Chris Abraham

Mark writes, “I decided to celebrate this International Workers’ Day by driving the rover with my family into the remote mountains here in southern Tanzania to a fly-fishing and hunting lodge . . .”

Fraternal Revolutionary greetings to my dear comrades the world over on this May Day, the 30th Anniversary of the Committee for a Workers’ International! by Mark Harrison

Onward in solidarity towards reaffirming the ideas of genuine socialism!

I decided to celebrate this International Workers’ Day by driving the rover with my family into the remote mountains here in southern Tanzania to a fly-fishing and hunting lodge up amongst the highland tea estates to spend the weekend playing lawn tennis and drinking gin and tonics. An absolutely splendid opportunity to manifest our solidarity with the international proletariat with a few invigorating rounds of golf, and a sortie or two of croquet.

The workers at the lodge estate - rather disappointingly for the glory of Socialism but rather fortunately for us - chose not celebrate May Day, they instead chose to report to work, which ensured that our meals were excellent, and that the greens were well trimmed.

The weekend offered my niece and godchild a valuable opportunity to manifest some solidarity and learn the joy of physical labor in that I permitted her to carry my golf clubs (see photo). I will be an excellent father some day.

I also taught her to fly fish - though she failed to catch anything. I intended to give her two educational gifts with our angling outing - one, the pleasure of enjoying the fruits of her labor, and two, the unparalleled joy of living off nature’s bounty - by allowing her to eat for dinner what she caught. In this particular case, of course, nothing. However, the mollycoddling grandparents, in their appallingly undidactic and emotional way, undermined my entire evening fishing trip’s work in that, at dinnertime, she was simply handed a plate of food in whose production she had had no part. I’m sure she was disappointed, though she made an impressively brave effort to put up a very convincing show of enjoying her utterly decontextualized meal. Once things have gone their course, and I have my inheritance firmly in my hand, my godchild will no longer have to suffer such unfortunate assaults to the development of her character. (see fishing photo)

Fortunately for my goddaughter’s education, the weekend started rather differently with some very good opportunities for character-building . The drive up into the mountains is only a hundred miles or so, but it is across bone-jarring, treacherously dangerous, washed-out dirt roads that make the Appalachian trail look like the Disney World monorail. Within minutes of departure, she had nausea and a headache against which to practice fortitude in the face of adversity. After a little over an hour of this hell, her whinging and moaning had decreased to a low embittered mutter, and I was afraid that she had become too rapidly acclimated to the travails of the trip and that the didactic effect would fade long before we arrived at our destination. Fortunately, well out in the middle of the bush endless miles from nowhere, the radiator cap blew off, becoming irretrievably lost, ejecting the coolant in a dramatic geyser of spewing froth and steam, the engine overheated violently, and we came to a grinding halt.

We were traveling with a group of academics - they in another rover - and this breakdown presented us with the chance to have a committee meeting in which everyone could present their completely unqualified, but impressively formulated opinions on how to fix a diesel engine in the middle of the bush with absolutely no tools or materials. The librarian spotted the bottom of a colonial-era soup can rusting on the side of the road and proposed we hammer it into the form of a radiator cap. The committee considered this and tried a few preliminary experiments with the tire iron and concluded that the idea was terrible. By this time, we were up over 6000 feet, and it was a bit chilly which gave my niece something new to build character over. All the Midwestern academics found the biting air invigorating and reminiscent of all the years they spent out in that featureless, culturally devoid hellscape between Pittsburg and Denver. My few memories of the Midwest usually pitch me toward depression, but these folks jabbered on happily about such revolting things as headcheese and ice fishing.

In any case, at some point, the menfolk realized that we each had Swiss Army knives in our pockets, so we decided that we should whittle something to solve our problem. That idea had an incredibly manly, frontiersmanlike quality to it, and the women hadn’t thought of it so we hunted down a well-sized eucalyptus branch and set to carving a cork for the radiator.

The subcommittee of men decided that the best way to hold the newly-whittled stopper in the radiator was to cut it just precisely so long that slamming the hood closed would secure it tightly in place. The women discussed something about the Midwest and my niece whinged about it being cold, which made me happy because this whole Africa experience was finally presenting an experience to toughen her up a bit.

After a bit more discussion in subcommittee, we advanced our stopper design to include a rag around the bottom of the stopper to create a tight seal, and a bunch of rag on top of the stopper to provide a compressible mass that would allow us to push the cork tightly into the radiator, but to do so without doing damage to the radiator by applying too much uncushioned force.

