High Tide in Tucson (17 page)

I recognize, exactly, Camille's wide-eyed thrill when we discover a trail of deer tracks in the soft mud among bird-foot violets. She kneels to examine a cluster of fern fiddleheads the size of her own fist, and is startled by a mourning cloak butterfly (which, until I learned to read field guides, I understood as “morning cloak”). Someone in my childhood gave me the impression that fiddleheads and mourning cloaks were rare and precious. Now I realize they are fairly ordinary members of eastern woodland fauna and flora, but I still feel lucky and even virtuous—a gifted observer—when I see them.

For that matter, they probably
are
rare, in the scope of human experience. A great many people will live out their days without ever seeing such sights, or if they do, never
gasping
. My parents taught me this—to gasp, and feel lucky. They gave me the gift of making mountains out of nature's exquisite molehills. The day I captured and brought home a giant, luminescent green luna moth, they carried on as if it were the Hope diamond I'd discovered hanging on a shred of hickory bark. I owned the moth as my captive for a night, and set it free the next, after receiving an amazing present: strands of tiny green pearls—luna moth eggs—laid in fastidious rows on a hickory leaf. In the heat of my bedroom they hatched almost immediately, and I proudly took my legion of tiny caterpillars to school. I was disappointed when my schoolmates didn't jump for joy.

I suppose no one ever taught them how to strike it rich in the forest. But I know. My heart stops for a second, even now, here, on Horse Lick Creek, as Camille and I wait for the butterfly to light and fold its purple, gold-bordered wings. “That's a morning cloak,” I tell her. “It's
very rare
.”

In her lifetime it may well be true; she won't see a lot of these butterflies, or fern fiddleheads, or banks of trillium. She's growing up in another place, the upper Sonoran desert. It has its own treasures, and I inflate their importance as my parents once did for me. She signals to me at the breakfast table and we both hold perfectly still, watching the roadrunner outside our window as he raises his cockade of feathers in concentration while stalking a lizard. We gasp over the young, golden coyotes who come down to our pond for a drink. The fragile desert becomes more precious to me as it becomes a family treasure, the place she will always like to think about, after she's grown into adult worries and the need for imaginary refuge.

A new question in the environmentalist's canon, it seems to me, is this one: who will love the
imperfect
lands, the fragments of backyard desert paradise, the creek that runs between farms? In our passion to protect the last remnants of virgin wilderness, shall we surrender everything else in exchange? One might argue that it's a waste of finite resources to preserve and try to repair a place as tame as Horse Lick Creek. I wouldn't. I would say that our love for our natural home has to go beyond finite, into the boundless—like the love of a mother for her children, whose devotion extends to both the gifted and the scarred among her brood.

Domesticated though they are, I want the desert boundary lands of southern Arizona to remain intact. I believe in their remnant wildness. I am holding constant vigil over my daughter's memory place, the land of impossible childhood discovery, in hopes that it may remain a place of real refuge. I hope in thirty years she may come back from wherever she has gone to find the roadrunner thickets living on quietly, exactly as she remembered them. And someone, I hope, will be keeping downy woods and crawdad creeks safe for me.

From Benin, West Africa, eight degrees north of the Equator, you can see both the North Star and the Southern Cross. They crouch above their opposing horizons, ready to guide you north into the Sahara, or south, down a flank of white beach into the sea. You can look for them even from Cotonou, Benin's largest city, where the night sky blazes, untouched as yet by serious competition from electric lights.

My first night in Benin, my eyes returned again and again to the sky, searching for my bearings. The night held the tricky, sensual promise of a dream. A wide-bodied jet had touched down briefly to leave me there, and once it was gone that whole event of armored comfort seemed as fantastic as extraterrestrial contact. Now I was left to walk through Cotonou's hot, rich-smelling darkness on streets lined with women selling ordinary
and inconceivable things: grilled bananas, shoes, gasoline sold in liter wine bottles. Each vendor's face was lit by the flame of a small oil-burning lamp; the crowds of tiny lights looked like banks of votive candles in a cathedral, accompanied by a choir of street-smart livestock. Pigeon-sized fruit bats flapped out darkly over the city, beginning their nightly forage.

