how it ends

when i was young, most of my summer days were spent with my cousins swimming at the neighborhood pool. my mom would pack me and my brother and sister into the car with a bag full of peanut butter and honey sandwiches, potato chips, watermelon slices, chocolate chip cookies, and soda pop. she would drive us up to loretto heights; making sure we had sunscreen on. we would swim and play marco polo and dare each other to try new tricks off the diving board.

on july 4th, the lifeguards who normally spent their time yelling at us kids would become nice; they would have a treasure hunt in the pool. we would jump in and collect some of the thousands of pennies that they had tossed in. some glinted like tiny slits of bronze on the white-tiled bottom; illuminated by slanting shafts of sunlight. others sat quietly in the depths; on the long row of black tiles that demarcated the center of the lanes.

after the pennies were collected, they would release hundreds of goldfish into the pool, and we would each have a tiny net to try to capture all we could. keeping our eyes open wide; chlorine and all.

those summers of watermelon and backflips would always be associated with my mother. all those innumerable, unacknowledged details that she poured herself into. laying on the hot concrete deck like a drenched lizard, i remember biting into a sandwich and thinking: so this is love.



******



for my last r&r a month ago, i went to cairo. trying to remember back to all that time i spent in school learning about this ancient civilization. now, looking out over the nile: there it is. there are the pyramids. there's the valley of the kings. there's the tombs where exalted men have decomposed in silence. there's king tut himself, his gold death mask still brilliantly shining all these thousands of years later; a testament to man’s insatiable vanity.

sitting on these shores. the silent black waters drift downward; patiently pursuing their union with the salt seas. eddies swirl in vortexes, making soft sucking noises, and the endless convection currents shift water around in boils and seams.


i think of all those people whose lifetimes of labor constructed the grave of a single man. and besides their back-breaking toils, the money they were forced to contribute toward it's construction. twice taxed.



what do we spend our lives working for, in these, the modern times?

mortgage means death pledge in latin.


why can't we invest in everyone's lives, instead of pouring it all into one man's transience?

our finest temples are nothing but houses for the dead.

i feel disorientated and suffocated in the 20-million-strong madness of cairo. i want to go back to abéché; back to the sands. i want to trade the car horns and pavement for the quiet whipping desert breeze and shimmering ice-blue stars. to the airport it is.

aboard the beechcraft 1900D, i take a seat over the wing.

it's been 8 months, rudy, and i still miss you.

i think about what the hell went wrong in those last seconds. i think about the violence of your death. the back of an airplane suddenly feels like a coffin. outside it’s dark; just a tunnel of cabin lights to assert our presence in the universe. we whizz through the stars in a dimly lit tomb, like the pharaohs before us.



******



a week before i'm scheduled to depart chad, the otter has to go to n'djamena for maintenance. this last flight is bittersweet; like saying goodbye to an impossible love.

the little otter is the only aircraft stirring in abéché on this quiet sunday morning. she doesn’t want to leave; and it’s like getting a child dressed for church. or maybe that’s her pilot. with the chadian sunrise behind me, i coax her back into the dust-swirled sky one last time.

holding interstellar communion at cruise, i watch tiny mud hut villages clinging to the sides of serpentine, bone-dry ouadis. a small stagnant pool remains in some of the curves through 8 months of yearly drought. i stare at the clouds; i stare at my propellers as they carve through the skies.


a year in congo and chad. i'm not sure what i've accomplished here. i've learned that i really can't change anything. all i've done is just smiled at people and maybe eased their suffering a little bit. brought them a bit of rice and some doctors. maybe shared in their pain so they didn’t feel so alone.



what difference did you think you could make, one man in all this madness?

i've tried to have a receptive heart and mind; as much as what i've seen hurts and has marked me. all i can do is carry their stories inside; hoping that the world cannot fully ignore or forget as long as those who witness live.

i cannot be an indifferent passenger on this earth just for the sake of comfort; emotionally or otherwise. those whose suffering you have within you do not suffer alone.

all a pilot can do is steer his own ship.....




