INTERLUDE I

SOUTH AFRICA AGAIN

It had been clear for weeks that a triple conjunction of the distant past, the near past, and the immediate future was imminent. As the date for departure from Cape Town approached, the tension heightened. It felt like being drawn and quartered emotionally. The drive from Paarl to the airport was spectacular with the darkness behind and over Table Mountain contrasting with the crepuscular rays through the clouds to its west. Then came that dreadful stretch on the N2; Topsi had promised it, and I had seen it before, both from the air and the highway. This time the infamous shantytown was partially under water because of the recent winter rain, and there were at least two dozen soldiers in the area beside the road in addition to the usual pair that watched traffic from each overpass. What an emotional contrast this provided with the total delight I had experienced on each of the previous two days when I spotted both a purple heron and a malachite kingfisher by the pond in the woods just below Roggeland Country House. And then it was into the safe and sanitary sanctuary of the departure lounge, where some waited to depart via British Air to London, and others, like me, via South African Airways to Miami.

The conjunction occurred suddenly, with no warning whatever, and quite surprisingly to the accompaniment of the Colonel Bogey March. What still seems hardest to believe, however, is that the music was performed by the New York Philharmonic under the baton of Leonard Bernstein. Elsewhere on this tape the same ensemble performs Souza's Stars and Stripes Forever. In the fourteen hours we were in the air, the tape went round at least a dozen times, so there can be no doubt that I heard what I claim. The Colonel Bogey March is known to many people as the music to which Alec Guinness' troops marched in the movie, The Bridge over the River Kwai. I knew it best as my favorite march at high school football games.

I blew a mean, if totally amateurish, trombone in my middle teens, and participation in Seattle’s Franklin High School band was certainly my favorite pastime during those three years. Its director, a man with one glass eye but a marvelous insight into what growing boys need to prepare them for life, influenced me far more than any other teacher, and I studied under at least a half dozen other very capable men and women. He set challenges for each of us, suggesting once that we try something and then never bringing it up again, no matter what our response, nor whether we succeeded or failed. The best thing he ever did for me was to mention one day that a certain girl wanted to meet me, and he was sure I would like her; he was right, and she and I became best friends for thirty-five years.

His suggestion for this particular march was that at the conclusion of its middle section, where the trombones had the lead, I should play the last phrase one octave higher than written. Now this meant hitting a high D-flat, something I could never do very often. In fact, some two years later, when I played much better, I only hit three of four high B-flats in my senior solo performance. Nobody in the stadium other than the two of us, and perhaps one or two of the guys playing trombone down the line from me, knew what was going on. Well anyway, it was this distant recollection that broke the emotional impasse and prepared me for a clandestine return to Seattle. The appearance first of the Southern Cross and then of a gradually descending Scorpius directly outside my port-side window and the continuing darkness implied strongly that we were achieving both increased northerly latitude and westerly longitude; the appearance of lights from eastern Brazil and then from Puerto Rico confirmed these opinions.

The sun set gracefully that evening in Seattle, my first there after thirteen months in Africa, but the temperature was surprisingly low for midsummer. It had not reappeared when I left five days later for a long weekend in California. In fact, on one of those days in between, the maximum temperature set an all-time low for the date. South Africa's Cape Province, where I had spent the previous week in the depths of austral winter, was balmy by contrast, yet those who lived there were complaining bitterly about the cold and wet.

Foremost among the unresolved matters that led me to return home was that of initiating Social Security retirement payments. The only word from that agency, after the completed forms were sent to Baltimore by the Embassy, had been received on my return to Ilboru on March 8. After returning from nearly a week spent recuperating from the dreaded Nairobi eye in that ailment’s eponymous city, I had found among the items of mail securely locked away in Mr. Chagga's desk a letter, dated February 21, from the Baltimore office of the Social Security Administration. The reply to my request for application materials included a wealth of forms, including two I had already filled out and submitted to them, one that I had been told I need not complete, another that I had not seen before but that appeared worth completing, an optional form that I chose not to complete, and an invisible form, listed as an enclosure, that I could not complete. Those forms that I did fill out and a letter of full explanation were posted to Baltimore on March 9, and there the matter rested as of May 30, 1993, when I departed from Arusha. Even a second request to the Congresswoman friend of my brother produced no reply, at least none of which I was aware.

