Hold the Enlightenment (15 page)

Cynthia documented the walk on video, and my job was to write about it. We had traveled with several Bantus and about a
dozen pygmies, but it had been simple enough for me to drop back or plunge ahead of the line of march. Alone, in the forest, it was possible to imagine that I was the only human being who had ever set foot on that precise square yard of soil. Often, as I stood in such a spot, chimps gathered in the trees above, howling and screaming. They approached way too closely—well, within rifle range—because they felt it necessary to throw feces and to piss on my head, all of which suggested they regarded me as just another primate, and nothing very special, to boot. I was really quite content, alone on the forest floor and moving through the yellow, dung-studded rain.

We had stumbled out of the forest and made our way to Imfondo, on the Oubangi River, where several thousand people stood in an open courtyard while lightning ripped the sky apart and rain fell in sheets. Suddenly the rain stopped and the temperature soared. Hours passed. One elderly woman fainted in the heat. Then another fell. The paved courtyard concentrated the heat.

Michael, Cynthia, and I were the only whites, and we moved in line with the Congolese: with Habib from the Ivory Coast, with Alphonse from Gabon, with riverboat con artists and naive villagers boarding the barge for the first time. The bottleneck was the single soldier who checked everyone’s papers. He wore a camouflage uniform, a brown beret, and carried an automatic pistol in a white plastic holster. His name, stitched in red on his left breast, seemed faintly mocking: “Thermometer.”

A great wash of humanity carried us onto the corrugated-metal deck of the barge, and eventually, motors thrumming, we moved majestically out into the current and began floating down the Oubangi, toward the Congo and our destination, Brazzaville.

Cynthia, Michael, and I stood at the very back of the very last barge, watching Imfondo recede into the distance. On the bank to my left, there was a small village and a woman ran down the dirt path to the river, screaming at us all. She was in her late teens, I’d guess, a tall, angular young woman who flapped her arms like the blue herons that rose occasionally from the banks. Her cries couldn’t be heard above the thrum and beat of our engines.

“Missed the boat,” I said to Michael.

The woman dropped to her knees, turned her face to the sky,
and howled soundlessly. She beat her palms on the rain-sodden red earth, raising splashes of mud that stained her orange dress.

“Seems disappointed,” Michael observed.

Cynthia thought we were like all men: cynical in the face of strong emotion. She felt sorry for the young woman.

We humped our gear through the crowds, looking for the first-class cabin we’d booked. The heart of the barge was the great riverboat called the
Fleuve Congo
. It consisted of an enormous engine room, containing two 850-horsepower engines, and a three-story wheelhouse that loomed above the eight individual barges cabled to it on the sides, on the front, on the back. Our cabin was located directly behind the engine room, in a two-story edifice that had once been a riverboat itself. The cabin was an olive-drab metal cubicle that contained a few monastic bunks along with a toilet, a sink, and an air conditioner, all of which functioned on various occasions. It felt, distressingly, like a jail cell, and the three of us escaped onto the teeming decks.

Just outside the cabin, there was a railing that gave over to the river. People dropped a bucket on a rope into the water and washed their clothes, their children, themselves. A harried mother asked me to watch one child while she bathed another. Juliet was four, and she held my index finger in her small hand while her mother washed an infant.

As I was standing there, watching Juliet, a man in clean khakis and a bushman’s hat came by with a young chimpanzee that was clinging to him as if he were its mother. The chimp had a rope around its waist and the man put it on the deck. It scampered about on its feet and hands, ooffing and woofing. Juliet’s mother swept her up in a single motion. People scattered in all directions. Chimps are strong and they can bite.

Cynthia, who had worked on a film about Jane Goodall and knew something about chimps, knelt in front of the animal. She held out her left palm and touched it with the bunched fingers of her right hand. A grooming gesture. The chimp took her left hand for a moment, then turned its back to her. She parted the hairs on the back of its head, grooming it, and the chimp seemed content.

The man who held the rope was named Sarafin. He was a
Congo River businessperson and had bought the orphaned chimp in a village upriver for about eight dollars. He thought he could sell it to the zoo in Brazzaville.

