Taking flight

Friday, 4 June 2010.

This is the day we arrived in Cameroon. Of course, I’m writing this long after that day, so what I felt then I don’t necessarily remember the same way now, but I’ll do my best to record my impressions accurately.

First, I just have to say how excited I get any time I fly over earth I’ve never before trod. I can’t say I’ve been to those places, but I can say I caught a glimpse. Flying over western Canada, southern Alaska, and the Bering Sea on my way to a study abroad in Japan was amazing. My friend Alex, who wanted to sleep, kindly gave up his window seat, so I could stare agog out the window for 12 hours. What a strange experience to fly west, following the sun so that night never falls.

My staying-awake powers were not so great on the trip to Cameroon. I’d slept only three hours before my 6:00 a.m. flight to Philadelphia for “stage,” where 42 other “stagiaires” and I had half a day of “This is Peace Corps” orientation and half of another early morning of waiting for our yellow fever shots. I managed to keep my eyes open most of the bus ride to New York where we would fly out of JFK to Brussels. I’d been to the city only once, when I was eight, so it was pretty cool to ride through the barrios of Brooklyn and catch sight of the Statue of Liberty between industrial buildings and skyscrapers.

I was sad I hadn’t gotten a chance to say good-bye to one of my favorite former students at the refugee center, but happily the morning of 3 June, I found a message on my phone from her. My co-worker must have given her my number. Once I’d eaten some au bon pain at the airport, I called my family, said my last “I love you” from the States, and then called this wonderful Iraqi woman who’d grown to love me more than I’d realized.

I didn’t dream it would be so, but it was sweet that the last person I spoke to before leaving my homeland was someone who’d reluctantly left hers so many months before. I said how I loved and would miss her and told her what I’d told my other ladies: that I was so grateful for what she had taught me about courage, about how to be a (nearly) perfect stranger in a strange land. Although she had never wanted to leave Iraq (or Jordan, where her family sojourned before coming to the U.S.), she had transitioned into American life with such grace.

I sat next to a Sierra Leonean and his white girlfriend on the way to Brussels, so I was far from the window seat I wanted. But we were flying east, so it was night sooner than it should have been, and we were mostly over ocean, anyway, so I wasn’t too sad. I think it was just barely dawn when we flew over part of Ireland and the U.K. It was also cloudy, so I don’t think I could have seen much of the start of Western Europe, even by the window. Morning was crystal clear over Belgium, however.

Oh, what gorgeous Belgian countryside and architecture I drank in as we descended for landing. What I saw is exactly what I picture when I think of Europe. Classic: rolling hills dotted with country manors, then something more akin to quaint row houses in lovely earth tones as we approached the city.

On the next flight – yippee – I had a window seat! It was a struggle to stay awake all the way south, and I succumbed to a couple minutes of shuteye here and there. (And “shuteye” is exactly the word: My eyes would just shut despite my best efforts to keep them open.) Still, I managed to see some picturesque villages nestled in the valleys between the snow-capped crags and aquamarine lakes of the Swiss Alps. In some ways flying over an area is better than visiting it. I didn’t see just one town or one peak but many, across an entire range of mountains.

Then it was on above more-populous northern Italy and finally over the edge of Europe itself, into the airspace above the Mediterranean. I’ve seen the Mediterranean! I did get confused at one point. Suddenly we were over land again, but I didn’t think it looked at all how I imagined North Africa. There was too much greenery (well, not that much, but too much to be Libya, over which the plane’s trajectory map showed we would spend a lot of time flying). Does anyone know what this could have been? One of Italy’s islands? We had been over water about 15 minutes when we came upon this land mass, and we passed over it for another 10 or 15 before reaching water again. Twenty minutes or so after that, finally, there was Africa, almost just how I pictured it.

I saw more brush than I expected, but it was sparse and grayish, and the land was visibly arid. I wish I could recall more details of the towns I saw. Some were rather large and dense. I remember a lot of white and drab beige construction against the pale-orange of the soil. This was surprising to me: Satellite photos I’d seen all show the semi-arid and Saharan parts of Africa to be yellow. What I saw from the plane appeared peachy, almost rosy in some places. It was so cool to see, too – I don’t know how to call them – salt-production ponds, maybe? I’d only seen those in documentaries. They are a series of progressively drier pools where saline water is corralled and left to evaporate, leaving the salt deposits behind.

It took longer than I thought, but the landscape eventually melted into the endless sands of the Sahara. Occasionally I could discern a windswept pattern on the ground, but mostly, this earth was as featureless and uninhabited as my weary mind. I let myself sleep.

I awoke to more desert, only this time, there were a few wispies obscuring my view. I had this stereotype that the sun bares down all the time on the Sahara, but there was a sizable chunk of time when I could spot the orange sands only through keyholes in the clouds. It was pretty depressing flying over infinite barrenness, but I had Belgian airline ice cream to distract me there at the last, just when I needed it: as the desert sun baked my face through the window, and my top half broke a sweat.
I had always wondered how the Sahara ended. In satellite photos, the swath of yellow just seems magically to morph into a band of brilliant emerald. And it was so.

(I did follow the shining filament of a tributary for several minutes before it broadened to become a blinding blade of reflected light that sliced through the parched earth, but this was the only indication that perhaps the sandy tedium would soon end. To my chagrin, however, the river didn’t seem to flow anywhere; it just stopped, as abruptly as that golden line first appeared.) Just when I thought the desert may truly continue eternally, a rich garland of green materialized, and the sand was no more. Like in the space photos, there was no succession of landscapes – no desert to scrub land to grassland to forest. Nope. Just straight from sand to subtropics.

How happy I was to break the visual monotony and see my favorite color once again.
I had been a little worried because I read that parts of Cameroon were arid, even desert, but I was glad to see green, even in the north, that continued all the way to our touchdown in the capital city of Yaoundé. (I learned that during rainy season, even the dry regions bloom.)

The green was broken up, though, by patches of bare, red earth: redder than Georgia clay – deep burgundy in some places, I would learn later – but in Yaoundé, the soil was a rich, burnt-orange red. On the way in, I was awed that I was now witnessing what I had eyed only in National Geographic before: the sparsely populated landscape, the little villages, the tin and thatched roofs, the airport landing strip that seemed so spare compared with those in the West. I was about to set down in Aaaaahhhfrica, and I was thrilled – a teary, weary, wondering kind of thrilled.

I was not thrilled to note the time the sun went down: around 6:45, not long after we made it out of baggage claim. There’s no daylight savings time here, and besides, when you’re sitting so close to the equator, the days approach 12 hours all year round. Alas, no 9:30 sunsets or 15.5-hour summer days like in my home state. But n’importe – it didn’t matter – I was in Africa.