Hidden Places: A Journey from Kansas to Kilimanjaro

By James Heaton

This is a story of growing up in the sixties, as much as a story of a clueless individual living a foreign experience. After encountering Kennedys inauguration, Jake is awakened to literature, joins the first wave of Peace Corps volunteers in order to become a writer, and discovers the cultures of eastern Africa through a host of teaching experiences, culture shocks, and a hike up the biggest mountain in Africa.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: May 18, 2016
• ISBN: 9781514488133

James Heaton

Before going to Africa, Jim’s upbringing was in Eastern Kansas, in a small beautiful town near Kansas City. As it evolved, his education was in physics, linguistics, literature, and creative writing, and he was privileged that it could be so. His learning also includes sailing, biking, photography, singing, acting, and cats. After the Peace Corps and an MA at UCLA, he did research in the effectiveness of ESL in the various linguistic regions of Uganda and published several primary school textbooks making use of that data. This project began about forty years ago as an attempt to sort out what Jim had learned from the Peace Corps experience and other travels in the ’60s and to put it into a form that others might enjoy. Since then, flexibility of travel and the spirits of the times have changed so drastically it is doubtful that this journey will be replicated. But then again, it might.

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Copyright © 2016 by James Heaton.

Library of Congress Control Number:   2016906692

ISBN:      Hardcover      978-1-5144-8815-7

      Softcover      978-1-5144-8814-0

      eBook         978-1-5144-8813-3

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Author photograph by Arline Pollock-Heaton

Cover photography and collage design by James Heaton

Rev. date: 06/28/2016

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Contents

Dedication

Chapter 1 Getting There

Chapter 2 Going to the Country

Chapter 3 Ask Not

Chapter 4 Venturing Deeper

Chapter 5 I Will Try – Part One

Chapter 6 I Will Try – Part Two

Chapter 7 Oh, God Bless Our Land of Malawi

Chapter 8 Winter Whirlwinds in Livingstonia

Chapter 9 Hiking That Which is Impossible for the Birds

Chapter 10 Postlude

Dedication

For Arline, who insisted that I get the dang thing finished;

For Bruce, who read early chapters and gave kind encouragement;

For my fellow Nyasaland/Malawi Ones, who are forever in my heart and mind, like it or not;

For Richard, Mtali, Msiska II, Mr. Nkana, nyaHarawa, Scotch, Kalima, Dzuwa, Njoka, Makoka, Mafubsa, and all their classmates;

And for all my fathers and teachers, without whose patience I would be just another blabbermouth.

Chapter 1

Getting There

In the fall of ’61, Miles Davis was playing at a club called the Mardi Gras in Kansas City, and he would play stuff from his album, Kinda Blue, and some other stuff, too, and walk off the stage while the others went on playing. The night we were there, he happened to walk by the table where my friends and I were sitting, and I asked him to autograph my writer’s notebook, which I always carried with me. You keeping a diary? he said, in his hoarse voice. Yeah, trying to write a few things, I stammered, amazed at hearing myself say that. That’s good, that’s good, he said, signed my notebook Miles Dace, and walked away. Being there, in the Negro part of town was very liberated and cool for us white college kids, but actually meeting Davis himself was unimaginably cool, and to drive 45 miles there from Lawrence was an act of extremely cool homage that only the extreme cognoscenti could imagine.

Coming back to school after working a year for the US government as an Electronic Engineer, I found that life was changing drastically, and that interest I used to have in science had waned and maybe it had gone away completely. Surely, there had to be more out there in whatever you called real life than my former job of drafting wiring diagrams and photographing waveforms. Even if I did get to monkey around with the world’s first high-powered computers, this would only end up as a career in creative codebreaking, and that wasn’t a career -- it was a sick form of temporary security. So I’d quit, figuring that studying literature at KU as a post graduate might somehow kick-start my writing and get me a qualification for teaching.

