Christmas and Senegal

12/22
We got underway today from La Gomera, one of the western Canary Islands (beaches, cafes, cozy, quiet, lots of German tourists, lots of SPF 90), after signing on a new crew member, Weronika, who’s sailed with us before, and in fact was one of the off-going sailors when I joined the ship in Dominica nearly two years ago. As soon as she had her gear in her bunk we had our anchor up, lashed to the rail, and, with the Canaries astern, we aimed our pointy end towards Senegal.

La GomeraBuddy stitching sails in La Gomera.

West Africa is known for its northerly trades, but we might push through some weird bits for a while before we find them. A high altitude, low pressure system is forming right over the islands, so it will be interesting to see what the winds do. Right now it’s an easterly force six. We’re on a beam reach with t’gallants set. The whole sky is in flux as the system deepens. High cirrus clouds before a thick haze, then cirrostratus and more haze. Hopefully we will be south before it really kicks in.

12/23
A trainee, who has been aboard since day one in Lunenburg, just asked what needs to be done to clean the galley. This person, a full grown adult, said he/she has never before, in nearly eight months, cleaned the galley of the Picton Castle. Priceless. Little episodes like that make me a bit slower to shake my head when I hear about high-school graduates in America who are illiterate.

It’s a good thing our galley stove isn’t a part of a union. It would have gone on strike long ago. Or if it was French. Then it would strike too. French and unionized? Forget it. Cold cuts and canned mackerel till Lunenburg, and probably since Lunenburg. Maybe we’d get porridge on Thursdays.
As it is, though, the old stove has been at it nonstop for nearly 48 hours in preparation for Christmas, and it doesn’t look like a break is coming before the famous morning.

12/26
Christmas was a great success. Our little tree, center stage on the hatch amidships, was trimmed with tinsel, ornaments, popcorn garlands, and twinkling lights. In the morning our stockings and ditty bags were stuffed with candy and trinkets, and around the tree the packages quickly piled up into an impressive bunch of yuletide loot.

The Tree
Donald in the spirit of the dayWeronika has a cookie"Fat Nick" (I don't know how he got that nickname) and the ship's doctor, Gary Lynsey's Christmas wig. Spongebob looks on.Captain surveys the scene from the bridge.

We had a pig on a spit, roasting on the barbecue starting at eight that morning under the watchful eyes of young trainee Nick and Chief Mate Mike, along with, invariably, two cents from pretty much every other testicular member of the crew. Help is not always helpful. Nick, a new addition since Las Palmas, is South African, and seems well versed in the ways of barbecue. He says where he’s from it’s called a braai, and they grill up ostrich, warthog, spring buck, kudu, zebra, water buffalo, wildebeest – basically half the cast of ‘Lion King’ – with the same regard as we do chickens and cows. All day our stove’s hard work was in full splendor on the hatch, as platter upon platter appeared, each crowned with a pyramid of cookies and fudge.

After the dinner and festivities, an impromptu music session erupted on the hatch, and our house musicians, Gunner, Sam, and Buddy, put on a great show for the rest of us.

Sam on the banjo
Gunner and Buddy on the fiddle and guitar

The night was as picturesque as a Christmas night at sea could be. Not a ripple on the ocean, it was like our barque sat bobbing in a big bowl of water with glassy reflections of the stars on the surface. Sirius and Procyon, the two cardinal stars of the celestial dogs and navigational markers for centuries’ worth of mariners, shone doubly by the sea’s mirror, and we sat, mostly silent, before the view until the next watch relieved us at midnight.

It was an unforgettable Christmas. Though it was my first one away from my family, as it was for many of us, we were all here with a different kind of family, but a family nonetheless. The week had brought me the greatest feelings of homesickness I’ve ever experienced, but I was never sorry to be here, and feel lucky to have shared such a special time with my shipmates aboard our surrogate mother, the Barque Picton Castle.

12/27
Spectacular phosphorescence. A constant sparkle on the sea, scattered flashes the size of basketballs below the surface, the other worldly dolphin-comets, a gentle neon cloud around our hull as it ghosts through the water, a steady trail behind us of brilliant jellyfish creating a glowing tail of nearly three ship’s lengths, and every so often we pass through a glowing ribbon of algae stretching as far as we can see in either direction. Spirits are high.

