wears
And in its fashion's hourly change
It all things else repairs
  -Henry David Thoreau
  "The Inward Morning"

"Sometimes I can hear my bones straining under the weight of all the lives I'm not living."
  -Jonathan Safran Foer
  Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close


Usually, before I lay myself down in the dirt, I check for scorpions, or fire ants, or any number of other African annoyances, but now I'm just too tired, I need to rest. I'm about four hours into a hike and an hour and a half into my regret. It's noon, my feet are blistered and my water situation is not quite dire, yet long past comfortable. The equatorial heat has a tendency to sneak up on you. The first two hours, I hardly took a sip out of my nalgene, walking under a early morning mist, but now that the clouds have burned off, I feel my body losing moisture like a squeezed sponge. I have four sacs of purified water, which I rip open with my teeth and pour into my water bottle. I don't know how much farther I have to walk. I've stumbled from one pocket of shade to the other for the last 30 minutes trying to will myself to stop drinking too frequently, but all I can think about is how I once read in a survival book that most people who die in the woods are found with water still in their packs. 

I'm on a hike I vowed to do before leaving here. I'm walking from one volunteer's village to another. My friend Emerson to my friend James, through the lush forests of the southwest Blitta Region, across the plains, skirting the ghanaian border and into the Northern Akebou Region. Right now, I'm somewhere between the village of Assoukoko and Seregbene, on a well worn bush trail used by farmers in the area. Only, I haven't seen another human being in almost two hours. I prop my back pack up under my head, lay down in the shade of tree whose name, as an environment volunteer, I should probably know, and close my eyes.

One of the most difficult things about keeping this blog is giving you the reader, not just an idea of how I live in my village, but how one copes with living away from friends and family who are back home in the states. Most people never live for two plus years overseas, and if they do, they have access to electronic means of communication fairly regularly. When volunteers become frustrated with life here, which is always, they don't want to log onto the internet and tell people back home about it, partly because they think that people back home won't understand. That is why many volunteers stop updating their blogs. You can see the linked blogs on the right side of my blog, some haven't been updated in four, five, or even eight months. When asked why they have stopped updating, they usually answer that they can never think of anything interesting to say. Everyday events come off sounding boring (even though those in the United States would hardly think so), and attempts at being "deep" about our experience seem dumb, or corny.

A long ridge of mountains runs north to south on my right. I assume they form the Ghana/Togo border, which means I have been traveling directly south. I intended to aim southeast towards James' village. I carry a compass to guide my way, but I walk at the mercy of the twisting esses in the trail, going where it takes me. I begin moving again. A farmer passes me going the opposite direction. He says he's going to Assoukoko, about four hours away, the village from which I just came. He carries no water and wears flip fops. I ask him if I am getting close to Seregbene. He says no. I'm going to Sekounde. Once I arrive at Sekounde, I must turn right on a different road. My instincts are right. I am farther west than I want to be. No problem. New destination: the village of Sekounde. My goal no longer to reach James' house, but to reach water. A nice Togolese villager will surely hydrate me in Sekounde. Will it be clean? After living here for two years, one begins to take some liberties with his health. I personally, in times of great thirst, abide by the veteran (and idiotic) Peace Corps volunteer water credo: "If through it I can see, clean enough it is for me."

Keeping a blog becomes harder because we feel farther and farther away from our lives in the States. In the beginning it was easy to write. We did not yet have lives here. We were still visitors, updating our real life back home what we were up to in Africa. But then suddenly, we lived here. And where one lives, one inevitably has responsibilities. And work and appointments. And friends.

And we began to miss things back home. A baseball season. An engagment. The birth of a nephew. A cousin's wedding. A death of a friend.

And those events make us think. We live in a shiny, chrome, pocket-sized 24 hour news channel, an up-to-the-minute existence, a twitter fed, smart-phoned, update-your-facebook-status-while-waiting-at-the-bank technocracy. We're bombarded by information, and I'm not against this, I even kind of miss it. But many people probably fail to realize why this is true - why we continue to spend more and more time in front of a screen and less outdoors: our fear of missing certain news far outweighs are desire to hear any news. Even if that certain news item only comes our way once a year or so, and even if it's not a complete travesty that you missed it, after awhile, they add up to something greater. And at some point you begin to feel like there's another life somewhere you keep forgetting to live.

I have now been walking about five hours. At least the sun has ducked behind some clouds, but the hills are now what really hurt me. My legs burn intensely. I probably look like some sort of wet, homo erectus zombie, sweaty, hunched over, my backpack throwing off my center of gravity, hands on my knees, lifting each knee deliberately, as not to turn an ankle this far from anywhere. I have now reached "manly grunt" stage, convinced that any gutteral utterance, a bark, an "ahh," will make the next step easier. I am almost at the top of what looks to be the last hill, at least for awhile. And the trail seems to enter a dense forest up ahead. I arrive at an intersection of two trails. Two peaces of carved flat wood line the fork. They scream at me to rest again. I decide the fork must mean I'm getting close. I rip open my last sixteen ounce bladder of water and mix in my bottle with a packet of oral rehydration salts. I take a sip. It's like getting sucked down by a nasty undertow and taking in a big moutful of sea water. It tastes fantastic.

The only thing harder than the physical isolation here is the emotional isolation. It is the lack of any opportunity to share a joy or a laugh, or a grieving moment with someone back home. It is knowing that at that instant there are no other people reacting to the same event, because it has already passed them by. It can be difficult to describe this condition fully, and I suppose that is what makes Peace Corps, among other things, so trying

This time I encounter not just a farmer, but an old woman and a young boy. All three are walking north, probably for hours and without water. The man assures me the village of Sekounde is not far. I should reach it in under an hour, and the trail is flat. He asks me if I have lost my motorcycle. I tell him no, I have walked from Assoukoko. He looks impressed, yet skeptical that a white man could walk that far. I must look awful because he tells me to take a motorcycle from Sekounde to Seregbene. It’s good advice. I’ve got nothing left to prove. I’ve already walked about 25 kilometers. And two hours longer than I thought this hike would take. I thank them and continue south toward the village of Sekounde. And from there I’ll go to Seregbene. And then on to my house in Kamina. I can't wait to go home.