Reading: Heat by Bill Buford

After twenty-three years of being a magazine editor, married to another magazine editor, Bill Buford apparently greeted the new millenium by having a mid-life crisis. His resumé includes both co-founding GRANTA and editing fiction for the New Yorker, but this is just work. Throughout Heat, his book on cooking under pressure, he ironically refers to this high-flying media career as his day job. Determined to quit all that and learn how to cook, he becomes an unpaid trainee in the kitchen of Babbo, Mario Batali's heralded Italian spot in the Village.

Where George Plimpton, long considered the inventor of this sort of experiential writing-by-doing, might be content to spend a solitary afternoon stirring a pot in the kitchens of a four-star restaurant before whipping up a piece about what life is like as a celebrity chef, Buford takes participatory journalism to a whole new level. He finagles to write a profile of Batali, he suggests, largely in order to foster a relationship with the man, since he has already set for himself the goal of quitting his job at the New Yorker to go and slave and toil at Babbo, and he doesn't know quite how else to manage it. Given the number of New York waiters who would crumble with excitement to have their words read by the fiction editor of the New Yorker, all desperate to a man (or woman) to quit their days jobs, Buford's seems a bizarre quest, at least by the standards of today's New York society.

But Buford is plainly not much concerned by those standards; mid-way through the adventure he even convinces his wife to quit her own well-paid editor's position and return to Italy with him, so he can learn to butcher meat. His world becomes arcane cuts of loin, unknown outside of the Tuscan hills. (When he returns, eager and breathless, to discuss his discoveries with Batali, he is like a Shaolin monk bringing back from the monastery crazy kung-fu unknown to the master who sent him there: Batali just looks at him blankly and says "Bill, I have no idea what you are talking about!")


Except for the proof of the book I was holding in my hands, there is little to suggest Buford entered into his contract with cookery with journalistic intent. Here and there, he reminds us that he took a note, wrote something down. He reads a lot, but his taste tends mostly to medieval cookery memoirs written in forgotten dialects. At one point he leaves Italy in the middle of butchering the hindquarters of a cow in order to fly back to New York for some vague, unspecified commitment relating to his former life, but that is about the sum total of his efforts to hang on to a Manhattan civilization that had thought he was thriving in it. If this is journalism, let us call it radical immersion journalism.

We should perhaps be unsurprised that Buford has written only two books, since he seems essentially unsatisfied to do anything less than make a complete career of something before writing about it. In his first book, Among the Thugs, he spends unhealthy amounts of time with Britain's semi-professional football hooligans. In this chilling, pop-culture expression of Elias Canetti's classic Crowds and Power, Buford, seduced and revolted by the endless violence and his own attraction to it, ponders whether he has crossed the line between observer and participant, and then, while being beaten half to death by the Italian police, discovers that it doesn't really matter which side of the line he thinks he's on if others see him as part of the mob.

Cooking professionally, we learn in Heat, is almost as violent as stomping on the skull of a hapless opposing football fan. There is no room to move in the infernal sweltering greasy sauna that the typical New York restaurant kitchen resembles. Orders for complicated dishes rain down unceasingly, like the hellfire of a Baghdad bombing run. Power and hierarchy are expressed through abuse and torment. Cooking is done under conditions of such stress and exhaustion that, like great athletes working at full capacity, successful cooks must cease thinking altogether, falling back on years of repetitive training to let instinct, or robotics, take control. Plant your feet, don't move, swivel at the hips. Know where your shit is at all times. Don't yield a square centimeter of your slick and fat-coated perforated rubber floor mat to your equally frazzled co-workers. Fire it! From this, we learn, great food can emerge. But it must be cooked with love.


After a year, Buford thinks he has begun to get the hang of it, but his obsession is unsatisfied. He retraces the trail taken by Mario Batali, learning pasta-making in some nowhere in northern Italy. Not content to have toiled in Dante's Inferno, he apprentices himself to the world's most famous butcher, Dario Cecchini, a maniac who quotes Dante's Inferno at exhausting length, drunk, at midday, from the podium of his butcher's shop floor. "Midway through the road of life, I found myself in a dark wood, on a lost road," being the opening line with which Cecchini greets the questing, middle-aged Buford upon his arrival.

