Fresh Air Fiend (23 page)

We threaded through the Ndinde Marsh, heading toward the Zambezi on waterways as narrow as creeks, with tall grass brushing us from both sides. The "vast herds" of elephants that Livingstone saw in and around the Chiromo Marsh no longer existed—indeed, though the bird life was vigorous and there were many crocodiles and some hippos, we saw few large animals along the Shire. They had been killed or displaced by the people who inhabited the small villages on the banks.

"We're going to the Zambezi!" Karsten called out confidently to the people on shore or in dugouts as he shoveled at the river with his lollipop-shaped paddle.

The people greeting us here were a community of marsh-dwelling Africans, perhaps two thousand of them, all of this same sprawling Sena nation whose precarious settlements were not on any map. There was no road, no school, no church, no hospital here. When they wanted to sell fish or buy nets or cooking pots, they paddled upriver to the markets in Malawi; when they bartered their fish for bags of sugar, they loaded their flotilla of dugouts and made trips in Mozambique, sometimes as far as the Zambezi.

"We don't need passports, Father," Karsten said.

The Sena come and go, downriver, from country to country, without passports—without even saying where they are going. But I was more conspicuous. At the international border, the tiny riverside depot of Megaza, with its mud huts, its abandoned collection of ruined river-boats, and its clouds of mosquitoes, I had to go through the strict formality of Mozambique customs and immigration. This was done in the open air under a mango tree. There was a commotion in the tree—ripe fruit dropped onto the official table. It was a rat in the branches, nibbling the fruit, and it kept interrupting the proceedings.

After that, and for many miles, we could see Morumbala, which is more a plateau than a mountain. There were farms and fruit orchards at the top, we were told. How had the Portuguese gotten up and down the mountain, I wondered.

"They were carried by Africans," the villagers said.

We saw abandoned houses and plantations, remnants of the Portuguese colonial presence, at many places on the banks. We camped in Sena villages, which seemed as remote today as they were in the time of Livingstone. Certainly people's lives followed the traditional pattern, the men fishing in the river to the cries of the masked weaver birds, and the women and girls grinding corn: that rhythmic thud of the pestle and mortar was like a heartbeat on the river.

After five days of heat and mosquitoes on the muddy, slow-moving Shire, I looked up one noon and saw the river turning a corner, entering the Zambezi—clearly the Zambezi, for it was half a mile wide and moving swiftly, tumbling down from Tete on its way to the sea. And soon I heard the chugging of an engine, the first since leaving Nsanje.

It was the barge at Caia, big enough to serve as a drive-on ferry for trailer trucks. Made "from next to nothing," Chris Marrow told me—twelve Uniflote pontoons and four engines that had been assembled from eight scrap engines—this brainchild of the Mariners was the only way across the Zambezi for the 260 miles between Tete and the ocean.

I approached a trailer truck loaded with sacks of beans as it rumbled off the barge at Caia. "Yes, we are going to Beira," the driver, Gilberto, told me. And, yes, he said, he had room for my folding boat, my camping equipment, my duffel bag. But he waved his hand when I began to get into the cab.

"You ride on top," he said. "Only the owner can ride in here."

He gave me a freshly picked pineapple as consolation, and I tossed my gear up, then climbed to the top of the truck's load. Think of this as a hayride, I told myself, as I shared the pineapple with the twenty or so Africans who also clung to the tarp that had been thrown over the bags of beans.

It was early afternoon when we set off. Then it began to rain. Fourteen hours later, in darkness and drizzle, we arrived in Beira and the air was briny. The distance had not been great, but the road was appalling.

Livingstone had believed that the whole Zambezi was navigable. He had been mistaken. He would be surprised that no ships ply the river, and probably startled by the hydroelectric projects at Kariba and Cabora Bassa, and by the towns on either side of the falls. But much of the river would be instantly familiar, for so little had changed. His scrupulous notes, his cartography, his taxonomy of the river's flora and fauna, still stand, and his descriptions of its topographical wonders and its dramatic weather cannot be improved upon.

Livingstone constantly referred to the beauty of the Zambezi, but he was a relative latecomer in this regard. The Africans have always seen the Zambezi as a river of mythic power, something lovely that was also a vital force, endlessly pouring from the heart of Africa.