Unfortunately, we had no rags.

Then my mother says, “Hey, no problem, I saw some rags ground down into the road a couple hundred yards back. I’ll go pull them out.”

Now, I’m thinking “WTF?” You see, when the radiator cap blew off, my mother was driving the vehicle. So you have to imagine that we’re pounding along this hellish single track - which in itself requires intense concentration so as to avoid pitching into a gaping pothole or careening off into the bush - the view is 90% obscured by the thick clouds of dust the rovers are kicking up, and the remaining 10% of visibility is ruined by the muddy smear of dirt you create trying to clean the dust off the windshield with your wiper fluid. Now, at the time she saw, identified, and registered the presence and location of a few tattered bits of dirty cloth embedded in the dried mud of the road, she was pounding along at 40 kph and there was radiator fluid and steam spewing out of the car.

To boot, my mom is in those years where she receives Social Security, she wears trifocals, and was relatively recently hospitalized to have surgery on her failing ocular nerves. She has no peripheral vision.

Now, this of course begs the question, “Why the hell was this woman driving the vehicle?” Yes… well, when you live in a country where every mosquito bite is a potential grisly death by malaria, building codes are non-existent, car inspections leave vehicles in a state where they not-unseldomly burst into flame for little or no reason, and genocidal wars in neighboring nations is de rigueur, you get a bit lax about doing your risk-benefit analyses… I don’t know. My mom was holding the car keys when we walked out the front door… so she was driving.

Anyway, so while she didn’t notice that the temperature gauge had climbed into the DANGER zone, and bright red warning lights had turned on, she did notice that a bit of rag was embedded in the road two hundred yards back from where the rover had ground to a halt.

Women are truly amazing. It must have to do with some latent gatherer instinct that’s been unused for thousands of years except when a husband/boyfriend says, “Hun, where are my car keys?” And she’s like, “In the right breast pocket of your suede jacket under the newspaper on top of the large coffee table in the downstairs TV room. Where you left them.” Stunning. I’m truly impressed.

What I hate though, is that I’ve never had a girlfriend who could give such a response without an eye-roll, as if that location of my keys should be obvious to anyone with eyes.

I’m sorry. Women are just built differently. If my half-blind, pensioner mother can pick up the location of a bit of rag ground into the mud while navigating a fuming 4×4 skidding to a halt on a single-track, then my girlfriend can certainly donate the .0000001% of her mental processing power it requires of her to focus her instinct on remembering where each and every one of my possessions are at any given moment. And to do it without the eye-roll, thank you very much.

Anyway, it was grand that my mother registered that bit of cloth. She’s the best. A saint. I’m not sure how the rest of you survive without her as your mom.

So my saint of a mother walked back the road, dug the rag out, came back, and we constructed our composite material stopper. We filled the radiator with our bottled water (a pampered vehicle, to be sure), positioned the cork, slammed the hood and the committee decided that I was going to drive.

My niece was buoyed by the apparent success of the repair and back in good spirits. We all got in the car, I turned the key and… nothing. Well, not exactly nothing. A pitiful, quiet whine from some warning thing, and a risibly weak chug from the engine and the battery was dead.

No problem, we have two vehicles - one working. We’ll just jump it.

Wrong, no cables. Again, another opportunity for my niece to slip into despair and to notice that she was now very hungry. The Midwesterners all seemed to be enjoying this, since it somehow reminded them of their hardscrabble, working-class upbringings in Indiana or Minnesota or wherever and old Model T’s and such tripe.

We were on a slight grade, so it was decided that everyone would push, and we would roll-start the car. Now at the decision of the committee, the one person past puberty and not qualified to receive Medicare - i.e., me - is chosen to sit in the driver’s seat, while the crew of retirees and their cast of physical ailments, and a little girl get behind the rover to push it. I, strapping young man, decades from the onset of senility, doubt the wisdom of this committee decision, but who am I to questions such a large mass of aged wisdom? I get behind the wheel, and they start to push.

Now, I’ve roll-started this vehicle in our 40-foot long driveway - in reverse. The slope of our driveway is about that of a handicap access ramp at a convalescent home. You don’t need much speed to start this car.