The appeal of Italy is that no matter how fabulous, no matter how Babbo, no matter how Batali, the very best New York has to offer is still a simulacrum, a valiant effort to recreate a culinary experience that ultimately can never exist away from the land that birthed it. I've been reading a lot about wine lately, with an eye to a project of my own, and Buford's efforts to comprehend the essence of the Italian ideal read like descriptions of that elusive wine-making concept of terroir, the idea that the identity of a wine and the experience of drinking it are inextricably linked to the minerals and conditions in the land from which the grapes spring, so that in its aroma one scents the crumbling limestone earth of a particular southward facing vineyard, feels the breath of the Mistral rustling the hairs on the back of one's neck just as the grape leaves were rustled, senses in the first sip the impossible but undeniable influence of the ancient fig trees in the adjacent orchard.

Everybody knows that the essence of Italian cooking is "fresh local ingredients, prepared simply." I just recorded sound a few weeks ago on a "web-based" cooking show sponsored by Bertolli olive oil that hammered home the conceit in six back-to-back episodes. This concept, which became the mantra of the 1980s California restaurant revolution that so attracted Batali, is now such a cliché that we even have a "fresh local ingredients" restaurant in Red Hook, the excellent Good Fork. Buford, obsessive that he is, delves much much deeper than this, right down into the dirt. The food he wants to learn to cook, the Italians tell him, should taste like the scent of moss after fresh rain, of wet twigs and crumbled lichen, of winter woodsmoke mixed with mud. (I couldn't be bothered to go back and dig out actual quotes, so I made these up, but I don't think I'm betraying the flavor of his informants' testimony). Apparently if it isn't made with something you walked out the back door of your Tuscan cottage and collected amongst the roots and stumps of the forest then we aren't really talking about food.


No wonder, then, that he visits Italy again and again, hungry for more knowledge. His marriage, he says, is tested. But what sense of terroir can one hope for cooking in an apartment in the West Village? The culinary journey Buford embarks on with such unswerving dedication is all about getting back in touch with the land, reaching out and actually harvesting, plucking herbs off of living plants that grow in ancient soils, and slaughtering beasts that have been raised with dignity. No wonder most of our meat tastes like crap, he observes, since somewhere along the way people seem to have forgotten that it actually comes from animals.

Buford is a fantastic writer, far superior on food and cooking to anyone I've yet stumbled upon in my wine researches, and Heat is a book that does much more than just make you hungry, the standard bar for food writing. He knows he is an obsessed freak and manages out of his obsessiveness to develop a nuanced, self-deprecatory voice from which flows a vein of humor as rich as a free range flan. A note of bemused apology creeps in as, for example, when he devotes an entire, long, chapter to his dogged attempt to pinpoint the exact moment when eggs became an ingredient in pasta. After apologizing he nonetheless proceeds to lead us on a culinary tour of literary Italy, from the middle ages through to the 18th century, desperately turning dusty and untranslated pages, looking for eggs. These exhaustive researches are fertile ground, and must have led to many of the most interesting factoids that are scattered throughout the book. I had forgotten, for instance, that both tomatoes and corn came from the new world--until well after Columbus polenta, scandal of scandals, was made with buckwheat. Tomatoes of course more completely dominate Italian-American cuisine than true Italian (not that such a thing exists, for like its language and political history Italy's cuisine is infinitely fragmented). But still, pizza without tomatoes?

As if he knows that he is leaving us salivating for more, Buford ends his book in classic Hollywood blockbuster fashion, dangling the threat and promise of a sequel in his very last sentence. After three hundred pages of slagging off "faggy" French cuisine and its cookery, also universally derided by his various teachers, and after reheating the old and discredited heresy that in fact France had no concept of cooking as art until Catherine de Medici brought good food with her out of Italy to the court of Paris, he (probably unintentionally) steals the ending of the seminal coming-of-age movie Breaking Away, in which an Indiana stonecutter's son obsessively takes up bicycle racing, idolizing the Italian riders of the Giro and driving his parents mad by speaking only Italian around the house. At the end of the film, when his idols come to town and realize that the eager kid riding up the hill beside them is actually a contender, they sabotage him, thrusting a bike pump into his wheel on a nasty ascent. In that cruel moment, to the relief of his father, he is instantly cured of his Italian obsession, only to fall in love with a French foreign exchange student (if I remember rightly--I must have last seen it about 28 years ago...). In the final frames he gives his father apoplexy, bursting into the living room and greeting him with a Bonjour, Papa!