T
HE CAPE COD
that people write about I seldom recognize. I constantly think about the place. It is my home, so it is in my dreams, a landscape of my unconscious mind, perhaps my mind's only landscape. Paddling between islands in New Guinea, I often think,
That's no worse than Falmouth to Oak Bluffs.
Swimming in a bad chop or a swift current anywhere, I think of Woods Hole or the harbor entrance at Lewis Bay. Living on the Cape has given me a good notion of wind speed and air temperature. This complex landscape has taught me ways of measuring the world of risk.

But the word "landscape" presents a problem on the Cape. I find it hard to separate the land from the water, or the water from the winds. The stranger walks or drives to the shore and looks across to the Vineyard, or on the bay side to Wellfleet, or wherever, always seeing divisions. The local does not distinguish between land and water, and keeps going, actually or mentally seeing shoals and eddies and sunken ships and the rocks that are exposed only at low tide—not barriers but features. There are calm days, of course, and the prevailing winds are often reliable, but the weather is eccentric, and it is not unusual for the winds on successive days to blow from all points of the compass, and these winds determine the weather and the condition of land and water.

To a stranger, Cape Cod seems like many simple separate places according to the time the person has visited, seeking the jolly, the quaint, the charming, the historical. When such strangers describe the place, they are very choosy. It seems odd for a local to hear such selective descriptions of the terminal moraine of the Cape, of the dunes and woodlands and harbors. Or of Nantucket Sound as a sort of moat that protects the island of Martha's Vineyard. Or how Nantucket Island is some distance to sea—too flat and far to be visible. Or how Woods Hole is like a spillway, and farther south in the sound there are ship-swallowing currents and the hidden rocks that holed the
QE II.
These are just versions of the Cape, simplified portraits of its peculiarities.

To me, knowing the true size of the Cape means knowing ways of navigating it: finding routes into the marshes and up the tidal creeks; knowing the offshore shoals and sandbars, such as Egg Island off Hyannis, the Billingsgate Shoal off Wellfleet, and the three serpent-shaped shoals that make the crossing from Cape to Vineyard so unpredictable: L'Hommedieu Shoal, Hedge Fence Shoal, and Middle Ground. Even on a flat day with no wind there are standing waves on the shoals, making a specific contour, and the waves range from a foot-high embankment of water to five or six feet of irregular fury, more like white water in a narrow river than anything in an ocean. Muskeget Channel, between Chappaquiddick and Nantucket, can be terrifyingly swift, full of whirlpools or rocks, and yet that is the same world of the Cape—just its nether side. These waves and swells have their analog in the dunes of Truro or Sandy Neck, or the wooded ridge of the upper Cape.

If a place is home, most years it offers 365 faces. Whether it is a Cape marsh, a creek, a pepperidge tree, a dune, or the sea itself, it is different every day of the year. Knowing the differences keeps you fascinated and may make you safe. Not understanding a current or an offshore wind or a shoal in a channel can lead to death. That is also why I have a problem rhapsodizing about the Cape or using the quick-to-fade colors of hyperbole. I would not want to paint a pretty portrait only to mislead someone into thinking he is safe when he is not.

Yet if the Cape were not dangerous, it would lose much of its reality for me. The water of the Cape is seen from shore as seemingly featureless and deceptive as moorland, which is why it has claimed so many lives. In a hubristic way, people plant their houses by the shore. Nearly always, these people are from off Cape, and when they return in late spring they sometimes see that the house has been undermined if not swept away by winter storms.

When Henry David Thoreau walked the length of the Cape and wrote about it, he remarked on how the world's true wildernesses lie under the sea. It goes without saying that, like everywhere else, a portion of the marine world of the Cape has been tainted and littered. More and more I have come to see that the single-species fanatics, like the protectors of certain stretches of beach, are missing the point. The Cape is its total sum of land and water. The much-too-big houses and pretensions of Osterville have to be balanced against the rural poverty of the woodlots of Mashpee. Oak Bluffs is black, Edgartown is white, but both are middle class. The little reckless alewives make their way every April up creeks in Brewster to spawn. The Cape has taught me that we live in one world, fragile and failing, and it is the whole that must be understood, not any fragment of it.

