this desert life

i figured i'd share a little about the struggles of daily existence in the desert, from an american-african point of view.

i think the heat and flies are starting to get to me. gone is the wit and wisdom of my other writings, here replaced with the awkward adolescent longings of someone who's been in the sands too long. fantasies. serious readers (including my mom) may want to skip it.


today's milk run is first north (north!) to iriba, a dirt strip protected by joint european forces. crossing overhead, i confirm the airport is secure and it's safe to land with a quick call on 124.50:

"india romeo base, u.n. charlie one, over."

"charlie one, india romeo base."

"bonjour. comment est la securité de la piste?"

"la securité ici est cinq sur cinq, a toi."


i check-in the outbound passengers and give them the spiel. it's amazing how many still try to bring weapons aboard with them. there are clearly marked signs near the aircraft doors.


sorry, it's the rule.


departing over town. below, i spy a woman unfurling a sheet in the wind to get dust out. it is immediately blown by the breeze into her neighbor's window. i imagine that neighbor, and the next, repeating the same process. all the way around the world, til the dust comes back into the original woman's house. i think alot of human solutions work like this.


back home to abéché. fuel for the bird, food and water for the pilots. whiskey for some lucky bastard somewhere.

every day, we get foot-long sandwiches for lunch made by our chef max. i was not expecting such damn good baguettes in the middle of the desert. it's one positive aspect to french colonialism.

off again, this time south. i give a quick call to comedy central (abéché tower) with my estimates and flight level.

climbing out over the endless minarets; poking phallically up into the virgin-blue sky. i think a good truth-gauge for any religion is one simple question:

how many cock-shaped structures does it have?

think of all the stone pillars erected throughout history. poking out the eye of the sky. this quick litmus test (judged on a sliding scale, 4-9 inches) is a rock-hard personal prerequisite for the validity of said belief system.


i don't mean to bash islam in particular, it's just the local example. the same could and should also be said of sleek secular skyscrapers, whorehouses of commerce all. why won't we seek something larger than our own self-gratification? it's the mindlessness of systematics, the swallowing of dogma, the intolerance for non-adherents, that so chafes me. the personal profit at the expense of the many.

if anything is really true, it should stand up to any amount of questioning (murmurs of approval). and it should never use violence to further itself (building applause). the true path begins with helping those in need, especially if they are different than you (a standing ovation).

i weigh the next piece of the puzzle, tasting it in my brain. i feel myself on the verge of an epiphany that will change all mankind forever. struggling under the burden of knowing that my readers (that's you!) are all depending on me. just before i can solve the eternal equation once and for all, abéché tower shakes me out of my ponderings:

"u.n. charlie one, confirm eta goz beida one four zero three?"

"goz beida at time one zero four three, insha'allah."

first goz beida, then on to koukou. we are the only operator who flies to koukou, because airserv flies "where no one else can or will."


it's the most challenging strip in eastern chad; only about 2,000 feet long. protected (defended?) by a river and hill on one end, and by trees on the other. the hard-packed gravel and camel shit runway is about 30 feet wide.

no one else can get it in and out like a bush pilot.

cruisin'. camels, donkeys, and goats wander the scorched lands, searching for food, leaving behind fertilizer. there is another herd animal that excels at turning resources into excrement. this natural talent is exceeded, perhaps, only by it's ability to breed beyond the carrying capacity of the land.


herd animals all. here in chad, one major factor in determining the local level of affluence is livestock ownership. as a bachelor, if you own a camel and a donkey, you can be a sugar daddy. i wonder what these colorfully-wrapped women who watch me from the shade trees would think of my caravan?


i reflect on the irony of a $1.5 million dollar aircraft burning $400 of jet a-1 per hour helping people who make less than $100 a year. why am i the privileged white boy born on the rich side of the world instead of here, under the brain-burning heat of the desert? here in the fly-sty? in the throat-coating gill-filling dust? is this cosmic injustice just pure random chance?

i don't know.

i need a break from my hypocrisy. i plug in the ipod. the beach boys seem like an appropriate choice, considering my surroundings.


iriba, guereda, ooh i wanna take ya
to goz beida, am timan,
come on pretty mama

to adré, or koukou
baby why don’t we go
down to dogdoré

we’ll get there slow because we're flying a van........

landing in goz beida, pulling into the ramp. brakes set, fuel pump off, standby power off, avionics master off. i feather the propeller and something curvy catches my eye. oooohhhh. i have a special passenger today. by special, i mean a vulnerable, unsupervised, dark-haired female biped. standing there on the ramp all alone (this is something that doesn't happen nearly enough).

glancing at my manifest, i gather her name is ana lucia. italian? spanish? no. swiss. even better. a mountain girl. a girl who can yodel!