On his last page, Buford plays it like this: "I saw that I'd mastered food in one tradition (I'll call it the Florentine-Tuscan-late-Renaissance tradition) up to a certain point: when Caterina became Catherine and crossed the Alps (or the Mediterranean), into France. There is still much to learn, and I may never have this opportunity again. I want to follow Catherine de Médicis. If I'm really to understand Italian cooking I need to cross the Alps and learn what happened next. I have to go to France."

There but for the grace of God go I...

The Alexey Maryshev, on board which I and the Generation Earth team sailed from Ushuaia, Argentina to the Antarctic Peninsula in March, has had a terrible accident, and the captain, a gangly, Ichabod Crane looking guy who chainsmoked and spoke only Russian, is in big trouble. He seemed to us a consummate professional and seasoned seaman, so the rush to judgement appears to me to be born out of a corporate desperation to assign blame first and figure out what happened later. Although there are special standards of responsibility for captains at sea, the fact that a glacier fell apart just as he was sailing underneath it seems to me to have much more to do with the grave state of the climate than it does to do with navigation. Here's hoping everyone will ultimately be okay....

Rwandan Textures

Rural Rwandan buildings are almost indistinguishable from the landscape in which they sit; in most cases the earth used to construct them is drawn from a hole only a few feet from the house, so they are literally made from their own surroundings. Water is mixed with soil in the pit to make a thick mud, reinforced with straw, from which bricks can be cut. These are then laid out in the sun to dry, mere footsteps away from the foundations of the structure they will create.



The doors and window frames are cut with hand saws from local, fast-growing eucalyptus. Sheathing on the door is invariably a skin of sheet metal recycled from a disused oil drum that has finally become so battered in its various transits that it can serve no other purpose. The top and bottom are cut off and bent into bowls or other vessels, and then the drum is sliced lengthwise, beaten flat into a rectangular panel, and nailed to the door. Although most are pounded to a rust-speckled patina, on some Rwandan front doors it is still possible to read an oil company logo, sideways: Shell, Fina, etc.



From a global warming perspective, compare the carbon footprint of a house like this with the one left by even our most basic structure. Our 2X4s are forested and lumbered with diesel-burning machinery and milled using energy intensive industrial processes thousands of miles, and sometimes continents away from where they will be used. Our steels girders are shipped from South Korea, the gypsum in our wallboard mined who knows where. The fasteners come from China on ships registered conveniently to circumvent any inconvenient niceties regarding emissions and engine efficiency.

I don't mean to suggest that Rwandan vernacular architecture, or for that matter, any architecture of grinding poverty, grew out of environmentalist sentiment. The first improvement a house here will see, given a bit of money coming into the household, is the plastering of the interior and exterior walls with cement, the bottom rung on the upwards ladder of purchases requiring actual cash money, and the first material that will come from outside the community. The next, and in this context an almost middle class progression, would be to build from cinderblock or fired brick, and the owner would feel no nostalgia for the earthen walls of his ancestral village.

There is no doubt that the African mud-brick house springs from an architecture of convenience and necessity, of opportunism and economy, and of realism in the face of extraordinarily limited financial possibilities. But that does not mean that we should not learn from it. So-called "development" remains a goal and an aspiration across the globe, something almost universally accepted to have a positive connotation. (Who is in favor of "underdevelopment"?). The elimination of poverty and corruption, the improving of education, health care, and human rights are all thought to require it. But if development has brought us to the brink of self-sponsored extinction as a species, without even considering the grotesque arrogance by which we have already extinguished so many other "lesser" species in its name, then we need to do some serious rethinking.

Ghettoornithology

When it comes to vagrants and rarities in New York, I'm like cancer, a man with the plague. It has almost come to the point where I don't even call the New York Rare Bird Alert (212-979-3070) any more because I don't want to be a spoiler; you can pretty much bet solid money that if I go chasing after some accidental bird that has washed up unexpectedly in the New York area, no matter how long it has been hanging around, that will be the end of it. I won't see it, and what's more, it will never be seen again. The last record of it will have been the day before, or even that morning, and once I set out for it, as if it knows I am coming, it's gone, forever.