Michael Fay told Sarafin that, in the Republic of the Congo, any traffic in primates was forbidden. Since Michael himself consulted with the government on poaching issues, he could safely assure Sarafin that he’d be arrested at the zoo. The thing to do, he said, was to take the chimp to the primate orphanage in Brazzaville, where it would be rehabilitated, taught to hunt and forage, and eventually released into the forest.

Later, in the cabin, we talked about the encounter. Michael said he wasn’t entirely sure that Sarafin would have been arrested at the zoo, though it was certainly possible. He thought the chimp and gorilla orphanage was a feel-good solution, and what was important was to stop any kind of commerce in wildlife. Sarafin was a bright young guy who had had no intention of breaking the law. He’d help pass the word.

Cynthia felt sorry for the poor chimp.

I identified with it.

There are almost no roads in the northern Congo, and people travel by river. But the
Fleuve Congo
wasn’t truly about transportation. It was about commerce. Even at the smallest villages, the captain brought the engines to an idle, and people paddled out to the barges in small canoes called pirogues. They came to sell smoked fish, or oranges, or live dwarf crocodiles with their snouts wired shut, or chickens or goats. There was no refrigeration on the barges, and food was kept alive until dinner.

Sometimes, one of the flat-topped barges was uncabled at a village, and another two or three would be added. Shopkeepers, who maintained covered stalls on the various barges, sold batteries, lamps, soap, salt, shampoo, T-shirts, shorts, hard candy, and music cassettes. Bargaining was a high-volume affair. Folks shouted at one another in the way I might address someone who’d just shot my dog.

Over the space of a week, I came to see that this was the accepted
manner of bargaining, and that people enjoyed it. There was always a smile hidden somewhere very close behind the seeming abuse.

Occasionally, we stopped at the larger villages, and hundreds of us—thousands—poured off the gangplanks and invaded the village, most everyone making for the forest. There were only three public toilets aboard the
Fleuve Congo
. And as folks did what they had to do, still more people from the now soiled village poured aboard the
Fleuve Congo
.

Eventually, the Oubangi emptied into the Congo proper, and in the town of Mossaka, we became deck passengers. A local politician had booked our cabin weeks before. Cynthia was concerned about the film she’d shot over the course of six hard weeks, and the captain, a fine man named Eugene Mongoli, allowed us to pile our gear in the wheelhouse.

In the early afternoon sun, the metal decks of the barges, where we lived, were hot enough to fry an egg. People sat on boards or bricks or rolls of foam padding. Sheets rigged on sticks provided some protection from the sun. At each stop, another 780,000 people boarded the barge. There was now so much sheer humanity aboard the
Fleuve Congo
that no one could take a single step without bumping into someone else.

The words most heard were “sorry,” “pardon me,” “excuse me.” It was a world of constant apology, and my choice, as I saw it, was passive acceptance or madness: this perception despite the fact that everyone else seemed to be having a swell adventure. Cynthia obtained the captain’s permission to stand on top of the wheelhouse and shoot crowd scenes along with sunrises and sunsets. Michael, already fluent in French, worked on his Lingala vocabulary, which was the local dialect. He underlined useful words in a dictionary—starting with
a
—then strolled about looking for opportunities to work “abstinence”
(ekila)
or “absurd”
(esongo na elonga)
into a conversation.

I, on the other hand, could not work. The essay that proposed itself was about heaven and hell, about the Edenic forest and the sweltering barge. Exquisitely uncomfortable and unable to write a
sentence, I spent many moping hours on one of the flat-topped barges devoted to livestock: goats and pigs and chickens and me all bunched together under a tarp that provided a little bit of shade. One of the goats fell in love with a pig, to the porker’s great annoyance. It was entirely
esongo na elonga:
a lesson, I thought, about all of us swirling down the drain of the behavioral sink. I was suffering a profound variety of culture shock and longed to be back in the forest, in the monkey-shit rain.

After two days on deck, I became entirely disconsolate and sought the company of drunkards. One beer, maybe two, then back to the goats: back through the general hubbub of too much humanity apologizing to itself. Excuse me, pardon me. It’s too much, I thought, it’s serious.
C’est trop. C’est grave
. I imagined the future of the human race as an endless ride on the Congo barge, and shuddered in the heat.

