Baron von FlyBeak

I’m sure it’s not possible to explain the last few nights, but I’m going to try. I’ve come out of them a different person, and I think it’s worth at least trying to share.

It all started with a storm. The rainy season is finally here and it’s kicking all kinds of ass. Roof ass, dirt-road ass, my ass, tree ass, and (most applicable to this story) baby owl ass. Coming to school the morning after this asspocalyptic storm, I met two children in the road having fun— which is never a good sign. They were dragging around what appeared to be a cotton ball tied to a string. They said the storm the night before had blown it down. “Give me this!” I thought on the inside of my head. “Semre mi Anyifu!” is what I said outside of my head.

Having been towed around on its cotton ball face, the guy was a little worse for the wear, but his inner, sleepy nocturnal beauty chopped off my ability to not love this creature. “I shouldn’t, I can’t take this home,” was my first thought. “I wonder what I’ll name it…” was my second.

The little guy, who I soon dubbed Erol and nicknamed Baby Beak, wasn’t as healthy as I would’ve liked at first. I got him on a Thursday and, distressingly, had to leave my village almost immediately for the weekend. I left him with a student to care for, and, morosely, assumed he would soon be in a hole next to the baby deer and baby chameleon I’ve tried to save. My morbid baby graveyard.

So my excitement was understandably boundless when I returned Sunday evening and a naked child ran up to me saying, “Anyifu amua O bana!” Which is always good to hear, right?!

From what I gathered the kids had thrown it up into the attic of their house and it spent several nights wrecking shop and tearing all the bats up there into bite-sized bats. So I went to investigate with an ever-growing army of naked child soldiers. A naked child went up into the dark attic and came down still naked-- but with an owl! “Momo-yo!” I remember saying to the naked child.

Night 1:

The guy didn’t fly that well, but he still had managed to wing his way onto the handle of my bike parked in the corner of the living room. The sun had given up on the day and the eyes of my new boarder were starting to sludge their way open. He reminded me of waking up in the early a.m. when I was little to go hunting. “Jaaared… Jaaaaaaared… let’s go kill baaaaambi.” And goodness knows Baby Beak was in a hunting mood when he woke up.

I had engaged in my ritual evening wash- my back porch is relatively secluded, and it’s there I disrobe and gleefully splash water out of a bucket onto my dirty (that’s not a tan) bod. My dirty bod was just starting to glisten in the moonlight when I heard the most unearthly, “SSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS.” It was Baby Beak screaming inside. Luckily I was wearing my Battle Suit (the nude) so I confidently strode into my living room to investigate this new sound. It was mayhem.

I keep a tight ship, you understand? Dirt on my floor bothers me. My clothes are kept folded. So the sight of a swarm of bats possessing the inner sanctum of my house rankled me. Where the bats came from, why they would pick the only night a predator had inhabited the room to come, and where are my pants, were all questions that I quickly dispatched. Now was a time for being bold, not think-y.

Team Human and Owl:

Weapon of choice: Broom (+3 range, +2 agility, +4 style: it’s pink)

Teammate: Fledgling Owl (+30 death talons, +25 razor beak, -2000 Doesn’t know how to hunt)

Vs.

Team BATtle: (information unavailable due to shield of pure evil)

After the feathers/vile-leathery-wings settled, there were three casualties- two bats and my sanity. I eviscerated a bat and laid it as an offering in front of Erol. His antics during the fight had been restricted to crazy hopping, swooping past my head to knock over all my candles, and that insane hissing, but I decided he still deserved some of the spoils.

Night 2:

I was a bit worried about Baby Beak. He hadn’t touched the bat and I was wondering if he’d actually eaten at all in the last week or so since I’d had him. Somehow he learned how to fly like a pro in the middle of the night and increased his elevation to reside on a shelf above my back door. There’s an interesting Lebanese man in my village right now (Shaalti Massoud, a famous Oud player that’s touring Africa for giggles) and when I ran into him down near the river we had a conversation something like this:

Me: “Hey, cool technicolor green snakes wrapped around your wrist.”

Not Me: “Thanks, wanna touch them?”

“Yeah, what kind are they? I’ve got a baby owl. Wanna come over and see it?”

“I don’t know what kind. I don’t think they’re poisonous though. We should feed them to your owl.”

“That’s definitely the best idea I never would have had. Let’s do it.”