It was a strange and colorful period in the world. Some kind of transformation was going on. I was spending more time in the library than I should have been, not getting papers written, poring over Beat writers, and prowling around in Special Collections seeking out galley proofs that W. B. Yeats had put his penciled marks on, early writings of James Joyce, and the chaos of Henry Miller. After the five years of science and engineering I’d already put in, the world of writing seemed both irresistible and unfathomable. One of my fellow grad students pronounced Miller’s Tropic of Cancer auspicious nonsense. She was right. It was possible to read Sexus, Nexus, and Plexus for hours, and then realize you hadn’t understood anything, but what did it matter if you were assimilating it all on a deeper level and that that was what a hopeful writer had to do -- assimilate. So I read more auspicious nonsense: Ferlinghetti’s marvelous poems, and volumes of Tristan Tzara’s auspicious Dada diatribes -- a lot of it.

In those times there were the late night parties off campus, in dark rooms with loud music where people (the people, a euphemism for the campus gays) would sit around all night not doing much of anything and the straight folks would hang around just to be cool and listen to the music and maybe find someone to dance with. Gina, a strange person I’d met at one of these parties a long time ago would meet me at the Thankless Child coffee house where we’d spend hours with espresso and tiny and expensive Polish sausage sandwiches. She had big eyes and an insouciance which I thought made her unattainable, but then anything was worth a try. Why, I asked her, should I do all this reading anyway? She stared at me like she thought I really didn’t know anything at all. Listen, dope, she said, after staring (she always prefaced anything by staring). "You have to, if you’re ever going to get out of the Kansas mud! Listen, right now you’re nothing but a Kansas beatnik – a wheatnik!" Then she’d stare someplace else, much too hip for my sort, and obviously didn’t give a rat’s ass about much of anything, least of all moi.

Wheatnik? Hey, I just finished three straight hours of reading Miller and you’re telling me I have to read more? Then Gina would stare (almond eyes, satin-colored voice). G’bye, Jake. And that was that, for Gina and the Thankless Child.

Later -- it was one of those warm nights in early spring when the winter winds turn to something like spring breezes and everyone is walking around eight feet off the ground, and Fred and Judy Markov and I were drinking Pabst beer at the new Pizza Place by the Student Union and listening to Ramsey Lewis on the jukebox. The Markovs were trying to talk art, how seeing is being, and how it would be nice if there were a way to encounter life without a frame around it and all. It was also a typical night when one was desperately seeking company and respite from the frame of college life, the one-room existence at Mrs. Miller’s rooming house, and trying to be witty and profound with anyone who would tolerate it. In those days, the draft board had started wondering why I had quit my first engineering job to return to graduate school to study literature. To my draft board, if you weren’t involved in science or engineering, your deferment could disappear in an augenblick. And then the Greetings letter came and they sent you on a train to Kansas City for a draft physical – the first step to Vietnam. They put you on a train for the short ride because it was more official that way -- and more like a funeral. Anyway, this was well understood to be the last thing that happened before you got the next Greetings letter that would begin your career in the army. This bohemian life in Lawrence was leading exactly nowhere. Then the scene changed.

The year before that – my year of living back in Maryland, there was a big Inauguration in DC in the dead of winter, and you couldn’t park your car any closer than the Ford Theatre. Robert Frost read his poem, and many pompous politicians stood around in hats and long coats, and John Kennedy, the young guy in the middle without his hat, read the oath in an Irish New England voice and made his inaugural speech. It was cold that bright morning, a fluid kind of cold that crept through your thighs and flowed up your gluteus maximus, as you stood in the snow at the back of the cheap seats east of the Capitol steps and waited for the dumb speeches to begin so they would get it over. Why did one feel one had to be there when the nearest place to park was in front of the Ford Theatre, four blocks away? A portly woman bundled in several overcoats kept trying to push past me through the impossible crowd "I want to see Jackie," she keened, over and over. You couldn’t breathe, the crowd was so tight, and hell if I, or anyone, could move. Everyone knew Jackie was beautiful, and Kennedy was handsome -- so what was the big deal? And my ass was really really freezing.

