icicles in heathrow

Christmas is coming soon.

I know this because of the blue icicles in Heathrow airport.

Twelve days ago when I flew through here on my way to Nairobi there were no streamers of blue light cascading from the ceiling, or coned trees winking fiercely. Now there is. Starbucks was not selling coffee in red and white cardboard cups and drawing Santa hats and candy canes on their chalkboards. Now they are.

I sit in my favorite café at Heathrow, Pret a Porter, and try to take stock. The sudden realization that Christmas season has arrived in the West while I was gone is jarring. But the pink pigs hanging from the roof of the next store, whizzing in battery-powered circles, and the endless, manic, yapping of toy dogs don’t exactly prove grounding. I get up, ditch my coffee cup, and prepare to waste the next several hours of my life wandering through airport limbo.

Twelve hours from now I’ll be landing in Washington DC. My sister, Michelle, will want to know how the trip’s been. And I won’t know where to start, because this past two weeks has been more a stream of potent, rushing, moments than a story.

Saturday. Los Angeles. I am dressed in my pajamas, playing at sleep-over for an inner child party, and sitting outside on the cold stone bench of a barbeque eating carne asada without the safety net of a paper plate.

Monday. London. I am sitting on a gravestone and eating meat pies, again with no safety net in sight. Angie and I did try to find a bench, but they are all full of uniformed British school children who, for some reason, are not in school. So we figure the occupant of this particular grave, Eliza Day, will not mind the company. We talk of friends we knew when we were both teenagers growing up in a peaceful, promising, Zimbabwe that no longer exists, and watch Angie’s toddler, Abby, sleep in her pram. She is a stark reminder of the fact, bewildering to me, that we are no longer teenagers. How did that happen?

Thursday. Nairobi. Work. During workshops I am nowhere else. There are only words and thoughts, and I am always searching for the right questions. One day of facilitating drains three days worth of energy. Nights are spent preparing for the next day. I am working over a solitary dinner by the pool, occasionally looking up briefly to see bougainvillea glowing purple in the shadows. A waiter, a beautiful man – tall and lithe and dressed in a spotless tuxedo – thoughtfully carries over a glowing copper brazier on a small stand and places it near me to ward off the dark’s chill. We share a silent smile. I go back to work.

Thursday. Accra. The last workshop is over. The bubble of total absorption breaks, and Ghana elbows it’s way in.

It’s 6am and I’m headed north with a silent driver named George for one precious day of adventuring.

Traffic and people. Chaos and heat. Pollution and dust glued to me in equal measure by the humidity. Women balancing buckets and boxes on their heads, selling plantains car to car.

10am. Elmina castle. The Portuguese and Dutch trading post that brokered the most valuable of commodities, slaves, until the late 1800s. I am standing on the governor’s balcony, overlooking the three barred, stone, cells that used to hold up to 450 female slaves awaiting the transport ships. At the governor’s pleasure the women would be driven from these holding pens into the courtyard below, to mill around until he had made his daily choice. When I look up I can see the church in the middle of the castle, placed directly over the dungeons that used to hold male slaves. In that church, words from Psalm 132:14 are inscribed above the door; “This is my resting place forever; Here I will dwell, for I have desired it.” I stare, and imagine, and want to cry with rage and pain and shame. And fear. What modern blind spots or willful, apathetic, ignorance will goad future generations into similar paroxysms?

I don’t cry though. I am not very good at crying. Outwardly, anyway.

1pm. More than 100 feet up, standing on planks and holding onto ropes, I look down into the treetops of Kakum national park and watch butterflies waft through the rainforest canopy. There is a tiny, brilliant, gecko by my sneaker – an emerald on legs.

4pm. Tetteh Quashi market. Buying an oil painting on rice-sack canvas that I do not need because I see the talent, and his pride mixed with anger, and I wonder what I would sell if my lot was a market stall on a dusty corner.

11pm. Kotoka airport. The blank, endured, space of the crowded gate lounge on a hot African night. On the plane I resent the roundness of the man beside me, the touch this compels, but refuse to relinquish the armrest completely.

Ten years ago now I spent three weeks traveling around New Zealand, and there’s a moment from that trip I sometimes think of in the midst of all the moments of these trips. I was in a raft, shivering in a wet suit, about to plunge over the highest commercially raftable waterfall in the world, a 21-foot drop. We got caught in an eddy in the top and there was a deliciously terrifying, wonderfully focusing, pause before we teetered on the very edge. Then the raft went completely vertical, and folded in on itself. Mashed against the others, blind, I opened my mouth to scream and was invaded by the ocean of water that had followed us over. The pressure was unbearable. Than, suddenly, it was over. We popped out the bottom, the raft unfolded the right way up in the calm of the eddy and most of us were even still in it – torn between shrieks of fear, laughter, and a silent awe that we were still alive.

We navigated seventeen sets of rapids in four hours along that river in New Zealand, and that’s what these work trips sometimes feel like. To adapt a metaphor from Anais Nin – like living for weeks in the rapids where novels are born, but not written.

Friday. London. As I step out of the plane it’s suddenly freezing and I am adrift, caught in this enforced eddy.

I look around in the sudden stillness and realize.

The raft is still the right way up.

There are blue icicles in Heathrow.

And Christmas is coming soon.