Pre-Trip Inspection

Evanston, IL

In one, I hopped out of the cab of a tractor trailer which I had managed to park inside a stall in an M.C. Escher version of a bathroom at my middle school, the cargo extending into shadowed obscurity where the shitter should have been.  It was imperative that I flail about for and turn on the light switch in order to see and fight, or else be knifed to death by an unknown assailant.  In another I saw a purplish Casey Fisher, my old friend whose soul I imagine to be at rest.  Unusual coloration notwithstanding he appeared to be doing quite well.  In another was a lion, ripcord and steel.  Panthera Leo, hot and bothered with a bloodied muzzle, reeking of urine and covered in flies.

The irregular sleep patterns that I have developed of late and these bitching, if unsettling, dreams are effects of a few recent developments.  During this past winter I became accustomed to waking at five-twenty am, five days a week.  Tree workers are not farmers, and there is no crop or livestock with which to synchronize schedules, but we began before dawn anyhow.  These days were ten hour, below-freezing, two-stroke potpourris of climbing, dragging brush, chipping, felling, grinding stumps and driving trucks (“fill out the pre-trip sheet and put it in the basket before you fucking go out in the morning, why are we having such a hard time here?”).  This was usually followed by a brief evening of massive food intake, light couch-based activity, brain-dead repose, and bed at nine o’clock for most of a night of comatose retard sleep.  Then back up and at ‘em.  Then came daylight savings time, which is a pointless disruption to routine. 

Then the world settled up with me for what has been more than a year of quiet diligence.  I was offered an opportunity to work in Tanzania, on the eastern coast of Africa.  Of course I quit my job immediately.  Absent the alarm and the nag of early morning responsibility my brain continues to sleep as long as it can.  Generally until bladder pressure is too great to ignore.   It’s also taken to frequent naps of no reason or predictability.  I indulge it, as it won’t last long.  Radical change is exhausting and I’ve not even left yet.          

I will work for a gold and copper mining company that my father became involved with a couple of years ago.  I wanted to go straight away, and set about unobtrusively stating and restating my case at strategic intervals, as though if I were too excited about the possibility it would be inherently impossible.  At the time, however, my presence onsite seemed logistically unviable.  I pushed it from my thoughts, applied to forestry schools and climbed trees and drove trucks.  But then things changed.

 To be succinct, which is the spirit of the sequence of events that led to purchasing a plane ticket, all celestial entities are in alignment and it is time to go.  At first I will live onsite at a mining camp located roughly 300 kilometers southwest of Dar es Salaam, the commercial capital of Tanzania.  With a population of four million and the Indian Ocean as its eastern border, I have limited my expectations of Dar to sheer pandemonium and abject poverty with salty overtones.  Of course it is much more than that.  I look forward to the couple of days I will have there to root around and get supplies and talk to people before the nine hour drive into the bush.

Living conditions at the camp have been described to me briefly.  Key elements are the lack of plumbing, with bottled water for drinking and a well for washing and operations, and the lack of electricity beyond the 220V generators used to power equipment, tools and some lights.  I will call the prospect of these impending adjustments to my current lifestyle “interesting”.  The specific projects for which I will be responsible are varied and will likely evolve as I spend more time there.  My first priority upon arrival is to begin assembly of three prefabricated buildings to be used as office space and living quarters.  It is the start of the rainiest time of year in Tanzania, and I am interested to see how this will affect such building projects as well as mining operations.  But who cares if it rains in the tropics?  I hope to see and feel some skull shuddering storms form over vast expanses of land.  Storms so brutal that the hungry fauna and I forget all about each other.

   There is not much else I know.  I’m traipsing the border between nervous and scared shitless which I believe is probably a healthy reaction to all the uncertainty, but my prevailing feeling is of unbridled excitement.   I fly from O’hare to Amsterdam, Amsterdam to Nairobi, Kenya and Nairobi to Dar es Salaam.  The end of this twenty-four hour bank of flights and layovers will mark the end of my obsessive research and constant speculation about what Africa is, and the opening of the floodgates in order to know firsthand.  Shit yeah!  It is unclear how often I will have internet access, but I will update as I can.