September 2001

I bought a BMW R69-S to get around but later sold it to a friend. He ran it into the side of the mountain on the Misawa road. He survived, but I remember we lost some troops on that road. You'll recall that the maintenance was nil and everybody and everything used it from tandem tractor/trailers to kids on homemade scooters using their feet for brakes. The kids who lived got a free ride down and hung onto the backs of trucks going back up. The side of the mountain dropped off like a cliff, was thick with prickly pear cactus that King Melelik had planted, and infested with baboons and prickly pear pickers who looked like the guy in Hellraiser.

Later I bought a 1937 Moto Guzzi - one with a single 500 cc cylinder placed horizontal as part of the frame with exposed butterfly spring tappets. That bike had been kept in mint condition and never failed me. One morning on the Misawa road I came around a switchback to find the road surface for ten meters covered in slick sheep shit. Seems the shepherd had camped his flock there overnight. Holy sheep shit! Because of the bike accidents, some officer ordered a fat asshole sergeant to give every bike rider a safety and skill test. Every bike on post had to be driven out into a field during rainy season and run across mud and through ditches. It was a blatant attempt to reduce the number of bike riders, thus fatalities. My Moto Guzzi had open carburetors and low straight pipes. With my lack of off-road skill and the Guzzi's configuration I flunked and had my license pulled.

I rode down to Misawa often and then sat by the harbor drinking Melotti in a puddle of my own sweat. You could drink all day and seldom have to piss. The sun came up over the Red Sea like opening the door of a furnace. But one evening a Somali girl took me home, stripped off my soaked, salty clothes, stood me in a large tub in the candle-lit darkness of her room and poured pitcher after pitcher of cool water over my head. Later I learned that the best thing about Misawa was the skin-diving over the reefs. We'd camp on the beach, rent a flotilla of rowboats and rowers and dive over the incredibly rich coral world.

But I preferred Keren. The old British club was deeply boring with its shuttered verandas and dark interior, but it dripped atmosphere and had a great cheap bar. One day walking along the rocky, walled streets of Keren, and little girl yelled to me in Arabic ("Ta'al hinna!) to follow. She led me deep into the town to a gate ajar in a stucco wall dripping with bougainvillea. "Enter here." she said, but wouldn't go in with me. Past a winding path through a front-yard cornfield was a house with a porch.

About seven Muslim Eritreans were on the porch dressed to the nines. Seem that they had sent the girl into the town to find a stranger to invite as the unknown guest at a wedding party. The fellow celebrating his marriage was named Ibrahim, the principle of a local school. I was welcomed like the prophet, and Ibrahim and I became friends. He never inquired too deeply about how I knew Arabic, and I never asked about his leadership in the ELF. But I think I got to travel safely to places others might find hazardous because of his friendship.

I wanted to take a bus trip into Sudan and bought a ticket at the bus station in the Bosch. The station was near the place where your eyes stung from the huge piles of red chillies on the ground. Waiting around for the bus, I was talking to two tall ebony Sudanese in their stark white turbans and robes. They speak an Arabic pure as the Koran. I shared a few crude words with a guy, maybe from the Beni Amer tribe - big afro stiffened with camel dung with his dagger stuck in the side of it like a sheath; standing on one leg with his arms draped over his stick held like a yoke across his shoulders; tribal scars on his cheeks. I'm happy to be talking to the Sudanese, and I'm thinking "Fuck me, this guy is a tough ugly bastard. Hope I don't have to sit with him on the bus." The bus to Agordat pulls in. I stand there waiting in line, but no one else is. Old ladies and their goats, nursing mamas, Amharic gentlemen with their natty white peddle-pushers and gossamer shawls and all their baggage are assaulting every bus opening including the front and back doors. My Beni Amer neighbor glances at me then takes his stick off his shoulders and wails a path through the skulls of the crowd to the seat of honor behind the bus driver (who are all heroes). Minutes later, I'm trying to wedge my butt into the bus when he yells at me waiving his arms. Shit, trouble. I crawl over the humanity, baggage and livestock to his seat because I'm scared not to. He gives me a big smile and says, "Sit here, I'm not taking this bus."
Sonofabitch was a gentleman.

I get to Agordat in the early evening. Get a room at a traveler's hotel and eat at a Sudanese restaurant in the square in front of the mosque. An Ethiopian Army jeep drives through square with an officer in the shotgun seat. A raggedy mountain boy jumps up from his small hot sweet glass of tea, runs out into the sandy square and lobs a grenade at the jeep. Ethie soldiers cut him down from every direction. In the morning, his head is displayed in the square on a sharpened post. I never use my bus transfer, but take the next return back to Asmara.