Before leaving, I stuffed a small box with many important papers and mementos, and left it with a PCV colleague to ship by “guaranteed air freight.” So my first questions to Dow when he met me at the airport were, “Any word from Social Security yet?” “No.” “How about the box Martin was to send; has it come yet?” “No.” Dow seldom wastes words when discussing bad news.

A phone call the next evening uncovered the startling revelation that my retirement payments had indeed begun, directly to Mr. Chagga's reliable locked desk at Ilboru Secondary School, but neither that news nor the checks had reached me in Arusha. Two days later I did retrieve the letter from the Congresswoman's staff, dated June 10, that confirmed this bizarre routing of my money. In the meantime a visit to the downtown office of the SSA had elicited their promise to stop payment on all checks mailed abroad and to transmit all future checks to my account in Seattle. An overnight exchange of faxes between Seattle and Arusha further implicated June 10 as a date to be avoided. On that day Martin did in fact ship the missing box to me, and he is now trying to reconstruct its itinerary during the intervening weeks.

But not all of the communications involved retirement checks and a wayward box. Among the more significant were discussions of changes in a securities portfolio, tentative plans for safaris in case I leave the Peace Corps, chats with a few friends who had stumbled on to my presence in town, conferences with family members, and two calls from Mason Clinic. The first informed me that my new glasses, both pairs, were ready, and the second related the results of my quasi-annual physical exam, this one required by the Peace Corps.

“Everything is normal except for microscopic blood in your urine sample. Doctor wants you to see a urologist before you return to Africa.” Naturally my first thoughts, and they persisted until a diagnosis was made the next morning, were of a third meaning for the letters “pc”–personal computer, Peace Corps, prostate cancer. I had only one day left before my scheduled departure to London, and I deeded it to Mason; it was used fully, from nine in the morning until seven that night.

The day began with donations of another urine sample–I fantasized that this one would turn out bloodless, and the doctors would attribute the previous reading to the bloodshot eyes of the microscopist–and a brief discussion of my problem with a urologist. He was totally sympathetic with my constrained timetable that prevented his doing all the usual tests, but he did hope that two procedures could be scheduled: ultrasound, which seemed to me quite straightforward and relatively harmless, and an unexplained and by now forgotten acronym whose letters had an ominous, intrusive feel to them.

Good fortune has led me safely so far through life's minefield of health hazards, so I had experienced neither procedure. The ultrasound examination was encouragingly pleasant, and despite heroic efforts by first the technician and then a doctor, nothing remotely abnormal in either kidneys or bladder was found. So I sat for some time in the urologist's office happily reading a New Yorker magazine–I think it was dated May 10–in my continuing effort to catch up. I made it through July before leaving, but only because I habitually tear out the good stuff to read later.

When the nurse finally did arrive she simply announced that the doctor was now ready to look inside my bladder. It was foolish of me even to think of asking how; there is only one readily available route.... In retrospect, I realize that I made only a single mistake: reading a New Yorker review of Ingmar Bergman's play on the life of the Marquis de Sade is bad preparation indeed for a bare-bottomed position on a flat bed with legs splayed onto elevated stirrups and a catheter dangling from a numbed extremity.

As has often happened before, my reliance on the power of positive pessimism again proved prudent, and the procedure was both painless and productive; a puny polyp was found. “I won't let you go back to Africa until I excise or cauterize it.” Miraculously, he was able to squeeze me into the afternoon schedule, and I experienced for the first time a spinal block, an IV, the recovery room, and all of the modern monitoring equipment that follows a patient from entering to leaving the hospital, even in its short stay arena. It took ten hours of my day for the surgeon to spend ten minutes on the polyp–it was so small that it disappeared when his instruments touched it–but it was an altogether novel and interesting experience for me. And I was on time for the next day's flight to London. My computer also required clinical study, but its stay at home for repairs will not be so short as was mine.

But I fear this unique route to the bladder will have to be re-explored periodically in the future.

W. Vance Johnson

13 Aug 93