at the hotel sterling, we had one house computer, shared among all the volunteers. this meant there was enough time to read emails, not enough to respond to them. since i have returned to the states and a slightly different situation, i have been on a disgusting interweb binge, first catching up on old emails, then reading friends blogs, then moving on to imdb, checking for new facts about chuck norris, anagramming carbamazepine, researching the origins of rochambeau. it is a terrible thing to happen to a human being, the best remedy i have found to halt the descent into this abyss is to get up and run to boone park, and mount the reliable swingset. when i am swinging the clouds blow off, and limpid fewer thoughts come into focus. i can think about where i just was, what the experiences meant, where i am now, what is essential and what was, what happened, what next. distillation is the issue of suspension. after the angusta and the augusta, there is the dvd bonus material: the outtakes, the alt/misc, the odds and ends – all of the colorful memories that are still floating around, like intransigent cards in a gin rummy hand. where to dump all that stuff? imbuildingarockwall seemed the obvious choice. just because as it happened, said outtakes consisted of: wheelbarrows, sledgehammers, zwabbering, overloaded motorvehicles, bilingual rap battles, fire poi, goats, found obamamania, magnificent sunsets, aggressive haircuts, and lots and lots of mud. all of these labels i identified immediately as the provenance of imbuildingarockwall (i have no idea why, but the association was as obvious to my intuition as it was obscure to conscious rationalization). then there was the bicycling, especially all the bicycling over roads that werent on the map, all the bicycling over roads that were on the map but werent actually there, and all the bicycling that wasn't actually bicycling: it was carrying the bike on my shoulders up a rocky 25 degree goat path. everyone knows that a lot of bikes and biking show up on imbuildingarockwall, so along with my gut feeling on all the other stuff, this blog seemed definitely the right place. but the real clencher was: the rockwall building.
on the north side of gonaïves is a prominent brown mountain, and that is where i found the rockwall builders. one thing you can say about it is that it hasn't any trees, which accounts for its colour. its a curious mountain in several respects. a visitor will be drawn to the limestone cliff cut into the slope near the northeastern flank of the mountain, the approach to which takes you through some winding picaresque neighborhoods, mud walls and tin roofs, passages of garbage and chickens, rockier mazes picked through by the goats who seem to roam freely and even aberrantly, amazingly having no issue with whom they belong to. if you slow down in a gully that gets more narrow and sticky, a dweller among the scree will call and ask if you aren't a lost white person, and you can tell her you want to see the rocks. the woman will indicate you should go that way, which is a steep winding slope, marked out by some goats browsing among unlikely thickets of acacia & plastic. certain boulders present limestone of an outstanding quality. the cliff itself is largely broken by cactus seams and hollows and slim perches where even more goats are sunbathing and waiting for more nourishment to develop in the environment. the cliff is not too promising for climbing due to a lack of clean steep faces. but it is a fun ramble-scramble cliff to pretend you are sir edward whymper on, and have just lost two of your team to the unforgiving justice of the mountain when your rope snapped on a sharp edge and they plummeted into the howling abyss. it might have even been severed on one of these cactus branches, because those are sharp motherfXrs and god knows what that rope was made of.
you turn around and you can see how the brown mountain spreads out in a pattern of three ridges, and you can see rock walls in tiers one above the other up the steep slopes strung between the ridges. what is surprising is the colorful crawling insect forms in the distance that resolve as not only people, but large, concentrated groups of people, not only on the mountain, but on the steepest and highest slopes on the mountain. i discern two such groups of perhaps a couple dozen each, past the middle ridge i can see into a gully where a third large group traverses the horizontal rock bands that score it.
hot sun, no shade, no trees.
a. cohorts of slow penitents in the helical progress of purgatory.
b. scorched wilderness, azazel into which draws of their town the convoys of secondrate goats.
c. backcountry skiers in the first half of a budweiser commercial.
d. what is this are these folk, so many, and so high on the brown mountain?
