January 30th: Malta
In Malta I have one day off to explore the ancient cities of Valletta and Mdina while Leah and Norbert install the ferry fuel system and do some maintenance on the aircraft. On this island, suspended in the Mediterranean midway between Africa and Europe, I wander the
high walls of ancient fortifications and look out to sea as the Knights of Malta and the ancient Romans did centuries ago. From atop these walls the ships of Sarasin or other approaching enemies would be visible well before they arrived. From their vantage on this island stronghold its guardians could see what was coming. Right now, I wish that I had that kind of perspective.
Africa is behind us, but this trip is far from over. For at least another four months we will be flying in Southeast Asia, Australia, India, and Europe, before we return to Canada. Beyond that, there are a lot of unknowns for me and for my job. For the last month I have been able to immerse myself in Africa. Now, with Africa slipping away, the future is suddenly uncharted - a flat and finite earth that I could sail off the edge of. I’m caught between wanting to stay on this tour indefinitely and thinking about what comes after it. Between trying to make sense of Africa and yearning for a line of sight beyond the horizon.
There were only three demonstration flights interspersed in ten thousand nautical miles flown. I believe they were successful - even in Algiers, where the air force has requested that we return for another demo on our way back to Canada. Despite the time spent and the miles flown, however, our exposure to Africa was often remote, much of it seen from ten thousand feet or from the window of a taxi or hotel.
But in all those miles there was also the driver with his head shaved bald and his face somber in the review mirror who talked about his three children and his education at the Nairobi university while we sat in the back of his taxi with its shot shocks and looked out the fogged windows at the flooded streets and the wet metal shacks and the traffic standing still in the heavy rain. There was the blazing South African sun outside the shade of the broad acacia tree where we sat with locals at a long table sweating and eating chicken pies and talking about airplanes, the sounds of the airport nearby, planes climbing from the runway with cumulous piled on the blunt hills in the distance. There was the guy who took us to the Aero Club in Nairobi, grinning and talking in his Swahili accent about his country and his hopes for its future, and there were the two twins that worked for him taking photos of the Twin Otter, who were thin and long-limbed in their black suits like leadwood trees bare on the savannah, friendly and identical, even to their afros. There were snapshots of lives barely glimpsed. Two women walking with buns piled high on massive trays balanced on their heads and babies slung on their backs. A man squatting on low concrete steps, coconuts trimmed with a machete and piled at his feet, his features like chiseled wood staring straight ahead trancelike as we walked by. There were all the lives we will never know that passed by below the airplane in huts strung together by dirt tracks high in the hills and deep in the jungle, and others living in the apartment blocks of cities or the shanty towns ramshackle and scattered with their tin roofs and dusty streets on the outskirts of these cities. But there were also the people that would come and greet us at every stop, grinning and asking us questions about our journey and the airplane, these lives which we did brush up against, however fleetingly, and the knowledge that these people are very much like us. Like our own. People struggling and suffering. Welcoming. Happy. Good people. Lost people moving and searching, navigating this life blindly, sometimes finding their way by the hearts of others - luminous beacons in the darkness.
It will be difficult to leave this trip behind. There won’t likely be another of its kind for me. So, what comes next?
Twenty years ago, I left Vancouver in my Toyota truck and headed south, bound for Mexico and eventually Central America. I didn’t see it at the time, but I was lost, looking to find my way by moving blindly forward. This can be an effective strategy. Movement is in our DNA. It’s what fueled the ceaseless diasporas of people across the globe as it was flooded with wave after wave of migrations; primitive rafts and canoes shoved off from ancient shores towards unknown horizons across uncharted expanses of water; and it sustained men and women wrapped in hides, their weathered faces stoic, looking to the north, their eyes hidden behind tooled bone and ivory against the low sun on the snow as they pushed into frontiers of wind and cold - hinterlands of night and spectral skies – where they stalked shaggy giants and brought down tusked beasts dead upon the ice, their bodies bristling with slender spears as dogs stalked the fringes of light cast by campfires and raised their trembling voices against the pale monsters and wraiths that roamed this void at the wind-scoured perimeters of the earth. This instinct to move was with vanished peoples passing like shadows beneath the vaulted canopies of endless jungles, brewing medicines long forgotten from the esoteric infinity of root, bark, and leaf. It calibrated the eyes of our ancestors to divine the movements of stars and planets as mystics atop stone temples raised their arms to the dark orbs of eclipsed suns, their gods revealed in these prophecies.
But I have no such powers of divination and I feel adrift. I came back from Central America with purpose and vision but neither took me in the direction I expected to go. That’s the bargain that you make with movement, with the seductive call of the horizon. Every time you pull stakes and head into the unknown, it is an act of faith. So far it has worked for me.
I walk into a cathedral, one of many whose spires stand above the old walls and roofs of the buildings covering the chitinous hills of Malta. I stand at the back, behind the pews. It is
quiet. People are scattered throughout the pews, their backs to me, some heads bowed, some raised towards the altar, the cross, the marble Christ there beneath the domed nave in the light of stained glass. I don’t stay long. I feel like an interloper and leave. But outside on the street in the cool sunshine I feel calm.
I’m reminded of another itinerant soul. In his philosophical manifesto, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert M. Pirsig covers a lot of ground, both literally and metaphysically. I’ve been preoccupied by what comes next for me, on this tour, after the tour, with my job. In Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance Pirsig writes, “The past only exists in our memories, the future only in our plans. The present is our only reality.”
Every fleeting instant leaves us behind, stranded, if we don’t attune ourselves to the present.
Pirsig also wrote that, “You look at where you’re going and where you are and it never makes sense, but then you look back at where you’ve been, and a pattern seems to emerge.”
I don’t know if I see a pattern, but perhaps glimpses of it. Perhaps more faith or wisdom is required for it to become clear, to truly believe that we are reborn in each instant, and yet that together we all persist. Like the countless generations of Carthage. Like boots of Spanish leather and the snows of Kilimanjaro. Like the old walls of Stone Town and Valletta and the wind that comes off the sea to course between their streets and buildings, whispering of the horizon. We are that wind. Flowing and constantly changing like the sands of the Sahara.
I walk the cobbled streets in the shadow of the stone walls until I come to the esplanade that borders the Mediterranean. The water and the white-capped waves look the same as earlier in the day. The breeze is still brisk and smells of the sea. But the horizon is just a line between sea and sky, a line that encircles everything. It isn’t something to seek, to chase, or to try to see beyond. It just is. An immutable part of the whole.
Movement is part of our DNA. But so is home. So is family. Sometimes the best way to find your way forward is to go back home. Home is far away right now, but only another week lies between me and my family. A week of ferrying this aircraft through the Middle East, India, and Indonesia, to get it to Singapore in time for the airshow. Africa is behind us, but as with each week, each day, each instant, the journey is just beginning.
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