Glory Ho

At the market that morning, there was nothing special for sale. It was Goodwill in the shape of a shoe horn along the lake. Fourth-hand dresses and Old Navy sweatshirts and shiny department store shoes minus the box on blankets. Frowning vendors sold tough-skinned tomatoes. Very occasionally a car would roll by entirely too fast and send dust into everyone’s eyes and nostrils. At the waterside were uneven rows–dozens of faded blue, green and magenta dug out canoes atop Lake Bunyonyi. It was part of everyone’s commute. They sat parked, empty, humming to themselves between the reeds and up against the shore. The rafia once wound tightly around their owner’s goods had now fallen away creating an accidental crow’s nest in each cradled space.

We’d taken our own out earlier that week from Crater Bay successfully avoiding the “mzungu corkscrew”, the typical circle-turning which occurs when tourists attempt to steer boats made by someone other than a camping gear company. In the lake, we became anonymous. It was only the lilipads and their flowers which stared up at us from the surface. Only the hills rolling around us, scaping themselves, who refused to look away. All the textures, at first glance, indicate a golf-course kind of development. Something done with great purpose and investment. But it was the unspoken custom of 150 banana, bean and maize farmers which created this quilt with twenty seven different shades of green. At any moment, I expected the scene to morph into solid colors and shrink up next to a word, just like a logo. Around us, the islands curved and wandered, like a thousand sleeping, sprawling giants in a shallow pool. Each slope a different scene. Mothers bathing their babies, volunteers teaching African orphans how to swim, farmers hoeing the earth.

Now we were grounded, gazing out into their highway. And so were twenty to thirty African men along the shore. Something was up. They were watching a boat of six men a hundred yards from shore. They were going far too slowly, we realized, because they were dredging the lake. Last night, a man had drowned.

But how could you live on a lake and not know how to swim?

I’d known how to swim as long as I could remember. But what does it really take to survive in the open  water? Not exactly swimming. It’s not about slicing skillfully and swiftly through the black and blue darkness. It’s about staying afloat while you call for help. About treading water. I suppose it’s about the absence of panic.

I know. I know. I’m sick of the metaphors too. But they just keep floating to my surface.

Someone stop me.

But seriously, when my suitcase fell out the back of the van last week (with my computer in it), it was panic which took the situation to a deep, hellish level. And scrambling to the other end of the spectrum, when we realized there was a mouse in our 5 x 5 room yesterday, it was my calm announcement: “I think there’s a mouse in our room.” which made it an unforgetable, but fun adventure.

Could it be possible that life is more about the absence of panic than the wisdom of what to do next?