Cynthia found me hunched up and brooding among the animals. “Can I do something for you?” she asked.

“Yes,” I said, “go away.”

I met folks named George and Slava and Josephine and Enrique. Many of them were extremely attractive. Movie-star quality, we’d say in the United States. God, however, was easily the most handsome man I’d ever met. He stood a couple of inches over six feet: a lean, well-muscled man of about twenty-five who seemed vastly amused with life in general.

God had just graduated from college and was going to Brazzaville, where he had secured a job teaching school. Cynthia met him early on, and right away he apologized about the name. He’d grown up in a remote village where his father heard educated people talking with great respect about this person called God. It seemed a good name for a son, and young God lived half a dozen years before he realized people other than his father found the name either offensive or amusing. “But,” he told Cynthia, “I’m stuck with it.”

God had traveled a lot on
Fleuve Congo
and was our single best source of information. There was, for instance, no set schedule. Some nights we’d anchor in the middle of the river, some we’d run
all night long. It depended a lot on Captain Mongoli’s mood, and the heat of commerce conducted at various villages. God had a kind of sixth sense for the captain’s humor. He’d predicted our arrival at the confluence of the Oubangi and the Congo to the hour.

Now I wanted to find out when we’d arrive in Brazzaville. My drinking buddies had varying opinions: some thought two more days, some three.

“Who knows?” Maurice asked.

God only knows, I thought, and set off to find him.

I bumped into Cynthia on the way and together we sought him out on all levels of the
Fleuve Congo
universe. He was, in fact, waiting in a long line for what was now the only functioning public toilet on the barge.

We stood with God, inching our way toward the toilet.

“Tim,” Cynthia told him, “is going insane.”

“How much longer?” I asked.

“Twenty-four hours,” God said. “We should be in Brazzaville tomorrow morning at this time.”

That, I thought, was acceptable. I could certainly bear it for one more day.

But now Cynthia had a problem. She wanted to get off the barge very quickly so she could film the disembarkation, which would be a madhouse. Everyone with something to sell, we knew, would want to get off quickly in order to get the best prices, or find the best corner to set up a makeshift stall.

“Tim and Michael can carry the gear,” Cynthia said, “but could you help me get off and find a high spot to stand?”

The man said it would be no problem. Cynthia was happy: she’d get her shot, with the help of God.

I spent the remainder of the last full day drinking beer with Maurice and maundering on, mostly in English, about the difference between Eden and the end of the world as we know it. There was a reason, I informed the drunks grandly, to protect wilderness areas and it had to do with our collective future and the cost of constant apology. Maurice agreed with everything I had to say and I finally bought him the beer he didn’t really want.

We pulled into the port of Brazzaville at ten the next morning,
just as God had foreseen. People began pouring off the barge, but God never showed and I wasn’t going to sit around waiting for him.

“Absenteeism,” said Michael, trying to recall the word in Lingala.

Cynthia, who had put her faith in God, was bitterly disappointed.

“He helps those who help themselves,” I muttered softly, and then grabbed my share of the gear and—apologizing all the way—got the hell off that God-forsaken barge.

I
was driving north, out of the flat and featureless sands of the Black Rock Desert, bouncing over a jolting gravel road that rose up into the Black Rock Mountains, a set of volcanic outcroppings with all the charm and color of a rusted anvil. Outside the air-conditioned comfort of my truck, northwest Nevada occupied itself in belching fits of ongoing and unforgiving geology. Exactly thirty-two miles out of Gerlach (“where the pavement ends and the West begins”), I acquired the second flat tire of the trip. Also my map blew away, and I made an imprudent decision that put me square in the middle of the Massacre Ranch, where, God help me, I encountered the Naked Cowboy. All that came later.

For the nonce, it was midafternoon, in late August, exactly 98 degrees in the shade—I hung a thermometer while I worked on the tire—and a blistering wind out of the north whipped itself into a series of imbecilic, whirling sand-colored funnels.