Storm Windows…

Rift Valley Children’s Orphanage, Monday, December 3, 2006, 9:02pm

The past two nights it has sounded like a party down in Campi Nairobi, the village below the orphanage; whistles blowing, drums banging, singing, and chanting. As I write this, I can hear the whistles and uniquely African sounds rising up from the valley. I was wondering what the celebration was or if it was a holiday, but it turns out they are just trying to scare the elephants away. It is a full moon tonight and except for the single glow of a campfire up in the mountains, the moon has painted the landscape in lunar shadows.

Yesterday, Lisa, Sue, and I went for a late afternoon walk because an elephant was sighted in the coffee fields and we have yet to see one except from a great distance. When we didn’t find one, Sue had to return home to receive a call from her son, so Lisa and I continued our walk in the reverse direction of what we normally do. Because of the elephants and other recently reported animals in the area we were paying a little more attention to our surroundings than normal.

We started down a cutback on a trail that opens up to a gradual descending field. I was following Lisa, chatting about who knows what, when she stopped dead in her tracks. “What is that she said?”

Down the hill a brown figure was stretched out across the path we were following. I wasn’t sure what she was talking about until I saw a head pop up from the soft edges (I didn’t have my glasses on). We immediately ruled out a Cape Buffalo (that is an animal that you do not want to encounter unless you are in a Safari vehicle) because of its size, but rather it seemed more like the size of maybe a hyena, a large jackal, or a wild dog. As we sat there debating for some time whether or not to turn around, a local man came up behind us. Lisa asked the man in Swahili, “What is that in the path?” She pointed it out and he started to run towards it; brazen, if not foolish young fellow, I thought. He ran right up to the damn thing and it looked like he was stepping on it. The figure then sat up. It turned out to be a local drunk who decided to pass out on this path, which incidentally was quite a fair distance back from the village. I wonder what he was doing out here? I’m sure the man who alerted us of the figure’s homo-sapien status thought this was no place for city-slicker mazungus.

We made our way down the hill and he slurred some gibberish at us as we stepped over him. Must have been a particularly good batch of “pombe,” which, as I mentioned before, is homemade bathtub gin with a little fertilizer or battery acid thrown in to give it a kick. This guy was spun. Pombe I have learned is incredibly addicted and once you are hooked, you are done. It fries your brain as you might imagine battery acid or fertilizer would do and there defiantly are no rehab or support programs out here.

Sunday morning around ten we headed off to the Ngorongoro Farm House as Sunday is the volunteer’s day off. On our way home that night, at the hour of the evening when shadows grow long and the countryside explodes with every shade of green you can imagine, Ashley, Lisa, and I stood in silence in the open air of the Land Cruiser truck, each locked up in our own thoughts. I listened to John Prine’s “Storm Windows” over and over for the entire half-hour, 8-kilometer trek home, trying desperately to take in the vastness of the green rolling plains; a vastness broken only by dirt roads winding towards the mountains on the horizon. During the day, it looks as if there is only one mountain range far off in the distance. It is only at this hour of the evening, when the setting sun paints the mountains in a monochromic color scheme, that you can truly gauge just how many mountains there are and how far they recede into the distance.

Driving in the open air reminded me of the opening scene in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, when the author speaks of riding a motor cycle as being a part of the scene; not separate and out of touch with it like you would be in a car (incidentally, I never made it much further in that book).

As we made our way back up the hills towards the orphanage, with the tail end of the Land Cruiser swinging to and fro and the driver working hard to correct what the mud and rocks wanted us to do, I thought to myself; the driver’s here are truly artists. It is an art form the way they masterfully negotiate ruts, rivets, rocks, mud, and mini-lakes, and the way they read the sometimes seemingly impassable roads like a ship’s captain reads the currents, winds, and tides of the sea.

A new addition to the daily schedule, since school is out is out for the month of December, is to take the kids, four at a time, down to the farmhouse to teach them how to swim. One of my favorite things to do is just drive on open roads listening to music so I look forward to the daily escape and throw my iPod on random, turning up the volume as loud as it can go to drown out the Land Rover’s straining workhorse engine. This morning Phish came on and immediately it put me in a different time and a place.

They say music is the soundtrack of your life, and Phish and the Grateful Dead definitely have a powerful way of allowing me to look back through the lens of time and once again peer out at the world through the eyes of seventeen-year-old.

