Life Lived Always and Necessarily In Detail

In her excellent collection of essays Teaching A Stone To Talk, Annie Dillard writes: “The point of going somewhere like the Napo River in Ecuador is not to see the most spectacular anything. It is simply to see what is there. We are here on the planet only once, and might as well get a feel for the place. We might as well get a feel for the fringes and hollows in which live is lived… and for the life that–there, like anywhere else–is always and necessarily lived in detail: on the tributaries, in the riverside villages, sucking this particular white-fleshed guava in this particular pattern of shade.”

I might have written these lines myself, about the shallow reefs, the coastal villages, slurping down coconut water in this particular pattern of shade under the palms here in Ushongo. Ushongo has felt like home more than anywhere else in Tanzania. The routines, the people, the food, the scenery have all settled into my soul in a way nowhere else has. It is this post I dedicate to the details that have stuck with me from this small and slow-moving place. 

To start, the food: the best versions of everything this country has to offer, salty beans and flaky chapati eaten in thatched roof huts, concrete floors rough with sand and dust, kids running amok, locals helping themselves and coming in and out to play pool or chat with the mama who runs the place. Our breakfast spot, almost too hot to sit and sip the scalding and delicious chai, syrupy sweet and spicy with ginger, but we stay anyways, for the muhoga, fried cassava that comes apart in your hands, warm hard boiled egg dipped in salt from a former ketchup bottle, the sweet, doughy mandazi, more flaky chapati, lightly vinegared salad. Our dinner spot where we’ve never paid the same amount twice, where the dada who runs the place giggles at our Swahili skills and wraps greasy chapati in newspaper for us to eat during morning data collection expeditions. The insanely perfect ice cream I ate outside one of the only air-conditioned spaces I’ve been in in this country, a tiny market tucked into the Muheza bus station, our one respite in the middle of our long days heading to and from Ushongo. 

The mornings, the best of which start with rain. One morning, heading out to collect data at six, Ryan and I were still opening our eyes as a downpour from the heavens swept across the sea. We could see it coming, all the way from India it seemed, speeding across the flat water until it was upon us, wiping clean layers of grime and sleep as golden light leaked out of the puffy, anvil-shaped clouds resting over Zanzibar. Gone as soon as it came, leaving calm gray water and the sun burning through, warming our wet heads. A dolphin leapt across the gray minutes later, and we saw a rainbow over the shore, arcing above the trees on the shoreline. 

The amphitheater of clouds itself is a character here, flat bottomed behemoths like mushroom clouds above faraway islands, dark wisps racing across the sky, golden clouds looking solid enough to walk across, all the way over the ocean. Somehow all of the clouds look so flat and far here, like they’re hovering over some tangible faraway place that we’re just looking at, ourselves unmoored and without land, no clouds above us. It feels like staring at a painting, like being trapped within one. 

The thunderstorm that woke me too early after a late night listening to American music and playing pool at the bar, dancing into our mojito straws, the loudest, longest rumbling thunder I’ve ever heard, traveling all that distance, followed by another downpour, filling our shoes on the porch and dripping off the uneven roof for hours. Rain that feels like letting out a held breath, the temperature tangibly dropping, pressure releasing, in this place that often feels pent-up with latent humidity. I walked onto the porch, peaking out at a flat gray sky, no sign of the drama taking place in the airwaves. I saw no lightning; I went back to bed. 

Coconut shells like a mountain of skulls piled on the dirt road between Pangani and Muheza. Reminiscent of images of buffalo skulls piled in the American West, post-settlers. Another pile further down of fertilizer from the shells, fragrant and black-brown, sights whipping by the window behind the grey dust swirling through the air inside. 

The motorcycle rides to the village and back, our rafiki Sam driving fast on the rocky road he knows like the back of his hand, our stuff strapped behind us, racing back after long days on the bus, feeling my body stretch back out as wind whips my face. Music in earbuds, one headlight in front of us, Milky Way draped above, trees on either side. Sunrise trips back to Pangani to catch the bus, the sky a milky pink, cows not yet blocking the road, kids running alongside us on their way to school. Returning here, seeing Sam and smiling by his side on the ferry; the rice donut I bought early one morning on the Ushongo side of the river; the delicious, perfect apple I ate on the ferry our first time. 