I
T WAS A COMPLETE
coincidence that I happened to be reading Freud's
Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious
the day I was summoned to West Germany not long ago. It was just prior to the present eruption of nationalistic feeling, the mutual embrace of the two Germanys, the breach in the Wall. Before I left, people kept asking why I was going. It seemed too boring to say I was on the circuit for my own
Das Chinesische Abenteuer: Reise durch das Reich der Mitte,
so I lied and said I was compiling an anthology of German humor. The axiom in joking is: a person's favorite joke is the key to that person's character, and so it is for a culture. A traveler profits by such insights, and many travelers recognize the querying faces and the silence that descends after he or she has told a joke in a distant land.

Like most jokes, and especially German jokes, this little wheeze had a serious side. Freud says "the factor of 'topicality'...is a fertile source of pleasure in a great many jokes." I wondered how East Germans might figure in this. What had begun as a piece of frivolity developed into a preoccupation: I found myself asking questions, making notes, and inquiring into nuances. Many Germans maintain that humor is nonexistent in their country—the formality of German life and speech does not lend itself to joke telling, and I suppose one could seriously question (as Freud does) whether jokes constitute humor at all. In my experience, most joke tellers are nags, bores, racists, sadists, boasters, blasphemers, look-at-me types. And since they comprise nearly the whole of humanity, surely such people could not be unknown in Germany.

"One Person in Four in Munich Is Unhappy," the
Süddeutsche Zeitung
announced in its main headline the day I arrived. No one found that the least bit funny, nor did anyone laugh over an enormous demonstration, thousands of students protesting over inadequate provision for their brass-band practice. In Rosenheim at the Klepper folding-boat factory, I was staring at a pair of antlers mounted on a trophy board when Herr Walther, the owner, said, "There are ten mistakes on that thing. Can you guess them?"

The inscription read "Shot by Enrico Caruso at Monte Gran Sasso, 31.11.1876" and there were other details about Caruso's having been a member of a paddling club in Naples.

"The antlers are upside down," I said.

"Good. First mistake. Go on."

"How old was Caruso in 1876?"

"Three years old. Excellent. Continue."

It was a thunderously labored joke—there is no thirty-first of November, there are no elk in Italy, and so forth—but it was the genuine homegrown item.

Political jokes are predictable enough, but in Germany, curiously, only Chancellor Helmut Kohl is the butt of them. There is no mockery for the far-right Republicans, whose leader is a former member of the Waffen-SS and fairly pleased with himself, having made electoral gains in the most recent election in Berlin. And there are no West German jokes about East Germans—none about the drabness of their lives, the fanaticism of their Olympians, and not one about their coughing, topheavy automobile, the Trabant, little more than a metal blister on wheels, one of the most laughable vehicles on earth. I elicited only pity or silence when I asked for jokes about East Germans.

Most Kohl jokes depict him as a blunderer, and just the mention of his nickname,
der Birne
— the Pear, mocking his shape—causes laughter. Another joke has Herr Kohl and Mrs. Thatcher toasting each other with a beer. "Here's to your health," Mrs. Thatcher says, and thinking she said "Here's to your
hell
(light beer), he replies, "Here's to your
dunkel
(dark beer)."

Blunderers and clowns are regarded as very funny, and in Germany they usually come in pairs: Little Erna and Little Fritz
(Klein Erna und Klein Fritzchen)
or the duo of Tünnes and Schäl, the Laurel and Hardy of Cologne. One day, they are required to sell a shipment of brassieres at the market. Schäl is amazed by Tünnes having sold hundreds. How did you manage to sell so many? he asks. Tünness replies, "I cut them in half and yelled, 'Hats from the pope!'"

The fact that it is faintly anti-Catholic and that it must be told in a dialect makes this joke hilarious, but only in Cologne.

As for regional jokes, East Frisians are the most mocked of Germans. Why do East Frisians smile during thunderstorms? Because they think they're being photographed. I met an East Frisian from the island of Juist. I asked him who the East Frisians make jokes about. He said, "Other East Frisians." But he went on to say, "These jokes were invented by East Frisians as a marketing technique to popularize East Frisia."