The tarmac ends at Sekgoma Pan, which looks like a lobe of hell, which is appropriate because driving through the bush on the back of a Bedford being operated according to the CTO theory of how to drive over unpaved road is identical with flying through hell. The pan had been ravaged by veldfires: what had been thorn trees looked like black candelabras and pylons. The ground was scorched black, with drifts of gray and white ash here and there. There were four of us on the load, all women. I couldn’t help thinking of the pol-econ officer at the American embassy who liked to say that Botswana was missing its calling: his notion was that it was a perfect setting for day-after-the-end-of-the-world movies, with a few outnumbered good guys running around in post-wargasm desolations, protecting the last nubile woman from the dregs of the lumpenproletariat.
The Bedford isn’t a four wheel drive vehicle, so the CTO full-tilt theory of driving may not be insane. The idea is to go, over the cross-rutted stretches, so fast that you’re touching only the tops of the ruts, in effect making them a continuous surface. Also your intense speed is supposed to carry you through the intermittent tracts of pure sand. We began. This way lies madness, I thought, which became the caption for my experience between Sekgoma Pan and Kang.
The wind ripped out everything that was holding my hair in place, so I thought So be it. I was keeping my hair long for attractiveness’ sake, against every rule about bush living there is. The blast made consecutive thought impossible. I stood up in the blast, the back of my shirt blown out taut like a turtleshell, and sang the Marseillaise. Faster! I frequently murmured. Denoon is the only non-French person I ever met who knows all the verses of the Marseillaise. He also knew other anthems, and specialized in ones from minor countries. He thought anthems were hilarious, as a genus. He thought occupations should have anthems. For chefs there could be one called La Mayonnaise. He did a hilarious English version of the Boer anthem, Die Stem, which I have on tape.
We stopped a few times before reaching Kang, once to pick up a hitchhiking young woman, a teacher, and to let all hands relieve themselves, and again when we hit deep sand outside Mabuasehube and the passenger-side door burst open and the teacher and the jack and the crank flew onto the road. The sand was soft, fortunately. She wasn’t hurt. The same or a slightly preceding jolt had cracked a carton of Daylight soap, so that bars of soap were distributed down the road behind us in a long array, The drivers were scrupulous, I must say. They climbed up high on the load to oversee us, the passengers, as we retrieved every spilled bar, and were very encouraging with their shouts and cries. This was our main rest break.
There was a moment when it looked as though getting out of the sand might be a problem. The breakdown kit, when it was extricated, surprised us by containing only a spare carburetor — no shovel, no sand mat of the absolutely reliable and time-tested kind they use all over the Sahel, no first aid kit. In point of fact, it wasn’t a spare carburetor but rather one that had given out sometime in the past.
Apparently our drivers would get us out through sheer experience. I was told how long they had successfully been driving this route, and it was years and years. The adolescent must have begun driving as a tot. I hoped they were right, because I wasn’t happy at the prospect of camping right there if they were wrong. We would be okay: there was water, although drinking water was siphoned out for us with the same length of hose used to refill the gas tank from the spare petrol drum. I was asked why I was asking the most questions.
By a trick, which no doubt took years of life off the drive train, a violent shifting back and forth between forward and reverse, they got us out. So it was back to more of the same searing thing, Botswana passing in a sepia blur. Ultimately I was too parched even for mental singing. I had to give up on the private travel game of guessing when the glittering decor along the roadside, the cans and bottles and broken glass, would thin out and stop. It never stopped. My mind emptied.
I was exhausted but increasingly elated. This was travel at its purest. This was velocitude, the feeling of wellbeing associated with being in prolonged transit. I had no idea this was a faintly contemptible thing. For someone who had traveled everywhere, Denoon was peculiarly scathing on people who liked to travel. Of all the enthusiasms, the one for sheer travel was the one he claimed to find the most boring. You could rarely if ever get a travel buff to tell you one thing of interest, he would say. They can tell you the names of the places they’ve been and the number of places they’ve been. If you’re lucky they can tell if someplace was fabulously cheap or criminally expensive. The quintessence of it was something Robert Louis Stevenson wrote, to wit, I travel not to go anywhere but to go, which was imprinted, fittingly enough, on the paper the Banana Republic wrapped your purchases in. Nelson was against recreational travel. It was his puritanism. If your work compelled you to travel, that was fine. Then you could enjoy it, presumably. But he hated tourism and thought people should stay home and make their own backyards interesting enough to hold their attention. There was something about Denoon not realizing he was having his cake and eating it too in this connection that drove me to distraction. He wasn’t a good sport about confronting it, either, or not at first.
The roar stopped and we were in Kang. Day was done. It was abrupt. I felt like one of those disciples of Gurdjieff who demonstrated the depth of their servitude by freezing in midcourse of whatever action they were performing, at Gurdjieff’s command, not excluding when they were running from the back of a stage straight at the audience. Naturally many of them sailed into the orchestra pit in marvelously frozen postures, crashing down triumphantly among the chairs and music stands.
The moon was up. We were under the wings of a beautiful tree, or a tree whose stasis seemed beautiful. I was still vibrating and still a blur as I got my gear together and set off to find shelter with the nuns at a mission oddly called, as I understood it, Mary, Star of the Sea.
The Sisters
Kang has douceur. The village is very dispersed, but the heart of it is under the canopy of a healthy acacia grove in which lots of the trees are lordly mature specimens of the umbrella and cloud genuses. The red aloes were up. At one time Kang was a government camp, and there is still a handful of government officers posted there who are typically away hunting or attending conferences or on leave, which doesn’t bother the Bakgalagadi farmers and herders who populate Kang. The dominant tribes tease and look down on the Bakgalagadi as hopeless rustics only one step above the absolute bottom dogs, the Basarwa. Sometimes in the most unimaginably remote spots in Africa you find a bemused lakhoa staying for years, unable to leave, gripped by the particular genius loci. I could conceive that happening in Kang. The atmosphere is drowsy and floral. Underfoot is fine dark-grayish sand, soft, almost a talc, overlaid with a lattice of some vine resembling trailing myrtle, with small tough white blooms you hate to step on. You have a silence decorated by occasional goatbell and cowbell sounds. All the housing is in the old style: the male and the common rondavels have trimmed thatch and the female houses have loose, weeping thatch. The people are ragged and the place is poor, but there is a sense that things are being seen to. Kang is not demoralized. The brush fencing around the lolwapas is kept tight.