******



my friend pierre has been living in a small town on the darfur border, working on water sanitation projects. the drinking water in adé resembles the muddy color of a cholera cappuccino. tests have shown high levels of bacterial contamination from fecal matter. the people use the stagnant pools for bathing, laundry, drinking, and as the toilet.

i’ve flown a lot of cargo into adé: pierre’s NGO, solidarites, has installed a water pump in a clean borehole on 4 separate occasions. each time someone steals it; selling the parts for other uses.

a week ago, adé was raided and the rebels held pierre at gunpoint; the cold steel of a kalishnikov poking at the back of his neck as he watched them steal money, laptops, and a vehicle. today he left for france; throwing his hands up in the air.

this continent is a mix of perplexing paradox and endless frustration. and yet, i feel that the chadian dust has been absorbed into my skin; that the pulse of congo courses through my blood. the swirling molecules of dirt and water have become a part of my being; inseparably intertwined into my own dna.


last week i spent a few days in goz amir refugee camp near koukou. the grass huts and fences are all tinder-dry; the people packed in like sardines. an arsonist has been setting fires for the past 4 sundays, relieving the inhabitants of their few earthly possessions. i saw a crying mother sitting in the lung-clogging dust, holding her baby; rocking back and forth as she looked over a smoldering life that had vanished into a thread of blue smoke.


i think about my own mother. i wonder if she remembers that time 29 years ago; when i was growing and floating in a warm bath inside her womb. that blink of an eye that i breathed through her body. how the molecules of her own flesh formed me, like the muddy clays of africa do today.


what would africa look like if white colonizers had never set foot on the continent? if she still was untouched by european hands grubby for profits? would the inhabitants be aware of the ever-widening disparity of lifestyles? would we realize that people who are poor in one way are rich in others?

just being here makes you realize the poverty of your own life.

it’s time. i’ve tried to avoid it, but the little otter is ready for her descent. imperceptibly, i pull back on the power and turn on the recognition lights. gently roll in some nose-down trim. we start down from our last dance together in the heavens.

on approach into n’djamena, i loiter off course and fly slowly to make it last a little longer. the growing pressure of the irreparable slipping through your fingers. the knowledge of some great beauty coming to an end.

the rubber kisses concrete in a hot vacuumy chirp, and i gently lower the nosewheel onto the centerline and pull the throttles into reverse thrust; so slowly that no one notices or lurches forward in their seat. trying to take care of my fellow passengers on this watery rock.

taxiing in. setting the parking brake. it takes a herculean effort to make myself feather the propellers and call for the shutdown checks.



******



i spend my last couple days slowly transitioning back to the west, easing the culture shock at a hotel in n’djamena. a real flush toilet. hot water. air conditioning. even a swimming pool.

i’m back at the beginning.

in the distance, the bruised purple clouds in splotches. a darkening sky turning from charcoal to golden brown as the sandstorm gathers. a light wind slackens; then stops all together. a tiny puff of air in a silently bubbling sky.

i stand on the edge of the pool. i want to feel it hit. the first storms of rainy season. god must be giving an indifferent send-off.

the gale slams into me; a wall of water and wind and flying stinging sand. visibility drops to nothing. trees shudder; deck chairs scatter like bowling pins. the downpour is too intense to be absorbed by the baked caked dirt roads, and it flash-floods off in a thick syrupy shot of mud pie.

why can’t we pour as much into each other’s lives as these drenching desert monsoons?

giving, like a mother does, with her one million unacknowledged actions. with the love that goes into her watermelon slices and peanut butter and honey sandwiches.

i know my mother worries about me. does she realize that i’m just trying to live with my eyes open wide? trying to capture all i could?

in the midst of the chaos, i look down at the pool’s surface. absorbing the stinging impacts heroically; it’s depths unchanged. i want to be like that.

i am overcome with desire to step off this edge, into my beginning. just water into water.

is this what the egyptians were trying to do in a lifetime spent preparing for death?

from watery womb to watery tomb.

i slip off the deck, torpedoing toes-first into the dark waters. they receive me; wet and warm and quick over my ears and head. the drenching slapping pellets of rain quiet to a muffled pattering as i plunge down into the depths.

so this is how it ends. with goldfish and pennies.

death feels just like love.


"each man is haunted until his humanity awakens." -blake