"Canoe Trip" #1

The canoe was a big one which according to Alex would be more stable in the water. For an anchor we tied a large rock to a length of rope. The rock had to be heavy enough to anchor the canoe in one place, and not so heavy as to sink it. As we struggled to lift it, the margin between the two seemed pretty slim. With the help of the fisherman, who had kindly lent us his canoe and paddles for free, we dragged the canoe down the beach and launched it into the Lake. I climbed in first and Alex climbed in behind and pushed off. The canoe drifted away from the shore and began to rock. This continued until I got more stability by wedging my feet firmly against the sides of the canoe, and just dipping the tip of the paddle into the water. As we got into a rhythm the canoe sped up, and an image flickered before my eyes, like an old Super 8 movie, of Alex and myself in the future, in our own canoe travelling from village to village along the Lakeshore.

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Hills of Ruarwe #6

Alex absorbed the connection between the marks I was making and the world they described; and his eyes darted as mine did, over and back from subject to drawing. It wasn’t long before a group of curious children and men gathered to watch. The chatter of voices grew as they closed in a semicircle around us. A small child was gently tugging at my elbow and a man sat on his haunches beside me, booming out a commentary. I was getting tired and struggling with the constant movement of the men sawing. At last I was able to tackle the minute detail of the village; and finally the composition was framed on either side by cassava plants, with their distinct lupin-like leaves, and at the top by the branches of an overhanging mango tree. To draw the leaves of cassava and mango I used a short hand style of drawing, roughly sketching them in, approximating their complex forms.

“You’ve done it,” Alex yelled out. I looked at the drawing and tried to see it as a whole, but I was uncertain, so I let weariness decide and put the pencil down, and relaxed the tension out of my neck and shoulders. Now everybody wanted to inspect the drawing. A wave of chatter, animated with laughter and loud exclamations followed the pad, as it was passed from hand to hand. Dusty fingers traced over the paper and tapped on details of the drawing. It was getting mauled, and I waited impatiently to get it back. It was time to leave, so we said our goodbyes and set off on the long walk back to the Ruarwe. How pleased I was that this time it would be down hill.

The Hills of Ruarwe #5

In my mind I traced out the composition onto the paper: the saw and its two operatives, the rectangular frame; and in the foreground a tin mug on a tree stump. Within the ellipse of the lip of the mug, lay another ellipse traced by the line of the water inside. The ellipses were at out of kilter with each other; the mug being tilted due to the unevenness of the surface it was resting on, and the water tilted in opposition to redefined the level. These dissonant, elliptical rhythms were echoed in the concentric growth rings on the face of the tree stump. The background was pale, sandy-brown earth, bleached by the glare of the sun, with the village where we stopped to get water on the way up, marked out in subtle monochrome shades, like a Japanese ink drawing.

The Hills of Ruarwe #4

We had arrived. I threw myself to the ground, exhausted, and sat gazing into the distance, completely without thought or design, neutralized by the shear intensity of what I was experiencing. 
“Come on then, aren’t you going to draw?” Alex blurted out, impatiently. I wasn’t thinking about doing anything, just trying to keep myself together, recovering from the climb, drifting in a kind of emptiness; in a state where all I could do was notice, not to react things. My attention was drawn back to the blade of the saw moving up and down, driven by the rhythm of the two men working it, and I remembered why we had come.
Slowly and deliberately, to conserve energy, I took a drawing pad and cardboard tube containing a pencil, knife and eraser out of my bag. A stub of a pencil was all I had left. I began to sharpen it, willing myself to focus, as I paired wood, then graphite to a fine, tapering point. My eraser was a lump of rubber cut out of the heel of my shoe that left black smudges and didn’t work very well. 

Hills of Ruarwe #3

We reached the summit of the first tier of hills, that rose precipitously up from the Lakeshore. The land plateaued out and we followed a track into a village. Women sat outside the huts shelling peanuts. One of them offered me a handful of the green kernels, and sliding the wet skin off, I chewed them one by one. Groups of men sat on their haunches, smiled and nodded as we passed. Some were weaving the large baskets used for carrying. I watched as they split springy switches of cane into strips, which were bent and woven into the half made forms. We came to where the hillside fell steeply away. Before us stood a timber frame supported by four tree trunks driven into the hillside. On top stood a man, with his large, dusty feet planted firmly on either side. He was stripped to the waist and wild looking, with muscles that bulged like steel cables through his shiny black skin. Standing adjacent to him on the ground below, was a younger, less heavily built man; his red shirt and white baseball cap standing out in vivid contrast to the backdrop of green-ochre hills. Between them a seven or eight foot saw moved rhythmically up and down. As the man below pulled, the saw cut down in one long continuous stroke, and when the man above pulled, the saw was drawn up ready for the next stroke. As this was done, a perfectly straight line was cut through a log that lay lengthways on top of the frame. At one point they stopped; and to allow the saw to continue to run freely, another man swung himself up onto the frame, and inserted a small wooden peg into the saw cut to wedge it open. It was slow, strenuous work, and I watched in awe at the simple beauty of it.

"The Hills of Ruarwe #2.

The path levelled out through plots of cassava and withered stalks of maize. We came to a group of huts. Alex disappeared to get water while I cooled off in the shade of a mud-brick wall. When he returned I asked him how much further we were going.
“Just up there, and over,” he said, gesturing the way ahead.  We carried on up a steep incline along the edge of a gully, carved out of the hillside by weeks of heavy rain.  A couple were coming down. The man was young, handsome and lean, followed by a beautiful young woman with a baby on her back. Their expressions were serious and, as they passed gave me cause for thought, as to what the matter might be. I wondered if perhaps they had argued earlier in the day and were now on their way to an event of a serious, and/or unpleasant nature, like a funeral they had to attend together, but weren’t relishing the prospect. Or perhaps their child was ill and they were going to the village for help. It was a hard life with only two feet for transport, where there were no doctors, nor medicines, and no schools to speak of, just hills where people eked out a daily living from the land.

The Hills of Ruarwe #1

One day we went up into the hills behind Ruarwe, where planks were being sawn from newly felled trees. Starting in the morning before the sun’s heat intensified, we made our way up a steep, rocky path. Humidity and exhaustion slowed me down and I had to keep stopping. Finally, feeling dizzy and faint, I wasn’t sure if I could go on. Nausea pressed up into my chest and down into my gut. I burped, broke wind, and collapsed down with my head between my knees, a cold sweat breaking out on the back of my neck and forehead. Alex waited patiently, but I felt he was itching to move on, and step-by-step we continued upwards. As we gained height, a view opened up behind us: in the morning stillness, with sun, cooking, burning, evaporating, we paused to look down to where the village lay nestled in trees. From the pale-magenta line of Ruarwe beach, the Lake stretched like a vast shimmering mirror to the faint serrations on the horizon, traced in mauve by the hills of Tanzania.