I walked across a bridge and found the concrete shell of a building that turned out to be a hotel. It looked as if it had been bombed, but that was only a trick of tired eyesight; the building just never got finished. The solemn night clerk showed me to a room with a cot and a sink. He considerately pointed out to me that the door had no lock, and no knob.

At first light, the commerce outside my window rose to fever pitch. The first travelers of the morning were half a dozen small girls driving a herd of pigs; the second, two young men zooming across the bridge on a motorcycle, carrying upright between them a five-foot-square pane of naked glass.

Women crossed the bridge at a more stately pace and moved toward the market balancing gigantic burdens on their heads: bolts of cloth; a mountain of bread; a basket of live chickens with their wings draped over the side, casual as an elbow over the back of a chair. Nearly everyone in Benin dresses in magnificently printed wax cloth, West Africa's trademark garb. Women wrap great rectangles of it around their bodies and heads; men wear it tailored into pajamalike suits or embroidered caftans. The central market is a roar of color, scent, and sound. Next to a pile of dried fish, a tailor works at his open-air table. A woman selling tapioca also does coiffure: a client at her feet can get her hair wrapped with black thread into dozens of pointed, upright sprigs. The market's outskirts grade into industrial zones: cooking fires and small foundries. Beyond this, pigs devoutly work the riverbank garbage dumps.

This is not a country notably equipped for tourism. Every sizable town has at least an inn or two that can provide a bed, a mosquito net, and a decent meal. But mainly Benin is equipped for the business of living as the Beninois do. It's a place to come and witness: to learn, for example, how people use resources when they have no choice but to be resourceful. How armies of little boys at the edge of the market can constitute a city recycling center. You'll have plenty of time to think about everything you've thrown away in your life, as you wind through a labyrinth of palm-frond shelters where hundreds of families are at work, hammering empty oil drums and tomato tins into funnels, buckets, knives, and votive-candle lanterns to light the streets by night.

Not a cubic inch of space in any moving vehicle is wasted. When you flag down a taxi—invariably a subcompact Peugeot—it already has passengers; three in the backseat will make room for a fourth. For thirty cents, you'll get where you need to go.

To travel to a different village you have to take a bush taxi. Go to the particular street corner where trips are organized for your destination. Make an agreement with a driver there, settle on a price. Are you traveling with luggage or animals? These things figure into the cost. Come back in a few hours, the driver will tell you, or tonight—he needs to line up more passengers. You ask, Which? A few hours, or tonight? He says, Both. Maybe you'll make the trip with three other travelers, or five. The driver is in control of this event, and since he is charging by the head, most likely there will be seven. Someone may ride on the roof. Don't worry, it won't be you; you have seniority.

Be prepared to wait. Time is the only thing everyone here has, and they have plenty.

 

When I told friends I was flying to Benin, alone, with no itinerary, their replies fell into two categories: “Why on earth?” and “Where is that?”

Why on earth is a very good question, though where travel is concerned I'm inclined to let the burden of proof rest in the camp of “Why not?” Among African nations, Benin doesn't have the faunal glamour of Kenya, the cultural cachet of Senegal, nor the political notoriety of Zaire or Somalia. But Africa pulls on me, the whole or any part; having rubbed against it in childhood like iron against a magnet, my poles of attraction are permanently set. Some acquaintances had recently moved to Benin and declared I was welcome to visit. And so, when other work took me as far as London, I stepped off the shelf of Europe into that bewitched place where anything might happen and your French need not be perfect: West Africa.