I don't take it personally. At this point I'm rather amused by the consistency and infallibility of it all, to be honest. But thank God I don't really fraternize with the local birding community, otherwise they would have caught on and would have already stopped by and snuffed me out, to prevent my chasing off their rare birds.

There was the Boreal Owl in Central Park a winter or two ago. Been there for months, hanging out in the top of one particular evergreen tree not far from the Dakota, sniping mice at Tavern on the Green [Update: See "Comments"]. I was out of town when it arrived, or didn't hear about it right away, but since I would (still) love to see a Boreal Owl, I drag-assed up there at dawn one day as soon as I heard tell of it. After all, this little beast only rarely makes it south of the vast conifer belt crossing east to west through the middle latitudes of Canada, for which it is named.

Needless to say, the owl wasn't there on its customary perch. At the foot of the tree was a sportive gentleman with flowing white facial hair and binoculars, "gripping off" the arrivistes with exciting tales of how splendidly the bird had "been showing" the day before, and the day before that. He had apparently been studying the specimen at his leisure for some weeks. "I'm sure it's still around here somewhere," he said, airily. "It's just a matter of re-finding it." Hah. Never seen again.

On another occasion I got onto the news of a Broad-Billed Sandpiper, a minute wading bird that breeds in Siberia and generally migrates down through Japan and the Philippines to Australia, a little late. This is a major rarity in New York, or anywhere in the USA, for that matter, and I only found out about it after scads of people had been seeing it daily in the West Pond at Jamaica Bay National Wildlife Refuge for something like a week. I called my main man Joseph, who could care less about waders but is always up for a bizarre sociological phenomenon, and inspired him to take the afternoon off and drive out there with me. The power birders with the frequent flier miles had mostly already seen the bird, which was only about two miles as the sandpiper flies from JFK. But the broke ones were arriving by car, from Maryland, Tennessee, Ontario, Florida, and so on, after getting the gas money together, having another bird-war with the wife, and calling in sick to the job. The parking lot was full of forlorn birders and out-of-state plates. What should I have said? Should I have jumped up and down yelling "sorry, it's my fault!" I don't think so. As Joseph and I made our way through the clusters of disconsolate telescope-toting mooks wandering aimlessly around, I tried not to look guilty.

I dipped on the Long Island Harris' Sparrow and the Smith's Longspur at Jones Beach as well.



One never wants to completely give up hope, however, and so, in an idle moment on the way back from the airport after coming home from Rwanda, I gave the old hot-line a call. In my absence a Western Reef Heron, the first record of the species for New York State, had taken up residence in a Brooklyn body of water I had never even heard of, the Coney Island Creek. I knew exactly where it was, though, because the instructions on the tape-recording suggested parking in the lot of the Coney Island Home Depot. Since I'm going into the fifth year of a career-long house renovation, I'm familiar with every Home Depot in Brooklyn and Queens.


This is not a bird I would generally drop everything and rush off to see, as I added it to the life list in Dubai a couple of years ago, and apparently the last time this particular individual had been spotted I was still chasing chimpanzees in the Nyungwe Forest in Rwanda, so it seemed like a long-gone long shot. But I was out reuning with the family down in Princeton on Thursday, and as the Rare Bird Alert is updated on Fridays I gave another little jingle as I was rolling back up the Turnpike on Friday afternoon. The Reef Heron was back, and had been seen Thursday morning, the very day before! I had seen one last year in Ghana, which is about as close as it should normally ever get to New York, but I didn't have it yet for this year's epic and growing year list (816, by the way, stop drooling with jealousy), and I was going over the Verrazano Narrows Bridge anyway, which is only a short Belt Parkway traffic jam away from Coney Island.... Since it had first been found all the way back on July 8th or so I figured anyone who would want to had probably had a chance to see it already anyway, so why not give it a shot, even if "the curse" were to chase it definitively away.



