A Weekend at The End of the Beginning

The beginning is over. It hit me like a physical forcefield the other day, sitting on the front porch of the office, drinking tea and talking to Neil about our upcoming assignments. I knew it intensely and deeply, that the beginning section of this journey is over, that we are into the soft underbelly of the middle, in the muck of thickening relationships and assignment deadlines. Our last two weeks have been full of homework, playdates, drinking beer on a beautiful hill, planning for future adventures, and stumbling our way deeper into the Swahili language.  In the middle of it, I spent a glorious weekend doing many of my favorite things with some of my favorite new people in my life. 

Saturday, 7:10am. Full of peanut butter, black tea, and the promise of an adventure, I step out of my house’s gate and walked towards the bar. I see Griffin and the bar owner/new friend Sebastian milling around waiting while Sebastian’s dog Max fends off advances from the ever-pregnant stray dogs that roam around the village. I catch up with Griffin, exchange Swahili greetings with Joseph, our guide, and Sebastian, and the other friends of theirs tagging along. 

Half an hour later Ryan shows up with his homestay brother, not a sock, closed-toed shoe, or water bottle between them. After Griffin outfits Ryan with socks, at least, and our final stragglers arrive into the dull yellow morning, we take off, a cloud of dust enveloping us as we walk up the road towards the large, ant-infested, grassy hill that overlooks the village and sits in the shadow of Mt. Meru. 

Up and down we go, through a dusty ravine, each of us waiting around the corner of the eroded valley wall, waiting for the person in front to pass and for the dust to settle. Soon, my teeth and gums are coated in grit, my snot dyed a dirty gray color, dirt working its way into my toenails and into my nail beds, yet to escape days later. 

We walk up through a forest of tall, brown trees with no undergrowth, dodging Max sniffing every corpse in the road’s gutters. We walk through a village, waving to motorcycles and kids, then take a hard right, following our guide through rolling hills of corn, Meru looking down at us through the thick air. We wander through more villages, dirt roads spreading into “main streets”, hop over fences to criss-cross fields, stop for water, candy, and peanuts in the last village, and turn our faces from countless dust storms kicked up in safari jeeps’ wake. After more miles, more road, more hills, and more dust, we arrive at the training forest. The boys and I discuss movies the whole time, ones that we love, ones that bore us, and watch Max bound ahead and come back to us, a yoyo on a string.

I anticipate a sense of peace inside the forest, a lack of people, real trails, protected land. Instead, after a short break during which Sebastian bargains the value of a goat Max attacks, we forge on on a road identical to the one we step in one, the boundary invisible between the two invisible. 

The sides of the road teem with life–we pick bushberries, hollow like raspberries but seedy like strawberries, the bushes releasing clouds of small yellow butterflies as we eat our fill. Monkeys screeching above us, hopping from treetop to treetop, stern Meru looking on all the while. Cultivated fields rise on hills above us as Mamas walk by with whole trees chopped into stakes balanced on their heads, motorcycles weaving between us. Broccoli, impossibly blue, growing beneath palms in small plots. People everywhere, tromping along in rainboots, growing something beautiful. 

Miles on, we turn right again, onto a steep trail into a ravine. Suddenly we are thrust into the jungle, that wet dripping mass of green life closing in on us as we descend. Dust and rocks slipping beneath our feet, we drop into the river and head upstream. Hundreds of feet of smooth rock, ferns, moss, and vines drape downwards, beckoning us forwards towards the water source. Our guides show us where waterfalls fall during the wet season, how high up the water would be, as we hop across the river a dozen times, tired calves shaking. 

I hear it before I see it, a foot-wide cascade of water tumbling one hundred, two, feet above us, down into a small, shallow pool. I push forward, clinging to boulders and avoiding damp feet, until I emerge into a clearing. Nearly 360 degrees of carved out cliff, dripping with plants, surrounds us. The waterfall in the center is small but powerful, pummeling the rocks beneath it. 

I strip off my skirt and wade in, shocked by the dirt embedded in my feet and the sudden chill of the mountain water. No deeper than my knees, I lie down and push forward, familiar feelings nearly overwhelming me. Deep breaths, floating staring up at the sun-specked water shooting down at me. Waterfalls are hard places to relax, like whitewater, too much power to pretend water is anything other than a being trying to hurt you. I stand beneath the stream, strong pellets pelting my head, feeling clean for the first time in weeks. I sit, hugging my knees, toes numb, unwilling, unable to get out of the water.

