Standing Up on Salt and Water

I traveled over ten thousand miles to stand up on my first surf board.

A few of us took advantage of a mutual day off today and headed back to Bureh Beach.  For some of us, it will be our final trip to the coast of Sierra Leone, and to a beach that has been restorative, almost antidotal during our time here.  We piled into an old Range Rover and opened the windows as we sped away from the heaviness of our somber routine.  Today would have been Bob Marley's 70th birthday so a station out of Freetown was sprinkling some familiar reggae tunes between West African pop songs. We past villages once unpronounceable that have been since weaved into our new vernacular.  Mamama.  Masiaka.  Rogbere. We skirted through Ebola checkpoints that have been loosened in the past few weeks.  The roadside hawkers peddled their fares.  It is pineapple season now and the papayas hung like green testicles high above the thatched roof lines.  Augustine, our driver, pointed out that the decapitated palm trees I have often inquired about have died from being tapped incorrectly.  People here, as in other parts of Africa, tap their palm trees in order to make palm wine.  It is sweet and pungent if you drink it in the first day or two after it is tapped but if you wait longer it ferments and becomes acerbic. If you tap it too aggressively the palm tree loses too much of its essential fluid and dies.  The top falls off.  Palm tree trunks stick straight up on the landscape as we drive.  Now I know why.  It is all about keeping your fluids in balance, whether in the Ebola wards or in the palm trees.

Michael, the Australian who runs Australeone, greeted us as we arrived from the hammock that overlooked the soft shore.  He came to Sierra Leone about 10 years ago as part of the UN's war crimes tribunal from Australia.  The trials revealed so many atrocities committed during the civil war. His job was to capture it all as the court stenographer.  He would escape to Bureh Beach as often as he could.  He bought a little property along with a Sierra Leonean friend of his and has created a rustic group of wooden cabins and a thatched bungalow where you can sit and have some fresh fish or crab with coconut rice.  We ordered our food and walked over the the Bureh Beach Club next door.    Michael told us that a reporter from the New York Times recently wrote an article about the surf club (http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/11/world/no-moon-suits-just-trunks-and-the-healing-surf.html?_r=0).  Kids were already in the water drifting out on surf boards, laying belly down in waiting for a wave to catch.  Smaller kids were running and skiffing on smaller boards in the shallow surf.  As they laughed and ran, it was striking how this was the first time I had actually heard kids being kids, free from Ebola, free from working to sell bananas or peanuts in the streets.  The surf crashed, the sun was  just where it should be and the palm trees leaned into it all.

We rented a surf board for the whole day for eight dollars.  Julie, another infectious doctor from the Bronx, and I wanted to join the kids and try to catch some waves.  I have never surfed before but Julie grew up in southern California and has some skills.  The kids were not just standing on their boards and riding the waves, they were actually dancing on them!  So we paddled out and I awkwardly tried to stand up on my long board to practice.  And fell. And fell. And fell.  The kids were laughing and showing me how easily they could mount their boards and ride even the tiniest of waves.  I laughed too at myself.  Here I live in Northern California with some great surfing, and I am trying to catch a wave in Sierra Leone.  Finally, after a number of attempts, I managed to stand up for a brief second before the board went flying out from underneath me.  That was enough to whet my appetite, but also enough for the day.

I met a man named Davis who was carving out a pirogue with a modified axe, by hand.  He told me it takes about three weeks to make a boat out of a log from a tree whose name I couldn't understand.  He offered to make me one for two hundred dollars.  I thought of my father-in-law who grew up in a fishing village in Colombia and how he would love to watch Davis claw and chip away to make this fishing boat, just as his great-great grandfather did so long ago here on this shoreline.

There is something about the ocean water here that allows you to float easier.  I drifted on my back, eyes closed seeing only the red of the overhead sun, and thought back to my time here.  I listened to my breathing internally with my ears under water.  In through my nose and out through my mouth, I attempted to empty my thoughts.  The waves raised and lowered me and turned me in the current.  Larger waves rippled my body.  I had to blank out the images of bodies in new death poses.  Get back to the breathing.  The underwater sounds were distant and carried by streams within the ocean before they fell apart.  Buoyant, there in salt and water and sun,  arms spread out to my sides, drifting in a stripped down vessel made of salt and water, pointed towards home.