Upon arriving one can only think: boy, is this a hole. Coney Island Creek is the sort of scummy disused New York City waterfront that people are referring to when they complain about the neglect we have heaped on our former maritime glory. No "greenway" bike paths here, just rats skittling across rotten pilings, a beach of green sludge impregnated with abandoned truck tires and half submerged shopping carts, and everywhere the skeletal rib-cages of vast, long-abandoned barges. Graffiti, fat men in wife-beaters fishing for toxic fish: it is the sort of place where, stumbling through the weeds to view the water's edge, one expects at any moment to surprise a party of crack-smokers, or worse. And that was what I thought even before I read this.


Looking around at this desolate post-industrial wasteland I really had to wonder what sort of dedicated nut-job birder would have ever come down here to go birding in the first place. The next thought was how improbable it was that any self-respecting bird would eat anything swimming here. However, there was a Great Egret marching through the muck, and many fishermen, so the waters must be capable of sustaining some form of life. The sonorous tones of the recorded voice on the hotline had warned that the Western Reef Heron was easy to overlook as it skulked about the abandoned barges, of which there seemed to be an inexhaustible supply. Most of these were viciously backlit by the afternoon glare and stranded beyond a moat of foul muddy sludge. Some were far away on the opposite shore and would require a telescope for effective viewing. I had none. There was nothing about the dismal scene to suggest that I had any chance whatsoever of ending my losing streak of rarity-seeking outings.

There is a Western Reef Heron in this picture; the tiny black dot to the left of the bigger black triangular lump of rusting boat that looks like a shark's fin. I shot all the pictures for this post with my cellphone, not only because I forgot to bring a decent camera, but because they look so much more ghetto this way. If you want to see what this Western Reef Heron actually looks like, go here.

Working my way around the squalid shore I flushed a few shorebirds (a complete list of species from my brief outing to Coney Island Creek is in the comments) and saw a Black Crowned Night Heron flying across the creek and into a sheltered cove, where, in fact, numerous egrets and herons were patrolling the flats. Among the six Great Egrets were two Snowys, three night herons and a dark, almost black, slate-colored heron with an exceptionally long and fine dagger-like bill. The closest thing we have in all the Americas to a heron with a bill like this is the Agami Heron, a permanent resident of densely forested wet tropical swamps that would be even less likely to wash up in Brooklyn than the Western Reef Heron, the bird I was definitively looking at. It was actively feeding, flying from one possible patch of fishery to another, and showing off its black legs and yellow feet. The curse was lifted!

Camping in Rwanda, Part One

Only about a two hour drive west of the capital, Kigali, Rwanda's Akagera National Park is a collision between a series of parallel acacia-clad golden mountain ridges, and the Akagera River and its broad valley, which cuts through them. After filling my cooler with ice at the renovated Akagera Hotel, a formerly decrepit relic that on my last visit was literally occupied by baboons, I drove north along the "mountain circuit," and then cut down a valley to continue along the edge of the marsh.

Camp One: There are a variety of possible campsites dotted about the park, and every intersection of two jeep trails is marked by a numbered cement pillar corresponding to a point on the map, so assuming one stays on the tracks, it is almost impossible to get lost. As the sun started to set, I chose a campsite and drove back up onto the ridge to sleep on this promontory overlooking the valley. Note my immaculate tent installation in the lower right hand corner.



Camp Two: On the shores of Lake Rwanyakizinga. This is one of the best spots for elephants in Akagera, and although I thankfully didn't encounter any right where I camped, I saw one on the way in, about a kilometer before I arrived, and then three more grazing in the papyrus when I left the next day. Not one unnatural sound intruded to disturb the snorts of the hippos, the kloo kloo kloo calls of the fish eagles and the splash of pied kingfishers dive bombing the lake.

The immeasurably baritone belches and yawns of the hippos grazing on the far spit, half laugh and half cough, were so loud that I felt certain they had to be coming from the reeds just in front of me instead of from a thousand meters across the water, where I could see them wallowing. Through the binoculars I watched families of warthogs coming down to feed, their tails held straight up, perpendicular to the ground. A goliath heron, the world's biggest, roamed the shore and varieties of antelope snuck down to the water's edge to drink, looking about in paranoid fashion. You would be extraordinarily lucky to see any of the big cats here, but the antelope certainly know that there’s always the possibility one could be about.

Fire, and dinner: a double dose of Ramen with blanched tomatoes "Al Fresco"

The next morning I walked along the shore and found a few hippos that had moved over to my side of the lake in the night.