12/28
Today I was annoyed to come into my bunk after watch and find a blue Moroccan headdress on my sea chest. This particular one had been floating around the focsle for a while and no one had claimed it.
“Whose turban is this?” I huffed at Ryan.
“I don’t know,” he shrugged back.
I don’t think that that particular question has ever crossed my mind before, but here it came so easily.
Only in the Picton Castle focsle are queries about banjos, wigs, pool toys, shrunken heads, beer, whiskey, gummy bears, and turbans so blasé. Sometimes we take our little never-neverland for granted.

12/29
300 miles from Dakar. Northerly trades finally setting in as we escape the influence of that big fat low forming overhead. Running before a friendly Force 5. Glow of jellyfish trailing 100 yards behind us. Wind just on our port quarter.

1/1
Rang in the New Year properly. The 12-4 watch spent the afternoon constructing a giant glowing ball, ala Times Square, and the thing was spectacular. Four feet in diameter, they wrapped it all in the sparkling lights and tinsel we had onboard, and even a few hundred watts worth of the engineers’ drop-lights made all spiffed-up and space-age gave it a glowing core within the outer twinkling layer.
Mike played Dick Clark, and we all danced a lot, too. From 0030 on, after each song, captain would bellow, “Bonus song!” and we’d all cheer and dance. We did this for another hour. Then we hoisted upper tops’ls, sheeted home the lowers and courses, set a couple jibs, and got back to business.

1/4
Spent my first day in Dakar, Senegal today. It’s as different from Prairie Village, Kansas, as you can get. When we were coming around the cape to our anchorage we could see, near the rocks in the distance, a black spiny strip just at the surface of the water. ”Is that some kind of reef?” someone asked.
Then it appeared to be moving. We were all lined along the port rail watching this long spiny thing get closer and closer, gaining definition bit by bit. The black strip became a long boat, the spines were people, and some were waving. The boat was about 40 feet long, and couldn’t have been more than five feet wide. It was like a floating needle, and it was loaded with people. As we came around the cape, we saw a harbor teeming with these boats, some completely jammed, stem to stern, with people.

The city of Dakar is not architecturally beautiful. Aside from the presidential palace, the great circular market, and some legislative buildings, the city is more or less a collection of boxes, some standing taller than others, some not standing too well at all.
What is beautiful about this place is the people. I don’t have a grasp of it yet, but I feel a strange glow of awe inside me after every conversation, every interaction, and even just the physical presence of the Senegalese.

There is great pride, but it’s good natured. There is great poverty, but the people are not downtrodden. Rather, there seems to be an overt, if instinctual, optimism here. For all the unhappy, hard elements of life here, it seems to be a happy place.

1/7
We had a spectacular day yesterday. Mike, Nadja, Christian and I took a taxi o the north part of the peninsula of Dakar. We walked through some neighborhoods along the coast, looking for a hotel for the night, making our way along streets lined with very posh, quiet houses, but somewhere along the way we found ourselves in a shanty town, full of people going about their daily business: cooking, cleaning, teenagers kicking a ball around. We had been urged from day one to avoid these places, as they are not known to be safe for visitors, so naturally, we were interested in finding our way back to the main road, but the place was a bit of a maze.

The children were thrilled to see us there, though most of the adults managed not to see us at all. The ones who did greeted us with a knowing smirk, or a questioning frown. But the kids just thought we were hilarious.

“Bonjour!”
“Bonjour!”
“Bonjour!”

They stopped their games and ran after us. Some held our hands, but most just followed close behind singing “bonjour” and smiling and waving, until we would round the corner where we had a new group of little laughing guides to escort us to the next block.

Though we were clearly there uninvited, and trespassing into these people’s lives, our overnight bags and urgent demeanor betrayed that we were merely lost, and not here as ignorant sightseers.

There are those kinds of tourists here, whose fascination with the different way of life seems to overwhelm them, and they begin behaving like ignoramuses, treating this whole place like some big cultural zoo for their own joy.

While we were on Goree Island on our first day ashore, we inadvertently wandered into an open churchyard where a wedding celebration was in full roar. We hung back behind the crowd to watch from outside.

The men stood together at the church steps, dressed in suits, chatting and watching the women, who were the stars of the hour. Each woman was wrapped in a vivid cloth, with a matching scarf knotted at twisted atop her head, like a psychedelic wave. They stood in a circle, facing the center, where a man in a gigantic hat, wearing big white sunglasses, suspenders, and a wild neck-tie, hummed on a saxophone that was painted in the motif of a graffiti mural.
The women had wooden boards in the hands, shaped like long, flat almonds, that they were clapping in unison. A barrage of drums constantly ringing.