...and their story had better be good, as i half had in mind to attain a something solitude for a couple hours as i walked up the mountain. the closer perspective, meanwhile, revealed the tiers of rock walls weren't for to buttress an access road, but rockwalls for rockwalls sake, an erosion prevention project. they barred the earth from bowling right downtown. they barberpoled the left bowl and the right bowl. to the left were promising looking boulders. i took to the left.
i came to the people among the rock walls. they said salut and thought i was hysterical. i said hello and passed them, walking toward the larger boulders. the people on top of the rock walls were building the rock walls. they had strings and their straightness was masterful. i saw no bladder: did they labor all day, as it appeared, without any water? as curious onlooker i thought of offering to help, it would have been a fine ploy to stay a while and watch, but you know how those situations are: look at how straight their walls are with the aid of the line, and they might have a way that they do things. on top of that there's the language barrier. i thought of the curious locals who would accumulate at our worksites and stare dumbly for hours in bored fascination at the blancs shuttling mud, and how it would irk the volunteers, especially the newly arrived, that they would watch and watch for durations so extensive without helping, and almost always refuse when offered the opportunity . i was tempted, but prevented by a sense of shame, to accumulate a few feet away and stare dumbly for a spell, watching the rockwall builders at their work. thats a lie: it was no decency or sense of shame that prevented me: it was knowing that any curiosity i had about them was a poor match for theirs about me, and that wallbuilding would be with all dispatch suspended to allow for a very lengthy, monopsonistic interview. it was so hot! so dry! i was not in the mood for such a thorough going over. i was already thirsty myself just from walking the mountain, and i wanted to see about these boulders up ahead. how do you do? i would say to the workers. so surprising to behold, a white person, so far up on the brown mountain, but if they would ask i would just say: i'm going to look at the rock up there.
they turned out to be the sort of boulders that were just a little closer and therefore smaller than if they had been large enough to be of a good size for climbing when you saw them from a distance that you could not yet determine but had hopes it was not too slight. higher on the mountain a few were tall enough to climb on and i stopped for a looksee at a steep junglegymish thing.
i made one attempt in my sneakers before some assistants came around the corner and asked me what i was doing. i was climbing the rock. but why had i come up here to this rock? i was walking all over the mountain. i wanted to see the mountain. they didn't believe me. why did i want to climb the rock? i wanted to go to the top. you can go around this side. we'll show you. but i wanted to go up this way. i would fall and hurt myself. and indeed, there were prickly plants that endangered the landing, as they covered much of the mountainside. why did i pass all those people back there and not speak to them? i did, i said hello to them. which house was i going to? not to a house: through, over, around, but not to. they could show me to a house, its just around the corner. but i wasn't going to a house, and eventually they gave up and let me climb my rock. alas, i should have listened to them! up high on the mountain the limestone was a rusty color and it was that prickly texture, like coral. i took my shoes off to take advantage of some pockets, but i barely made it down to the base, so painful was the footing on the descent. miniscule to avoid the gauntlet of lances and thistles encroaching from every crevice were my steps, and slow my advance.
i was altogether impressed by the industry of the people building the rock walls and the extent of the rockwalls they had built. there was so much mud in the houses in the poor city! it was a pity if all those rockwalls were the right idea, but not enough.
***
the storm of the morning after battaile de vertieres day was the only rain i saw in gonaives. the most advance hodr volunteers had been there since the start of october and it was the first that they had seen. at twilight insubstantial clouds would gather and a breeze would strengthen into a wind, blowing from the east, from the mountains across the city and into the gulf. from the black mountains beyond which lay enneri and st michel de l'attalaye and couleuvres, but i had not explored them yet, and they were still an axiomatic presence whose farside was mystery. a solitary figure or a cocktail party of yabbering silhouettes would scramble onto the roof of the hotel sterling to watch the sun set and the sky clouds heat up over the point of land at the end of the bay. the wind would begin to calm down. before the gledes died, in a runaway victory over her dimmer counterparts, the smokingdeck star would race into view, and simultaneously, with twice the brilliance, the smoking deck planet, which must be by now the powerline pole planet, and whose identity i am not sure of. he was a palm below and at about 4:30 to the smokingdeck star when i arrived, at the full moon. he puzzled me because he wasnt so far to the south, and if i took him out of the picture, the smoking deck star appeared to be the head of a familiar origami creature who moonwalked across route 120 each night back home. i was slow to catch on to his game. he had been gradually narrowing the gap between himself and smokingdeck star. he had risen to her level and just passed to the left when a young quick moon went sailing right through the two of them during not many minutes one evening.