we load bags and i give my weak attempt at a french briefing. N208PA spools up her purring PT-6 into a high-pitched, jealous whine.

it's ok, sweetie. you're the one i really love.

the 10 minute flight to koukou passes in an instant. one pest who flew over to koukou. i do my smooth, captain cool approach, crossing overhead and then letting down from on high. this one's for you, ana lucia.

i configure the aircraft while in a sweeping, nearly continuous, 270 degree turn. this time, i remember to inhibit the terrain feature of the TAWS. with the hill on short final, i don't want her yelling at me terrain! terrain! pull up! pull up! (that seems to scare the folks in the back.)

i don't need anything exposing my posing. i have to at least keep up an appearance of competence. for your passenger's sake, captain! show her what a good stick-wiggler you really are!!

the approach is solid. i roll out, passing just a few feet over a turbaned train of donkey jockeys crossing short of the threshold. just when it really counts, i get my greaser (none other!) precisely positively painting it on. indeed. my moment of glory, here and now! did you feel that, ana lucia?! me neither!

i set the brakes and shut her down. climbing down my ladder from the tower of victory. i let the passengers out and help them with luggage. as i pull out the swiss jungfrau's grocery-store plastic sack, the handle rips; spilling it's contents into the dry dust of donkey dung. the prized jar of spaghetti sauce breaks and flows out like the blood of a slayed pilot. crashed and burned.

i promise her a replacement from abéché. thanks, she says, and walks off. the luck of the irish.

licking my wounds back at the house, i hear the deep, melancholic, air-raid siren voices spooling up from speakers on the minarets. the muzzein's call to prayer.

the pilot's call to beer.

i celebrate today's pyrrhic victory with an ice cold castel lager. golden-sweet mother's milk. lloyd comes over to console me. i pour him half in his dish. bière premium de qualité.


this is our guard dog. no, he's not growling at you; it's just his inbred underbite smile that only a polygamist incestuous saint could love. one of the pilots rescued him when he was just a couple days old; starving and abandoned in a mud puddle.

islam teaches that dogs are "unclean" both physically and morally. angels, as god’s agents of mercy and absolution, will not enter a home that has a dog. keeping company with dogs will also void a portion of a muslim’s good deeds.

huh. dogma?

mark twain said "if you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous, he will not bite you. this is the principal difference between a dog and a man."

and lord byron's epitaph for his dog says "[he] possessed beauty without vanity, strength without insolence; courage without ferocity; and all the virtues of man without his vices."

maybe we've got it all backwards, and in fact dogs are superior beings compared to many of us who wear clothes. (doggod?) they have loyalty and faithfulness; we have treachery and deceit. (goddog?) they forgive and quietly console; we avenge and spout endless empty words. and i think a survey of the respective populations would conclude that they are generally more intelligent than our slobbering masses.

i'm preparing lloyd for the 2009 mayflower kennel club dog show. (if you do a good deed for a dog, is that self-canceling? it is?! damn, i guess i'll be missing out on my 72 virgins).

i feed him baguettes for breakfast and beef stew for dinner; this helps his flaxen coat shine to it's potential (and how!). we practice sashaying around the french base and i'm teaching him commands in spanish. mostly so he'll stop humping people's legs, which wouldn't be good in front of the judges (i guess we're both sexual perverts).

just victims of the doghouse drive-by
i say jump he says how high?

we both sleep alfresco.

shortly after arriving, i moved my love nest outside to the screened porch, where it's much cooler. i've never understood the whole brick-houses-in-hot-places thing. at night, the heat-soaked stone radiates it's thermodynamic potential into le maison, and it's like sleeping in a pizza oven. (the puerto ricans did this too!)


it took awhile to get my feng shui right, making sure to line up my slumbering cock with the earth's magnetic field and all.

i think i've finally found success, though. already i feel more aligned with the galaxy. laying there, under the african night sky, i watch the quiet trajectory of satellites through an inky sea of phosphorescent stars.

in the morning, at 0530, i am usually awakened for a couple minutes by the french base playing their réveille. it sounds alot like the american version, only more flaky and layered, like a croissant.

in my dehydrated haze, i hide out under the mozzie net from the eager malarial bloodsuckers hovering like an electron cloud. apparently they didn't read the notam about this new prohibited airspace.

i think it's a fairly well-known fact, but i'll reiterate it here: all mosquitoes that bite and suck your blood are female. they need the protein to make their eggs.

the males mostly chill out, spending the day flying around and drinking nectar, and waiting for the females to come home and give them some lovin'. that's science. if you don't believe me check wikipedia, the internet's bastion of truth. according to the site, women are nothing but disease vectors.

in any case, i think it's a great way to wake up: surrounded by a cue of ladies eagerly waiting to suck something.