My grandfather used to deliver coffee and english muffins to my
grandmother in bed each morning at about nine o’clock. By then he had
already been up for three hours, two spent talking on his ham radio to
friends in places like Australia, Denmark, Japan, Hawaii. My
grandparents were great travelers before they retired on a mountaintop
in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina. Born in the era of
transportation, they experienced the transition from horse and carriage
to the automobile to the train and the plane and the jet and the first
man on the moon. My grandfather, a radio engineer and then, later, a
higher executive at Western Electric, witnessed a manned rocket launch
to the moon. He said that when it took off it went up so fast he nearly
snapped his neck trying to keep it in sight.
I have a photograph
of my grandparents embarking on a trip. Ruth and Roy Tyack stand on a
runway in front of a prop-plane. It looks like a cartoon plane, with
curves, not edges. Bubbly, balloon-y. My grandmother wears a tweed
traveling ensemble; a skirt and jacket, hat with a fringe of netting
around the top and her dark hair clipped short and curled around her
face. She clutches a neat little rectangular purse in front of her and
smiles delightedly at the photographer. My grandfather stands casually
by her side, a good ten inches taller than her, one hand around her
shoulder and the other in the pocket of his billowy pressed trousers
that would be fashionable today. His jacket, unbuttoned, flaps in a
gentle breeze. He, also, is grinning. He is an experienced man of
science, business, and adventure. She is his lovely companion.
I
am in possession of their travel journals, a set of small, black
notebooks bound in leather. My grandfather’s journals record distances,
times traveled, conversions and costs. My grandmother’s journals
describe landscapes, restaurants, and people. He is fascinated by road
building, levies, architecture. She with menus, paintings, languages,
fashion. As I browsed through these journals recently, it called to
mind my bicycle trip through West Africa with my brother Jeffrey.
I was thirty-two and he, twenty-one. I had lived in Europe for quite
some time, and was bored, having realized once that I learned French
that they were no more exotic than any American I’d ever met. I wanted
to experience a different culture, language, race. Some place and
people as opposite from me as I could imagine.
In my building
lived a Senegalese man. He was lovely, tall, with an angular face and
almond eyes and dark black skin verging on purple. He had impeccable
manners, and when he realized that I was a foreigner like him, made
sure to talk with me in the elevator and accompany me down the street.
I liked his French. It was slow and clear, with an accent much like
mine. We didn’t become real friends, but he gave me an idea. I would
travel to West Africa, a French colony of mostly black Muslim-Animists.
There, I would find my experience with people as different as they
could be.
I decided to travel by bicycle. I lived in Nice to
research a book on mountain-bike touring. It occurred to me to
motorcycle, but when I found out how difficult it would be to find
gasoline, my decision to bicycle was confirmed. But even though I was
an experienced solo traveler, I wasn’t sure if it would be smart to
travel through West Africa alone. So I asked my brother, Jeff.
Jeff had never traveled if you didn’t count Mexico, which seems so
integral a part of the California psyche it almost doesn’t count. He
was facing the transition from college to career and wanted an exotic
travel adventure to separate the two. Also, he and his longtime
girlfriend Lauren had just broken up. Their relationship had been
exhausting. They were incredibly attracted to each other but outside of
sex they were usually fighting. When I invited him to bicycle West
Africa with me he jumped at the chance. He put himself and his bicycle
onto a plane and arrived in Nice. From there we hopped a plane to Rome,
and arrived in Senegal.
It was a grand adventure. One of those
"adventures of a lifetime" that people are always talking about, and
Jeff and I talk about it often. He talks about distances, building
materials, machinery, vehicles. I talk about people, fashion, cooking
methods, landscape. I have a photograph of him in a jungle near
Liberia. He has a machete, and is holding up a tiny, green hand of
bananas. He’s laughing because he’d just scaled a banana tree, couldn’t
find a ripe bunch but succumbed to an overwhelming desire to harvest
something with his newly-purchased machete. I’m happy he’s laughing,
because he’s been obsessing about Lauren for days. There had been
fights, infidelities.
He was tortured, he was twenty-one. I was thirty-two. I don’t remember having any good advice to give him.
— to be continued —
NOTE: This was a free-writing exercise. I need to finish my book on China, but for some reason all I could write was this story. Now, hopefully, I’ve cleared a path…