Afterwards, we share sweet bananas and dark chocolate, and look around quietly. Nothing like a water feature, much like a great meal, to make a group of chatters fall silent. We sit for a while as tourists and locals stream in, taking family pictures and gasping at the cold on their fingers as they stream their hands through the shallow pool.

Too soon, always too soon, we turn back, returning the way the tourists came, straight up a set of stone stairs zigzagging up the ravine walls. At the top we rest, hands on knees, still lethargic from the cold water. Ryan and I share earbuds, listening to the chatter around us in one ear, my music in another. The way back is longer, with more twists through the forest and crossing back over the river further up–in the wet season, an impossible route. We ponder water, our new friendships, Max the dog. We walk a long time, a long way, through the training forest.

Eventually we loop back and begin the odyssey again in reverse, through the villages, now full of people in the middle of their days. Joseph buys us sugarcane on the side of the road, little boys hacking off chunks and handing it around to the group. I can’t bite into it, I’m not doing it quite right, I can’t cleave off huge chunks to chew on and spit out, I can’t do anything but let sugar juice drip down my chin. With your canines, Rayna, not your incisors, Sebastian says. I don’t think I’ve ever gotten tooth-specific advice, I reply. All the boys look on, the little boys giggle. Eventually I figure it out, but Ryan’s brother has to cut the outer layer off mine. The sugarcane is cool and sickly sweet on my tongue, the plant’s flesh hard and stringy when leeched of its sap. 

You fit in well with us, Ryan says, it’s clear you have brothers. I pocket the smile, refusing to let him see how much it means to me.

We stumble back to the bar and decide to walk on further, to meet our friends at the further bar, the promise of a cold beer more compelling than the idea of stopping. Another mile down the road, to a garden oasis where I instantly curl up on my side, stretch out my legs, and refuse to get up until sundown. We drink beers and talk about our days. The boys and I reminisce like the adventure isn’t still happening, like we aren’t still writing the story. 

I sleep hard that night, and wake early, and rest hard some more, reading in bed and massaging sore calves. 

Later, that next day, after frosting the purple cake with white icing spelling “happy birthday!”, after singing of Happy Birthday and crowning the birthday boy, Ryan’s brother, with a blue party hat, after a long talk with Dad, him telling me how proud he is that I’m seeing the good and the bad, taking it all in stride with my head on straight, after the first beer and the first two card games, me slowly coming back up for air after the clear, gasping water of a call home, we walk back up the hill. 

I run, handing my beer to Neil, wanting to feel my lungs gasping for air, wanting something to feel hard and sudden and immediate. I wait for them at the top, properly heaving, watching my new friends wind their way up this tall hill, golden haze of mountains in the distance, Meru behind me. Neil runs up after, two beers in hand, foam spilling out over his fingers. 

We sit, and we are immediately covered in ants. Refusing to let the bugs ruin the moment, Txuxa lights her cigarette, and Neil suggests that we say affirmations for each other. We go round in a circle and I can’t help from laughing, giddy from the beer, the cigarette smoke, the love I feel swelling in my heart at the top of this hill impossibly far from home. The odds we are all here, right now. The odds we all found each other. The odds we’ll ever know each other as deeply, as intimately as we know each other right now. The odds we’ll call each other on our 26th birthdays (Griffin's money is on no. Mine is, obviously, on yes). None of it matters, because here we are. Complimenting each other’s big brains. Each other’s capacity for curiosity, question asking, language learning, kindness. Speaking like we know each other’s deepest truths, like we didn’t meet one month ago, like in two months we’ll part ways. Speaking like we’ll be young forever, like we’ll always be able to hike 30km, run up this hill. Like our brains will always be this sharp and primed for adventure. Like we’ll always be as brave as we are right now. Like we’ll always be right here, in this moment. 

Eventually we move, the ants proving too much for our romanticism. Our next spot has just as many ants. The moment passes, the light fades. We all have to be home for dinner– we might all be tipsy, but these days we’re treated like we’re closer to eight than 21. Txuxa and Griffin walk first, hand in hand. Neil and I follow, tipping into each other, high on the intimacy of the moment. 

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On the right night, in the right light, when I step outside the house and hear the chickens, smell the woodsmoke, feel the crisp air at the end of a hot day, it feels like I could be home, at the tail end of a July night. In a way, I am home. In a way, I’ll always be home, right here, in the house behind the tall gate, between the stray dogs and the banana trees.