Then, all at once, the music and dancing jumped to full pitch, the women’s throbbing steps elevated into ecstatic hops and kicks, the saxophone’s steady hum wound up into manic wailing, the wooden claps became a machine-gun staccato.
One at a time, a woman would leave the ring and dance in the center, jumping and spinning, her feet never stopping. Then another would replace her, and another and another, until the music and the women regained their steady pulse, sweating, smiling, and anticipating the next eruption. It looked sublime.

But all around this circle were pasty tourists with cameras cocked. They hovered around the circle of dancing women, clicking away photos. Some were even trying to dance into the circle; a few were dancing just outside it. They all had big dopey grins, thrilled at the show being put on for them. I was immediately self conscious. I knew their behavior was not without good intentions, but I found it so troubling, so distasteful, and so unfortunately typical.
It was their deliberate intrusiveness which emerges from a sense of entitlement to the experience, like it was some kind of theme park.

There is nothing wrong at all with experiencing new things, sharing in different cultures. These are prime reasons for traveling abroad, and particularly outside our western sphere of comfort, but this was done so flippantly, without any investment in the people, without any responsibility for the experience or real respect for what they were seeing. It was another kitschy trinket from an excursion to wild Africa.

My visit to Goree Island left me with so many strong feelings.

It was the final processing depot for Africans being exported into slavery, though that is a sterile description of a place of such horrors.
The buildings and layout of the island village are all well preserved French Colonial specimens, though they are now inhabited by African families who live in them like Africans. A stroll through town and you will see families sitting on the ground around massive wooden bowls of rice and fish and chicken, with animals wandering in and out the front door. Some of the vacant buildings were taken over by local artists, of which Goree has plenty.

If you want colorful acrylic paintings of black stick figures rowing skiffs, or playing music, or with baskets on their heads, this is the place. Most of the island’s shops are artisan shops, and half of those sold these paintings, but each set up his gallery as if it was his own unique style.
Of course there was much more diverse artwork and craftwork to be seen as well, people who painted sand on wood, and a handful of men under a grove of palm trees who made and sold djembes, the archetypal African drum.

One of our final stops of the day was at the main slave processing center, a small, two story, stone fortress at the edge of the island. The top floor had whitewashed plaster walls, and was where the slave traders had their offices. The ground floor was a cluster of small chambers, walls of jagged black stone set in cement. Over the portal to each was a succinct placard: “MEN,” “WOMEN,” “SMALL CHILDREN,” “INFANTS.” For so many years these rooms had been crammed with people, no where to sit, no where to sleep, nowhere to piss or shit. Now they were filled with graffiti, left behind as spontaneous cathartic memorials by visitors over the years. Words on top of words, on top of scratches in the masonry, signatures of ghosts, it is a haunted place of frightening tangibility.

It is a landmark of my troubling, European heritage, as it is to the ancestral legacy of much of the world. Donald could trace his own ancestors from Grenada in the West Indies back to this place. At the center of the building was a door, as if the whole place was a funnel into it, and to the ocean horizon beyond. It was called the door of the voyage of no return.

I walked up to the balcony on the second floor, overlooking the coast. I leaned over the rail and saw two boys fishing off the rocks. They smiled and waved, and I smiled and waved back. Three local women, wrapped in bright robes, came and stood at the rail with their daughters. They smiled and nodded at me, and one of the little girls squeezed my finger and sang bonjour. I smiled and bonjoured back. They got their fill of the view much sooner than me and then left.

It was a passing moment, but it delivered a thick, immediate weight to the place, lined with a strange feeling of optimism, too. This place was the epicenter of the western slave trade, an ugly part of the narrative of the human race for both the Europeans and the Africans involved, because it was not just the white man’s endeavor, and it is a tragedy for all involved as well, both the victims and the perpetrators. Everyone has suffered for it. Yet, somehow, the little beams of optimism still managed to break through, even here.

---

Last night, after a walk on the beach, and a nap in the hotel, we went out for dinner and then to a night club that we heard would have live music – and did they.