Those late adolescence and teen days were some of the most carefree days of my life. I did not have a care in the world – at least I should not have had a care in the world – as life was simply about freedom and exploration. But of course I had a way of making life heavy and serious, and wondering and worrying about what tomorrow might hold or how I fit into the world. If I had a dollar for every time I wrote in my journal things such as; why am I here? Why am I born into this family at this time in history? Why am I, as a consciousness, a part of this body, this person who is called Tim Shields? I think questions of such nature can be a very slippery slope for a young mind, and someone who has a mind of such nature needs to be shepherded and guided, for a mind of this nature can get one into some very dark places.

No one really knew the thoughts and questions that consumed me day in and day out, mostly because I didn’t know how to express them, so I turned inward. I think I was also an angry child, and only recently have I been able to see where that anger stems from. There is no one source; rather it is a series of external events as well as an incredibly complex concept and institution called family. But I don’t think there is anyway to make it through childhood and adolescence unscathed and without some scars, no matter who you are or how perfect the environment you grew up in was. The scars are just a natural part of growing up. It is ironic that I am writing about that from my bed in the middle of an orphanage in Tanzania.

My way to express my anger when I was a child was with a sharp tongue or fists. I was always playing with older kids so I was actually pretty tough, didn’t take shit from anyone, and got into a lot of fights. I’m sure my friends would get a laugh out of that these days. But as puberty came around, like what often happens at the Division of Motor Vehicles, I got stuck with a high number so I was waiting around for my growth spurt while kids outgrew me and my scrappy fighting style was simply outgunned by height and weight.

I remember one incident that brought this message home. Freshman year of high school, I was in the schoolyard pecking away at a kid named Phil, using whit and sarcasm to make him feel very small. He was not the brightest bulb on the tree so he was an easy target. I was probably showing off to a circle of kids, being a cocky little bastard and making them all laugh at his expense. Phil was a big kid and rumor had it he was even doing steroids. In my memory, I can’t see his face anymore, but I can see the expression on it and how uncomfortable and awkward he was in his own skin. He finally snapped and grabbed me around the neck in a chokehold until the point of nearly making me pass out. None of the kids did anything, but rather just stood there and watched.

That was one of my earliest lessons that the world outside of Pottersville, New Jersey, the sheltered white-bread country town I grew up in, was a dangerous and unpredictable place. I can see a string of those instances, a line running through my past that reinforced those lessons and ever so slowly I began to shut down on certain levels. These incidents shut down my ability to express anger because I was learning from my surroundings that it was not safe to express anger, so I turned that outwards anger in on myself. I think over time, bottled up anger slowly transforms itself into gripping depression and since late adolescence I have been in and out of its chokehold.

For all intensive purposes I was doing the same things as any other adolescent; going to school, playing soccer, getting stoned and experimenting with drugs and alcohol, listening to music, and trying to lose my virginity. But of course I was particularly adroit at finding ways to complicate my life, as I desperately searched for meaning and my place in the world. I often felt like a child who has not quite yet learned how to swim, struggling with desperation to stay a float.

I don’t know if I will ever be able to completely shake that part of me, that part of me that is forever seeking. Sadly enough, I think there was a while where I did not want to be happy, because I thought of my sadness and depression as a wellspring of content and inspiration. But the fact of the matter is, depression fuckin’ sucks, and whether you are writing music or the written word, painting, or creating any other art form, the art is generally stronger when it is coming from a good place, at least that has been my own experience in writing. In hindsight though, I can see how depression has been a necessary experience to create who I am, an invaluable learning tool that I would not trade in.

The last few years I have thought of the concept of depression almost like a shadow; it is always there behind you, and sometimes when the sun is shining it is at its strongest. I think of the feeling of depression as if you are falling down an endless hole, and as you are falling, you are looking up at that hole receding in the distance, and as you fall deeper, the hole you are looking up at becomes smaller and smaller and the light grows weaker and weaker and the surrounding darkness grows ever more consuming.

As I’ve gotten older, I’ve learned to recognize the approaching storm and the weather patterns that create these tempests. I am also learning how to give this formless mass form, and in doing so, transforming it into something of light. I think by learning how to express it and bring light and life to that darkness, it becomes weaker and weaker until it is something that is very manageable. The writer Eknath Easwaran does a good job of expressing this concept, however he talks of managing it through meditation.

Now how do talk about this shit at the lunch table in your high school cafeteria?