Then the Kennedy guy started to speak. The usual formulas. He was talking about Communism and ideals and principles and things needed to improve the country. Was there something here that was suddenly different from the usual smoke and horseshit? Was he actually saying something about what a twenty-four year old can do? It felt different, more serious, distinct from all the refuse of these post-collegiate aspirations. This Kennedy could speak and maybe he could even speak to ones inner self.

* * *

A little further digression, if you don’t mind.

It seems crazy, but when one thought about ones upbringing with all its small towns and odd practices, maybe it wasn’t so different from southern Africa, or at least how most of us thought of that continent. Baldwin, where I began life, was a small enough town that one could walk from one side to the other in 15 minutes -- it would qualify as a village, if you wanted to describe it that way. The most prominent feature was a dignified Methodist church with a square tower, next to a small Methodist college occupying four blocks. But there were some more things. Baldwin also had a dairy, a box factory, an ice plant, a three-story red-brick school, a number of very durable red brick streets, many imported elm and maple trees, an unused railway station, several creeks, and 1,200 people, living in neat, well-used frame houses. From a distance Baldwin looked like a forest with a water tower, a church, and a grain elevator. Up close, it had a kind of New England look for a Kansas town, given the stately college buildings, the ancient trees, and the advanced age of most of the inhabitants. My father said the town was full of old-timers, by which he referred to the only people who hadn’t gone marching off to the various wars of the period. People gossiped a lot and there were the town characters whom one meets again and again in villages everywhere. There was Ike Thomas, the painter; Dick Fisher, the trash hauler; Arthur Bridwell, the college student from seventy years ago who was now the museum caretaker; Virgil Reeves, the mayor and dime store proprietor; Oscar, the pharmacist with the distinctive goiter; my friend Eddie Turner, the only black kid in town, who worked the counter for Oscar. And many others. You’d see them all the time. Dick Fisher drove his pickup truck up to our house once a month to collect old newspapers. He had a voice like John Ford, a New England twang that was hard to identify, especially as he had a hard time articulating when he was drunk. He shouted a lot and this helped.

Hey, Cornpone, I come to get your papers! He would expect help. Jes’ put ‘em right in there. Thas right. Right in there. Thanks, Cornpone! Dick would engage whoever was around to help tie up the stacks of old Kansas City Stars on the back porch. And then he’d be off in a cloud of blue smoke and debris, singing a hymn, as he always did. You trusted him always, that he knew what he was doing, drunk or sober. Every week he would have an ad in the Baldwin Ledger: "Newspapers collected. Government needs them. Dick Fisher." Always the same, and I always liked him. Dick died an unseemly death of too much life, sometime around 1964, the second year of the Nyasaland I Project.

Kennedy had talked about the Peace Corps in the election campaign, in Madison one night at two a.m. He wanted to send new graduates to faraway irrelevant places to do idealistic stuff. The clean-cut, all-American college kids saving the downtrodden, or something like that.

The screening exam at the Lawrence post office wasn’t such a big deal, and I even felt strangely honored that suddenly I was getting a bunch of mail and a lot of bureaucratic stuff to sign. I’d expected all this to be another one of those pro forma acts that you could go through in order to get even with your conscience, get it over with, and never expect a single consequence from. It was a windmill to play with, an acceptable way of getting on with it, like submitting poetry to the Atlantic and awaiting the usual rejection notice to add to all the other rejection notices. At least you were getting on with it. But nothing happened the way one expected it to happen. First came an invitation to go to Ghana, then one to go to Nigeria, and then one to go to Nyasaland. Training was to be somewhere back East

* * *

The lobby of the creaky old Hotel Onondaga in downtown Syracuse gave out an air of fatal excitement, like waking up with a terrible headache on a strange wooden ship moving out to sea. I had joined; I had been accepted. I wasn’t going to Vietnam -- I was going to Nyasaland! A bunch of young people were milling about. Hi, my name’s Glenna Willis! Rhymes with ‘Phillis’! A perky college girl was greeting me in a Chicago accent. Having just volunteered to be shanghaied, I was intensely grateful for