the electrical grid was not up until the first or second week of december, and until then the night was profoundly rich and the stars were crazy million clear. hanover had been all mizzly before i left, cold to discourage spending time outside at night, and lately a lot of getting ready to go crap had been keeping me in all the time. but in gonaives we lived outside because the night was pleasant and the rooms were hot and stuffy, the air was dry, the trees were not there, the skies were huge and cloudless: it was like discovering a tremendous inveterate curtain. it wasn't quite bishop, but it was uncanny to think you were witnessing this spectacle, clearer than that from any vermont farm, above a city of 300,000. if you went walking at night, there were the headlamps of the motorbikes, and the amber candles of the streetsellers, like a vigil of elves in a dark chapel, and a veil of near blackness. the barking chorus of blanc! blanc! that i heard during the day diminished to the occasional call of a kid who caught me in the right light at the right time, and sounded more hello? than gotcha!. from the apex of the roof, i would look down on the city below, and see a diamond of mild light in the middle distance on a field of true darkness extending in all directions: the walled confines of the minustah compound at the base of the brown mountain. since the balcony looked toward casseiopeia, you could see the tropical lunette only also from the ridge of the roof, across the garbage field, at the tip of the horse mountain where it prayed to the water: a tea kettle blooming over the horns of a Y. orion was soon in full season, rising at night fall, setting at dawn, sweeping enormous and fast around the penultimate lane, just inside the equator.
some times a dream fit or times when the close keen drone seized my head then would open my eyes to his progress, commanding the hours, and the shadows of mountains and seas, and hear the sounds of the night, the dogs and the songs and the cockcrows, and the huzzbizz of the miniscule mosquitoes infinitesimally numerous and invisible to my earhole, and their many tiny irritating nipneeps & pinches and bites at my face. the roof is concrete and very slanty but there is a narrow ridge at its apex tucked under the banked border wide enough for a mediumsized person to lie down with a conservative arrangement of limbs and leaning a little toward the restraint of the bank so as not to roll off the long pitch into the watertank wall.
the night i was in petionville i crossed paths with the santacruzans K&J who were on their way home from gonaives and they had brought mafia to the hotel sterling, and it had been immensely popular, and the volunteers played every night. unfortunately the mafia craze had ended since we arrived and the santacruzans had left and we only played one night while i was there. i was killed or voted out in the first round of every game, because vol lancelot had it in for me. in scattergories, which was played more often, mr X had it in for me.
the santacruzans also reported that there was a rule against sleeping on the balcony, that it was he, J, who had first ventured this sensible innovation, leaving the sweltering poorly ventilated crowded dormrooms to sleep in the fresh dry cool air outside. (many) others had followed suit, and the popularity of the practice led to its prohibition. volunteers, & especially not the triumvirate, rarely use the word rule. people arrive at the project whenever they arrive, and stay for a week to several months, so the volunteer population is always sliding. the rules are typically introduced once, when an issue arises, at a nightly meeting. new volunteers are greeted with a ten minute walk through & there is a heres the setup sheet posted, but many of the rules are spread by word of mouth. therefore there are rules in the hodr code to cover small details which typically dont come up, whereof most people are in excusable ignorance most of the time.
one night ref arthur was in a meeting at the un compound with other ngos, vol lancelot was i think in the states for a couple weeks, and so it fell upon merlin, referee emeritus, to conduct the nightly meeting. the nightly meeting proceeds in this order: salutations (usually only on tuesdays and fridays), field reports: each of the three or four trip leaders says things like "yeah we moved some mud, its a tough site, team worked really well, got two rooms left, day – daynahalf...yep." (unless newcastle andy speaks, who pauses for half a beat and says coolly: "smashed the granny out of it ... unbelievable ...") after field reports, review of the next days jobs. last of all will come signups for dinner dishes, lunch dishes, and housekeeping, and (mondays and thursdays) valedictions. but the heart of the meeting, following the job overview, is "meeting notes" a numbered list of agenda items added to the board by any volunteer during the previous 24 hours. merlin (in this case, but typically the ref) goes down the list and reads off the items, usually cryptic, telegraphic mnemonics, whose author comes forth to identify and explicate. sometimes these are just headsups about power or water usage or an IIBFID/IIYLIM type thing, dont sit on the tables, etc. in other less routine cases, a roundtable discussion ensues.
merlin once told me a funny story about our plastic patio furniture, which comprised a few dozen chairs which were for sitting on, & several small tables. he told me: you were sitting on one of the patio tables. you were doing your foot thing with some moleskin and white powder. and you were kind of staring into the sky: you were staring at the moon. (how could that be? i was supposedly sitting just outside the entrance to the computer room) so i asked you, robert, please dont sit on the table... & then i pulled over a chair. robert? hey, can you use the chair please? you got up, and you brought the chair over, and you sat back down on the table, propped your foot on the chair, & continued