Fast forward to midnight. I’m hunkered down. Literally, I’m as hunkered as I’ve been in my life. A pubescent owl is screaming back and forth across my parlor, nearly extinguishing the sole burning candle after every frenetic pass. Two snakes are leashed to a chair in the middle of the floor, twisting together into the strangest green ball. A frog hops through the scene, sure he’s stumbled into a carnivorous hell. The night is a long one.

Do you see the feast I’ve gathered and set before you, my Baby Beak? Trust your instincts! HUNT.

Total failure. The night/early morning ends with me holding a peeved owl, force feeding him fish morsels and dripping an oral rehydration solution into his extremely sharp beak. The snakes I released the next day and the frog was never seen again.

Night 3: The Finale: Not with a bang, but with a whimper

He’d been sleeping all day while I was at school teaching. His torpor was more than entertaining and endearing during the daylight hours. He hadn’t really been becoming active till well after dark. Reclining on my back veranda watching the slow-glow of a dying day to my left and a percolating storm on my right, the strangest feeling happened to my head. If you’ve had an owl strafe past you and take a little piece out of your shoulder with its talons, you know the feeling I’m talking about. “Since when did Baby Beak turn into Baron von FlyBeak???” The thing took off like a real ace into the thick jungle that climbs the hill behind my house. I spent some time trying to track him down, all the while mindful that it was in the same area where I’d let my prisoner snakes go earlier that day. His “SSSSSSSSSS” became fainter though, and I decided I’d fully rehabilitated him in a week and he was going off to tell the other owls of my kindness.

That’s my baby owl story. Sorry I took so long to tell it, but I’ve got a lot of time during these computer classes I teach to write. The combination of the solar panels that UNDP donated to my school and my recent acquisition of a mobile modem has brought the power of internet into my swampy village. I figured I’d use the WWW for what it was meant for—frivolous rambling.

Snails

Snails don’t have hands. Can’t you imagine how much trouble they’d be in if they did? They feel danger and pull back inside, divorcing the world for the safety of their swirled, calcareous shells. How comfortable it must be in there—where threats are reduced only to clicks and scratches on their walls as they embrace themselves, layer on top of layer. Now, give that snail hands and its trouble starts. Danger is coming, but it’s holding on to something it’s spent energy to approach and eat—it’s invested. There’s no room for two in the singular safety the snail enjoys, so it exposes itself and holds the connection while its hand is chewed, pecked, or smashed off. It’s a snail so the hand grows again, and, inexorably, danger comes again. The hand grips tighter this time, that first want mixed now with frustration and defiance. Another hand lost.

How many repetitions of this predictable show play out before the snail stops investing? How many times can you invest and fail before your hands stop reaching out?

Humanity isn’t defined by the opposable digit with which you can so efficiently manipulate your environment, or by the bipedal manner with which you move toward food, shelter, or a mate. You’re not able to weigh humanity on a scale against the tenants of a government or an exclusive religion, and a monument or structure can hardly be said to be a bottle for it. Humanity is a verb. Not a stagnant noun, but a kinetic reaching to form connections—pulling and supporting. Being intangible precludes it from being destroyed, but doesn’t prevent inhumane actions.

A decade past, during the war in my current country, pregnant mothers were eviscerated, their intestines used as ropes to cordon off roads—but not before bets were placed on the sex of the unborn baby that was torn out of the mother. Nails were driven through the genitals of village elders and they were given the choice to tear themselves and escape, or be shot through the head when their captors returned. After watching their families murdered, fathers were forced to rape their daughters and then had both hands cut off to make it harder to kill themselves.

It’s absurd to think horror can diminish humanity in the least though. It’s connections not only streamed around the depravity of that war, but through it. I’m incredibly humbled to work with one Rev. L. J. Bokarie at my school. During that difficult wartime, he took in twins whose mother had died in childbirth. Traditionally seen to have bad spirits that killed their mother’s, they’re usually abandoned by their families. When his village was attacked, the babies were taken to hide in the jungle. The soldiers pursued them and the babies were smothered to death because their cries were leading the soldiers to the hiding villagers.

Rev. Bokarie took in three more orphans after that, and each, one by one, eventually died in the war from disease or brutality. How could someone do that? Any animal would fold after that much painful conditioning. Put your hands in your pocket. Give up on connecting.

Humanity is what reaches out, over and over, to connect, to pull, to support—even when horror repeatedly burns your hands. Don’t be a snail.

