Spring Break! (Part Three) - The Stars

Part Three
How could I possibly forget to mention the stars? It was the night before we went on the tour of the bird park, we were at the hotel. So it was the first day we were at the hotel that was on the bird part property but not at the park itself. The hotel was part of a group of buildings looked like a giant child picked up a toy house and set it down in the middle of a dried-up mud puddle. Small collection of buildings, an old faded room that was an ecological museum, the tourist center that sold necklaces made by women from the nearby village, and a small neighborhood of sleepy looking houses. A wall separated the estuary of the Fleuve Senegal from the buildings. I went on a walk with a friend, there was a nice little road or a big path out to the horizon, we followed it. West there was what looked like a marsh, reeds and birds and water. The road was on an artificial ridge, maybe something like a barrier between the rushes and on the other side was dust. A dried up mud puddle with cracks in the ground and maybe some sticks that used to be a bush clinging to the ground to stay upright. We even found some dry bones and animal footprints, and tracks fro horse carts that don’t use the road up on the ridge. Walking barefoot it feels like you’re walking on the soft top of a perfectly-cooked brownie, with a soft brittle top-crust that feels like it could flake off, and you leave footprints on the sandy soil underneath. It’s warmed by the sun like the whole earth just came out of the oven.

We kept walking and got to the village and the road turns into sand and there’s more trees and tiny houses and everyone stares at us but surely they must be used to tourists, we walk past a football soccer field and in the middle of a group of houses there are men and boys with fishing nets drinking tea, they invite us to stay but the sun will set soon and we don’t even have our cell phones to light the way back. Two very young girls are washing dishes in the little bit of river that touches the edge of the village, and I approach them and have my very first unaided basic conversation in Wolof, just asking their names and how is their family and what are they doing. I don’t really understand their responses but I’m communicating without being in a classroom without having any French mixed in and then we walk back to the hotel.

The sun sets quickly and those who buy overpriced dinner go eat it at the surly empty-but-for-us restaurant and I sit on the floor in our hotel room and eat apples and bread that’s already starting to go stale with Chocoleca and write in my journal. Then Kenta comes in from the next room and asks does anyone want to go with him to see the stars. I was the only one who felt like it at first. We walk out of the hotel and out the gate of our little encampment until we reach the road and there’s nothing.

And then we look up. And I feel like I just fell off the face of the earth. I can’t feel the ground under me and because it’s so flat there’s nothing to either side of me, I’m standing on a tabletop and I’m surrounded by a blanket of stars so thick you can see dimension and texture in them, the milky way is a highway of clear light and Kenta and I look at each other then go running back to the hotel, banging on doors getting everyone out there. We’re so excited and people are so reluctant and we get outside and they say yes they see the stars and we say no wait until we’re out on the road and the group of us go back and there is a collective loss of breath. Now I’m one of then people on a tabletop but we’re all alone looking up, I can’t see anything else. The generators turn off at midnight. No streetlights, no cars, no cities, no towns. The village might have lights inside the houses but there’s a tree-wall between us and them and if you don’t turn around it’s dark and the stars and taht’s it.

It’s a religious experience. That was a moment when I wanted to reach out to whatever was in between all those points of light, just like later I would find it between beats of a drum. The Thing That Holds the Stars Together, I was fascinated, and kept looking harder and harder to see something there, something farther away, I was on my tiptoes and not breathing, and when I did breathe it was deep and respectful and I would exhale in laughs and I was grinning like an idiot and my jaw was hanging open and I wanted to tip off the edge of the earth and fall up, the stars looked so soft and dense and they’d catch me and if not I didn’t care. And then whenever I found myself saying Alhamdoulilah, thank god, Inshallah, god willing, Mashallah, knock-on-wood, la illaha illa la, in god we trust, I’d think back to that night and how I felt so small but so important and so excited but so calm....

Kaela and I stayed outside after the others left. I think Kenta might have too but he was farther off. Tiana did too, but she was on the phone with her entire family, talking and giggling by the gate. She’d been pointing out constellations and planets earlier on, ones that we’d never had the chance to see before. I was almost ready to go back inside when I realized something and started laughing. Kaela asked me what it was. I looked at her- “we lost the moon!” I couldn’t stop giggling about it. Here it felt like hours I was staring at the sky and didn’t even notice that the moon was missing.

Then I heard a sound that sounded like a not-a-dog. It couldn’t have been an actual dog, it didn’t sound like a dog, but it sounded enough like a dog for me to think of coyotes, but there weren’t any coyotes, and after the third time I heard it I realized it might be a hyena. And we hurried inside rather than contemplate how possible that was.