The team of seven gets pushing and we’re going about as fast as you do in the drive-thru line at Taco Bell at lunch hour. We’re very slowly using up the bit of downward grade we’ve got left, approaching the bottom and end of our opportunity. I’m thinking, “We gotta go faster”. But how do I, 30-something guy, sitting at the wheel of a rover being pushed along a dirt track in the middle of the African bush by a group of retirees find the gall to stick my head out the window and yell. “Faster, you guys!”? Answer? I don’t.

One by one, they drop off and from their various wheezing stopping points yell some suggestions about why don’t I start the damn car… by this time, I’m going maybe 3 miles per hour and the last retiree, a healthy 65 year-old former judge from that vigorous, outdoorsy state of Washington begins to very slowly distance himself in my rearview mirror, yelling his starting suggestions. I pop the clutch, the wheels stop dead, and the rover skids to a halt in yet another cloud of dust.

Now I’m 100 yards down the road, it’s uphill in both directions, we have no jumper cables, no tow rope, and we’re in the middle of the freaking African bush. I get out of the car, and walk back up toward the reconvened committee meeting which has already started.

Still, I’m in good spirits. I’m thinking, “This is a great experience for my niece! Maybe we’ll get stuck out here and she’ll have a real Africa experience, like that time when I was a kid and the drunk soldiers in Liberia were going to execute me at that checkpoint!” I think things like that at an early age do wonders for character development. I’m completely convinced that it’s those types of mildly traumatic experiences at an age where you have no sense of mortality that give you the perspective and attitude necessary to truly enjoy the rest of life. I credit all those somewhat unpleasant experiences in my youth that I survived by the skin of my teeth with being the reasons why I am such a smashing human being.

So I’m walking back to the committee meeting with visions of toughing it out, teaching my niece how to purify water with a bit of cloth, a plastic bottle, and six hours of sunshine, or perhaps a really dangerous ride hanging onto the back of a lumber truck, or something of the sort. Something to get her to think about something other than what kind of dolphin-motif curtain she’s going to get for her bedroom when she gets back to States in the fall. Something to toughen her up inoculate her against becoming an airhead mall rat.

Then, out of the blue, a sparkling-new Land Cruiser roars by me and slides to a halt at the committee meeting. The doors spring open and out jump two tanned, sexagenarian Great White Hunter guys decked out in pith helmets and khaki short shorts. I can’t believe my freaking eyes.

The short shorts safari gents turn out to be old colonialists who came from Great Britain as children 50 years ago and still live up amongst the old colonial tea plantations, studying exotic butterflies. I’m stunned. It’s like Halloween in Chelsea.

One is a tall, still-brutally-handsome Sir Anthony Quayle type with the accent and mannerisms that make you not want him anywhere near your girlfriend. And he can probably cook, too.

His long-time companion is a petite man with a bitchy expression who makes catty comments about his partner’s fading hearing.

The safari lepiologists announce gallantly that they are returning to their estate to fetch jumper cables and a tow rope, and that they will be back forthwith! They roar back off in a cloud of dust. The womenfolk swoon. We menfolk try to change the subject to something about backcountry road construction techniques.

In a half an hour, the short short safari men are back with jumper cables, their Land Cruiser humming virilely, our rover reanimates with this automotive Kiss of Life, they give us their tow-rope just in case, and we all drive off towards our destinations.

The rest of the weekend passed affably except for an evening when we watched this awful flick, “The Snows of Kilimanjaro”, in which Gregory Peck and Ava Gardner take two hours proving that a Hemmingway story can really suck. Not only was the acting unbearable, and the story painfully boring, self-indulgent, and astoundingly stupid; the oblivious racism was stunning even for its time and the Swahili they had the “natives” speak more often than not laughably and unforgivably had nothing to do with the rest of the script.

Gregory Peck (lying on a chaise lounge at the base of Kilimanjaro, in a safari camp, dying of gangrene from a cut on his leg): Mke wapi?! (Translation: “Wife where?!”)

Dark Servant Guy Incomprehensibly Wearing Fez: Alikwenda kupika nyama, bwana (Translation: “She went to cook meat, sir.”)

Gregory Peck: So, she went hunting impala…

AAAAAAAGH!!!

DIE GREGORY! DIE!

After that scene I drank a bunch of beer and went to play snooker with the retired judge who also didn’t have the fortitude to stand any more of the movie. I’m impressed that the rest of the crew was able to watch to the end - but then, their hearing is going and they don’t see so well at night, so perhaps it wasn’t as painful for them.

My niece said the movie stunk. I’m thrilled she showed some character growth this weekend.