Each day is a day full of details, the same ones, state changes, rinse repeat. Wake up late, read in bed. Check the sea from the front porch– still there, alright, glowing in the flat light of late morning. Breakfast in town, a long swim out to the boat, floating in the stillness. The bulk of our day spent at the restaurant, staring out at the sand and salt as we work on crossword puzzles, our research projects, chatter. Lunch is a splurge meal, fried prawns and curry over rice, side of cooked vegetables. All of us unable to tear our eyes from the blue expanse in front of us. In the afternoon, when the waves pick up, a nap in a hammock, more reading. Usually a run, to the end of the cove and back, and another dip, fighting out past waves to get to Seawolf, the boat where we’re all learning how to do flips. Flips till sunset, a quiet swim in during “shark hour”. A shower, sun-warmed water on sun-warmed skin, and then a walk into town for the simple meal I crave every evening by sundown. Cards at the bar, pool, most nights ending in us splayed on some elevated surface or another, listening to music with our eyes closed, breathing in the night air that once felt so foreign, feeling together. 

Specific nights have their own details, too, like the night we watched the boys play pool and the restaurant employees let me DJ, switching back and forth between the early 2000s songs ever-present here and the music we like, too. The night we had a fire on the beach and played games for hours, trading back and forth between Seven Up, Simba Says, Yeehaw, and Ninja until Ryan and I dissolved into the sand to play word games. Seven faces lit up by orange firelight from below, sand slipping into the firepit among the hunks of driftwood smoldering as we danced and jumped. Nights at John’s bar up the hill, asking questions about the reefs and drinking cold, cheap beer. Swimming and playing in the bioluminescence, that starlight seeping through salt water under clouded skies. 

The physical spaces stick with me, too, like the bungalow where I’ve lived with Sam, and then Ryan, and then Sam and Ryan as my almost-month here progressed. It’s practically outdoors, musty-smelling and always covered in sand despite our best efforts, slightly-stinky warm water from a sporadic shower head, a bathroom with no walls that always smells like the head on a boat. I’ve slept some of my best sleep in this country here, with swells crashing just a few feet from the door, the knowledge of another perfect day on the horizon, the possibility of seeing anything when I step down and out from under the overhang to check the sea state in the morning. The bungalow I’ve returned to at all hours, creeping in in the middle of the night, smelling of beach bonfires and salt, stepping through laundry hanging over bug nets and half-walls, giggling with my friends in the darkest hours of the night. The bungalow we thought gave Neil bedbugs–even the infinite mosquito bites, the jellyfish stings nursed in these four walls, the grubby sheets my mother would never stand for, these are details I won’t soon forget.

Snorkeling in the marine reserve, finished with collecting data for good, after a morning of play– human pyramids, marco polo, digging each other into the sand, chicken fights in the gatorade water. Sandy fruit eaten in the shade. Diving down to follow the huge blue fish, the lionfish, the neon-colored schools as they traverse their way through coral, alive and dead, lungs burning, cooler down there than at the top, where the golden-hour light shines through at a 45o angle and spreads, diffusing into the dark alleyways between corals. 

I am considering every detail of walking around this small town, the chess games outside the one dinner place we never tried, the men in bathing suits and flip flops hovering over a pool table, motorcycles parked outside. The kind woman who sells us water and compliments our Swahili through a barred window. The smell of fish at the market in the village, scales falling into buckets full of water, the sight of spears dripping with octopus, red fish. The wooden sailboat we took to collect data, water dripping in through the cracks in the driftwood-smooth gunwales. The fisherman at the tiller, taking a pack of cigarettes out of his Taqiyah as we crossed to the island, blue smoke floating through the cool early morning. The people, their habits, their details. Getting a feel for the place.

They don’t add up to much, these details, no earth shatteringly beautiful scenes or peak-of-life moments, but they still have meaning. Much too soon, this place and moment that has become so meaningful to me will disappear into the mist, this town won’t remember the wazungu who took it by storm for a week, new SIT students will arrive or won’t, the tides will go in and out, the people will get married and move away or not, the businesses will change hands. In a year, a Chinese-built superhighway from Kenya to Mozambique will be finished only a couple of miles from the village, and then everything will change, this quiet place no longer a three-hour bus ride on dirt roads away from everything, but instead tucked in along the way to everything, beckoning tourists on their way to big cities. I could return, so long as I understand that this will be a place I’ve never been.

It seems all these posts are destined to end the same way, with an expression of gratitude for all of it. Tomorrow, early, I will leave the bungalow and get on Sam’s motorcycle for the last time, and leave Ushongo for, in all likelihood, the last time. I am almost too sad to have fun today, to swim our beers out to the boat for more flips and late-afternoon sunshine, but I will, and as I do it I will know that this sadness comes from a place of immense gratitude, that I am lucky to have found this place, and that, even it forgets about me, I certainly won’t forget about it. Thank you Ushongo, thank you rafikis, thank you to the fringes and hollows, thank you to the sweet, salty sea. Onwards.