Getting There

I went mining in my foot earlier this evening. I think tweezers were called for, but I chose the more rugged, traditional blade. Now on the back porch, laptop in lap and clean water in hand, I can finally put two thoughts together without the distraction of infection’s signature throb. The red, setting sun is turning the ointment globbed on my foot into a sangrial re-run of just twenty minutes ago when Knut poked his head in to look at my scarlet foot before trotting off in his own unaffected way. I’m afraid living with me the last several years has undermined his faith in our specie’s competence.

By the way, it’s good I can string thoughts together again. The Peace Corps gave me plenty to think about earlier when they sent me my official Close of Service date, July 30^th—exactly three months from today. I have a stylish escape planned from Sierra Leone via Cairo, Luxor, Giza, Bangkok, Ko Phi Phi, Patayeh, and Seattle, but for now I’m more concerned about how to hold the door open for my replacement volunteer—whoever that might be—while I bow out. I have vague sketches in my mind of presenting a cola nut to the paramount chief, end-of-year events with the school staff, and giving away everything in my house that won’t fit in the two bags I’m taking stateside. Three months is a while still, but I had sad-stirrings when I picked up my little friend, Sunday, and thought about three months and one day from now.

I’m sure I’ll be ready to escape from the rainy season when the time comes though. Signs that the dry season is crackling its last are too obvious to miss. The mangos dripping off every tree are burning orange like feeble imitations of autumn leaves, and even tonight as the evening’s slow glow dies to my left, the phrenetic lightning of a faux-storm is flashing on my right. The rainy season always sends out feeler clouds, like a pipe gurgling before it spews out that first dusty water.

My nights have been hacked-up episodes of Masterpiece Theater lately with all the dreams the warm weather has been giving me. The fruit bats are having fun with my sleep too, knocking mangos down from the higher branches so the snik-snik-snap-womp of their falling wakes me up from old college classes, drags me away from flirtatious encounters on a sunset bridge, or interrupts a rehearsal for a musical I’ve somehow ended up in. I can’t complain too much though, I ran into one of the volunteers from my staj recently who was in Freetown solely to escape his own sleeping problems-

“Hey, what’s up? What brings you to town?”

“Oh… just had to get out of the village. Having problems with the goats.”

                      

“…ya say, goats?”

Apparently the goats in that village engage in extreme nocturnal copulation just outside the volunteer’s bedroom, preventing any kind of meaningful sleep. Pens were built. Town meetings were held. Still the goats loudly found ways to carry out their amorous campaign of sleep-depravation. Apparently one can only take so much of a goat sex soundtrack before breaking. Move over Waterboarding.

So because nothing more normal than raucous goat romping has happened lately, let me explain how I battled with a beast the other night:

I mean, there I’m laying, my aforementioned cacophony of dreams keeping me busy, when I’m quite literally clawed out of slumber by Satan’s lap pet. “Is that innumerable sulfurous stalagmites falling on my shoulder?” Is my waking thought. “Ohhhh… good. I found the Headless Horseman’s gruesome head.” Is my next thought after clicking on the flashlight I always sleep with, hand-ready.

Cross a carnivorous squirrel with a dead rat, give it the face of a road-killed hampster, glue tufts of fur on its whip-like tail, then paint discordant gray and white patterns over its rotted body—this is my foe. Are those clusters of cutlasses? No, just hell’s teeth.

The ensuing battle is on-par with the fabled bear/shark showdown the world will never be fortunate enough to behold. Thankfully I sleep in the full nude, so I’m already wearing my Battle Suit. The Beast’s hiss is answered by my war shrieks, it’s infinite, boring eyes deflected by the pillow I hold up as a shield.

Not being able to climb sheer walls, I remain ground-bound as the Beast leaps and postures, dodging my hurled shorts and t-shirts I had the foresight to leave laying on my bedroom floor. Scrambling away from my onslaught, the Beast was fortunate enough to find an open window and escape, giving one last toxic scream before disappearing into the dark maw of night. “Victory?” is the trembling thought that eventually lulls me back into a fitful sleep.

And because the shower (I try every now and then) just opened up downstairs in the hostel, let me conclude this post with something completely unrelated. These are some wise words my principal used to advise students at a recent morning assembly:

“If you only knew the meaning of the word ‘Marriage’ you would never desire this! Be you ugly or handsome, marriage only makes you become more ugly. You are forcing your face into unnatural positions and beating on it trying to figure out where you will find food to feed your children, where you will find money to fill your debts. And then from all this worrying you get Hypertension! And then you die! This marriage has killed you.”

Not that getting married and having a pair of goats tied up outside was ever an end-dream for my life, but I’m glad I’m learning what pitfalls to avoid when I go home in three months.