The second question—where?—is hardly easier to answer. The Republic of Benin, whose name prior to 1975 was Dahomey, passes almost unnoticed on a map: a slim knife of a country between Togo and Nigeria, it is roughly as large and populous as Tennessee. But its narrow borders contain a world of different nations. The climate changes along a north-south gradient from arid savannah down to humid coastal palm plantations, and like most African countries, the modern boundaries reflect colonial decisions that have nothing to do with ethnic unity. Within Benin, and overflowing its borders on all sides, are people who speak Fon, Mina, Yoruba, and other completely unrelated languages. In the northeastern drylands, Islamic influence is strong among the pastoral Fulani. They have little in common with their Somba neighbors, who build castlelike family compounds in the northwest, or the Fon farmers of the south, or the Aiza fishing people who travel by canoe and live
in villages of stick houses on stilts over the coastal lagoons.

And so it was that when I asked, in a Cotonou restaurant, for a mashed-yam staple of the north called igname pilé, the waiter grinned broadly and said, “You'll have to come home with me, then. These people down here in the south don't know how to cook.”

Southerners are likely to be just as contemptuous of their northern neighbors, who wear startling scars and tattoos on their faces as tribal identifiers. “I would never dream of marrying a woman with tattoos,” a Cotonou University student told me, and another young man insisted, when he learned I was going north, that the food in the markets up there is unclean. Members of different tribes, even when they move into the cities, tend to segregate themselves. When the Marxist government led by Ahmed Kerekou—a northerner—was overthrown in 1990, it was on regional grounds as much as ideological ones. Many northerners remain loyal to Kerekou.

In the past, these people had even less in the way of common interest: the Dahomey Kingdom dominated the region for centuries with its army, and amassed stunning wealth by selling the men and women of neighboring tribes into slavery.

Now these tribes, as different as stone, paper, and knife, are crowded into a single national domicile and expected to behave like family; to speak French, agree upon a president, and consider themselves “Beninois.” It's a nice theory. The truth is far more interesting.

 

The 540-kilometer drive to Natitingou is a long, long day. As our bush taxi headed north from Cotonou, commerce gave way to countryside: deep fields of high grass, then forests defoli
ated from drought, then hillocks of rounded boulders. Termite nests poked up everywhere like gigantic sandcastles. The air hung thick with red dust. It was February, season of the
harmattan
—a hazy heat wave on a languid extended visit from the Sahara. No rain had fallen for four months, and none was expected until late March. Fat-trunked, flat-topped baobab trees punctuated the landscape with comic relief. The car startled a grouse from the roadside brush; the driver swerved, hit it, ran back to collect it. Later we would deliver it to his mother.

Whenever we stopped in a village, which happened often, we were mobbed by children selling bananas. I got out when I could, to walk among the thatch-roofed mud houses, and was greeted by cries of
Yovo! Yovo!
—“white person.” I was the first they'd seen all day, maybe all year, and for kids it's a thrilling game. Adults simply say, “
Bonjour, Yovo
.” I managed to force a smile, though I felt my pale skin fairly glowing.

“Well, what would you say to an African you saw in America?” a young woman asked, when I complained about this later.

I told her I would not, under any circumstances, say, “Hi, black person.”

“Well, here we are all different tribes. We identify ourselves by tribe, and that's how we greet strangers.”

I felt faintly consoled, and tried to represent myself—in this land of differences—as a cheerful, upstanding member of the Yovo tribe. Eventually I arrived in Natitingou about the same color as anyone, covered from teeth to shoes in fine red grit. I gratefully showered at the home of my friends, Peace Corps volunteers who taught in Natitingou's secondary school. Their cement house nestled with several others under the canopy of a cashew tree. All night long the apple-sized cashew fruits dropped,
socking the tin roof like wayward softballs. Around midnight the bats began to sing in unearthly voices that rang like bells. I lay under my mosquito net, wide awake, unable either to shut away or resist the foreign night.

 

Northwestern Benin, divided by the dramatic escarpments of the Atakora Chain, is rolling savannah, baobab trees, the Pendjari National Wildlife Refuge, and the remarkable
tatas
of the Somba people. These compounds, scattered out of earshot of one another over the plain, are built of hard red mud like the termite nests and bulge in the same organic way, each one housing an extended family. The cylindrical towers hold stored grain, and high walls connecting them enclose private courtyards. Animals dwell on the ground floor; people sleep upstairs.