Elephants are most easily found in the northern reaches of the park, perhaps because fewer people drive all the way up there. Although they are not easy to see, signs of them are everywhere, from enormous chunks of dung left in the track to sizable acacias rendered into puny matchsticks.

When the elephants are feeding they will snap trunks in half or uproot entire trees to get at the uppermost leaves. Along parts of the northern lake circuit there are patches of forest that look as though they have been devastated by a tornado, and in many places I had to drive off road to circle around downed trees.


Camp Three: Perched on a high and breezy mountaintop overlooking the spectacular chain of lakes and vast papyrus swamps along the Akagera River. I won't presume to tell you what you are thinking. But what I think you are thinking is something like: "that's funny; his tent doesn't look nearly as spiffy at Camp 3 as it did at Camps 1 and 2.... It doesn't look quite so much like a tent commercial." If this is indeed along the lines of what you were thinking, then you absolutely have a point. After driving four hours of kidney-lurching rutted jeep track up the side of the mountain, fighting a near-constant assault from battalions of tse-tse flies streaming in through the windows and into my ears, I was ready for a quick dinner and a good sleep. Only when I finally arrived at Camp 3 and got the tent out of the car did I make the unpleasant discovery that I had left the tent poles back at Camp 2. Luckily I had a boom pole in the jeep with which I managed to improvise this elegant structure. Still, rain would have been most unwelcome.

This is what comes of what I was thinking that morning when I packed up, which was "hey, I have a car, with three empty seats in it. Why bother to pack up the tent in its bag? I'll just cram it all in here somewhere.”

The tent calamity did nothing to diminish the indescribable tranquility of sitting out on my own personal remote scenic overlook, soaking up the approaching evening as the sun lowered in the sky behind me. Thinking that the light was just getting nice for some landscape photography, I got up and went to get the camera from the car. Looking up at the ridgetop I saw, sticking up out of the grass and peering at me, this immediately recognizable neck.

I pursued the confused beast, who was probably wondering what on earth had gone wrong with my tent setup, and why I had put it directly in the way of the usual giraffe route down to the river.

The next morning, after a slight detour to collect my tent poles, I continued the “lake circuit,” reaching the very northernmost section of the park, where some of its most spectacular savannah is to be found. Wild game was abundant.

I had forgotten to bring my Kingdon, and my large ungulate identification skills are a little rusty, but I believe this is a magnificent buck Kudu, with one of his wives just to the left. [UPDATE: Oops, my bad. This looks much more like a Defassa Waterbuck, Kobus ellipsiprymnus.]

Even the non-birder will appreciate the spectacular plumage of the Southern Carmine Bee-Eater. My complete bird list from two trips to Akagera can be found in the “comments.”

I’m good enough with my large ungulates to know that these are Cows. Cattle remain the major threat to the park. Before the genocide Akagera was three times its current size, but the turmoil of the war led to large-scale invasion and settlement of the park by refugees and squatters. It is still a huge park proportionate to the size of the country, and the current borders are well protected. These longhorns are outside the park perimeter but in places where the route runs near the edge of the park territory the graze line exactly followed the park boundary markers, with long grass on the park side and nubbly razored stubble on the cow side. Unless significant numbers of visitors come to Akagera and deposit their hard currency in the park coffers it will be all to easy to understand if over time the current rules are relaxed and grazing cattle are again allowed inside. Population is extraordinarily dense in Rwanda, and protecting a vast, unpopulated wilderness like this park requires a major political tradeoff. I drove for three days without seeing anyone else, camped where I chose, saw abundant wildlife in great variety, and spent as much on the entire experience as I might have paid just in one day's entrance fees at a game reserve in Kenya or Tanzania. This is a major bargain, and you should rush over and visit right away.

Edvard Munch and the Sooty-Cheeked Mangabey

I don't remember enough of the the particulars of Edvard Munch's biography to recall whether his angst was of purely Scandinavian distillation or if, like many artists of the time, he went on exotic journeys, which then fueled his depressive aspect. He seems most unlikely to have ever travelled to the Albertine Rift, one of the least and last visited slivers of central Africa, a mountain chain of cloud forests defining much of the Congo's eastern frontier with Burundi, Rwanda, and Uganda. Nonetheless, a few days ago, there in the Nyungwe Forest, I thought of him.