It was a local band. Electric guitar, bass, drum set, keyboards, a singer who stood at the mic like Bono and sang husky like Harry Belafonte. African drums were brought on stage. Then more, and more, and more drums were brought, filling up all the spare space on the low platform. One man sat behind them. The music started, and his arms turned into hummingbird wings.

Then a guy got up from the audience and started to dance. His purple velvet suit plumed like a cape, his long, thin dreadlocks whipping around his gigantic forehead, and an ecstatic smile of very small teeth. He jumped and kicked, spun and gyrated, slower and faster, than an explosion of movement. Stepping and turning from side to side like he was never sure it was safe to cross the street.

Another guy joined in. He was tall and bald, and was the yin to the other guy’s dancing yang. He slowly walked back and forth, his back stiff and bent slightly backwards, a beer in one hand, the other one raised in testimony. Each time he reached the perimeter of the stage, he would bob down slightly, like an oompa loompa, pop his drowsy eyes and open his mouth in a silent “WOW!” and then about-face until he reached the other side of the stage, where he did the same strange motion. Sometimes he would wave his raised hand. I have never been to a nightclub like that before.

1/9
Another spectacular day in Senegal yesterday. I set out, after a quiet morning, to run a few errands, and ended up last night sipping beer and sprite by the highway with three local guys after celebrating the religious fete with them at their homes.

I bought a djembe from one of the artisan shops. I didn’t have much money, and ended up bargaining down to a quarter of what they were asking.
It took a long time, and I spent a while hanging out with the guys there. They offered to give me a lesson. They were very proud of the drum they sold me. They led me out of the store and down a beach lined with the long, thin fishing boats. We sat on a rock wall, they put the drum between my legs and one, a gentle guy named Momo, squatted in front of me. He was my teacher. He played a simple beat. I botched it. They laughed. He played it again. I botched it again, and they didn’t really laugh so much this time. He played it again, and I played it back. We played together a bit, and then he left me to go and play it myself while they all laughed and danced and sang. Then they stopped, and Momo knelt back down to teach me another beat, and we did this for about half an hour.

I told them I needed to go and take the drum home. They insisted I let them carry it to my hotel for me, but I showed them a Picton Castle card and explained that I am not staying in a hotel. They were very impressed and asked to see my ship. I said OK, and brought them all back to the ship for a tour and coffee and muffins.

Back on shore, Willie, the one who sold me the drum, said I was welcome at his house tonight for the fete, for the Muslim celebration of Muharram, which comemorates the New Year, and the martyrdom of the prophet Mohammed's grandson.

We took a cab to his house where I met his family, his brothers and sisters, and nieces and nephews. The smallest one cried whenever I looked at him. Willie said I was the first white man he’d ever seen. We watched a basketball game on the TV, drank coke, and then went to Ablaye’s house for the first serving of dinner, where I met all his family as well.
The youngest boy brought a big plate of food into the room, where all the men ate. The food was a cous-cous type of meal topped with roasted meat, vegetables, and a spicy red sauce. It was delicious. Most of us ate with spoons, but a few of the guys ate with their right hands. As the plate was nearly finished, Ablaye’s sister came in with milk and poured some into the dish, everything was stirred together, becoming creamy and sweet.

I said thank you, “Djir a jif,” in Wolof, and we went back to Willie’s for round two.
After the meal at Willie’s we sat in his room and listened to music, and talked. Then Momo, Willie and Ablaye began dancing. Big goofy dances, they were cracking each other up. All the kids in the house came and looked and laughed as well. Willie and Momo kept asking me, “We are very happy. Are you happy? We are very happy. It’s good you are happy.” I was overwhelmed.

Soon the dancing stopped, and Willie said, “We’re going to make a walk, to have a look around.” We went out for a walk around the block, and all around the neighborhood were parades of kids playing homemade drums, hassling all the adults on the streets for coins. The adults would pretend to be annoyed, and then relent, giving a few coins to the gangs of kids. Momo, Willie, and Ablaye did this too, laughing together after they’d shooed off the parade. We stopped at a corner store and bought some drinks, beer and pop and chips, and sat by the road. It was a great night. We all laughed and talked and shared with each other. They asked about the ship, they told me about their lives, but most of the time we sat and watched the cars go by. Finally, I had to say goodbye, and I hailed a taxi for the trip back to the ship. They shared their lives with me in a way I will never forget. It was a touching evening among people who I am happy to call friends.