I'd been warned that the Somba people are private. But I was fascinated by the lumpy, castlelike
tatas
, and too curious. After visiting the market one day I ambled out across a rutted mealie field, vaguely in the direction of a
tata
. Whistling, I paused to inspect the baobab trees, the ants, the sky, enjoying my nature walk. When I stepped within a stone's throw of the
tata
, an old woman flew out the door, brandishing over her head a yam the size of my arm. I hastened away.

I'd caught only a glimpse of the inner courtyard and its host of fetishes—low mud pedestals crowned with calabash bowls—representing the spirits of ancestors and a conduit to higher powers. Not only the
tatas
but most other villages have fetishes. Usually they appear darkly spattered with fresh blood, a disturbing sight for eyes unaccustomed to such. In Beninois markets I'd seen surly dogs lined up for sale—not as pets. And once along a roadside I caught sight of a procession of young women with live
chickens clasped to their heads, dancing toward a ceremonial animal sacrifice.

This part of Africa is the birthplace of
vodoun
, which emigrated with the slave trade to Haiti, Brazil, and other lands where voodoo still thrives. Seventy percent of Beninois place themselves in the category of “animist,” where religion is concerned, and nearly everyone wears the
gris-gris
, a personal fetish to ward off bad luck and bad will. It doesn't necessarily preclude belief in Catholicism or Islam; it's simply an acknowledgment of the powers at work here.

My visit happened to coincide with a much-publicized
vodoun
festival, and a pamphlet published for this event explained, in its way, the premise: “Every creature—animal, vegetable, or human, in an obligatory rapport with nature—disposes an energy intermingled with and dependent upon the vibrations of Djoogbe, the most powerful of the vodoun mysteries.”

I began to fathom the extent of these mysteries while talking with a man named Julian, who was born in the north but went to Cotonou for a university education. I found him articulate, practical, and by his own assertion, not religious. When we spoke of his family he told me his mother had ten children, of whom five were killed.

I asked, “Five of them died?”

“They were killed,” he repeated, pointedly. “My father's other wife was very jealous of my mother.”

I was incredulous. “So she
murdered
your brothers and sisters?”

“No, not herself.” He was patient with my ignorance. “She went to a fetisher who knew how to use
vodoun.
”

Several days later, on the road south again, I kept my eyes on the horizon, where lightning was glancing up like sparks in dry
grass. Suddenly the sky broke open and drenched the land. A red flood gushed through village streets, women's draped skirts clung to their legs, and kids danced, ankle-deep. I could not help but point out that there was supposed to be a month left of the dry season. The taxi driver answered flatly, “It's that festival they're having in the south. All those
feticheurs
in one place mess up the weather.”

 

The Royal Palace Museum at Abomey, in central Benin, is a monument made of red clay soil and blood. The twelve successive kings of the Dahomey Empire struck fear through West Africa for two and a half centuries, prior to the French conquest in 1892. When a Dahomey king died, his subjects killed huge numbers of war prisoners in his honor and mixed their blood into the walls of a temple built to house his spirit. The prisoners would otherwise have been sold to Portuguese slave traders, so it's hard to assess the exact degree of their bad luck. I felt chilled, considering their lives, as a museum guide led me through the labyrinth of the palace's red walls. We entered a hall of huge carved animals, the royal icons for different kings: a blue chameleon, a copper-covered lion, a hyena with a poor wide-eyed, half-swallowed goat sticking out of its mouth. (That one, I was told, symbolizes the king's lack of compassion for enemies.) Specifics of history were recorded on giant appliquéd tapestries on the wall. The one devoted to Guézo, ninth in the line of kings, showed Guézo himself engaged in one of his legendary sports: beating an enemy over the head with the unfortunate's own dismembered leg. In the long hall that housed all twelve kings' wooden thrones, Guézo's stood out, twice as high as the others, resting on the skulls of four of his important enemies. “They were Yoruba,” the
guide stated placidly as I stared at the varnished skulls. “From north of here.”