Had Munch come here and observed the diverse array of primate species that dwell in these dark, damp and fog-shrouded forests I am certain he would have been much taken with the Sooty-Cheeked Mangabey, an extraordinarily gloomy-looking monkey with a very long tail.



Furred entirely in dismal gray tones, the unhappy Mangabey sports for facial decoration twin charcoal black streaks under its eyes, like those worn by American Football players to protect their vision from the glare of their own rosy cheeks. (What a bizarre, pseudo-military, macho affectation--nobody does this in any other sport, do they?[Update: Yes, apparently, baseball, see comments]). Worse, the pinched and panicked look on the Mangabey's face seems to permanently express the particular grief of constipation. I hope these photographs, taken in the dim and misty depths of the forest interior, are suitably pathetic.



(Mangabey images mine, as are all uncredited photographs in these pages: Munch images hooped absolutely without permission from here, according to my own personal and constantly evolving fair use doctrine. Anyone with legitimate issues contact me and I will do my best to resolve them.)

It doesn't seem like a cliché when you're there...

"Greetings!" from Akagera National Park

Out of Office Notification

I'm on Safari, spending the next ten days in two of Rwanda's spectacular National Parks. First I'm off to Akagera, the vast big-game savannah and impenetrable papyrus swamp that marks the country's eastern border with Tanzania, then on to Nyungwe in the extreme southwest, where thirteen species of primates live in primeval cloud forest. See you soon!

Visitors from Mars

Last night we had our "wrap party" for the current video shoot in Rwanda. It was our sixth such "last supper," and over dinner we joked that had Anne known how many times she would be here on the current film she could have constructed a mud-brick McMansion years ago on the hillside and saved herself a pile of money and many hours of commuting. The village in which we work is two hours from Kigali, where we stay in luxury at the Novotel Umubano. The tradeoff for being able to take showers in comfortable hotel rooms looking out over a swimming pool, and having a reliable source of electricity for plugging in battery chargers, watching the day's videotape and downloading digital audio to hard drives, is that we do a lot of driving on horrific dirt roads. (Anyone who thinks that Anne and I can't do without our creature comforts, however, should go back and read some of my posts from October and November of last year, when the two of us were living in subzero conditions in tents in the Dry Valleys of Antarctica). Leaving at 6AM is a grim enough prospect, and one that only gets us up into the hills by about 8, which is practically mid-morning in rural Africa. The result is that over various trips we've only once really managed to see the village waking up, and that required leaving Kigali in the middle of the night.

I wanted to record the sounds of the village at dawn, and so on the last night of shooting I convinced James Gakwerere to spend the night with me in what passes for the village square. James is the best cameraman in Rwanda, and he has been working with us for years, whenever he can get time off from his job at Rwanda Television. Much hilarity ensued.

The trusty tent set up on the village green. While actually putting it up we had a fascinated crowd of about thirty villagers gathered around. "I can't believe he can fit his whole house in that little bag" and "it looks like a voiture with no wheels" were two of my favorites of the remarks James translated. They questioned whether I would fit in it, so I jumped in and lay down to demonstrate, to a chorus of guffaws.

Jean-Paul, one of our regular interviewees, lounges after dusk with James and, in burgundy fatigues, the local civil defense. Civil defense are dudes given training and arms, and they patrol day and night to keep the peace. Someone in the village decided we and our crazy muzungu toys probably ought to have protection, and so this guy slept out on the grass beside our tent with his AK47, waking us frequently with a drunken, tubercular hacking cough. It's our fault, however, since we fueled him with several bottles of urugwagwa, the vile local pit-fermented banana brew he is seen drinking here out of an antique Primus beer bottle.

Lounging tentside.... Ouch! That stalk of hay stabbing me in the eye is the price I paid for trying to look sultry. We wanted our own beer, of the non-banana variety, so we conscripted my young friend Jacques, an-eight-year-old with excellent bicycling skills, to ride off into the night and fetch us these two bottles of warm Mützig. He was gone for ages and had to get them from a cabaret on the crest of the next hill, which tells you something about the local economy. Photo: James Gakwerere


The Junior Filmmakers of Ruhango club meeting.